Authored by Leslie Corbly via American Greatness,
Conservative influencer Charlie Kirk’s assassination forces Americans to confront the dark side of progressive values. This confrontation is fundamentally reshaping society by exposing the hatred harbored behind plateaus of love and tolerance.
Decades of cultural messaging have focused on the harms caused by religious, conservative belief systems. Individuals and groups who fall on the margins of conservative ideology have been studied in universities, profiled in elite magazines, and their plights have been sympathetically portrayed in Hollywood.
The word “bigotry” has long been associated with backward, conservative values. Manhattan Institute Fellow Colin Wright captured the left’s lurch towards extremism in a viral meme, updated after Kirk’s assassination:
Kirk’s assassination comes at an inflection point in American culture and politics. Donald Trump’s political career, and the corresponding progressive response, have revealed the degree to which leftist cultures can serve as incubators of hatred. Casual progressive dehumanization has spread into disturbing displays of gruesome violence. In just the past year, the public witnessed Trump’s attempted assassination, an anti-Trump transgender slaughter of Catholic school children, and a gruesome stabbing in Charlotte.
While each individual is responsible for their individual actions, the media and other left-wing responses to violent incidents paint a clear and troubling picture. Violence on the left tends to be minimized, while rhetoric on the right is treated as synonymous with violence itself.
That Kirk was assassinated on a college campus—a sanctuary of left-wing thought—is profound. Progressive students sought to silence Kirk by petitioning the college to deplatform him on the grounds of hate speech just prior to his death.
In light of the left’s unchecked, ideologically based dehumanization of their political opponents, words like “bigot” and “fascist” are simultaneously losing their stigma and morphing in meaning. People no longer assume the person labeled a bigot is morally corrupt. Instead, the individual hurling the insult is suspect.
In true 1984 fashion, words have inverted meaning. The public implicitly knows the angry anti-fascist is more threatening than a conservative, church-going man with a microphone.
The numerous assassination attempts against prominent right-wing figures over the past year did not arise in a vacuum. To understand the left, it is necessary to dissect its prejudice. This is the subject of my first nonfiction book. Progressive Prejudice blends autobiography and cultural commentary to give voice to challenges to progressive ideas by giving voice to the pain caused by progressive hatred.
Books like these are vital. To combat the hatred of the left, it is essential to name the moral deficiencies of progressive ideology. This includes an honest and complete conversation of the people the left loves to condemn, marginalize, and kill.
Understanding the dark side of the left is essential because all worldviews have victors and victims. The inability to confront the hatred of any ideology, particularly one dominant in culture and society, creates conditions ripe for polarization, mistrust, and violence.
The left has monopolized righteous superiority by painting their opposition as extreme, morally reprehensible, and narrow-minded. Among the most effective tactics of their movement has been storytelling. By controlling the framing of narratives, the left guaranteed that people and groups they scorned were appropriately reviled.
However, society is not static, and in the 20th century, secular progressivism transformed from a marginalized set of ideas to the establishment. From the Ivory Tower to DC, Hollywood, media, and law, progressive beliefs set the benchmark for moral goodness.
Now that these ideas are facing serious challenges, the mask of hatred is falling, revealing the dehumanization and authoritarianism that those on the left love to deny.
Our culture is at a critical crossroads. Societies are composed of people, and the wheels of history move according to the emotional logic of humanity. No matter the governing ideology, there is a cap on the oppression people are willing to tolerate. The left’s iron grip on the moral imagination of the nation is slipping. And, as that grip loosens, progressives lash out in anger, determined to control the public they claim to liberate.
To avoid sustained social ruin, America must return to goodness, order, beauty, and peace. But this reorientation cannot occur under the value system of radical progressives. The ideology itself is rooted in force, coercion, and the destruction of human dignity.
Charlie Kirk contended with progressive prejudice, and it got him killed. Still, regardless of the risks, the danger, hatred, and prejudice of progressive culture must be boldly proclaimed. For the body may be killed, but truth overcomes the grave.