Thank you all so much for your many thoughtful responses to my last several columns. I appreciate the cathartic release (and salutary effects on my blood pressure and mental outlook) of being able to write here, and get all of this angst out of my head and off of my chest!
That being said, this might be another rare 5-column week, because each time I sit down with my thoughts, I find my fingers flying over the keyboard like Stephen King on crack. (Only without the malevolent political derangement that talented but hate-benighted writer has been spewing lately.)
One other point before I get started. Though I have an appreciation for a sparingly used swear word in my writing, I try to keep that to a minimum. When I’m drafting something and the emotions are strong, I’ll write an unexpurgated version, and then go back and edit most of that stuff out. (I’m like a rapper, with a clean and dirty version of every song. Except that instead of writing awful, tuneless crap, I produce sparkling gems of English prose. Also, I never use the “n” word, even in a rough draft! Because: narwhal, please!)
But since I learned of Charlie’s murder, I am wearing out the “f” key on my computer! I’ve always liked Gutfeld’s bit, where he says a funny tongue-in-cheek sexist line, then instantly defuses it with a graphic that drops, accompanied by a bass voice saying, “A sexist would SAYYY!”
I need one of those for half of my first-draft thoughts: “An angry right-winger would SAYYY!”
Anyway, when I left off yesterday, I’d outlined the violent, hateful response from the Left to the death of their four primary martyrs in recent years, when three of the four of them were career criminals, and all of them were killed because of their own violent actions while committing new crimes.
Now compare the reaction of the right to the wicked murder of Charlie Kirk. For the last five days, there has been a gigantic, nation-wide emotional response. Only it hasn’t involved an orgy of violence, or night after night of rioting and looting and burning down whole city blocks. Nobody in any city has spent a single dollar on plywood to board up their windows.
We righties haven’t put on all black, and armed ourselves, and attacked the headquarters of the DNC, or the offices of CNN and MSNBC, or the offices or homes of Democrat politicians.
We haven’t painted slogans on our armor and public buildings saying “ALAB” (All Leftists Are B*stards), or “Kill the Commies!” We haven’t blocked interstates, or set cars on fire, or gone to hotbeds of leftism like Berkeley and broken into campus buildings. Many of us own guns, yet none of us have shot a single leftist.
Our response hasn’t been “mostly peaceful.” (Left-wing media speak for “horrifically violent, but in ways we approve.”)
It has been “actually, literally peaceful.” As in, “Pax Christi,” (the peace of Christ).
In churches and on campuses, in parks and at state houses, we met in our handfuls and hundreds and thousands, and we prayed, and sang hymns, and remembered a good man, cruelly taken by an evil one. In Madison Square Park, several hundred of us waved America flags, and sang Amazing Grace.
We held up signs and made memorials of candles and roses in London, and at the American embassy in Berlin, and in Sydney, Australia, and at the Reagan Library in California. Thousands of Koreans marched through the streets of Seoul, waving American and South Korean flags and chanting, “We are Charlie Kirk!”
In Scottsdale, where Charlie lived, and in Utah, where he died, we held prayer vigils, and said the rosary. Small remembrances popped up all over the country, from Maine to Florida to Oregon, in big cities and small towns.
And everywhere, there were crosses and American flags and pictures of Charlie and hand-written signs covered with Bible verses and quotes from Charlie and expressions of love and sorrow.
The political gulf is obvious. The left (not all of them, but many) riots, and burns, and steals, and destroys.
We pray, and mourn, and celebrate a life well-lived, and control our righteous anger, and successfully fight to keep it from spilling out, and taking an eye for an eye.
They have violence, and we have vigils. They burn the American flag, and we wave it, and fly it at half-mast. Take away the details of this particular assassination, and I still know which side I want to be on.
I haven’t had a chance to respond to your comments from yesterday (because I’ve been writing like a maniac), but I did want to agree with but also challenge Tari Trowbridge’s point, when she said that the left doesn’t have a corner on fringe radicals. I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t accept any Manichaean argument that we’re 100% pure and they’re 100% evil.
But I would push back a bit on the idea that the right “has its share of murderers,” if by “our share” anyone would suggest that it’s a roughly proportional, 50/50 breakdown. (And I don’t think Tari was suggesting that.) And I would also require more evidence from the MSM when they immediately label some killers as conservative or MAGA, simply because their targets were Democrats or leftists.
Tari mentioned the guy who killed the Dem pols in MN as a right-wing example, but as I said last week, I don’t think that example holds. Yes, that killer was a registered Republican, and yes, he murdered three Democrats. But he was nuts, and had been appointed to a committee by the Wolz administration, and specifically said that he was killing those people to help Democrats Klobuchar and Wolz.
Others have mentioned the guy who tried to kill PA Dem Josh Shapiro by setting his house on fire. And yes, though that guy had been a political independent until 2024, he did try to convince family members to vote for Trump last year.
On the other hand, he was diagnosed as bipolar and schizophrenic, with a long history of criminal behavior and mental illness, and he was off his meds. And investigators found that he had targeted Shapiro based on “perceived injustices toward the people of Palestine.”
Quick political quiz: a perp targets a Jewish politician because he sides with Hamas over Israel. Which side of the political divide do you think THAT would-be killer belongs to?
If you said anything other than “the Left,” you have been disqualified, and must depart the field with your head hanging in shame.
Having said that, I’ll still grant Tari’s general point, that there are bad actors on both sides. (All of us are fallen. The battleline between good and evil goes through every human heart.) I hadn’t thought about the mass murder by bomber Tim McVeigh, who was more libertarian/government-hating, but still clearly “on the right,” and I know that a few abortion doctors have been killed by right-wingers over the years.
But here are the salient points:
1. Most high-profile or mass killers are at least partially mentally ill, and to the extent that they evince any political ideas at all, it’s often hard to tell what portion of their motivations involved politics. (Son of Sam killed because his neighbor’s dog told him to. Some killers attack because they think Trump or Biden are sending them instructions through the fillings in their teeth.)
2. If we could analyze and classify every killing in which the primary motivations were political (with additional secondary or tertiary motivations that might involve mental illness, childhood trauma, etc.), I’m confident that among those primarily-political crimes, the Left ones would lopsidedly outnumber the Right ones.
3. And even in the context of mental-illness-driven murders, one of the most prominent of those motivating conditions in recent years involves trans/gender dysmorphia. Which the first four versions of the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) all classified as a mental disorder, and which the fifth and latest version – in an obvious attempt to trim its sails for political and not medical/psychiatric reasons – still classifies as a “mental health diagnosis” for which psychiatric/medical treatment is often indicated. And ALL of those attacks that I’m aware of have been committed by leftists.
That’s tragically true of Charlie’s killer: literally the last question he ever took involved transgender killers. It was asked by someone clearly implying that the number of trans killers had been exaggerated by the Right for political gain.
Annnnnddddd… then a hateful, leftist antifa fan who was banging his “trans” roommate murdered Charlie Kirk before he could answer.
So “F” you guys! F you hard, and F you long. And F the perverted little furry-cosplaying freak you rode in on.
(An angry right-winger would SAYYY!)
But the most important thing about the differences between these killers is that the leftist ones are using the same talking points and citing the same hateful complaints that are espoused by millions of mainstream Democrats, including those in positions of power.
Yes, some (maybe even many) elected Dems have condemned Charlie’s murder. As I said last week, I pray that for their souls’ sake, they are sincere. But it’s also true that NOT offering at least a rote “condolences” message would be an act of political suicide in all but the deepest of blue districts.
Even so, thousands and thousands (probably tens or hundreds of thousands!) of otherwise normal-seeming Dems and leftists in responsible positions have gone full-Satan or Satan-adjacent about this. School teachers, doctors, college profs and Deans, congresscreeps, “journalists” etc. have not been able to at least pretend to be human beings in the wake of Charlie’s murder.
Should I, as a Christian, revel in their firings and arrests? Probably not.
Should I be drinking celebratory shots of bourbon, and considering buying some champagne, to celebrate each new high-profile defenestration of a hateful goblin who’s crying over a cardboard box of his/her possessions on a Tiktok video after she/he/it has been fired? Definitely not.
Am I doing so anyway?
Abso-freakin’-LUTELY! (An angry right-winger would saayyy!)
Should I be taunting those freaks, thusly:
“You lost your job (not your life) because you couldn’t control yourself enough to refrain from vomiting the vicious hatred from your black little cinder of a heart onto public websites and social media.
Charlie lost his life (not just his job) because he tried to debate and reason with you.
So cry me a river, buttercup!”
Yes, I will someday regret the feelings that are roiling in my posts this week. And someday I’ll repent, and I’ll get back to trying to be better, and to love my enemies, and to try to forgive them even though they DO know what they do.
But to paraphrase the king from Lord of the Rings, when orc asses had to be kicked, “A day may come when the courage of conservatives fails, when we forsake our friends and forgive their murders. But it is not THIS day!”
Okay, maybe I got a little carried away, or the Knob Creek got the better of me.
Let’s see if I can do better tomorrow, when I try to find a few silver linings in this story, and look at a few representative lefties and see what we can learn from their reactions
Hamas (and trantifa) delenda est!
Martin Simpson 