President Donald Trump’s second term is the Great Clarification: Things that were once hidden are now being made plain. 

This is uncomfortable for a lot of people, but it poses the greatest difficulties for the left, whose strategy has long rested on obscuring basic truths.

The Charlie Kirk assassination has made many things clear. 

The outpouring of grief demonstrated just how many people loved him and cherished the principles he stood for — as well as how many stand in opposition to the violent leftism that ended his life. 

And it has also demonstrated just how awful that leftism is, and how far its perpetrators have infiltrated into our society and our institutions.

It wasn’t just politically active right-wing types voicing anguish, either.

Here’s golfer Phil Mickelson: “The assassination of Charlie Kirk is bringing out some of the best in humanity and it’s also exposing some of the worst.” 

While he praised the “heartwarming” outpouring of unity, love and support around the world, the online cheers for Tyler Robinson’s violence, he wrote, opened his eyes to “a side of extremism with a moral superiority complex” that shook his faith in humanity. 

Yes on both counts. 

Kirk’s assassination was a potent demonstration of the power of martyrdom, revealing that many, many more Americans — and even people elsewhere around the world — supported Kirk and his views than our leftist media had ever been forced to admit.

New Zealanders in London danced a Haka in his honor.

Crowds gathered all over the United States, as well as in Canada, Rome, South Korea, Germany, Israel and elsewhere, to mourn him.

Major-league sports teams like the New York Jets and New York Yankees observed moments of silence on his behalf (which were quietly dignified, unlike the similar attempt in the US House of Representatives that was marred by Democrats’ boos). 

Candlelit rallies took place around America, including a huge “Light up the Sky for Charlie Kirk” event on Long Island.

Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, has been overwhelmed with 18,000 new chapter requests for an organization that now has 9,000 chapters. Donations have flooded in, too.

This has been a terrible blow to the left, which has always tried to paint its opposition as a handful of “far right” crazies way outside the mainstream of American politics. 

That’s nonsense, of course: The left hates its opposition because its opposition is the mainstream of American politics. 

There’s no one the left hates more than the normal-American community.

But now people are gaining the courage to express their views rather than hide them — and that’s a problem for the left, which has depended on a mixture of bullying and media cover to suppress all opposition.

Meanwhile the left is undergoing clarification of its own, as the response to the assassination from within its own ranks demonstrates just how far it has strayed from Americans’ core values. 

The approving response to Kirk’s murder from so many apparently respectable people revealed just how many of our fellow citizens adhere to a leftist ideology of hate.

These aren’t just a few wackos, but large numbers of people in professional and managerial jobs — including, it seems, a heavy proportion of teachers and government employees— who genuinely believe that holding ideas they don’t like should carry the death penalty, and are perfectly comfortable saying so in public.

These people are everywhere.

They might be teaching your kids.

They might be the face looking down at you as you’re wheeled into the hospital emergency room.

They might be the guy who approves your building permit — or not.

It’s an Army of Haters, whose existence has now been made clear.

And it’s not just the United States experiencing a moment of clarity. 

In London this weekend Britons thronged Whitehall, Westminster Bridge and surrounding streets waving England’s St. George and the UK’s Union Jack flags — weirdly, an act of rebellion under Keir Starmer’s government — in a rally promoting free speech and decrying illegal immigration.

The huge turnout of ordinary citizens — 150,000 according to police estimates, 3 million according to organizers — belied the regime media’s attempts to characterize the protesters as a fringe of “far right” malcontents.

“Far right,” as we learned last week, is just a leftist hate term designed to make hurting or oppressing their political opponents seem OK.

As Elon Musk observed, they don’t shoot you because you’re a Nazi; they call you a Nazi in order to be able to shoot you.

But intimidation works only until people start to stand up against it. 

Perhaps Charlie Kirk’s lasting legacy will be that his death encourages us to finally stand up for decency, comity and open debate — and refuse to be bullied out of civil society. 

For that we owe him thanks.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.