I think I may have found the smartest Democrat in congress.
I know, that sounds like the set-up for a cruel, list-making joke. E.g. let’s identify the most impressive leftist SCOTUS member, the most mentally-healthy Squad Member, the most attractive Antifa Member.
So sure, the competition is not exactly stiff. But my candidate is Ro Khanna. Because on Tuesday, on CNN, he said, “Every Democrat was horrified by the assassination of Charlie Kirk.”
I didn’t say Ro was the most honest Democrat. (The candidates for that one could fit into a phone booth!) I said he was the smartest Democrat. Because he has the sense to know what your average third-grader should know: if you’re a politician who wants to win elections, you’re supposed to at least SAY that you’re horrified by the assassination of a good man from your political opposition!
But I think that even as he was saying that, Ro realized that he was in trouble, since for the last week all PWFEs (People With Functioning Eyes) have watched literally thousands of Democrats all over the country ghoulishly celebrating Charlie’s murder. So “all Democrats are horrified” wasn’t going to fly.
He amended the thought two sentences later, saying, “That has been what every elected Democrat has said.” That was a little better – again, most minimally competent politicians know enough to hide their evil glee from the public – but it was still, sadly, a lie.
Because disgusting Ilhan Omar trashed Charlie during an interview with the equally disgusting Mehdi Hasan the day after Charlie’s murder, and Grandma Squanto Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher), J(um)B(o) Pritzker (#putdownthatoversizedturkeyleg) and many other elected Dems pivoted within seconds from Charlie’s murder to blaming Trump’s rhetoric. Which is not something that anyone truly horrified by a murder would do.
When Ro was ratioed into next week, and buried with thousands of clips and examples of Dems cheering Charlie’s death, he finally had to retreat to saying that “every elected Dem I talked to” was horrified by the assassination.
Okay, Ro, we get it. You talked to yourself in the green room mirror at CNN before going out to sell that line. Nice try, anyway.
Since we’re cautious optimists around here, I’ve got a short list of some good news that I see coming out of this heartbreakingly awful story:
1. There is now a huge new spotlight on Charlie Kirk’s work. And that necessarily means more people following in his footsteps and joining his cause. (Witness the 54,000 new applications for Turning Point membership or chapters. 54,000!) Because any normal person with an unclouded mind (regardless of political priors) who watches any number of randomly chosen videos of Charlie’s speeches and debates will see a lot to admire, as well as realizing that the gloating leftist mobs have been lying about him.
2. There is also now a huge new spotlight on the left, and everywhere that spotlight moves, it reveals a bunch of sick, hateful humans scattering like cockroaches at being exposed. (No offense to cockroaches, who are just as God made them, and haven’t intentionally shriveled their souls by choosing a path of gleeful leftist hatred, like certain teachers, “journalists” and elected officials I could name.)
3. An ancillary benefit of all of the malevolent lefties exposing themselves through their own social media ghoulishness is that waves of them are being fired. And that doesn’t just make me giddily happy – though it certainly does that! – it also improves every school, organization and workplace out of which their sorry asses have been kicked.
Think about that. Every school, every hospital, every newspaper that is no longer employing those ghouls has now increased its collective IQ, mental health, workplace quality of life, and ability to serve its students or customers.
4. Another ancillary benefit is that the remaining employed lefties have learned that it’s not the Biden years anymore, when they could behave horribly without consequences, and every normal person has now been emboldened to push back on those lefties if they start acting like idiots in the future.
5. The exposure to Charlie’s wholesomeness and the left’s creepiness is prompting many people to leave the left and move at least tentatively toward conservatism. More importantly, IMHO, many are also coming to Christ, or at least moving in that direction. (Seeing a good Christian man martyred by evil goblins can do that.)
Okay, I’d planned to refute the leftists’ specific attacks on Charlie’s work, and to analyze four leftists who behaved in representatively bad ways this past week, but I’m going to call a mid-column audible instead.
I’ll save those ideas for a column tomorrow and one on Friday, for the rare quintfecta of a 5-column week. (Yes, I think I just made that word up. And yes, it’s spectacular.)
Because I want to discuss a topic that CO raised, to a spirited response, yesterday: Pam Bondi’s announcement that the Trump administration will be going hard after hate speech after Charlie’s murder.
I agree with most responders that Bondi didn’t phrase the point well by relying too much on the problematic term “hate speech.” But I also think she was smart to respond shortly afterwards, and clarify that she was talking about going after speech that involves incitement to violence and threats, which is already illegal, and widely accepted as such.
So, a self-inflicted wound, but a very minor one, and quickly cleaned up.
I think we conservatives should push back hard against hate speech laws for the same reason we should do so against hate crime laws: because both of them sound good initially, but they are far too subjective, and give far too much power to government bureaucrats.
It sounds good to say that you’re going to enhance criminal sentences if you kill someone because of their race, gender, sexual preference or religion, because we don’t like racism, sexism, etc. But that has 3 main flaws, IMHO.
First, we often have to guess at people’s motives for their crimes. (Criminals will quickly learn to claim that they killed for whichever motive will draw the least severe sentence.) Second, how important is motive, really? Am I any less dead if I’m a white guy killed by a black guy, or vice versa? Or a woman killed for being female vs. a man killed for being male?
But most importantly, hate crime laws punish people differently based on whether they committed the identical crime for government-approved motives – I killed you to rob you, or because you stole from me, or because I was drunk and just lost 5 large betting on the Bears – or government-disapproved motives – I killed you because of your skin color, or genitalia.
And I don’t think the government should have that kind of power. After our experience over the last decade or so, do any of us trust judges or the legal system as much as we used to?
Everyone knows that in a deep blue city or state, hate crime enhancements go lopsidedly in one direction. A far-left judge or jury will look into the heart of a white murderer of a black person and see racism, when they won’t see racism in a black killer of a white person – even when the white killer has no documented history of racism, and the black killer is on video muttering “cracker” and “white devil” while stabbing his white victim.
Listen to many leftists – and academics – of any race, and they’ll tell you that it’s not even POSSIBLE for a black person to be racist against whites! Does that sound like a recipe for an unbiased application of hate crime enhancements?
Hate speech is even more problematic, since it necessarily clashes with fundamental free speech rights. Hate speech is nearly always in the eye of the beholder, and inevitably comes down to “speech that I hate.” Especially when the totalitarian left and its voracious desire to control everybody is involved.
When “words are violence,” and silence is also violence, the leftist speech police has total control. That’s why they redefine words, or drain them of all meaning. Violent Jew-haters will call Jewish conservatives “Nazis.” Angry imbeciles will call supporters of free speech, free markets and smaller government “fascists.”
Bigots will call people who want to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin “racists.”
Science-denying narcissists will call medical mutilations intended to deny your actual gender “gender-affirming care.”
Labeling speech you don’t like “hate speech” is a power game used as a cudgel by people who couldn’t persuade people without coercion, and couldn’t win a debate to save their lives.
That’s why they hated Charlie so much. He was smart, and well-informed, and had common sense, reason, and benevolence on his side. Whereas they are dimwitted, uninformed and malevolent, and reality is squarely against them.
In that situation, what’s a loser a**hole to do, but pick up a gun? (I mean, besides run for office as a Democrat?)
Or as somebody on X said last week, “They don’t kill you because you’re a Nazi. They call you a Nazi so they can kill you.”
Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!
Martin Simpson 