I’m still under a dark cloud after Charlie Kirk’s murder, but the aftermath of that heinous act has thrown into stark relief the radical differences between the left and right, writ large.
I don’t want to do a simplistic, Manichaean “they’re all terrible and we’re all great” thing. Primarily because it’s never true. All of us are fallen and broken in some way, and there are good and bad actors on both sides.
It’s also useful to remember the line from Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn – a great man who knew more about the evils of totalitarian leftism than any of us – to wit, “The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.”
But that truth doesn’t excuse or prevent us from trying to honestly judge the varying degrees of evil or corruption in competing groups or ideologies. And I think it’s just demonstrably true that the left has a real problem with its own base, in the form of a sick propensity to embrace and justify political violence.
Consider the most significant recent examples of serious violence that were politically motivated. There have been three mass movements of organized, long-lasting political rioting in the last 5 years, all propagated by those on the left: the BLM riots, the Antifa riots, and the recent anti-ICE riots in LA and several other cities. The first two continued for months, causing billions of dollars of damage, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more, in cities all over the country.
When it comes to individual attacks, we’ve got the shooting attack on the GOP softball practice that nearly killed Steve Scalise; two assassination attempts on Trump in the span of a few months; the attempted burning to death of Jews in Boulder, and the murder of the young Jewish couple in DC; the mass shootings of Christian school children in Nashville and again in Minneapolis; the murder of the health insurance CEO by back-shooting coward Luigi Mangioni; and now the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
What counter-balancing examples are there from the political right? When it comes to group violence, I can think of only two possibilities: the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, and January 6th. One person was killed in Charlottesville, and the only one killed on January 6th was a Trump supporter. Both were events lasting no more than a few hours, carried out by several hundred people who acted violently – as compared to the many hundreds of thousands in the organized mobs of violent leftist rioters who wreaked havoc for literally months, and all over the country.
When it comes to individual attacks, the only ones I’m aware of were the shooting of Gabby Giffords, the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, and the three Democrat office holders recently murdered in Minnesota. And none of those turned out to be committed by right wingers for recognizable political motivations.
Gifford’s shooter had no discernable or rational political beliefs and was mentally ill, believing among other things that “the government was controlling people’s minds by controlling their grammar,” that the Mayan calendar apocalypse was imminent. Pelosi’s attacker was a schizophrenic, intermittently homeless, commune-dwelling hippy.
And after some excitement in Democrat circles because the Minnesota Democrat killer appeared at first to be a Trump supporter, it turned out he was a whacko who killed the three pols because he thought it would help Amy Klobuchar and Tim Wolz.
In fact, the white supremacists at Charlotte were also not affiliated with any mainstream conservative group or school of thought. Trump denounced them at the time and since, saying they should be “condemned completely,” and no white supremacists hold any office or sway in GOP circles, in congress or any other national office.
(I know: many Democrats scream about white supremacists throughout the GOP. But they are either lying, delusional, or both. Because when you examine their claims, it turns out that in their world, “white supremacist” means anyone who opposes racial discrimination of any kind, and supports the constitution, merit-based hiring, hard-work, punctuality, and every other good thing under the sun.)
In fact, the closest you can get to any political violence from the right that had any support from any mainstream Republican or conservative groups was arguably that committed on January 6th. And initially, the violent minority among the J6ers were almost universally condemned by every corner of the conservative world.
That only changed after the Democrats went after all of them so viciously, imposing a double standard so blatantly unfair that by the time Trump was re-elected, most Republicans agreed with his decision to pardon them. (Even then, there was at least a strong plurality of opposition to pardoning the small number of January 6th protestors who had been violent.) After watching Democrats let hundreds of thousands of violent thugs, rioters and looters in BLM and Antifa go without so much as a slap on the wrist, we conservatives were no longer willing to tolerate the wildly disproportionate punishment of non-violent J6ers who peacefully walked through the Capitol and then went home.
Again, I would challenge my leftist friends to cite any examples of representative conservatives, motivated by and espousing mainstream conservative beliefs, who have committed acts of political violence. To the extent that they can point to anyone, they’d have to dig up some far-fringe sliver of whackos with no serious connection to any legitimate, influential conservative candidate or group.
Compare that to the leftist practitioners of political violence listed above. BLM and Antifa might not speak for ALL Democrats, but they certainly speak for the majority of the most energetic Democrat base. The central views which can be found in any of their manifestos, speeches, banners or chanted slogans – the condemnation of free-market capitalism, of America as irredeemably racist, and of the “evil” rich, along with disdain for straight people and white people and the police – have been commonplace in the last half-dozen DNC platforms and Democrat presidential candidacies.
Steve Scalise’s shooter was a mainstream Bernie bro and campaign volunteer. The Muslim Jew-murderers in Boulder and DC (and elsewhere) are no more anti-Semitic than the jihad enthusiasts in the Squad. Trust-fund coward Mangioni is a folk hero to bloodthirsty, dimwit leftist fangirls (of both sexes) throughout the Democrat party and blogosphere.
And the transgender venom spouted by the murderers of Christian kids in Nashville and Minnesota – and, if early reports are right, by the killer of Charlie Kirk – could be lifted directly from the malicious, pseudoscientific babblings of the “57 genders” mainstream of the Democrat party.
And this isn’t new. The totalitarian Left has always justified political violence. Marx’s obsession with revolution was never about peaceful, democratic change. Lenin is often credited with the cold-hearted cliché about needing to break a lot of eggs to make an omelet (though it may have come from that earlier proto-Leninist, Robespierre). Stalin dismissively called the murder of a million people a mere “statistic,” and Mao happily noted that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Today many senior Dem politicians were smart enough to condemn Charlie Kirk’s murder, and I hope that for the sake of their souls, they were sincere. But we also saw an outpouring of vile celebration over this good man’s death from Stalin’s heirs, eagerly pursuing the bloody family business. If the Democrat party wants to avoid disaster, it needs to do something about the poisonous progeny it has allowed to spawn.
I think it’s a good sign that a smattering of leftist hate-mongers have lost their jobs today because of their wicked tweets, posts and videos. MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd (and boy, does that guy put the “anal” in “analyst) lost his job, along with his audience of literally dozens. So did a couple of creepy academics, and an even creepier “transgender” comic creator lost his new series.
On the other hand, the cesspool of Bluesky is full of vitriol, and Democrats in congress wouldn’t even allow a moment of prayer in the House when Kirk’s death was announced. Evil blimp Pritzker (#putdownthegiantturkeyleg) and phony squaw Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) both rejected the idea that they should tone down their vile rhetoric, and said that Trump is the problem.
That’s right. The people who have called all conservatives “Nazis, fascists and existential threats to democracy” non-stop for years can’t see why that might have inspired some of their more unstable coreligionists to act as if those slanderous lies are true. And they’re simultaneously offended because Trump shoots his mouth off about Rosie O’Donnell being fat, and calls lunatics and illegals “lunatics” and “illegals.”
Ugh. At times like these I feel a kinship with H.L. Mencken, when he said, “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
But even momentarily indulging in that fantasy would be betraying my faith, and the cause that Charlie Kirk died for. While his foes spouted hatred and justified violence, Charlie did what old-school liberals always said they wanted: he engaged in spirited debate. He gave as good as he got when confronted by trolls and bad-faith homunculi, but he was even-handed and told the truth to those who would hear it.
He always made a point of allowing people who disagreed with him to come to the front of the line – as Ben Shapiro and many other conservatives routinely do. And I think it’s telling that I can’t think of any leftist “intellectual” or influencer who does the same. They prefer stacked partisan audiences, classrooms where they have power over cowed students, and the ability to cancel anyone who defeats them in a fair argument.
I’ve read a few Christian commentators over this last, sad 36 hours, pointing out that for the faithful, death is not the end, nor should it be sad.
But then I think of the famous, shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” Most of us know that one if we know any, and it is a favorite of lazy students who were assigned to memorize a Bible verse. (I respectfully plead the Fifth on this point.)
But many don’t remember the context. It appears in the book of John, and His reaction is caused by the death of his friend Lazarus. He weeps, and the next verse says, “Behold, how He loved him.”
Even though most of us never met Charlie Kirk, that’s how we feel now, and it’s right that we should. Let those whose poisonous politics are shriveling their souls wallow in their hatred; we shouldn’t lower ourselves to their level, and their misery is its own punishment.
Regular readers will remember that I discussed one of my favorite Shakespeare sonnets (#73) last month. It’s a somber meditation on death, by an old man facing the end of life. The speaker sees in his own frail body, “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”
Though the context of a dying old man couldn’t be more different from Charlie being cut down in the prime of life, the final couplet could have been written about what just happened on a beautiful, early fall day in Utah:
“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
Charlie is definitely gone too soon. However, since the news broke, it’s become clear that he inspired so many young people.
We can take comfort in the prospect of a thousand Charlie Kirks stepping up and continuing the work that he had started. And in the words often read in Advent services: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it.”
But even so, it is heartbreaking to be talking about Charlie Kirk in the past tense.
Martin Simpson 