I’m haunted, as many are, by the prospect that we may have lost our country for good this week.
In his column on Friday, Washington Examiner Editor-in-Chief Hugo Gurdon contrasted the assassination of Charlie Kirk with the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump in Butler last year. The latter sparked a MAGA renaissance, while Kirk’s death produced “a different feeling of hollow dread settled heavily onto the national consciousness.”
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Butler felt like a miracle, with Trump’s head tilting at exactly the right moment. His fist pump and battle cry caused even adversaries to marvel. But the assassination of Kirk is a final act. It led to permanent ends: a destroyed family, an interrupted career as a movement leader who built a network the likes of which we’ve never seen and may never see again.
The horizon brightened following Butler. Storm clouds gather following Utah.
Despite platitudes about “lowering the temperature,” one doesn’t detect among partisans the will to steer clear, but only to storm forward. Democratic Party leaders’ sober and subdued responses suggest fear more than moral clarity. And they are right to be afraid of the mob they cultivated out of experience and cowardice. It no longer appears governable.
The Right, justifiably apoplectic over losing a beloved leader, appears eager to rumble. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh released a harrowingly terse video assessing the stakes Friday morning, saying, “Charlie tried to have conversations, and you killed him for it. You’re killing us in our churches. You tried to kill our president. And you killed one of our greatest advocates … and you celebrate Charlie’s death even now. It’s too late to turn the temperature down.”
The “you” Walsh refers to is no single person or political party, but the tens of millions who comprise the Left. The briefest glance at social media on Friday morning shows that he speaks for many on the Right and does so with the authority of a grieving friend. That makes his call for collective retribution even more foreboding. More blood will be spilled — it feels certain.
The rank-in-file on the Left appear to be courting this vengeance (though they will doubtless cry and play victim should it come). Thousands of videos of young people in standard woke aesthetic — neon-colored hair, septum rings, a studied smugness — celebrating the gruesome shooting circulated immediately. They involved gleeful dancing, lip-syncing to upbeat music, sometimes overlaying the footage with edits like sparkles or celebratory effects.
Their glee over Kirk’s demise is not calculated but reflexive. One young man in the audience at Kirk’s event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday stood and cheered as everyone else ducked and covered. This occurred about 20 feet from where Kirk lay.
How did they become this way? Look to their teachers. Scores of school officials, public school teachers, and college professors have heaped praise on the assassin.
Samantha Marengo, a special education teacher in Framingham, Massachusetts, posted a video on Instagram singing “God Bless America” while smiling and zooming in on a TV headline about Kirk’s death. Wynne Boliek, a social studies teacher in Greenville, South Carolina, posted: “America became greater” following Kirk’s death. Joshua Bregy, an assistant professor at Clemson University, posted that “karma is sometimes swift and ironic. As Kirk said, ‘play certain games, win certain prizes.’”
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Dozens, perhaps hundreds, more such examples could be listed — and those are only the ones that have surfaced. The troubling fact is that our children have become radicalized by the very adults we’ve placed in their charge. The sickness has spread deeper and farther than we realize.
Something has changed. The scales have fallen from our eyes.