It has been one week since the assassination of Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point USA event held at Utah Valley University. In the intervening time, we’ve found out that the shooter was one Tyler Robinson, a far-left activist with a trans boyfriend and a penchant for referring to Kirk as a “fascist.” Further, every indicator suggests that Robinson didn’t act alone. At the time of the shooting, a local left-wing gadfly claimed to have shot Kirk but later confessed to doing so because it would distract police from the real shooter. A number of participants in transgender-related Discord chats appear to have had advanced knowledge of the shooting. Trump’s administration is now investigating possible networks which may exist among radical trans and LGBTQ activists. All in all, the story runs much deeper than the typical “lone wolf” who is usually involved in left-wing stochastic terrorism.
It has been just as interesting, however, to see the absolute mask-off moment that the Left has been having since last Wednesday. The news was greeted almost immediately by left-wingers of all stripes - from politicians and social media influencers to regular rank-and-file nobodies - by dancing on his grave, declaring that he “served it,” mocking his wife and children, and generally just showing us what absolute garbage people they really are. Many others, in addition to cheering the shooting, took to social media to start demanding other assassinations, some even giving lists of other Rightists that they’d like to see “liquidated.” Hundreds of these people have been facing social accountability for this, losing their jobs and otherwise facing the just consequences for their actions. Eventually, some of them started clueing in to how unpopular this was making them, so they hit upon on a new tactic, claiming that Robinson was ReALLy a RiGhT wInGeR!!1!, despite all the opposing evidence and common sense. Others, who are less savvy, have continued to barrel down the avenue to oblivion.
All of this has been very enlightening. Indeed, it shows us a number of things about this Left, things which they do not possess.
First, the Left simply doesn’t have any common sense. If they did, they would at least be able to exercise the self-control to not publicly say some of the things they are. For a faction that (wrongly) prides itself on being smarter than their opponents (while at the same time being IQ denialists), they have been consistently stupid. Yet, you’ve had hundreds already lose their jobs for these completely unforced errors, and even now you still have more of them doing the same exact thing despite having seen what happens. It’s like they’re incapable of learning from the mistakes of others. We’re talking about doctors, nurses, IT professionals, business executives, military officers, public school teachers, and more, all people who ought to be intelligent enough to know better (well, maybe not the public school teachers). Why do they keep doing this?
What you need to understand is that, in a sense, it’s out of their hands. There’s a salient fact about leftist communication that we need to grasp, which is that it is entirely performative. By that I mean that it is designed to signal “right doctrine” to other lefties, showing that they hold to the orthodox religion of left-wing progressivism. Even at the cost of their livelihoods, many left-wingers feel the need to signal to each other their adherence to right dogma while also identifying potential heretics who hesitate to affirm these expressions of the creed, no matter how offensive. As such, the drive to self-immolation is a humiliation ritual, a compulsion which forces lefties to do unthinkable things to affirm their loyalty. Leftists are forced by their own ideology to keep on going down that path, despite what happens to other lefties.
Second, the Left does not have the moral high ground which is has always pretended to have. You can’t credibly claim yourselves to be the moral conscience of the nation when you’re dancing on the grave of a loving husband and father whose “crime” was constantly beating you in arguments. Nor can you do so while not-so-subtly threatening to assassinate a whole list full of other factional enemies. The Left has spent eight years creating fake scandals and engineering obviously biased show trials against Trump and then tried to browbeat conservatives for continuing to support him. Between their response to Charlie Kirk’s murder and their months-long crash out in support of even the worst criminal illegal aliens, the effectiveness of this browbeating has basically ended. We do NOT have to abide these people when they make their idiotic “both sides” argument to try to excuse the bad behaviour of their own side.
This leads to my third point, which is that the Left simply does not have the power they once had. Elections really do have consequences, and contrary to what some of the wags on the Right might think, Trump is actually exercising power in intelligent ways this second time around. Many of the moves he’s already made over the last eight months have aimed at undercutting both the funding and future electoral support of the Left. But it doesn’t stop there. The Left simply doesn’t seem like it has the cultural power it used to. Prior to this year, they could bully sports teams into supporting the LGBTQ agenda, companies fell all over themselves to celebrate pride month, employees were forced to “list their pronouns,” and so forth. Now all of that and more is being rolled back. The Left’s cultural power is eroding like a sandbar in the middle of a hurricane.
Four years ago, the Left could basically get anyone canceled for any reason they chose. People got canceled for saying “All lives matter.” They got fired for liking the wrong tweets, for disagreeing with rioting, for being related to the wrong people. You even had an Hispanic dude get fired for making the “OK” hand signal (supposedly a “white power symbol”). At the same time, lefties could say the most egregious things and nothing would happen. Shoot, they could burn down entire city centres and face no consequences. Fast forward to the present day and now the Left is feeling the brunt of “accountability culture.” The patronage network that once sheltered them from the consequences of even their most obnoxious, threatening behaviour is no longer protecting them. Rank-and-filers who could once depend on this support are finding out it doesn’t carry the weight it used to.
Lastly, we see that the Left is no longer in a position of control over its own weirdos. Political and social leaders on the Left find themselves in a somewhat precarious position. They have to at least appear to be trying to appeal to the broader cross-section of American society while balancing this with the need to not antagonise their fringe weirdos. The problem is that the “fringe weirdos” aren’t really that fringe but make up a goodly chunk of the Left’s base of support. To keep them happy, the Left ends up having to constantly trawl the edges of advocacy for stochastic terrorism. Too often, these nuts slip the leash and then the kind of thing happens which is happening right now, a public relations nightmare.
This is doubly troublesome because while your average leftist isn’t actually that smart, as a group they ARE better organised than the Right. People on the Right are constantly purity spiraling and infighting, often over the stupidest stuff imaginable. Getting them to work together for long can often seem like herding cats. The Left, on the other hand, is much more adept at building networks and organising for “direct action.” Sometimes they get a little overzealous. Sometimes they get out of hand and embarrassing. The more these people accelerate, the more this is going to be a problem for them (and for the rest of us) in the future.
This is why it’s heartening to see the Trump administration take the threat seriously. Declaring antifa to be a terrorist organisation (which opens up a wide range of already-established federal remedies) would be a great place to start. Using RICO to go after the Left’s checkerboard of NGOs and funding sources is desperately needed. Clamping down on the Left’s demotic organisation via sites like Reddit, Discord, and Bluesky would be quite helpful. It is, in fact, time to use the full weight of government against the Left and its organs.
In short, strike while the iron is hot. At the risk of sounding opportunistic, the assassination of Charlie Kirk woke a lot of people up and the outrage about it is still at a fever pitch. We need to use that to our advantage, especially since doing so is objectively good for the nation as a whole. The whole history of the Left going back to 1789 (and one might argue even earlier than that) is one of subversion followed by violence followed by the seizure of power with the systematic repression of the decent people in every nation where this has happened. When left-wingers mock the death of good people and talk about making lists of enemies to “take care of next,” they are showing us who they are and we should believe them when they tell us this. We need to make and keep the iron hot by constantly putting pressure on the Left, acting to suppress their violent and subversive tendencies, keeping them from activating their networks which they have and still try to use to overthrow our nation and its people. The Left cannot be allowed to exercise power ever again. We can’t guarantee that they won’t just try to formalise their effort to seize power via a true-to-life armed uprising, but we can do everything that is needed to prevent that from happening by shattering their organisational capacities NOW. Let’s keep up the pressure.
The left cannot have power again until they go back to being liberals.
The most important groups to go after are the professors and public school teachers who are teaching vulnerable minds that hate speech IS violence and widening the definition of hate speech. They all need to lose their jobs.
Good article author you write well.