This essay was originally published in the weekly subscriber-only American Thinker newsletter. 

Dave Rubin is a credit to the conservative movement. He is personable, thoughtful, well-informed, and altogether an excellent spokesman for MAGA and the movement as a whole. But he’s not infallible.

I was taking a break from working on something else entirely and doing a bit of YouTubing when I came across a new video drop from Rubin, one confronting Ilhan Omar, one of the Democrat party’s many demure, high-minded, and levelheaded females. Omar was doubling down on some ghastly bilge she’d spewed out concerning Charlie Kirk: a claim that Kirk had “created his own Frankenstein” that turned on him and killed him. With her customary level of grace, she insisted that she was not going to “sit there” and be forced to honor the likes of Charlie Kirk, whose memory and ideas deserved to be tossed “into the dustbin of history.” (A direct cop from Ronald Reagan, not that Omar would have any idea who that is.)

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Her tone and expression were so vicious that they aroused something of a reaction from interviewer Kaitlan Collins, who normally has all the emotional resonance of a garden gnome. (She even blinked! A couple times!) Altogether, the kind of performance you’d expect from this offspring of a war clan in a failed state.

Now, Rubin answered with the straightforward, measured tones he’s noted for, handling Omar much as we’ve grown to expect. But in the midst of it, he did make one statement all too typical of modern conservatism: “We don’t believe in violence.”

“We don’t believe in violence.” Okay. This is fine. Noble sentiments aren’t so commonplace that we should ever overlook them when they’re presented. But, to paraphrase one of the men responsible for unleashing the firestorm of violence that marred the last century (and who died as he had lived):  We may not believe in violence…but violence surely believes in us.

Consider just the past couple of weeks. A beautiful girl was hacked to death by an out-of-control loon released by left-wing legal advocates. A TV station was shot up by somebody offended by their treatment of poor Jimmy Kimmel. A Fox News truck was firebombed. Three helpless illegals in custody were shot by another demented man out to accomplish who knows what. And of course, Charlie Kirk was shot to death by a human mutt while doing not only God’s work but man’s work as well.

Violence is a tool. It can be used for good or evil. It can be used to threaten. It can be used to demean. It can be used to coerce. It can be used to destroy innocence and decency, as in all the above examples. But it can also be used to protect, to rescue, and to punish.

I grew up among violent men, men who used violence as the tool of a crusade, to carry out some of the great acts of cleansing in human history. A man who flew heavy bombers against the Third Reich. Another who served on a destroyer that helped run down and sink the Bismarck, Adolf Hitler’s super battleship. Another who fought his way up the Korean peninsula against communist invaders, and then back down, and then halfway back up again. Nobody — certainly not Dave Rubin — would condemn these men for their violence. Nobody would wish them to be less violent than they proved that they could be.

The simple fact is that violence is sometimes necessary. It’s a terrible thing to contemplate the possibility that such a necessity may be bearing down on us at this very moment, but those are the cards that we have been dealt, and the ones we will have to play.

So to say “we don’t believe in violence” is not enough. There have to be qualifiers. In any society, including our own, we turn over the employment of violence to the government to act in our name. It’s part — a key part — of the social contract. It’s one of the red lines that separates settled civilized societies from those still steeped in barbarism.

A primitive society operates according to Lex talionis, the rule of vengeance, in which an individual and his kin, his tribesmen, deal out violence personally according to the dictates of circumstance. In advanced societies, it’s different.

In the medieval world, it was the nobles and knights who had the monopoly on violence, wielded on behalf of the clerisy, the peasantry, the merchants, and the artisans. Today it’s the police and military. But no system is perfect, and we have to acknowledge that there are times when we must take up the murder blade personally, in order to save all that matters.

So we can say we don’t believe in sadistic violence, we don’t believe in unnecessary violence, and we don’t believe in ideological violence. We can say that in all honesty. But to remain honest, we can’t simply make it a blanket statement, knowing all the time that it’s a vow that we will someday need to break.

I’m well aware that Dave Rubin was attempting to channel the spirit of Charlie Kirk, the man who set his table in the presence of his enemies and spoke to them one-on-one. And I agree with that. But this is a fallen world. A world in which the conciliator can be murdered out of hand. A world in which, as Carl Jung said, “The only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger. And we are pitifully unaware of it.”

There are situations where you must kick the table over and reach for the baseball bat.

This is a conversation we need to have: how many more deaths can we endure? How much more can we take? When are we justified in striking back? When does it in truth become a sin to turn our backs and walk away?

We need conciliators. We need Charlie Kirks and Dave Rubins. But we need violent men as well.  And I wish it were any other way.

(Note from Andrea: One of the reasons I've never been a fan of Mahatma Gandhi is because, in 1938, after Kristalnacht, he said that Jews should passively resist the Nazis to arouse world sympathy. In fact, that is what they did do, because the Nazis had disarmed them and because they had given up their warlike ways when the Romans conquered Jerusalem. Six million then died. 

The problem, of course, is that Gandhi was too stupid -- or perhaps naive is a better word -- to realize the difference between the British and the Nazis. The British were sufficiently moral not to engage in mass slaughter against the passively resisting Indians. That is not to say that there were no bad actors in Britain who would take advantage of passive resistance or that the British were truly good. However, by the mid-20th century, the British had abandoned medieval mass slaughter battle tactics. The Nazis had not, and it was clear in real time that they had not. 

Passive resistance only works when you have an opponent who responds to the moral suasion of passive resistance and is not inherently violent.)