Bill Maher loves to play referee. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, he jumped in with a familiar refrain: both sides do it. To Maher, the blame for our toxic climate is bipartisan—left, right, it’s all the same stew.
But that line, while superficially reasonable, collapses under scrutiny. There is a difference between heated rhetoric and the systematic habit of politicizing tragedy or weaponizing institutions against ideological foes. The left has turned that into a craft, and pretending otherwise erases hard realities.
When Tragedy Becomes a Talking Point
Look at Charlottesville, 2017. A white supremacist rally ends in a murder. Within hours, the media—and much of the Democratic Party—settled on a narrative that Donald Trump had praised the marchers. “Very fine people on both sides” became a cudgel, stripped of the surrounding sentences in which Trump condemned neo-Nazis explicitly. Even outlets that later printed clarifications allowed the shorthand to harden into cultural memory: Trump equated racists with anti-racists.
That wasn’t an honest mistake; it was a decision to weaponize a phrase before the facts had cooled.
The pattern repeats. After the shooting of Steve Scalise in 2017, there was zero soul-searching about the climate created by constant talk of Republicans as existential threats to democracy. After the attempt on Brett Kavanaugh’s life, progressive Twitter treated the story like a footnote. Yet when violence can be pinned, however dubiously, on conservatives, the coverage is wall-to-wall and the moral verdict arrives before the press conference ends.
The same reflex is surfacing around Charlie Kirk’s killing. Conjecture about the shooter’s politics spread faster than verified facts. Prominent commentators filled in gaps with assumptions that fit their priors. By the time investigators briefed reporters, half the internet had already cast the tragedy as a referendum on right-wing speech.
Courts and Bureaucracy as Blunt Instruments
Politicizing grief is one thing; bending legal levers is another. The left has grown comfortable using litigation and regulation as tools of attrition.
Consider the blizzard of partisan lawsuits in recent years—many thin on legal merit but rich in press value. Conservative state laws are enjoined before ink dries, while progressive jurisdictions slow-walk compliance with Supreme Court rulings they dislike. During COVID, officials in blue states often imposed speech or worship limits that courts later found unconstitutional, yet the restrictions lingered long enough to chill dissent.
There’s also “constitutional hardball,” the academic label for stretching lawful powers to score partisan wins. Progressive attorneys general pioneered it: endless subpoenas for ideological opponents, attempts to bankrupt advocacy groups through discovery, selective enforcement of disclosure rules aimed at conservative donors. Each step may clear a technical legal bar, but together they create a message—cross us and the machinery of the state will make you bleed time and money.
None of this excuses abuses on the right; selective prosecution or censorship is corrosive no matter who swings the hammer. But the left’s appetite for using process as punishment is neither symmetrical nor theoretical. It happens in city halls, statehouses, and federal agencies every week.
Maher’s Comfortable Equivalence
Maher’s shtick works because it flatters an audience that wants to seem above the fray. “Both sides” offers a moral escape hatch: you can scold extremism without offending the tribe you secretly prefer. But when one faction dominates cultural and bureaucratic institutions, its lapses carry heavier weight.
Calling out excesses on the right is easy—and often deserved. But it’s dishonest to pretend that MSNBC panels and Ivy-League lawfare brigades don’t shape the incentives that lead to doxxing, lawsuits, or the smearing of a president over words he didn’t actually say.
Violence against political figures should unite us in condemnation, not trigger an arms race of blame. Yet the record shows who usually reaches for the megaphone first. If Maher wants to defend free thought and civility, he might start by retiring the lazy symmetry and demanding the same accountability from progressives that he expects from conservatives.
Trevor Anderson is a contributor for Direct Line News. Trevor can be reached at Trevor.Anderson@mcgopclub.com
Direct Line News is a Maryland-based free-access publication committed to the Republican reform tradition.
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