Charlie Kirk was right. Assassination culture, which has grown from the gaping spiritual vacuum in large parts of the West, is a profound threat to American self-government and our future as a free country.
In April, Kirk posted on X what has turned out to be a sickeningly prophetic message.
“Assassination culture is spreading on the left. Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump,” Kirk wrote.
As we’ve seen from some of the ongoing reactions to Kirk’s assassination there aren’t just hordes of leftists on social media (many of whom are not just random weirdos, but teachers, librarians, doctors, and professional people) who are openly celebrating his murder, but a fair number of legacy media journalists and pundits who have said that Kirk essentially had it coming.
And a growing number of elected Democrats have decided that this is a moment to demonstrate who is the most ghoulish among them. They’ve shamefully signaled to their apparently bloodthirsty supporters that assassination is perhaps no big deal if the slain is on the “wrong side of history.”
Here’s the CNN interview that in part led to Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s censure vote.
As Democrats and the broader Left lose their grip on power over American society, its seems that there will be a growing number of leftists, some deranged, some coldly calculating, but most filled with a supreme sense of self-righteousness, who simply won’t let the country take another direction without violence.
We’ve only been fortunate that many recent assassination attempts have been unsuccessful. Make no mistake, though, what this represents in America right now is an extension of the so-called heckler’s veto on college campuses. This is the assassin’s veto, and it is a form of ruthless tyranny at odds with the entire American political project.
Instead of the American system that requires a free exchange of ideas and consent, they want to change the American political direction by violent, unilateral force.
And I’d argue that this period of increasing assassination attempts — the idea that America can and should be changed forcefully — is a continuation of the cultural revolution that began more than half a century ago.
Left-wing political violence exploded in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1970s.
At first there were a few assassins, like Lee Harvey Oswald, who decided to take the John Wilkes Booth path of killing influential political leaders. Most acted on their own or had less than coherent worldviews. Then, as now, “mainstream” liberal commentators and institutions tried to pin this violence on the Right.
Oswald was a Marxist, yet journalists were able to transform the narrative about John F. Kennedy’s assassination into a tale about right-wing hate in Dallas. There are similar echoes in the nonsense peddled by ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, formerly a comedian, that it was a member of the “MAGA gang” who killed Kirk and not an angry leftist in a homosexual relationship with a transgender furry.
But the violence of that era of cultural revolution wasn’t just being carried out by a few evil killers. Organizations and terror cells committed to various leftist and “postcolonial” causes proliferated. This remarkable and now somewhat forgotten period of domestic terrorism was chronicled by author Bryan Burrough in Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence.
Groups like the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the FALN, the Black Liberation Army, and various other far-left organizations committed acts of terrorism around the country. As Burrough noted in his book, most of the members of these groups were seemingly normal, middle-class kids from good families who had radicalized, not too unlike Kirk’s alleged assassin.
These groups mostly targeted institutions rather than individuals, though they clearly weren’t terribly concerned about the people they killed along the way. The scale of their chaos was incredible and is still underappreciated today.
The violent trend hit a high point in the mid-1970s. Between 1971 and 1972, there were an estimated 2,500 domestic bombings in the United States.
But this didn’t last forever. It fizzled out as the country became utterly fatigued by the chaos. The political winds changed. Americans turned on Democrats, who were often quite cozy with the extremist groups. They put President Ronald Reagan in the White House. The “vibe shift,” at that time was very real as Reagan noted in his farewell address.
In his final speech to the nation as he left the president’s office, Reagan highlighted why it had been morning again in America, but he also forewarned our re-emerging crisis.
Reagan noted that the country’ spirit was back, it was morning again in America, but “we haven’t re-institutionalized it.”
Many of the radicals who had participated in the bombings and terrorism of the ’60s and ’70s were rewarded for what they had done with sinecures and tenures at prominent universities. Their prior lives as domestic terrorists were whitewashed. They were laying the groundwork for a reenergized cultural revolution that had only been half-completed.
That’s what America, and the broader West, is up against. Assassination culture on the Left isn’t going away until we fix the root problems at the heart of our country. The issue is not just a few radicals willing to do incredible acts of evil and violence. It’s a much larger cultural cesspool that is encouraging these people to act on their homicidal impulses.
So, a clear takeaway from recent events is that “unity” isn’t enough. The country simply won’t come together after 9/10 as it did after 9/11. If America is going to heal itself, it needs a genuine revival of faith, a return to the foundational ideas that create a society of good health and character, as Kirk wanted.
That’s the project we, the living, must continue if we want to see assassination culture defeated and our nation restored.
Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. He is also the author of the book The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.
