The murder of Charlie Kirk has highlighted a portion of the Left that approves of violence. The frenetic response of the violence-accommodating Left to Charlie Kirk’s assassination is remarkable for the things that seem to have surprised them. These include:

1. There is a vast difference in the responses to the assassination of someone who is influential and someone who is merely powerful. If you kill a powerful man, his power dies with him. If you kill an influential man, his influence may grow and spread. Whether it does so or not depends on the source of that influence. The superficial pop influence that is ubiquitous on social media is not really influence; it is advertising for transient social fashions. The influence of Mr. Kirk derived from his willingness to say things that he thought were true and, as a result, influencing people who were seeking truth, whether they ultimately agreed with him or not.

One did not have to agree with Kirk to realize something essential about him. He believed that his life did not belong to him. He believed that his life had a purpose that could only be fulfilled if he spoke what he believed to be the truth. This was the source of his enduring influence. It is why his assassination caused his influence to redouble and not only touch, but move, people who might otherwise have paid him no mind.

This simple characteristic of influential people, that the source of their influence when they are alive determines whether that influence grows when they are dead, and grows spectacularly depending on the circumstances of their death, should have been obvious to the violence-accommodating Left. It wasn’t, and this has left them panicked and flustered at the prospect that his legacy will be greater than they ever imagined.

2. The response to Charlie Kirk’s death contains an element of repudiation of decades of progressive and globalist encroachment on normal people’s lives. This is one reason why there were international reactions that seemed out of proportion to what was assumed to be his core audience.

The carefully designed constraints that the Left had spent decades constructing around public discourse, education, and “acceptable” behavior, and which were erected on a scaffolding of identity politics and authoritarianism, flew apart in an instant. The pent-up frustrations provoked by the mendacity and incompetence of the COVID response, and indifference to concerns about crime, corruption, and erosion of civil liberties, were released by a single indulgent, stupid, and evil act.

The violent Left should have known that their edifice of grievance, resentment, and authoritarianism is unstable. It was constructed largely by exploiting the civilizational instincts and fair-mindedness of the great mass of decent people but was ultimately a con. The progressive elites represent a very small minority of fanatical interests, and rely on a consensus of media-generated smoke and mirrors. It is held together by capricious accusations of any number of -isms, phobias and unspecified “hate,” and the implication that these justify violence. It is now associated with a senseless assassination, and the evolution of the response -- glee, false equivalence, victim-blaming, gaslighting, denial, etc. betrays a dawning realization at the extent of the damage.

3. The animating principle for those who initially celebrated, mocked, and ridiculed on the occasion of a political assassination was not as claimed. It was not moral superiority, “resistance” to oppression, or part of some mythical struggle on behalf of the vulnerable. It was quite simply and shamefully an adolescent desire for status and affirmation within a group of morbid eccentrics.

The concerns of those who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk were not those of the great institutions of democracy, nor of humane civilization, or of philosophical enlightenment. They were instead the concerns of the junior high school cafeteria. People were desperate to broadcast their depravity for the approval and affirmation of people whose edgy appeal consists largely of hating someone without really knowing why.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has not vanquished the activist Left but it has set them back. It has certainly cost them a fair measure of credibility that they have heretofore taken for granted, and which will not easily be regained. It should have been obvious to them, to their allies in the academy and the media, and their status-obsessed and narcissistic supporters, that their great enterprise could be severely damaged by a confused, propaganda-addled fool.

The possibility that approval of an assassination might alienate a large number of people who were open to persuasion seems not to have occurred to the violence-approving Left. It did not occur to them because they have little respect for people who are open to persuasion. They see no need to persuade anyone who might be cowed, or shamed, or duped into compliance. As a result, the realization that name-calling, ridicule, shaming, slander, and various other bullying tactics have lost their potency comes as a shock. There should be a lesson in this for those smug and sneeringly contemptuous people who are baffled by the response to Charlie Kirk’s murder. That lesson is that violence is unreliable and unpredictable in what it ultimately destroys.

Image: Gage Skidmore