The Left is not "progressive" or "democratic." It is violent. Everything reduces to that, though many Leftists shy away from openly saying so – let alone doing the violence themselves. Yet they vote for it to be done – and when that does not work, the Left often reveals its true self, as it has in the cases just mentioned.

Kirk bothered the Left immensely because he identified what is at the root of Leftism. Yes, conservatives are to some extent guilty of complicity in violence but it is not generally their motivating animus. They tend to be utilitarian-minded people who will support that which they think "works" or that which they think is more "efficient." Theirs is a sort of benign dissonance; the intellectual flotsam of disordered (unprincipled) thinking. The Left, on the other hand, is defined by the desire to control that is the basis of all violence, the most extreme expression of which is the taking of someone else's life (which is the ultimate expression control-taking).

They are savages, driven by hate to murder when they do not like what someone else says. This was Kirk's great crime. Ironically – and this is very interesting, psychologically – it is the Left that imputes hate as the motive of those who disagree with the Left. If a person objects to being told he must refer to him as "her," then he is  transphobic; i.e., he hates people who are confused about which sex they are, as opposed to refusing to pretend they are the sex they claim to be, in defiance of biological facts about their sex. A person who questions feminist (Leftist) nostrums is a misogynist; i.e., he is someone who hates women. If you do not like the idea of your small town being flooded with random strangers from foreign countries, you are a xenophobe – and so on.

Note that all of the foregoing are pseudo-moralistic terms of derision. They are not merely the usual insults – e.g., you're an idiot! They are attacks upon your motives. More finely, they are attacks on your humanity. Only a truly bad person hates someone merely because they happen to be gay (or "trans"). It does not matter that this is untrue – that is not their being gay that they hate but the pushing of the gay agenda on them (and especially on kids).