Conservative political commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated last week, the surface evidence suggesting it was for political reasons linked to leftist ideology that so far other evidence is confirming. Is it now open season on those of us with something of an audience for conservative political commentary, and what can we do about preventing that in Louisiana?
Understand firstly that this event broadens the shooting gallery. Trying to kill politicians is nothing new, or seemingly out of vogue, because they personalize political conflict and are seen in the warped minds of their attempted assassins as dangerous change agents. Stop them, and the threat is reduced, whether it be because Louisiana Republican Rep. Steve Scalise is one of the most powerful conservative politicians in the country leading a partisan faction, or because Minnesota Democrat state Rep. Melissa Hortman was viewed as an impediment as part of a scheme to advance a faction of her party to greater heights, as dreamed up in a demented fantasy by an appointee of Minnesota Democrat Gov. Tim Walz (and to bring it back to Louisiana, the reason why 90 years ago this past week Democrat Sen. Huey Long was assassinated, shot by a relative of a victim of Long’s intraparty machinations).
But Kirk was killed, it is becoming increasingly obvious, simply because he was successfully disseminating conservatism to the masses, particularly on college campuses. It drives home two particularly and complementary ugly points.
First, if you are a conservative opinion writer, you will get threats about your personal safety. I have been getting such threats for 43 years, when I first started writing opinion pieces in college. Some came anonymously through surface mail, most then by phone (so I had to petition the university, as I lived in the dorms, for an unlisted number). The last I received by post three years or so ago from what appeared to be an aggrieved Bossier City political insider telling me I was being watched and it was known where I live. Especially in the early years of this space more often intimidation took the form of haranguing my superiors, although that has tailed off as conservative officeholders have proliferated in state government.
Which leads to a second, extraordinarily unfortunate thing for both my profession and society as a whole: the vast bulk of these I received over the several years I wrote for college newspapers. There may be something of a selection bias since these days mostly my pieces are presented online (and nothing that appears in print doesn’t also appear in some online format), and it’s obvious when a threat is delivered by electronic means (print and voice) it can be traced back to its sender, whereas mail is still anonymous, and to where do you send surface mail to an online source, especially if unaffiliated?
But social media is hopping, so it’s no accident that not only have a lot of leftist individuals made gloating posts about the murder (one site claims at least 30,000), but also that these come disproportionately from academia and government employees which disproportionately attract leftists, particularly vocal ones. Worst of all, within the leftist sphere of politics and academia and the media there is an increasing belief – and one successfully disseminated to the younger generation – that speech content justifies reciprocal physical violence against communicators.
Any study of the left reveals the two points that explain why such beliefs increasingly are accepted while shunned by conservatives, a few far-rightists excepted. Understand firstly that leftism is millenarian. Leftists believe their worldview is ascendant and an inevitable consequence of the march of history as their quest to perfect humanity reaches its conclusion.
This is why the past decade has been so puzzling and disturbing to the left. It could write off 2016 election results as aberrant and a product of conspiratorial forces and revanchist attitudes that could be overcome quickly, as it liked to interpret subsequent election results. That is, until 2024, when there can be no other interpretation that rollback is underway.
Rollback of the tides of leftist policy has created an enormous crisis on the left. It entirely negates the millenarian ethos, which has as a bedrock of its faith that in the public policy square what is its is uncontestable and forever while whatever policy remains contrary to its tenets is up for grabs and eventually will be subsumed by leftism. As Republican Pres. Donald Trump and the GOP trigger the first massive reversals in policy for decades has created panic on the left, for it strikes at the very foundation of assumed inevitability of its belief system in policy.
Which complements the second point which magnifies the distress is that today’s leftism, or what was called decades ago the “new left” as opposed to the “old left” of modern liberalism, is an emotive exercise. Very much contrary to conservatism, which is built upon sturdy intellectual foundations shaped by factual description of human agency and interactions, leftism ignores that and is a production of feelings and assertion that at best skims the surface of reality before subsummation into increasingly bizarre hypotheses and tenets that deeper delving onto the facts at hand easily invalidates.
It has to take this warped course, because of the discrediting of the old left whose rival theories to conservatism over the decades have become discredited by facts and history. Maybe 75 years ago liberalism could compete on a speculative basis with conservatism, but as time has gone on the evidence consistently has mounted demonstrating that conservatism presents a far more compelling worldview that gives us the most valid understanding of the human condition – its nature, behavioral motivations, and philosophic aspirations for the place of humans in a larger cosmology – one far superior to that under the assumptions of liberalism. Simply, in the battle of ideas, conservatism wins.
So, for leftism to advance it has to discard its intellectual component and ride on its more emotive dimension. And this in turn explains why among the left it is far more acceptable to justify speech codes restricting, if not practicing violence against, those who merely speak out against leftism. In its view, these guilty are speaking out against, and by their words actually inhibiting promulgation of, what must be true and the policies derived thereof. Remember, mere speech is violence to this crowd because that speech defeats at an intellectual level its arguments and thusly (so it believes) deceives about the larger underlying and emotively-realized “truth” that underpins leftism. Suppression, if not violence, is justifiable, by any means necessary, to defeat debaters from the right because of the presumed danger they pose to the millenarian march of leftism that, if prevented from its fruition, is considered an attack against all of humanity. Uttering conservative arguments is an affront and attack that cannot be abided, with this emotive response fueled by the basic emotive nature of today’s leftism.
Not all on the left think this draconianly, and not even a majority. But it is a large number who tolerate such attitudes within their ideological fellow-travelers and for that reason bear blame for the misdeeds of that cohort. And, again, much of this is centered in the public sector, particularly in education on a vector to higher education, which is why it’s no accident that it’s the young and impressionable who disproportionately turn to assassination of nonpoliticians, slain only because of the ideas their presences propagate.
Understanding all of this helps us to make the appropriate policy response. In Louisiana, a couple of salutary trends have appeared. First, there is increasing heterodoxy encouraged in higher education (which, of course, its leftist core decries as an attack) by leaders’ willingness to police against those who would use their power to punish those who don’t share in its preferred orthodoxy and in strengthening structural processes to encourage free expression. Mind you, little of this sprung internally and likely wouldn’t stick except for external forces to academia forcing this upon it, but it does represent progress regardless of its source.
Second, those in education who publicly support violence against others for mere intellectual argumentation against their preferred belief systems should face punishment to discourage the cancerous mainstreaming of such attitudes into the academic community. Southern University appropriately set such an example with this suspension of a faculty member who did just this related to the Kirk assassination.
However, there’s more work to be done. For example, there’s no assurance to education at any level cannot be pervaded foundationally by what goes by various terms as “anti-racism,” or “woke,” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion” agendas. These are built upon the notion that certain ideas are illegitimate to express and if acted upon constitute violence against certain minority groups, principally blacks. For example, to express as a goal of public policy that any evaluation of policy and people is race-neutral, in the absence of any reasonable adduced attempt to discriminate, is an attack upon nonwhites (and, in reality, excluding Asians), according to this ideology.
It's all right, especially in a higher education setting, to teach and explore these ideas. But it feeds the notion of the words-as-violence trope if this is taught foundationally without acknowledgement that this view isn’t the only one defining sociological and political power relations and it’s not indisputably the most convincing. If presenting it in this fashion as part of basic (such as general education requirements) coursework, it represents a closing of the mind that, to its extreme extent, led to the assassination of Kirk.
Especially as my audience, even as engaged and as thoughtful as you all are, is small compared to Kirk’s, I don’t think I’ll be gunned down any time soon. At the same time, we must come to grips with the spreading, albeit tres chic on the left, sickness that led to his senseless killing and see it is our responsibility to construct public policy that discourages its propagation.
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