It has now been 49 days since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, an act of evil - make no mistake, it was evil - woven of so many threads that writing about it feels daunting.
The day it happened, the only words I wrote were the following, posted on Facebook: Since we do not yet know anything about the shooter, I will withhold commentary for now other than to say what should be obvious: Murder is bad. Prayers for his widow and two kids.
I do not blog nearly as much as I once did, and the focus of this blog isn't quite what it once was, but after (reaches for smelling salts) 17 years opining in this space, I cannot allow this assassination to go unremarked about here. After all, my descendants might one day read this blog after I have died and am no longer here to speak, and I don't want to leave the impression that I had no particular thoughts about an event that might prove to be a turning point (no pun intended) in Western civilization, so here I am.
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A major difficulty in commenting about Kirk's killing is deciding what angle to approach it from.
One could write a whole piece dwelling on the question of whether it deserves to be called an assassination (it does) or "simply" a murder like so many others.
Or a whole piece dwelling on whether Tyler Robinson acted alone.
Or, in a JFK'esque approach, asking if Robinson was just a patsy for someone else.
Or in a related approach, asking if Robinson did it at all, or was instead expertly framed.
Or flat-out saying he was either innocent or a conspirator, then speculating about what nefarious forces pulled the strings (George Soros acting as puppeteer to stoke social chaos? Donald Trump acting as puppeteer to justify crackdowns against political foes? Whatever floats your boat, let your freak flag fly!).
One could gloss right over the killing and dwell instead on the question of whether Kirk was a good person (he was) or a hateful one (an adjective I've seen deployed repeatedly on social media).
Or, one could write a whole piece dwelling on how Kirk's young daughters have had their lives thrown into the kind of terror and turmoil no child should have to experience (on a human level, this is what's most important).
In the grand scheme, however, Kirk's assassination was intended to roil the waters with social impacts in the hope that they will flow downstream and have political impacts. And as it turns out, social and political effects have been by far the most observable over the last 49 days, so it is there to which I turn.
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Charles James Kirk was Christian and conservative, but his most galvanizing trait was neither his Christianity nor his conservatism: It was his two-fold ability to persuasively articulate principles and address counter-arguments without chasing red herrings down rabbit holes.
Kirk encouraged critical thought and used it to advance Christianity. He also used it to advance conservative political ideas, which are not always or automatically Christian, but do have more overlap with Christianity than liberal political ideas do.
Most galling to those who disagreed with him, Kirk enjoyed unprecedented success bringing young people into the conservative fold and inspiring already conservative young people to speak their minds in the face of slander. He was so good at this that he was loathed by the Left. Not begrudged, but loathed.
Leftists - not to be confused with mere liberals - would have scorned Kirk even if he was unsuccessful at debating them, but he was successful, and exceptionally so, and that was something they could not tolerate in the face of their ongoing inability to score a win. Thus Leftists hated him viscerally, and personally, and a critical mass of the Left came to genuinely want him dead.
When news of the killing first broke that Wednesday afternoon, my immediate thought was: They couldn't beat him, so they killed him. And I was not alone, for I would later learn that even Chris Alar, who is almost invincibly joyful by nature, uttered those exact words from his Stockbridge, Massachusetts pulpit.
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But that We-They-Us-Them reflex is not healthy, is it? Especially when Kirk's raison d'etre was to talk out differences and understand them rather than come to blows over them. And even more so when there remain many gaps in what we know about September 10th.
Yes, I do think it is unhealthy. Sadly, however, the hive mind of the Left - and to repeat myself, Leftists are not to be confused with mere liberals - shows that normal people may no longer have a choice no matter where they fall on the political spectrum. The Left desires for those who don't genuflect to its dogmas to remain silent, and those who openly dispute its dogmas to be silenced.
Why do I say this? Well, much as I generally oppose philosophizing by meme, a particular one whose circulation skyrocketed after Kirk's killing - we'll call it the "We Are Not the Same Meme" - has proved to be appropriate as the intervening month and a half has unfolded. It shows images of the praying and candlelight vigils that proliferated in response to Kirk's killing, juxtaposed with images of the rioting and destruction that always seem to sprout up in response to every liberal cause celebre; then it supplies the five-word phrase "We Are Not the Same."
Is that meme provocative? Yes.
But is it true? Judging by what I've witnessed in public and private and quasi-private forums over the last month, it is.
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Violence is a human trait, not a political one, and neither side of the aisle has a monopoly on it. But the Left's tendency to openly excuse and even romanticize violence is so pervasive that it bears full responsibility for things having reached fever pitch at this moment in American history.
The American Left's infatuation with orchestrators of political murder goes way back regardless of whether we're talking about individuals (Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro) or organizations (PLO, Weather Underground, Black Panthers). I cannot think of a single corollary in which the American Right has ever excused, much less celebrated, any similarly violent figure.
Looking back over just the past half-decade, it was Senator Chuck Schumer who threatened Supreme Court justices by name; the Left that did not rebuke him but instead engaged in Schumersplaining; a leftist (Nicholas Roske) who traveled cross-country and tried to assassinate one of those justices, then was granted a breathtakingly light sentence by Judge Deborah L. Boardman partly because of his announcement that he wants to be a she; the Left that neglected to condemn Roske; the Left that neglected to condemn either of the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump; a leftist (or so I deduce from him shouting "Free Palestine") who murdered two young Israeli Embassy staffers on the streets of D.C.; the Left that neglected to condemn him; another leftist (or so I deduce from his professed hatred of conservative Supreme Court justices as well as Jews, Catholics, and ICE) who was arrested with more than 200 explosives outside a D.C. cathedral before a Mass that the justices were expected to attend; the Left that neglected to condemn him; liberals who creepily swooned over Luigi Mangione while the Left encouraged their swooning and neglected to condemn his murder of Brian Thompson; Virginia Delegate Jay Jones who openly fantasized about killing a Republican and about the killing of the Republican's children; that same Jay Jones who is now running to be Virginia's attorney general, and did not lose a single endorsement after his fantasies became public; and, deja vu alert, it is the Left that neglected to condemn him.
The chilling thing is not the fact of violence being committed, for that is a story old as time. The chilling things are: 1] the complete failure of one side's leadership to speak out against the violence being committed in its name, and 2] that side's concomitant failure to discourage its rank-and-file from accepting said violence. As long as those failures hold, things will continue to devolve and it will become harder for - here comes that adjective again - normal people on the other side to dissuade its lunatic fringe from responding in kind.
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That other side is of course the right wing of America's political spectrum. Those of us who are on that side have long taken comfort in the thought that proactive violence is anathema to us but not anathema to the Left. That thought is comforting, in large part, because factual events bear it out and give us reason to believe it is true.
But deep down, we know Solzhenitsyn was right when he wrote: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years."
And because we know he was right, we also know (but rarely say) that "our" crazies are unlikely to be kept at bay forever. The odds say at least one of them will spill innocent blood and claim to have done it on our behalf.
When that happens, we can protest all we want that for every act of political violence by a putative conservative there are fifty acts of political violence by a putative liberal. And we can protest all we want about the mainstream media imputing a killer's sin to conservatism despite having never imputed a killer's sin to liberalism. But such protests will not matter.
What will matter is whether we hold right-wing crazies just as accountable as we hold left-wing crazies, and, perhaps more importantly, that the American Center sees us do it and trusts us to do it. Which brings us to a classic chicken-or-egg conundrum: Do they need to see our behavior first in order to trust us, or do they need to trust us first in order to see our behavior?
It's probably some of both, which brings us head-on into an uncomfortable question too few of us are asking: What should we do now that a president who has done things we admire - e.g., appoint great justices to the courts, castrate Iran's nuclear weapons program, reverse the tide of illegal immigration, enable the defeat of Hamas - is using our military to kill unknown human beings by destroying private, manned, non-combatant boats in the waters off South and Central America, without proffering the slightest evidence that any of them were being used to do anything wrong?
Donald Trump's boat-sinking spree began 57 days ago. Charlie Kirk was assassinated 49 days ago, at which time nobody knew the boat-sinking would become a spree rather than a one-off. Kirk has not been here to see what's become of it.
As of three days ago, 43 people had been killed in the spree. As of right now, the number of dead has grown to 57. Looking at these attacks with a legal eye, they are unconstitutional, and looking at them with a moral eye, they are unconscionable.
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I'm no military expert, but it's a safe bet our armed forces should be focused on real enemies in places like the western Pacific and Middle East, not small-fry boats that are not even alleged to be en route to our shores.
What would we be saying if Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden was ordering strikes like these? Especially at a time like this when China is ascendant, growing its military by leaps and bounds, and scheming to dominate? The question answers itself.
Broadly speaking, conservatives usually hold the high ground because we have legitimately earned it over the long course of many years. But we can lose it very quickly if we don't keep doing what it took to earn it in the first place - and lose it we will if we cannot stir ourselves to call a spade a spade when there happens to be an R after his name.
Neglecting to condemn the contemptible has always been a quality of the Left. It is within the Right's power to make sure it remains a quality of only the Left, and I wish I was confident in the Right's ability to pull that off, but I have to be honest: The crickets I'm hearing about these so-called "drug boats" give me no confidence at all.
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I appreciated Charlie Kirk, but at 23 years his senior, I was not influenced by him. The youth, however, were, and what influenced them was his willingness to speak truth no matter how discomforting it felt.
We owe it to them, and our principles, to keep that legacy alive by not being mute about this slaughter on the seas. For the cock will eventually crow, and if we are silent all the way up to then, the youth will take note of our silence and judge us accordingly.
Silence might very well result in us squandering all those once unthinkable gains Kirk helped us achieve.
