A cliche response to an unexpected tragedy is to ask “Why?” Nobody’s really asking that after the assassination of Charlie Kirk as has was speaking in front of about 3,000 people at Utah Valley University. Charlie himself outlined the problem five months before his life was cut short:
We could have derived this much earlier from a host of events, including the celebration and justification of the October 7 massacre, the reaction to the assassination attempts against Donald Trump, the Luigi Mangione cult, or even the reaction of some people to 9/11.
Substack even has its own local version, though the thumbnail has been ruined by an after-the-fact edit:
We’re really in quite a silly place, and we’ve been here for a while. There are millions of people all around us who would celebrate our deaths. Many deaths - millions of people’s deaths. They want us to die; they just don’t want to suffer any consequences for making it happen. That’s why they’re so excited when someone else does it!
To understand these violent sentiments, we only need a 30-second overview of the entire history of Leftism: “Truth is subjective”, “words are power constructs”, “Identity Uber Alles” (Karl Marx in a nutshell), and “morality is a social construct”. An obsession with class warfare, which becomes a proxy for all other forms of identity.
That is the Left. It’s always been the core ethos. Its various offshoots are just restatements. Orwell knew it, which is why he understood that thoughtcrime was the only real crime under Leftism. He also understood that there was no such thing as a small thoughtcrime or a big thoughtcrime. Just as #MeToo defined “the male gaze” as “literal rape”, left-wing culture declares that “words are violence” and “silence is violence”, yet also “violence is speech”.
Which brings us back to Charlie Kirk.
Many of Kirk’s supporters have spent the hours following his assassination talking about how moderate Charlie was. How nice. How friendly. How willing to reach out to people who disagreed. And it’s true - there was no one in America more famous for reaching out from the Right to debate the Left.
How many on the Left give him credit for that, even in the immediate aftermath of this tragedy? I genuinely challenge readers to find even one example. The only characterizations of Charlie that I find from the Left are mountains of commentary calling him a “hateful”, “evil”, “extremist” “Nazi” “MAGA” who “wants transgenders to die”. The Left finds precisely one bit of common ground with Charlie’s beloved Christianity: Its belief that every single (right-wing) person deserves damnation for his sins.
Every one of us.
Now of course, the phrasings of this belief come in tiers. At the absolute top of the Lefty hierarchy, a host of public figures “say the line”:
“Thoughts and prayers”? I thought it was heresy to respond to shootings with prayers! Somebody tell (Minneapolis mayor) Jacob Frey!
Slightly downstream in the aristocracy, the figureheads complement insincere condolences with partisan talking points.
We could look at many more Democrats for whom it’s all about “gun control”, but let’s move on to America’s heaviest gerrymanderer:
Ah, now we’re getting there. A proper DARVO! It’s all Trump’s fault!
And we dare not omit the old classic - “Our victims are clearly attacked by partisans, but your victims are attacked by random ‘mentally ill’ people!” Thanks for playing, Stephen King. Oh, and you even got the gun control thing in there!
But of course, such sanitized performances are only required of the public figures. The rank-and-files - the nobodies - they tell us what the egregore is really thinking.
There are too many to count, and the poor gulag masters on reddit have had a long, tiring day deciding which subreddits and threads to lock and which posts to delete without angering the natives too much. It’s a tough job!
The Left finds precisely one bit of common ground with Charlie’s beloved Christianity: Its belief that every single (right-wing) person deserves damnation for his sins.
It’s not only the forums that are being flooded with bloodlust, though. Many a Christian has shared that his own posts of condolence have received replies from real-world acquaintances pushing back on the notion that Charlie Kirk should be mourned. Even Facebook posts with dozens of supportive comments are not immune to that one person who feels compelled (and safe!) to slam Kirk amidst a group of aggrieved friends. Can you imagine anyone denouncing a hypothetical assassinated Democrat in a thread full of his friends who support the victim? The malice gap is also a confidence gap.
Rather than sharing more citizen hate, let’s move on to the media edition:
Focus is rightfully given to an MSNBC bit that aired live shortly after the shooting. “We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration” is the one and only speculation offered by a guest, whose views are aired uncritically.
A few points:
There was only one shot fired, and it hit Kirk in the neck.
Kirk’s audiences are often more hostile people than allies.
This was a college campus - the epitome of a gun free zone.
There is no “celebratory gunshot” culture on the American Right any more than on the American Left.
“Celebratory gunshots” are the stuff of the developing world, or as ChatGPT puts it: ✅ Summary: Celebratory gunshots are most prevalent in the Middle East, South Asia, the Balkans, parts of Africa, and Latin America.
Left-wing people are famously (and proudly) oblivious to the ways of the people they hate, but it beggars belief that this guy actually thinks that “celebratory gunshots” are something that Republicans ever do. Even if they weren’t only a fraction of the crowd on a college campus.
If a Fox News host said that “Pramila Jayapal should put down the peace pipe”, it would be both offensive and stupid, as Jayapal (A House Democrat) is not that kind of Indian. Calls for the speaker’s head would be loud and long. Will MSNBC take action? I think we know the answer.
The real evil in that short utterance wasn’t how insultingly wrong it was. It was the intent. The speaker, in all his smarm, condescended to have a laugh with his audience at the hated right-wingers. He didn’t believe he was offering a genuine theory. He was just tossing a barb, and he knew that the useful idiots watching would gleefully snatch their new talking point and run with it on Bluesky.
Now, before we talk about what comes next, we need to address a talking point to which the very naive might ascribe merit:
I expect more convergence on this quote over time, as the Lefties decide that it’s their strongest defense. But it’s a ludicrous argument, provided you haven’t misquoted Kirk. Akin to saying that someone opposed to banning cars should die in a car crash. Or that someone who thinks earth is overpopulated should be executed.
Law Enforcement Can’t Save Us
As the Right tends to know best, gun control laws don’t work. They disarm the law-abiding, and when they’re actually violated, charges are generally dropped due to the shooter’s over-imprisoned complexion (No, seriously, we’d eliminate most gun murders by consistently enforcing the laws we already have!).
But this type of shooter isn’t “representative” of most shooters. As explained here:
A large majority of violent crime is committed by repeat offenders. Repeat offenders are people with low impulse control, which is why they frequently cross lines that other people wouldn’t cross. Once they’ve identified themselves by offending for the first time, we can manage them with policy. Or at least we could, if the political will existed.
But there are other types of crime. “Crimes of passion” are often the sole offenses of the perpetrators’ lives. A man catches his wife in bed with another man and assaults them. A distraught father pummel’s his daughter’s rapist. These offenders don’t have poor impulse control; they just found situations that met their high thresholds for snapping.
Unfortunately, the Bluesky bubble-dweller is a similar story. He incubates in a constant cacophony of doomcasting which can only be solved by eradicating the Right. This means that it’s quite unlikely that he has a prior record of violence, or anything else that might prevent legally obtaining a firearm.
We can also forget about “good guy with a gun” thwarting a shooter like Charlie Kirk’s sniper. The shot was fired before anyone saw a problem. Would a stronger threat of capture have deterred the shooter? Maybe, but it didn’t deter Thomas Crooks from taking a shot at Donald Trump.
There’s no law enforcement solution to a culture of suicidal hate.
Conclusion
Charlie Kirk lived to win debates with the Left, but debate actually has preconditions. Your opposite must believe in debate, or else you might as well be arguing with a grizzly bear.
Many left-wing voters are followers - they believe their leaders are sincere about “helping the poor” or “saving the environment” or “opposing violence”. Charlie Kirk had good exchanges with these people, and none of them tried to shoot him.
But there are millions of others who never made it into Charlie’s published videos. Mostly they would never exchange words with him, but if they did, they wouldn’t actually engage. These are the people who are celebrating Charlie’s murder today. They are not few in number, and their numbers are enough for serious influence. They’re not hiding their celebrations on the “dark web”, because for years now they’ve been free to live in the light without consequences.
If good is to come from this tragedy, it will not be “Charlie’s Law” or any Trumpian executive action. What is needed - the only real thing that will move the needle - is a broad expansion of awareness of where we actually are as a country. The millions who want us dead must be seen not just by their “perpetually online” right-wing counterparts, but by the broader population. Only then can a broad cultural pushback begin. We must transition from a society where the Left is unafraid to scream hate in any forum to one where meaningful social consequences apply, and they stick!
Someone filming herself dancing to news of Charlie Kirk’s death should receive the Justine Sacco experience.
Yes, it’s “Cancel Culture”. For people who desperately need it. Embrace it, or expect more assassinations.
Excellent essay.
Yeah, I was a bit surprised it happened, but I certainly didn't ask *why* it had happened.