Murderers of the Land That Bore Them

One of the best dialogues in any Hollywood movie is from Tombstone. In a conversation with his friend Doc Holiday, Wyatt Earp is trying to make sense of what makes Ringo, the main antagonist, tick.

Wyatt: “What makes a man like Ringo do the things he does?”

Doc: “A man like Ringo got a great empty hole right through the middle of him. He can never kill enough or steal enough or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.”

Wyatt: “What does he need?”

Doc: “Revenge.”

Wyatt: “For what?”

Doc: “Being born.”

Now, I could go on quoting the movie Tombstone until you jammed icepicks into your ears to end your suffering, but in the interests of brevity, I’ll keep it to this one scene. I’ve been thinking of this scene ever since Charlie Kirk was assassinated. It’s a precursor to Alfred Pennyworth’s “some men just want to watch the world burn” quote.

In the outpouring of sadistic and giddy pleasure that took place after Kirk’s murder, we have seen the face of pure hatred. Leftists talk a big game about compassion, empathy, tolerance, love is love, etc. But where is the love in celebrating the killing of an innocent man? Where is the love in the calls for more killing?

Different people cheered Kirk’s murder for different reasons, and some of them, though Machiavellian, were very pragmatic. Ilhan Omar is a radical Islamist who believes that America, and by extension Charlie Kirk and his ilk, impede the path to a worldwide caliphate. Jasmine Crockett is a gutter variety racist who can’t expand her mind past the singular thought of blaming whitey for everything. Still others genuinely bought in to the libelous smears of Kirk as a racist, sexist, homophobe, etc., not because they’re hateful, but because they’re intellectual cripples who lack the critical thinking skills to verify whether these smears hold water.

But there is something darker out there in the comments and the videos and the yelling and screaming and threatening. There is a macabre nihilism that has taken systemic root in the hearts of a large swathe of our fellow citizens. There is an emotional hollowness, a lack of meaning or purpose, a “great empty hole right through the middle” of them. They want to destroy beautiful things solely for the sake of destroying them.

To this end, Charlie Kirk’s politics were purely incidental. The slanders of “racist,” “misogynist,” “transphobe,” and whatever other absurdity they lobbed at the man were simply covers to justify their nihilistic desire to destroy. These are the same people who cheer the murder of children in Christian schools or in Israeli villages, none of whom were anywhere remotely guilty of the slanders with which the left routinely denigrates their opponents. They don't cheer Kirk's murder because they think he was bad. They cheer Kirk's murder because they know he was good.

On paper, these nihilists have little reason to be angry. They are the most privileged people ever produced in the entirety of human history. They have everything, but they are nothing. And maybe that’s the root cause of this…a smug, arrogant attitude that screams through a bullhorn that the universe revolves around them and their feelings. And when this produces not happiness, but its exact opposite, they turn not to humility or reflection or development, but to envy, bitterness, spite, resentment, and hate.

Much has been printed in the conservative press about how polling shows liberals to be both the most unhappy people and the most violent people in America. And yet leftists continually brag that they’re the richest and most educated. So why then, if wealth and education supposedly make them better people, are they so angry, especially when the socialism they claim to espouse would rob them of the very wealth and social advantage of which they boast?

It's been decades since any serious thinker has ever sincerely proposed socialism as a compassionate, logical retort to capitalism. Anyone who pretends to is lying. They know full well that socialism doesn't work. They propose it precisely for that reason. They propose it with the full knowledge that, if implemented here, it would destroy this country from the inside out.

The people cheering Kirk’s assassination fall into this category. They are not compassionate, but misguided idealists. They are sociopaths crawling out of the abyss of their own meaninglessness to pull us down with them. They are material emperors of a spiritual wasteland. They have rejected the building blocks of human meaning, i.e. God, country, family, and true community, and they hate you because you haven’t.

Sadly, this seems to be a recurring human condition in societies that grow so rich and prosperous that its people lose themselves in its lethargic abundance. In his masterpiece City of God, Saint Augustine criticizes the indulgent, narcissistic Roman youth who smugly encouraged the destruction of their own empire as “murderers of the land that bore them.”

Today’s indulgent, narcissistic leftist youth know as little of history as they do of gratitude. Whether America is destined to follow the path of Rome remains to be seen. I don’t have the solution, other than to say I don’t think we will make any headway by using reason to appeal to people who take pleasure in the destruction of good. The next few years could be very dark indeed.

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C.A. Skeet is a recovering liberal and freelance writer with PJ Media who covers politics and culture. He is also a former Marine, he holds a Master’s Degree in History, and he is the author of several unwritten bestselling books. Follow him at local pub crawls to ensure he gets an Uber.

Murderers of the Land That Bore Them

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