“They” killed Charlie Kirk. Tyler Robinson (allegedly) pulled the trigger, but he was armed with a deadly ideology, wound up by narcissistic rage, and sent out into the world by a leftist culture that told him, and a thousand like him, that since “words are violence,” violence is justified to stop those words. He allegedly texted his trans-gay partner, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Where did he learn that Kirk was the hateful one, rather than the one who took a gun to a word-fight? The Left. Oh, sure, they didn’t collectively pull the trigger, but they wrote the ethic and catechized the assassin in it. They cultivated the ethos that made the shot inevitable. They baptized narcissistic rage, and then wondered why someone snapped. When the assassin lashed out, it wasn’t a bug in their system. It was a feature.

The Closing of the American Mind

In 1987, Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, warning how American academics were becoming increasingly insular and, despite their then claims of “liberalism,” illiberal. A professor of mine, then, pooh-poohed it, as if Bloom’s concerns were over-wrought and hysterical. In the ‘90s, conservatives began to complain about “political correctness,” now a quaint-sounding concern. Then came, by the 2010s, “cultural Marxism,” Antifa hooliganism, and wokeness. Still, the vast middle swath of America wasn’t convinced it was a threat. Smash a storefront for “justice”? That’s activism. Shut down a Riley Gaines speech at San Francisco State University? That’s safety. Fire a man for his tweets? That’s accountability. Even if it was excessive, it was moral zeal, so they thought, or hoped. Then a shot rang out at Utah Valley University. Suddenly, the pooh-pooing is over.

For decades, they told us: their mind is not closing. It’s becoming “woke” and so awake to how benighted we are. Meanwhile, they became numb to their own hatefulness. “Tolerance” doesn’t mean, in their mouths, the allowance of different points of view. It means only allowing their point of view. “Hate” doesn’t mean shooting someone for their beliefs. It means believing something they hate. If we won’t use their pronouns, we are a threat to them. And if you’re a threat, what do you deserve? We saw that at Utah Valley University.

Immediately after shooting Kirk, the assassin apparently claimed Kirk was the one with hate. Try to imagine the utter lack of self-awareness, the self-righteousness that would put a Pharisee to shame, to shoot someone who was only conversing and accuse your victim of being the one with “hate.” The assassination was the logical culmination in a chain of events — closing of leftist minds, PC, DEI, Antifa, and wokeness — that was predictable, indeed predicted. We’ve warned about it for a generation. We’ve warned about how the culture of pronoun-naming, shouting-down, rioting, and cancelling would escalate. That culture killed Charlie Kirk.

We’ve seen it before. We’ve seen social media czars — like the head of Twitter’s “trust and safety” division — swearing to Elon Musk her allegiance to free speech, only to censor conservative documentaries at the first opportunity. We’ve seen judges declaring transsexual absurdities as “findings of fact.” We’ve seen Kamala Harris stabbing the air with her finger, lashing out at a journalist for daring to question her. But all this time, the mushy middle often could not see it.

Yeats warned us a century ago: the best “lack all conviction,” while the worst are “full of passionate intensity.” What made Kirk so great was that he was one of the best, and he did not lack conviction. That’s why they killed him, hoping the rest of us would lose our conviction. And if we do not, if we resist or deign to question them, they will rage, give us failing grades, categorize our TPUSA chapters or our churches as “hate groups,” censor our publications, stab their finger in the air, or, worse, find a sniper’s perch.

What We’re Up Against

This is what we’re up against: a generation trained to believe that they are truth incarnate, that their opponents are evil incarnate, and that their fury at being challenged is noble, as they congratulate themselves on their virtue, which they, in fact, lack. Meanwhile, we’ve also been up against a mushy middle easily distracted by the media’s ploys, like being more concerned about fired comedians than fired-upon leaders.

Yet, the out-pouring of love, compassion, and patriotism at the Kirk memorial on September 21 shows we must not despair. For a generation, the mushy middle of America has heard our warnings of the red storm rising from the Left, the dangers of their murderous ideology, already drenched in the blood of the preborn. They were not convinced. Maybe they were too busy, too intimidated by the wokesters’ smug assurance that they were on “the right side of history,” too sedated by the clapter provoking replacement for comedy by the likes of mediocrities like Jimmy Kimmel, too wooed by the sophistry of professors and pundits, or just not convinced that they should join in on the fray. Not just yet. But now, times may have changed. With, first, the open failure of the Biden idiocracy and, now, the true intent of what we’re up against laid bare in what they dished out to Kirk, and then, pretending to care about “freedom of speech” when Kimmel lied about it. They may be rousing from their slumber. Our task is to tell the truth, relentlessly, courageously, even when they call it “hate,” rescuing the mushy middle before they, too, catch the mind virus.

Charlie Kirk was killed by the culture of intolerance the Left birthed. Tyler Robinson was (apparently) just the final link in a long chain of lies. The question is whether America’s mushy middle has finally learned the lesson. Let’s hope.

John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell Substack.

Image: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.