The establishment media is full of descriptions of Charlie Kirk these days, almost all of them wrong, and almost all of them negative. Clearly, the media wants you to think that in Charlie Kirk, we had a very bad, very dangerous man, a man of the “far right,” whose “extreme” rhetoric finally met its inevitable response at that fateful moment on Wednesday when he was murdered. Numerous more rational and fair voices have pointed out that there was nothing “extreme” about Charlie Kirk’s views, and that they were not on the far end of any accurate representation of the political spectrum, but were, in fact, quite mainstream. Yet for the establishment media, that doesn’t mean that their characterizations are inaccurate. They’re just part of their game plan.
In his monumental Gulag Archipelago, the insightful and courageous Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explains that the law-enforcement apparatus of Stalinist Russia wasn’t in the least interested in meting out actual justice. They would arrest people for the flimsiest of reasons, or for no reason at all. This was not a failure of the system; it was one of the foremost ways in which the Soviet system worked.
Soviet officials, Solzhenitsyn explained, “had no profound reasons for their choice of whom to arrest and whom not to arrest. They merely had over-all assignments, quotas for a specific number of arrests. These quotas might be filled on an orderly basis or wholly arbitrarily. In 1937 a woman came to the reception room of the Novocherkassk NKVD to ask what she should do about the unfed unweaned infant of a neighbor who had been arrested. They said: ‘Sit down, we’ll find out.’ She sat there for two hours—whereupon they took her and tossed her into a cell. They had a total plan which had to be fulfilled in a hurry, and there was no one available to send out into the city—and here was this woman already in their hands!”
That woman’s arrest served, in a small way, the same purpose that the murder of Charlie Kirk was intended to serve. Once news of her arrest got out, her neighbors would be well and truly terrorized: It showed the people that the Soviet authorities were always watching, always ready to act, always vigilant, and to all appearances arbitrary. The only hope, and it was a slim one, of avoiding arrest and a term in the gulag was to toe the Soviet line with fanatical scrupulosity, hoping by a display of zeal for the regime to make it inconceivable that the regime one served so ardently would betray such ardor.
But it invariably would. It had to. If it didn’t, the population might cease to be terrorized, and start to relax. A terrorized population is docile; a relaxed one might have the leisure to start entertaining thoughts of resistance.
Killing Charlie Kirk was meant to send the same message. Yes, by the left’s insane contemporary standards, his views were extreme and dangerous, and yes, violence is increasingly the left’s only answer to those whom it fears and hates. But the mainstream character of Charlie’s views is also a key aspect of the message the left is sending here. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a warning to each and every ordinary American: if you don’t toe the line, you’re next.
Related: Violence Against Political Opponents Is Becoming Mainstream on the Left. Here’s (More) Proof.
Millions of Americans are getting the message and nodding obediently. Many people have always parroted the leftist establishment line not because they’re true believers, but because they’re afraid, and because they know what the left does to dissidents. The idea of the murder of Charlie Kirk is to make the rest of us too afraid to do anything but get down on our knees and submit.
Messages that are sent, however, are not always received in the manner in which they were intended. The real lesson of Charlie Kirk’s assassination is that we are not in a battle of left versus right, but a battle of good versus evil. We can only hope to win that battle if millions of Americans realize what is happening, refuse to be intimidated into submission, and reclaim their freedom, their values, and their history, before it’s too late. There was a reason that the signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to their great cause. They knew that each of those were on the line in the face of the tyrant’s rage. That’s where we are again today.
