The Left’s Assassination Culture
I like to think of myself as a very even, analytical person. I’m not overly emotional, and I am very much out of tune with our culture’s constant sense of outrage about anything and everything. However, yesterday, a friend texted me that Charlie Kirk had been shot. I went over, looked at the video, and afterwards, I was as angry as I had been since 9/11:
The assassination attempts on Donald Trump were certainly horrible, but there’s a reason the Secret Service protects the President. It’s EXPECTED that people are going to try to kill him. That doesn’t mean it’s not infuriating or way, way, over-the-line, but it goes with the territory.
Charlie Kirk was not a politician. He was a political activist and a media personality. Furthermore, his big thing was actually HAVING CONVERSATIONS WITH PEOPLE WHO DISAGREED WITH HIM. This is someone who spent a lot of time handing liberals a microphone and letting them debate him publicly:
We’ve seen two left-wing reactions to this murder, both of which are entirely expected.
The first is deeply insincere liberal politicians and commentators condemning political violence, sometimes with some calls for gun control thrown in. This is part of a game the Left plays over and over.
They call their opponents Nazis, fascists, and evil. They make up apocalyptic scenarios. “Oh, those guys are going to put black people back in chains,” “They’re declaring war on American cities,” “They’re going to cancel the elections!” They endorse harassing conservatives, step up to the line of encouraging violence, and sometimes go over it. If they do openly encourage violence, no one on the Left cares. Then, when the violence happens, “Oh, we condemn that.”
This would be like a guy wearing a Steelers Jersey, a Steelers hat, with Steelers season tickets, who tells everyone the Steelers are his favorite team, watching them win, and going, “Whoa, I didn’t want the Steelers to win the game. I don’t know how anybody could think that.”
Yes, there are undoubtedly liberals who genuinely mean it when they condemn Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but no matter what they say publicly, the majority of them are probably thrilled out of their minds that he was murdered.
If you don’t believe that, look at the reactions from liberals who love the fact that this happened:
Believe it or not, Charlie Kirk has talked about this subject before:
People don’t want to believe this because it’s too uncomfortable, but an awful lot of liberals, probably even a majority, are absolutely fine with murdering conservatives. Just look at those numbers. Nearly half of liberals are good with Elon Musk getting murdered, more than half want to see Trump dead, and it’s probably a safe bet that more than half of them are glad Charlie Kirk is dead. You think they feel any different about the average conservative? Their family? Their kids?
No.
Furthermore, if there are an enormous number of liberals who are willing to endorse killing Trump and Musk, how many do you think there really are? Most people feel uncomfortable actually expressing sentiments that monstrous, so the real numbers are probably significantly higher than that.
This is extraordinarily dangerous because political violence can easily escalate once it starts. It can even be enough to break up a country. From 5 Nightmare Scenarios That Could Lead to the United States Breaking Up:
3) Out of control violent political groups: One of the fundamental principles of good government is that a government should have a monopoly of force. In other words, people want justice handed out according to the agreed-upon law, by trained professionals, not by mobs or groups of thugs. If the cops are not allowed to stop a group like ANTIFA, then the most natural thing in the world is for a group like the Proud Boys to rise up and challenge them. If you allow violent liberal protesters to run wild across your city, eventually they are going to run into a Kyle Rittenhouse who defends himself instead of becoming another one of their victims. Support for each side is going to tend to break down across political lines. So, for example, in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, most liberals tend to believe he’s a murderer while most conservatives tend to believe he was so obviously engaged in self-defense that he shouldn’t even be on trial (raises hand).
The problem with all this is that it can very quickly and easily escalate. For example, the latest ANTIFA/Proud Boys clash predictably featured fights with weapons between the groups, which is now the norm in Portland, but it also escalated into gunfire. The surprise isn’t that it happened, it’s that it didn’t happen sooner and hasn’t gone further. If this is allowed to continue, the bodies will inevitably start to pile up, and the killing may become more professionalized. Imagine a sniper on one side killing people on the other, or a “Saint Valentine’s Day” massacre of a half-dozen members of one faction. What would happen afterward? Not just pressure to retaliate, but people across the country saying, “they deserved it” or “this is a tragedy” after each bloodbath, based almost entirely on which political tribe they’re in. That can quickly inflame the situation and help spread the politically motivated violence everywhere, with people across the country organizing for violence out of fear that their neighbors are about to group up and put them in a kill-or-be-killed situation. Once you get to the point where armed groups are killing each other in the streets over political differences across the country, it wouldn’t be a shock if a civil war or secession weren’t far behind.
Could this event lead to retaliatory murders? Everything Asmongold says in this video is spot on:
As he notes in the video, the violence is likely going to get worse because there’s no reason for it to stop – and he may be right. If the Left doesn’t pay any price for encouraging violence and demonizing conservatives while liberals continue to call for the murder of Republicans, at some point, the guns are going to turn in the opposite direction.
Are we there? Probably not, and we should all hope we never get there. But if conservatives conclude that the choice is “fight or wait around for the Left to pick us off and laugh about it,” the choice is not going to be “die”:
That brings us to a big question people are starting to ask:
We should certainly hope so because the alternative would be horrific, but the answer to that question has yet to be determined because the Left will also have to want to co-exist, and many of them do not seem to want to do that.
Also see:
25 Liberal Calls for Violence, Harassment, and Lawlessness During the Trump Years in Quotes
Yes, Fire the People Calling for Conservatives to Die
Why Would it Be Wrong to Try to Assassinate Hitler?
What a National Divorce Would Actually Mean
The criminal who committed this murder, this assassination, is personally responsible and must be caught and held accountable (at best, death penalty after decades of appeals); nevertheless...
Democrat violence is now continuous, and it a natural result of their decades long socio-political war against US culture - especially the last 15 years, with: the Right is evil, offensive words are violence, everything is offensive, actual violence is an acceptable response to right wing violence (which by definition includes "offensive words"). The glorious result of their progressive push is not only fostering but facilitating "regular" crime while also pushing mostly peaceful protests and attacks - up to and including murder - on Republicans, conservatives, MAGA and anyone else who disagrees with The Party.
Response to today's post will be varied, horrified, and vicious in some cases. Maybe we need Townhall meeting, led by someone who could be as calm and collected as Charlie Kirk, to invite those who hate us so much to discuss that hatred. Otherwise . . . we'll hear repeated cries "to arms!"