Why Won’t Republicans Say Melissa Hortman’s Name?
Political violence is never acceptable.
Sep 11, 2025
https://endlessurgency.com/p/why-wont-republicans-say-melissa
Let me be clear: what happened to Charlie Kirk was horrible.
However you or I may feel about the man, political violence is
unacceptable—full stop. He didn’t deserve that. His kids didn’t deserve to lose
their father. No one should have to suffer that kind of loss.
But there’s a name Republicans are terrified to say right
now: Melissa Hortman.
Melissa Hortman was a Democratic lawmaker from Minnesota,
brutally murdered—alongside her husband and her dog—by a conservative activist
just 12 weeks ago. Her name deserves to be said in this moment.
Charlie Kirk’s murder is an attack on all Americans. So was
Melissa Hortman’s.
Every time this kind of political violence surfaces—whether
it’s the attempted kidnapping of Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the January 6th
insurrection, or the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband—it shakes this
country to its core. It causes real trauma. It makes people afraid to run for
office, to engage with their communities, to believe in democracy at all.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: the overwhelming
majority of these attacks come from the right. That’s not partisan spin—it’s
backed by data. Yes, there are incidents from the left too, and in those
moments, we all have a responsibility to look in the mirror and figure out how
to move forward and do better.
What we should be doing right now is coming together to
condemn political violence across the board. But instead, we’ve got the
President of the United States, conservative influencers, and right-wing media
rushing to blame Democrats and “the left”—as if we haven’t universally
condemned what happened.
They cherry-pick a couple of morons on the internet
celebrating Kirk’s death and pretend they represent all of us, despite the vast
majority of Democrats condemning this violence—including myself, who found out
about the shooting live on Newsmax and had to react in real time. Same playbook
they used with the dumb Sydney Sweeney jeans ad, or any number of other
manufactured moral panics.
It’s bullshit. And it needs to be called out for what it is:
a desperate grab for cheap political points that pushes us further down the
road to a society where violence is normalized.
And it is not normal.
They won’t say Melissa Hortman’s name because it shatters
the narrative they’re trying to sell—that the left is violent and the right is
peaceful.
That narrative is a lie, and we need to call it out.
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