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Saying ‘Political Violence Is Wrong’ Doesn’t Go Far Enough
When people say “political violence is wrong,” does that change the underlying substructure of thought that leads to a massive elevation in violence in the country of the political variety?
I don’t think it means anything to just say that political violence is wrong, because there are actual substrates of thought that lead to the elevation of the violence that compel fringe actors to go out and do things like murder Charlie Kirk.
Thus, having our politicians simply go out there and say, “We’ve got to take down the temperature; we all have to use better language,” is absolutely true, but it isn’t specific enough.
Chuck Schumer said, “The bottom line is this is a time that all Americans should come together and feel and mourn what happened. Violence, which affects so many different people of so many different political persuasions, is an affliction of America, and coming together is what we ought to be doing, not pointing fingers of blame.”
Hakeem Jeffries said, “This moment requires leadership that brings the American people together, as opposed to trying to further divide us. Political violence in any form against any American is unacceptable, and should be denounced by everyone. And moving forward, we have to figure out a better way to come together, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.”
All of this is correct.
But all of this is incredibly vague.
I want to talk about something that we all know is true, but nobody seems to want to say: Not all ideologies are equally prone to violence.
When there is a shooting, a mass shooting at a synagogue, a mass shooting at a church, when Charlie Kirk is shot, everybody’s mind immediately goes to this: What are the likeliest probabilities in terms of who did the shooting?
Everyone does this. We cannot pretend that we are blind to the realities of the world. When there is a shooting at a synagogue, I can tell you my mind goes to two places: radical Muslim or white supremacist. Those are usually the options. If there’s a shooting at a church, your mind might go to a trans radical or a radical Muslim.
That’s where your mind is going to go. And this is leaving aside people who are generally mentally ill or where there’s no political ideology involved. If there is a political ideology involved, your mind immediately goes to the movements that are likely to drive people toward murder.
Not every ideology is prone to this. No one thought that when Charlie Kirk was shot, it was because of his stance on low taxes. No one thought that. We differ on all sorts of politics in this country. Nobody thought that a debate about marginal tax rates was why Charlie was shot. Nobody believes Charlie Kirk was murdered because of his stance on energy policy.
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In order for an ideology, for a movement to coalesce in such a way that it allows for violence — the sort of bubbling of violence that lies at the outskirts of a movement — there have to be some preconditions.
I’ve been talking a lot about lions and scavengers. What we are seeing here is the scavengers at work.
The basic philosophy of the scavenger is very simple: All models and civilizations are merely guises for power. My failure is a result of one of those corrupt power systems. There’s a great conspiracy out there. I am the victim. I’m being targeted. I am the actual victim.
And thus, if there is a great conspiracy that is targeting me for destruction, I must respond in kind with violence.
This is how you get to the idiotic notion that speech is violence.
Those are the three elements: “Morals and civilizations that I don’t like are simply guises for power,” “My failure within that system is a result of that great conspiracy and I am the victim,” and “It is an existential threat to me and therefore I must act out with violence and harm somebody.”
Let me give you three examples, and I’m going to take them from the top death threats I received.
I receive an enormous number of death threats. I have 24/7 security on me, on my family. I literally go nowhere without an entire team of security at this point in my life. And that is because of things like what happened to Charlie.
There are three main wings that I get these threats from: Trans ideology/Marxist ideology, white supremacists, and radical Muslims.
I want to go through each one of those and explain why these particular ideologies, why these particular movements are likely to generate violence.
A trans ideology says that your argument about biology, that there is simply male and female, is, in fact, a guise for power. You’re doing it because you hate me; you wish to erase me. I am a victim of your failure to accept my identity, such that you’re erasing me. You’re engaging in a “trans genocide,” and therefore, you are threatening me. Your speech is a form of violence. It is wiping away my identity.
And therefore violence ought to be met with violence.
Marxist ideology, which is derived from the same general area, is the idea that the governmental system, the free market system, is an imposition on me. It is a conspiracy from above to harm me, to destroy me. My failures inside the market are actually not my own. They’re the fault of the system. And you, as an advocate for the system, are victimizing me. You’re erasing me. You’re destroying me. And I must act with violence. There’s a reason why Marxist movements are so violent. They say that speech, advocacy for the free market, is, in fact, a system of power. It is to be met with violence.
White supremacy: I know that there’s an attempt to pretend that this doesn’t exist, but it absolutely exists in online spaces. Pretending it doesn’t is bulls*** and everyone knows it. I know it because I’ve had to have the FBI arrest somebody who was doing this while threatening not just me, by the way, but Donald Trump Jr.
That ideology says that white people are being put upon in the United States by an entire system. And if you’re an advocate for that system, you are threatening me with destruction, with erasure, with white genocide, and thus you must be killed. Violence is a proper response to an attempted genocide. That is the argument that is made, at root, by many white supremacists.
I’m not talking about what the Left calls white supremacy, which is anything to the right of Hillary Clinton. I’m talking about actual, honest-to-God white supremacists. I get an awful lot of death threats from them.
Group number three, radical Muslims, who believe that the failures of the Palestinians, for example, are the result of evil Western systems. And thus, if you are an advocate for those systems, it’s because you want to erase the radical Muslims and you want to kill people and you want to commit genocide, and therefore it is fine to shoot two Israeli embassy staffers dead in Washington, D.C. That is why it is fine to throw a Molotov cocktail at an 80-year-old woman in Colorado who was protesting Israeli hostages being held.
We all know this is true. Pretending it isn’t true doesn’t make it go away. Not all movements are equally likely to bubble up with violence.
And so when we have politicians saying political violence is bad, if you’re not speaking out against the movements that use this logic, if you’re not speaking out against the movements that say that speech is in fact a form of violence, that systems are in fact a form of violence, and that violence is the proper response to that, then you are contributing to the environment in which this kind of stuff happens.
It is not that there are many radical Muslims in the United States, by the numbers, thank God.
It’s not that there are many white supremacists in the United States.
But by the numbers, the increasing radicalism of the Left in the United States is, in fact, a massive issue.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) recently did rankings of campus free speech. And what they found is that college campuses are replete with the failure to speak your mind.
Why? Because people are afraid of violence.
It goes all the way back to when I was in college. There’s nothing new here. I wrote my very first book, “Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth,” in 2004 about the kind of discrimination conservatives faced on campus. And yes, there was the possibility of violence, even in 2004, not being shot, but the possibility of being physically assaulted, which is something that came close to happening to me multiple times, even when I was an undergrad.
That’s going back 20 years, when I was warning that this was going to metastasize and take over huge swaths of the political Left. People ignored it at the time. But it was true.
I spoke in 2015 at the University of Missouri during the Black Lives Matter upsurge, after Ferguson. And I remember people asking about safety. I said, “I’m not worried about safety. There are some police there; I’ve got a security team now. No one’s going to take a shot at me. This is America. You don’t get shot in America for saying things on a college campus. This is America. I grew up in this country. This is my country. This is a country I love. This is where our fundamental value is the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. No one’s going to do this kind of stuff. No one.”
But it’s becoming more and more common. According to FIRE, a record 1-in-3 students now hold some level of acceptance, even if only rarely, for resorting to violence to stop a campus speech.
Now, I’m sure not everybody who believes they’re using violence thinks in terms of shooting someone to death. But when you are drawing from a pool at this point of legitimately tens of millions of young Americans, who are atomistic and isolated and don’t touch grass, it is not going to be hard to find some unhinged people who decide to take that to its logical conclusion and fire a bullet through the throat of a man who is simply attempting to speak truth to people in the friendliest possible fashion.
I don’t like when people say “They shot Charlie,” because “they” isn’t a person. A person shot Charlie Kirk, and he shot Charlie Kirk for a deranged reason.
With that said, there are movements in which the substrate of their political thinking leads to an elevation in violence. Period. End of story. That is a reality.
And it is not enough to just say “political violence is bad” if you are not calling out the movements themselves.
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