Politics is fundamentally about violence.
We forget this easily in our world where the federal government subsidizes 90% of student loans, runs pension programs, gives billions of dollars to “research,” builds highways, manages dams and bridges, owns 90% of home mortgages, gives food to ‘poor’ people, subsidizes fiber optic line construction, and monkeys constantly with the money supply, interest rate, and stock market.
This is to say nothing of all the random things done by state and local governments. The city of Hillsdale, where I live, is currently in an uproar about whether to install bike lanes on the main thoroughfare. Five years ago, there was a minor scandal when city bureaucrats purchased a $10,000 ice cream machine without informing the city council.
It is a ridiculous state of affairs. Businesses, charities, and voluntary organizations can build bike lanes, parks, hospitals, and ice cream parlors. You don’t need tax money to do any of this.
All of this extraneous nonsense clouds the core issue: Politics is about violence.
We ought to repeat this axiom until it sticks. It should orient everything we think, say, and do in public life.
Politics is about violence.
Politics is about violence.
Politics is about violence.
War, murder, and theft are the proper subjects of political thinking. The science of inflicting and withstanding pain (of which military science is the most prominent example) is crucial to this endeavor.
Whom should we harm, maim, and kill? This is the critical political question. Are we going to live our lives by conquest and theft, or will we only use violence in defense? We must decide. There is no more important political question.
Conservative political activist Charlie Kirk’s brutal assassination at the hands of a leftist assassin this week drove this point home again to me in blistering clarity. I watched the close-up footage of Kirk’s death multiple times. The .30-06 round enters to the left of his throat, immediately severing the carotid artery. I estimate he lost about a liter of blood in less than 10 seconds.
It was a horrific injury and the most gory scene I have ever witnessed on camera. I suggest that all of you with the stomach for such things watch the footage. It is clarifying.
Understand the stakes.
Politics is not a game. There are people in this country who would happily kill me for the opinions I hold. Kirk was 31, as am I. He was a married father of two children, a girl and a boy, just like me. The only difference between us is that Kirk was a lot more effective and important than I am.
To see the hundreds of thousands of likes on posts mocking his death, the outpouring of cheerful glee at his brutal murder, and the despicable attacks on Kirk’s character stuns me.
I knew the Left is made up of psychopaths who celebrate murder and theft. Their principles demand it. Resentment, after all, is the animating leftist passion. But to see it up close has taken me aback.
How can I share a country with these people? I don’t think I can. That is a deep question. There are no easy solutions. My heart is troubled by this reality. We have crossed a line as a nation.
COVID lockdowns, the 2020 riots, the legal campaign against Trump, and the attempted assassinations of the president all pointed toward a growing rift in American life and a radicalization of leftist violence. Assassinating a prominent personality, who was not a politician and had no role within the state, is the crossing of another Rubicon.
It is obvious that the shooter, Tyler Robinson, was animated by leftist ideas. The proof is in the assassination pudding. Actions speak louder than any manifesto. Targeting and killing a prominent conservative influencer and friend of the president is revealing enough. The fact that he has a transgender roommate and a plausible lover, that relatives confirm he thought Kirk spread hate speech, and that he was an outspoken leftist in front of friends and family confirm what we already knew.
Right now, the most important thing to do is to put an end to any more violence. We need to make clear to leftist murderers and their accomplices that political violence is not an option.
Tyler Robinson and any of his accomplices must face the death penalty. They need to be arrested, charged, tried, convicted by a jury, and then hanged in public for all to see. This kind of insane political murder must be swiftly and relentlessly punished.
The first and highest duty of government is to protect the citizenry. It does this by punishing every crime it possibly can. No government can prevent every murder by assigning bodyguards to each and every citizen. Police response times are never fast enough to prevent all acts of violence, even when policing is carried out efficiently.
The most important thing the government can do to prevent crime and terror is to punish after the fact. It can set the incentive structure for the use of aggressive violence. It can create enormous barriers of entry for violent misbehavior.
The assassination carried out by Luigi Mangione against UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson this past December was the canary in the coalmine of leftist violence. This killing of a random businessman by a communist agitator, and the subsequent groundswell of leftist praise for the killer, revealed how sick the left has become.
Mangione should have been immediately executed after a quick trial following his capture. He should have been guillotined and his head placed on a pike as a warning to those inspired by his murderous actions. The same should have been done to Teresa Youngblut, a member of the transgender cult known as the Zizzians, who murdered a border patrol agent on the day of Trump’s inauguration. The same goes for the antifa terrorists who ambushed different border patrol agents on July 4.
Federal and state governments need to respond to murder and terror with immediate brutality in response. Leftists need to feel fear. They need to know in their heart of hearts that murder and assassination will be met with immediate death. It must get to the point that the only leftists willing to commit acts of terror are those who are ready to die in the process.
Some of these types exist, of course, especially among transgender people. Transgenders have made themselves eunuchs for gay race communism. They are, therefore, its most fanatical defenders. We can expect many copycat assassinations and mass murder attempts in the coming years. Churches, Christian schools, and conservative activists are all targets.
The only solution to blunting this ongoing leftist wave of terror is harsh violence in response. Some have suggested that conservatives should go after leftist “networks” using government power. This is, in my view, unlikely to work well.
The War on Terror that began after 9/11 was not a success. The Bush administration sent the American military into two grueling wars on the other side of the planet, getting thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of foreigners killed in the process of trying to “stop terrorism.” Yet here at home, our immigration policies remained untouched (despite all of the Muslim hijackers being legal migrants) and the leading planners of both the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, respectively, remain alive even today. It took the federal government 11 years just to find and kill Osama Bin Laden.
An inability to focus resources and effort against concrete, definable targets (such as the actual planners of the terror attacks) was a major flaw in the American response to radical Islamic terrorism. Something similar could easily happen in a campaign against the left.
I recommend, therefore, a narrowly tailored but relentless response. Execute leftist murderers. Hunt down their accomplices. If their funding networks can be established, then use RICO against the donors. Use social pressure against those who cheerlead assassination and murder. Republicans should push for these people to lose their jobs, any and all honors they have, and any public platform they use to spread their malice.
We have a clear pathway forward as conservatives. The relentless punishment of crime, including political violence, will disincentivize future attacks. It will improve the quality of life. It will prevent the marketplace of ideas from turning into a battlefield of ideologies.
We must act, and we must act soon.