By the time you’re reading this, national news media will have had at least a weak to debate the motives of Tyler James Robinson, who was arrested in Utah on Sept. 12 for the murder of Charlie Kirk.

They’ll have talked about how he was an ex-Mormon, how he had a transgendered roommate, how on Christmas Day when he was ten years old his mother wrote that depressing Facebook post that said: “Almost forgot Tyler! He can totally avoid us now that he got all of the computer accessories he’s been wanting.”

But the situation just gets more dreadful when you remember that for every American who’s actually committed a political murder this century, there are hundreds of others who have celebrated Kirk’s assassination on their social media (one database has already collected thirty thousand such messages).

And for everyone who posted unqualified celebrations (which are not rare! My own employer has already fired three such people!) there are probably dozens or a hundred more who have posted things like “I will never condone violence, but … ” where the “but” is followed by a dozen or so reasons why Charlie Kirk was a Bad Person and nobody should be getting emotional about what happened to him and his family.

I know this because I saw multiple such posts from my own left-leaning social media friends. And these post aren’t just coming from low-status attention-grabbers. One of those friends saying “I don’t condone violence, but … ” was a lawyer with decades of experience in his profession, who was qualified to argue cases before the Supreme Court of the United States.

And to really understand how awful this situation is, you have to remember that Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father of two, was killed for his words. He never held public office. He never signed any legislation. He was just a man who had a podcast, a man who went around the country founding chapters of Turning Point USA at college campuses, giving conservative students (who are used to feeling frightened and outnumbered) a place to meet likeminded people, and a place to publicly and peacefully debate their opponents. Which is exactly what Charlie Kirk was doing at the moment of his death – answering questions, many of them hostile, from a crowd of students at Utah Valley University.

I am not the kind of person who says “political violence has no place in this country.” I can’t square that statement with my admiration for men like George Washington, whose service in the Revolutionary War was an act of political violence. But after this assassination, I certainly have a right to be horrified by far Left’s choice of target.

Charlie Kirk was killed for his words and opinions, not to avenge any malicious or harmful act he had committed. Also, most of the opinions he held are my opinions too. And most of my family members hold those opinions, as do most of my close friends.

I was a member of the College Republicans in Arizona, where Kirk’s family lives and where he’s likely to be buried. I had friends in that state who spent most of their free time travelling from campus to campus, setting up CR chapters and TPUSA chapters, talking about politics to impressionable young people, and doing their best to have intelligent debates with people who disagreed with them … basically, the same kinds of things that Kirk was killed for. And for which millions of leftists celebrated his death –  or at least shared long Facebook posts explaining why it wasn’t as sad as their right-wing friends thought.

This is the endpoint of the ethos of “words are violence” (and its corollary, “silence is violence.”) And it is the endpoint of the ethos that thinks that it’s no big deal that America is a NATO ally of countries like Britain and Germany, which are jailing people for their tweets. (After all, in America we sometimes let armed civilians shoot people to prevent murders, rapes, robberies, and other things that criminals can be jailed for … so why not mean words?)

There really isn’t any co-existing with the people who cheered on Kirk’s murder from the sidelines. 

At the very least, these people will say that, while it’s wrong to kill us, if we do get killed we shouldn’t be mourned. It’s because we like Israel too much, or we want to treat illegal border-crossing like a crime, or we don’t accept trans women as real women, or we’re too callous about gun violence, or we don’t think Donald Trump is a fascist, or whatever.

Now it’s true that the leftists who are our friends and family, and who know us for things other than our politics, would mostly still be sad if we died in real life. But if they only knew our political beliefs, they’d probably just say we got what we deserved, like all of those random, unnamed orcs or stormtroopers that the heroes kill in droves in a Hollywood movie.

Also, these “hateful” beliefs are conservative beliefs. For the most part they were held by more than 90 percent of the population just a generation or two ago. Basically, the pro-assassin crowd is gloating over a man being killed for being too much like their own grandparents.

I don’t know how long it will be until this country has its next civil war. Our time since the last one – 160 years – is longer than the global average, and no nation escapes political violence forever. It’s just a fact of life that, from time to time, people with deeply incompatible value systems will settle things on the battlefield.

And I’m not even saying they never should. I think that ending slavery was worth having a war over. As was independence from Great Britain.

But I am terrified about what kind of leadership the Left is likely to have in the next war. They certainly don’t want a George Washington or an Abraham Lincoln – someone who shows mercy to the defeated enemy when the war is over. Someone who is content to let his old foes live in peace, whatever their thoughts may be, so long as they don’t try to renew the war by violence acts.

But soon, people like Barrack Obama and Bernie Sanders will be gone (people who disagreed with Charlie Kirk about almost everything but who, thank God, denounced his assassination as the horror that it was). And then the Left will be led by a younger generation, people who are less like Washington and Lincoln, and more like Maximillian Robespierre, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, and Mao Zedong. People who are eager for one party rule. People who think that coexisting with those who think differently is the same thing as surrendering to them. People who are convinced that, as long as the other side has a voice, their side is being oppressed. And people who think that victory means silencing that voice, if necessary with violence. Lots and lots of violence.

Right now, most people on the far Left are content to fill their Facebook and Twitter feeds with screeds to the effect of “I don’t condone violence, but …” where whatever comes after the “but” is much longer and more heartfelt than what comes before it.

But the people who cheered from the sidelines are still worth fearing. They’re cowards all right – the whole point of their weaselly tweets is that they get to feel superior to the assassin (since they themselves would never resort to violence) while also feeling superior to Charlie Kirk (who died for his Awful Opinions) while also not having to put their own lives on the line for what they believe in (like the assassin did).

But the next time there’s a war or a revolution in this country – the next time those people get a chance to torture or kill their enemies with only a small amount of risk to themselves – they’ll probably be eager to do it. Certainly they’ll play along if it gets to the point that conservatives, or religious people, or whoever else they hate are hiding in basements to avoid the death squads, and ratting them out is the less risky choice.

And so, even though the people who cheered from the sidelines are cowards, it’s still worth being afraid of them.

People on our side of the aisle need to be prepared for things to get worse. We need to own weapons and know how to use them. We need to make sure that our children are educated by people who share our values (after all, schoolteachers make up a disturbingly large percentage of the people who were happy when Charlie Kirk died.) And we need to make sure they don’t spend much time on the internet before they’re legal adults. (Just remember the killer’s mother’s post: “He can totally avoid us now that he got all of the computer accessories he’s been wanting.”)

There are people in this country who want us dead because of our words. Sooner or later there is going to be a reckoning. We can’t put it off forever; we’ve probably already put it off for too long. If we care about our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children, then we’ll keep our armor bright and our powder dry.

Twilight Patriot is the pen name for a young American who lives in South Carolina, where he is currently working toward a graduate degree. You can read more of his writings at his Substack.

Image: Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed