The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a horrific reminder that the Left is based on nothing other than terror, violence, and aggression.
This has been true since Karl howled to Friedrich that the bourgeois would someday pay for his plague of skin boils. The history of the Left is a history of violence. Scarcely a single leftist government has gained power without violence or the threat of violence. No leftist government has ever remained in power without violence.
Violence is built into the very foundations of leftist ideology. Marx himself fantasized in print over the apocalyptic events that would accompany the revolution of the proletariat. Mikhail Bakunin preached the “propaganda of the deed” – political activism by means of bombing and assassination. Sergei Nechaev was so eager for blood that he began killing his own followers (he was also crazy enough to terrify even Bakunin). Pyotr Tkachev calmly asserted that 10% of the bourgeoisie would have to die following the revolution, a sentiment echoed by none other than Obama’s bestie, Bill Ayers. All this rhetoric came to a head in the next century thanks to Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, and a legion of others, at the cost of 100 million dead or more. The Age of Massacre could not have occurred without the Left.
Leftists simply cannot attain their goals without bloodshed. They can’t so much as win an argument or prevailing a debate without threats and menacing. They not only settle for it – they revel in int. Anyone doubting this can take a look at all the dancing and laughing memes and emojis that greeted Kirk’s murder. Or the victim-blaming on from MSNBC and CNN. It was all Charlie Kirk’s fault, you see. He didn’t have to show up on campus. He could have hid in his basement. He could have ducked.
The only sane answer to this is that of Solzhenitsyn: “We are not as they are. Nor shall we ever be.”
The shooting of Charley Kirk is only the latest of a long line of atrocities, many of them buried to a point that they scarcely made a mark in the record. Late in the 19th century, anarchists triggered a worldwide campaign of assassination that accounted for a Spanish prime minister, an Austro-Hungarian empress, even an American president. (The anarchists claimed that McKinley’s assassin Leon Czolgosz was just a hanger-on. Today’s Left will say the same about whoever shot Charlie Kirk once he’s picked up.) Today we have the Alexandria shooting. The Las Vegas shooting. We have Butler, PA, and Mar-a-Lago. And we have Orem, Utah.
The American Left will back off. They always do. They will give us the standard pious sighs, the sad head shakes, the calls to overcome “divisiveness.” Don’t buy it. The Left gave permission to Charlie Kirk’s killer the same way it did to Lee Oswald in 1963, the same way the Jim Crow segregationists sanctioned James Earl Ray in 1968, the same way that Palestinian fanatics did for Sirhan Sirhan that same year.
The point of this killing, as with all the others, is to terrorize us. To force us off the public square into frightened silence. They have lost, and they know it. They are on the run, utterly defeated by Donald Trump and his MAGA legions. So, like the anarchists of the 1890s, like the Lenin and his Bolsheviks, like the Red Guard and Khmer Rouge, like the Weathermen and the SLA, like every left-wing tyrant down to this day, they have reached for their hole card. For the assassin’s bullet. For the gunshot out of the crowd. For fear, terror, and bloodshed.
The answer to this is defiance. We must not back down. We must not give expression to our fears, however well-grounded they may be. We must not “reach across the aisle.” We must return to the campuses to carry on Charlie Kirk’s great work. There must be marches and demos in the on the radical campuses and in the blue cities. We must spit in the faces and tell them to do their worst. We must act like the majority that we are, like the country that we embody. That is how we honor Charlie Kirk, and carry on his mission.
Let us gird our loins, and let us go amongst them.
Image: Gage Skidmore