Source: Bigstock

What have we learned since the murder of poor Charlie Kirk two weeks ago?

First, it’s an open-and-shut case. Tyler Robinson’s own parents turned him in.

Perhaps some other young creeps were involved, but, obviously, the assassination didn’t require a vast conspiracy utilizing the extraordinary talents of the Impossible Mission Force. Since rifles became common just before the Civil War, it’s never been terribly hard to shoot a man giving a speech. (What’s gotten harder lately is getting away with it, due to all the cameras.)

Second, this was another example of the recent but now growing phenomena of Trans-Related Terrorism. In decades past, transgenderism was correlated with sex offender serial killers, but not with school shooters, murder cults like the Zizians, or political assassins. But lately…

The murderer shot Charlie while he was answering a question about the growth in Trans Terrorism. Why? Presumably because he loved his trans boyfriend/girlfriend and thus hated Charlie, who therefore was guilty of hate for being hated by an assassin.

“This was another example of the recent but now growing phenomena of Trans-Related Terrorism.”

Less hate-driven Establishment voices are trying to obfuscate Kirk’s killing by claiming it was driven by “nihilism.” Echoing Walter Sobchak’s observation about nihilism in The Big Lebowski, “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos,” a New York Times reporter argued:

But if previous periods of violence could be understood as clashes of grand visions for the nation, today’s ideologies are just as likely to be nihilism and despair.

But nah, it’s not nihilism, it’s the transgender mania of the past dozen years.

If anything, the transgender dogmas that have been ascendant from twelve years ago to ten months ago are not nihilist, but gnostic. Transgenderism enthusiasts believe that while it may appear to you or me that their sex is plain for all to see, but in the true reality, not this horrible simulacrum that we see with our eyes, they, personally, are entitled to know a secret reality in which they are actually the opposite sex.

The transgender movement tends to attract support from smart nasty people and dumb nice people. The latter tend to assume that they are saving gentle victims from bullies, and thus are clueless that they are empowering some of the worst people in the world.

My guess is that a declining fear of going to hell plays a role in these kinds of suicidal shootings, along with a declining dread during the Internet Age of being sentenced to life in prison and thus stuck in a small room for the rest of your life. One way to discourage the handful of young men who commit these kinds of crimes would be to make clear that if convicted to life in prison they won’t get access to their phones for the next sixty years.

On the other hand, after two weeks, there still isn’t much evidence that Charlie’s killing had much to do with left-wing movements besides transgenderism.

As I’ve often noted, you don’t even have to be terribly left-wing to be into trans. For example, a couple of decades ago, I was plagued by cancellation attempts by the famous free-market economic historian Donald/Deirdre McCloskey. Among the high IQ, the transgender ideology tends to appeal to folks who are extremely self-interested.

On the other hand, there is only vague evidence at present that the shooter was motivated by broader left-wing concerns, much less that he was tied into left-wing activist organizations.

The Trump administration has announced a crackdown on Antifa, which, in general, is well overdue. Antifa originated in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s as Stalin’s bullyboys who fought in the streets his chief enemies, the leftist Social Democrats, whom the Soviet supremo denounced as “social fascists.” As a student of Marxist historical science, Stalin was convinced that the main enemy of his Communists were Socialists, while rightists like Hitler were merely a doomed distraction.

Not surprisingly, German Antifa were a failure at stopping the Nazis because they were so focused on overthrowing Stalin’s foes, such as elected Social Democrats like Hermann Müller.

Something we saw over and over in 2020 was that the first night of rioting in most cities would begin with local black kids using Black Lives Matter marches as cover for their lowbrow looting of the local Target store or similar. But the next morning, trained white rioting hobbyists would pour into town from the rest of the country, and the anarchy would get a lot heavier from then on, such as burning down the 3rd Precinct police station in Minneapolis.

Antifa is by no means as centralized of an organization as was, say, the Communist Party USA in 1939, when on Aug. 23 vast numbers of American Communists switched on a dime from being anti-Nazi to being anti-anti-Nazi on Stalin’s orders to promote his Hitler-Stalin pact.

On the other hand, Antifa appears to be vastly better organized nationally than, say, the Ku Klux Klan has been in recent decades. Yet that doesn’t stop the feds or the public from acting like the KKK is a going concern.

As far as I can tell from Andy Ngo’s book Unmasked, Antifa tend to be organized primarily locally. For example, Rose City Antifa are the notorious Portland branch.

But they have enough national ties that when leftist rioting aficionados fly in from out of town, they have local rioters to crash with. And when they get arrested, national networks mobilize to pay their bail over Venmo and GoFundMe, and old-time Stalinist members of the National Lawyers Guild handle their paperwork to bail them out of jail so they can be back rioting again the next night.

But the Trump administration will likely need to justify its crackdown by all the bad things that Antifa have been up to over the past ten years or so, rather than by this particular assassination case.

Granted, the endless Antifa/Black Bloc rioting in Portland in 2020 was tied into the state of Oregon deciding a few years before to provide free “gender-affirming care” to any mutant who showed up, which is why Portland rioters’ mug shots are so horrifying.

Still, at present, there’s only faint evidence that the clean-cut Utah killer had much contact with Antifa, much less with so many other leftist movements that it would be convenient to tie to him.

As New York Times opinion columnist M. Gessen (formerly an angry homely woman named Masha Gessen who recently declared itself nonbinary) explained in the Old Grey Lady, Charlie, like a Nazi official, just had it coming:

I have been thinking of historical, rather than fictional, antecedents, in particular the assassination in 1938 of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by a Polish-German Jewish teenager named Herschel Grynszpan…. He decided to kill someone he saw as a representative of the force that was immiserating his loved ones. If the information released by the Utah investigators so far proves accurate, Tyler Robinson might have felt a similar desperate fury….

The comparison seems straightforward: The person who was murdered was a representative of a hateful ideology, the person thought to have killed him was a deluded young man who may have tried to oppose that hatred in the most destructive manner imaginable. And yet something in the transformed landscape of this country tells me I’m not supposed to say so.

So, M. took to her column in The New York Times to say that Charlie was a veritable Nazi, in the sense that M. is full of murderous Nazi-like hate for the murdered man.

And because, as we all know, M. must be a Good Guy/Good Gal/Good Thing to be a Times opinionist, therefore the murdered man must be hateful, in the sense that M. is hate-filled toward him.

Granted, M. can’t find any evidence that Charlie, who might well have been President around 2050, was any more of a hater than, say, Ronald Reagan was.

But that, by all evidence, Charlie was a great guy while M. is a not-so-great whatever is not the point. The point is that M. is hate-filled toward Charlie, and therefore the murdered man had to be hateful.

After all, what else could possibly be true? That a New York Times transgender opinion columnist is not a good person?