There have been several, just in my lifetime. The assassination of JFK is probably the most important one, because it opened the way for the others: September 11 and the nothing-to-see-here Epstein files are two other rather obvious such turning points – maybe better to call these inflection points of greater acceleration…but that would kind of mess up the use of my title to this post.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Did I even need to write that this event is what has prompted this post, given the title? Many thoughts come to mind, but I will stick to a couple of quotes from Angelo Codevilla, who I have written about often over the last several years – even before Trump’s first election nine years ago. So, here goes.
This he wrote even before Trump’s first victory in 2016:
We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate manifestation. Regardless of who wins in 2016, this revolution’s sentiments will grow in volume and intensity, and are sure to empower politicians likely to make Americans nostalgic for Donald Trump’s moderation.
This from a few weeks after Trump’s first inauguration:
Hear me…you see the entire ruling class essentially rejecting the Constitution, the American way, rejecting the legitimacy of elections. There can be no mild response to that, and there isn’t one. Trump’s voters want certain results and they don’t particularly care how they get them. The ruling class wants its power and doesn’t particularly care how it holds on to it.
This also from around the same time:
In short, the P.C. “changes in law and public norms” (to quote Galston again) that the ruling class imposed on the rest of America, rather than having “gradually brought about changes in private attitudes across partisan and ideological lines” as the ruling class imagined (and as Gramsci would have approved) have set off a revolution—of which we can be sure only that it won’t be pretty.
What do all of these have to do with Charlie Kirk? (Oh, and let’s not forget the image of a young Ukrainian female refugee knifed while on public transit in Charlotte, and the reaction this has caused.)
Charlie Kirk was just talking. He held no involuntary authority over anyone. No one was forced to do as he said, or even to listen to him. He was not a politician; he did not manipulate the suffering masses to be pawns in his game.
He was just talking.
No, I didn’t agree with him on everything, but he moved the conversation in America in a better direction, and he did it the way it should be done – by just talking.
Charlie Kirk was to be just such a voice for the next forty years. Now? We get to hear mainstream media talk about how he supported gun rights so he kind of deserved it, just a few days after they told us that the system failed the black man who came up behind a white woman and stabbed her. And, by the way, here is the background of the system that failed him.
Someday, true conservatives (not the ones who merely wear the “R” label out of convenience, or the ones that support some tiny speck in the Middle East no matter what) are going to decide that Trump’s “moderation” is not going to get the result they want, and they want their results and don’t particularly care how they get them; it most certainly will not be pretty.
They know how to shoot back, and they are way better at it. And, even though much of what they do is destructive, most people in the military and in law enforcement lean conservative and not kooky.
With that said, all of us are being set up by the elite written of by Codevilla.
Conclusion
A 31-year-old young man, a husband, a father of two, was assassinated for talking. This word combination can’t be real, but it is.
Christ or chaos. We each face this choice in our personal lives, and as a society the choice is no different. I pray we move toward Christ, but it seems we are being ever-increasingly pushed (manipulated) toward chaos.
The last set of years, 2020-2025, has been similar to the rise of the New Left in the late 1960s. It culminated in the violent years of 1968-1970. It led to the election of Nixon and I think even Carter was a reaction against the violent left. Then we got Reagan.
ReplyDeleteBut the problem was that the left radicals were never really dealt with. Popular opinion shifted greatly against hippies and commies, and the problem seemed to solve itself. The government cracked down on public protests and arrested a few radicals like the Weather Underground. The police killed Kent St students and the subversives went underground.
But the architects of the New Left, the Frankfurt School professors and Herbert Marcuse were left in place to poison the minds of the next generation. The evil stayed incubated for about 40 years. But then when Obama was elected he took the radical left ideology out of the universities and implemented it into government policy.
The big question is how far the right will let them go, and will they be willing to remove the ideological cancer from universities. I'm not sure how to do that in a way that respects natural rights, but I think we must find a way to protect natural law from those who are tearing it down. There has to be a way that threads the needle.