The point of democratic politics – the reason it exists – is for the peaceful resolution of intractable disputes. Two sides who disagree fundamentally on the most important of issues agree to put their cases before the people, who vote. Both sides agree in advance to abide by the wishes of the majority. The winner, ideally, is magnanimous, and the loser, ideally, is disappointed but defers to the wishes of the electorate.
When that breaks down – when the loser stops consenting to his defeat – then the peaceful resolution of intractable disputes is impossible. And people get shot and killed for their beliefs.
Thus, we have a problem in the modern west. That problem is that a large swathe of the political left has stopped consenting to defeat. It views its opponents as not merely wrong, but illegitimate.
Charlie Kirk was murdered, about an hour ago (as I write this), because too many of his opponents thought his politics were illegitimate. Not only that he was wrong, but that he should not be permitted to say what he thought. That his very arguments – on everything from gun control to abortion to the middle east to tariffs and trade – should not be heard, in case people might agree with them.
He should not be permitted to win.
For generations, college campuses in the United States have been the preserve of the political left. At the moment he was shot, Charlie Kirk was speaking to tens of thousands of cheering young people on a college campus. He was in the most traditionally hostile turf for a conservative right winger, and he was winning people to his side – by the power of argument and persuasion alone.
He was doing democratic politics the way it was supposed to be done. By going into hostile territory, taking questions from those he disagreed with, and winning his audiences over by simply persuading them that he was right. He proved vastly more effective at it than legions of tenured liberal professors, despite never having gone to college himself.
Last summer, an assassin tried, and was two centimetres away, from killing Donald Trump. Had the bullet that grazed the Presidential ear been just a fraction to the right, the assassin would have succeeded. That assassin’s intent was the same as the unknown shooter’s this evening: That Trump should not, could not, and must not be permitted to win.
The determination that the right must not be permitted to win does not in most cases extend to violence. But the violence is the logical extension of an attitude that starts well before the violence commences. It begins with a determination that conservative voices should not be heard. It begins with laws restricting free speech, and laws censoring the internet.
It extends to the funding of an entire public infrastructure determined to load the political scales: In Ireland we see it with our multi-billion euro NGO complex, which exists for the sole and entire purpose of making sure that the public debate is dominated by voices of the political centre left to the exclusion of voices from the political right. It extends to the state’s funding of the media, which is conveniently tied to pledges to cover left wing issues and adopt left-wing internal policies. It extends to the overt and not particularly subtle indoctrination of children in schools with curriculums that are heavily and consciously weighted to the political left.
The violence, you see, is only necessary if you get past all the initial hurdles. Respectable left wingers don’t want you dead, they just want you silent. But if you are not silent, and you happen to win, well, what do you expect to happen?
And then there’s the hypocrisy: In the last week alone in Ireland, we have had to put up with frankly insufferable whinging from the media about threats to Simon Harris. This whining would be more sufferable if it were at least consistent, but it is not. It is the most rank and disgusting hypocrisy.
Just under three years ago at the Lough Erne resort in Fermanagh, a political conference of a fringe right wing party with little public support was physically attacked and invaded by thugs with hammers and other weapons, and attendees were hospitalised after being assaulted. Nobody was ever arrested, or charged. The political establishment looked the other way, because the victim was Justin Barrett. Some of them even chuckled at his inability to defend himself, as if preparedness to meet physical violence was a necessary qualification for having an opinion.
For years, violent thugs in facemasks have been permitted to operate as the disrespectable paramilitary wing of respectable left wing opinion on the streets of Ireland, with slogans like “punch a nazi” quietly ignored by the great and the good and casual assaults and violence openly tolerated.
Even today, respectable left wing opinion in Ireland lionises, or tolerate the lionisation of, a musical act whose members were investigated for, in the words of the BBC, “allegedly calling for the death of British MPs”, and who face charges for waving the flag of a terrorist organisation.
That is the “respectable” left: Smiling indulgently at Kneecap, marveling at their popularity, while mopping the sweat from their own brows at the thought of violent rhetoric coming from the “far right”. Then, considering hate speech laws for anyone intemperate enough to call them the hypocritical self-righteous fuckers that they are.
Make no mistake: The left tolerates violence. And I do not mean the hard left. I don’t mean People before Profit. I mean the respectable centre-left types in the newspapers and on the telly who pretend to be civilised but know exactly to what a blind eye must be turned, and when.
Charlie Kirk leaves a wife he loved dearly, and two young children who were his world. Those children, and that beautiful young woman, have had the man who was the centre of their world torn from them in an act of brutal, calculated, political violence.
If you kill somebody because you disagree with them, you are not the good guy. If you quietly cheer the death of somebody because you disagreed with them, you are not the good guy. If you are one of those smug fuckers who thinks that it’s bad but he got what he deserved because you disagree with somebody, you are not the good guy.
No, what happened tonight was clarifying, for a whole generation. If the west’s culture wars cannot be resolved peacefully, through democratic politics, then ultimately they will be resolved another way. History is littered with bloody civil wars and purges, almost all precipitated by dominant regimes that got cocky. If you are one of my reasonably thoughtful left-leaning readers, you should know that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.
And those of us who do, are doomed to watch everyone else repeat it.
Rest in Peace, Charlie Kirk.