What can you say in the aftermath of a national tragedy like Charlie Kirk’s assassination?

In the 24 hours or so since Kirk was gunned down in Utah by a shooter who, as of this writing, is still at large, we’ve been treated to a torrent of predictable responses: outrage and hurt from those who knew and loved him, sadistic glee from many who didn’t, and, from the vast majority of Americans in-between, some version of the following sentiment: We can’t allow this sort of thing to happen in America.

Amen, selah. But to stop the next shooter we need to understand where this one came from first. And for 24 hours or so, we’ve been offered nothing but heaps of twaddle on this singularly crucial question. To hear our politicians and pundits—left, right, and center—tell it, the shooting occurred in a politically charged climate, committed by some coward who chose to end the debate with a bullet. Toss in some lip service to mental health and the obligatory lip-pursing about gun violence, and you have the consensus vision of what went wrong. And it’s a strangely comforting one at that, because it casts the shooter as a horror movie monster, terrifying but singular in its ghoulishness, the one meanie who emerged from the toxic swamp of bad but curable social phenomena. All you have to do, then, is find him, catch him, deter others from getting any crazy ideas, and our long national nightmare will be over.

But the nightmare, sadly, is far greater than that. If we’re being honest and level-headed, it’s not too hard to understand that the tragedy was imminent. It didn’t happen in a vacuum and it was no freak aberration. Charlie Kirk was shot because great forces spent decades reshaping social norms and institutions and creating vast cadres of Americans ready to do great violence to anyone they were led to believe was their enemy. This isn’t hyperbole. In a grim coincidence, just a few hours before Kirk’s assassination, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released a survey of 68,000 students in 257 universities nationwide; one in three said it was acceptable to use violence in response to offensive speech.

Like all complex and still unfurling stories, the account of how we got here is intricate and contains multitudes. But we must look at this straight in the face, and attack the problems head on.

Let’s start, fittingly enough, with births. Over the last few decades, American birthrates have plummeted precipitously, and are projected to reach 1.6 births per women in the next three decades, well beneath the 2.1 births per woman replacement rate. This should come as no surprise, because Americans, it turns out, have also stopped having sex. In 1990, according to the Institute for Family Studies, 55% of Americans reported having sex on a regular basis. The number now stands at 37%, and it’s dropping even faster for younger Americans: In 2022, the Kinsey Institute found that one in four members of Gen Z had yet to have sex with a real, live, human partner.

How did we become a sexless society failing to reproduce? The answer is simple: by design. For 30 years at least, we’ve all been treated to a carefully orchestrated campaign against embodiment, or the idea that biological realities matter and that they have something profound to do with who we are. It began with abortion, which we were told was a human rights issue and, besides, was to be kept safe, legal, and rare. Then, before we knew it, we had entertainers like Michelle Wolf celebrating abortion as an all-out good on Comedy Central. Then came the tide of transgenderism, which began with the silencing of a Brown University professor whose research proved that kids were declaring themselves trans because of peer pressure emanating in large part from the culture and social media platforms. Before too long, we were told that though every cell in the human body has its own sex-specific chromosomes, gender is a social construct that could be changed at will, and that biological males should now be allowed to compete in women’s sports or choose to be incarcerated in women’s prisons.

Those who objected to this lunacy were silenced, or, if they were unfortunate enough to be British, arrested. Entire generations of children grew up being taught that it was right and good to deny obvious biological reality. Entire swaths of doctors were trained to say that cutting off the breasts of a healthy young child was called “gender affirming care” and was entirely virtuous.

This collective psychosis didn’t just happen. It was orchestrated by a tightly knit coalition that included Democratic politicians who pushed transgender messaging and policies—including, say, former Vice President Kamala Harris, who cheered on federally funded sex change operations for prisoners—as well as media outlets who framed the issue as a civil rights crusade, foundations that funneled millions into activist NGOs, and corporations that rushed to enforce the new abnormal. And this collective psychosis left us with no shortage of people like, Robin Westman, for example, a transgender youth who eventually picked up a rifle and slaughtered two children in a Catholic school in Minneapolis, or Audrey Hale, a biological female transitioning to male who massacred three children in a Christian school in Nashville. That broken, disfigured people will eventually do something desperate should come as no surprise.

The list of iniquities, sadly, goes on and on. In the name of “criminal justice reform,” for example, hordes of violent criminals were let loose, backed up by progressive attorneys general and activist judges and local legislators who robbed law enforcement officials of any means of meting out justice. Bail, we were told, was modern day Jim Crow. Prison was slavery in other forms. Policing was racist. And when savages like Decarlos Brown Jr., with 14 prior violent convictions to his record, were set loose, it was only a matter of time before they produced a knife and slaughtered Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian refugee, on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina. When brave men like Daniel Penny, who successfully neutralized a deranged violent criminal threatening to harm fellow commuters on the New York subway, intervened, they were dragged through the coals in court and on TV. When a police officer detained a repeated violent felon high on fentanyl and methamphetamines, leading to his death, American cities burned for days, with Democrat politicians taking a knee and corporations paying vast fortunes to a group, Black Lives Matter, that vowed to dismantle the nuclear family and failed to report what it was doing with its vast funds. Put bluntly, then, we have angry, violent, and hopeless people because many of our societal institutions worked assiduously to produce them since at least 2008.

All of this should be entirely coherent to any serious student of politics. What we have here is a group of people assembling an entirely coherent construction for the purpose of holding and maintaining power. And to keep this charade going even when it got patently ridiculous—arguing, say, that there were 57 genders, or that houses of worship had to be closed during COVID but liquor store and nail salons were welcome to do business as usual, or that the race riot that torched up your town was a mostly peaceful protest—the left applied its most trusted weapon, that of the permission structure. When every academic and every late night talk show host and every newspaper editorial told you that Trump was Hitler, good luck wearing your MAGA hat to the neighborhood picnic and not facing severe consequences.

Let’s be clear: No progressive member of Congress, or union boss, or assistant professor of anthropology anywhere ever told anyone to go ahead and shoot Charlie Kirk or Donald Trump or anyone else. But the whole point is that they didn’t have to say the quiet part out loud. All they had to do is construct a society thick with brainwashed young men and women who hate themselves, hate the bodies they were born into, hate their nation and their faith and their families, and take directions from a top-down political infrastructure that instructs them what to think and when. It’s precisely the sort of environment that easily breeds shooters.

That’s the bad news. But here’s the good: There’s much we can and must do to make sure there’s not going to be another shooter. The left’s power vertical is mighty, but it does not get to define what the law means. And our Constitution and system of government alike, hallelujah, give us a boxfull of sharp tools designed precisely to eliminate this sort of overwhelming threat to our freedoms.

Examples abound:

None of these measures are extreme, and all are perfectly legal and entirely precedented. They’re all absolutely necessary. Holding quiet candlelight vigils or townhall meetings on Zoom won’t stop the next shooter. To do that, we need to crush the titanic structure erected by the left and free our republic from its ruinous designs. And that’s not a project for just one candidate, or one political party: It’s a civilizational reclaiming project, and it calls on all of us to first understand what happened to America and then work together to change it. Then, and only then, will we give Charlie Kirk justice and America a real turning point.