Dangerous Days

I suppose that goes without saying.

The left has lost a fair bit of its mind over the course of at least the last decade.

The right has thrown in its lot with Trump--whose main strength and selling-point has been his immunity to the rhetorical viciousness of the woke, PC left. His main weaknesses are almost too obvious to bear enumerating.

And now the left's rhetorical viciousness has mutated into physical viciousness--including murderousness.

In fact, of course, this mutation already manifested itself (most notably) in the violent parts of the BLM riots--which were predicated on one of the left's most prominent and destructive myths, the myth of racist, even "genocidal" law-enforcement and "the carceral state." Antifa blackshirts--terrorists--have long operated in several American cities with impunity.

The ideologically-grounded aversion to enforcing the law, especially against nonwhites, led us to the brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train--just to name the most recently notable incident.

And now, after the cold-blooded assassination of one of their most prominent voices, Charlie Kirk, the right is a powder keg.

In fact--of course--that may not be quite the right application of the metaphor.

It may have already been a powder keg, and Kirk's murder may be the spark that touches it off.

And, even if not: the very widespread and obscenely rapturous expressions of joy across wide swaths of the left at Kirk's murder may fan the flames to the point of doing the trick.

I will, frankly, be rather surprised if there is no violent retaliation from the right.

As I've said many times, I generally don't hold a faction's lunatic fringe against it. Every faction has one--or more. The problem with the left over the past 5-50 years has been allowing the lunatic ideas of its fringe to become its orthodoxy. To take just one relevant example: you can only insist that words are violence so many times, and for so long, before someone believes you enough to meet the "violence" of words with the violence of violence. They went from joyfully punching "Nazis" to murdering a young father for politically incorrect speech--to exulting in that murder. They even printed up t-shirts bearing sketches of the moment he was shot in the neck (to which I refuse to link). (They're also selling t-shirts like the one worn by the shooter in the surveillance video.)

They have, in fact, even gone so far as to invade memorial services for Kirk to celebrate in the faces of mourners.

This was not one act, one time, by one leftist lunatic. It was the culmination of an ideology and a set of attitudes and actions we've been warning about for a decade.

The left is doing just about everything possible to turn the culture war into a war war.

And I already have a rather low opinion of the self-control of the fringier elements of the right. They are not renowned for their calm and sensible reactions...

It's possible that we'll get out of this without more murder.

Though, even if we do, I expect that the increasingly radicalized left will go right back to prosecuting its "long march through the institutions." I have little faith that the mainstream left--especially academia and the media--will take a hard look at itself and repudiate the extremist, cultural Marxist radicalism that has set its agenda over at least the last decade.

Sadly, the left seems to have an unshakable conviction that it's the good guys--pretty much no matter what it does.

I shared that stupid view for much of my life.

The right thinks the analogous thing--that it is undeniably right. But, in its defense, it has not, to anything near the same extent, combined that self-concept with ostentatiously insane and destructive ideas and policies. The neocons led us into the lie-laden catastrophe of the Iraq war, it's true. But it did not seize control of the culture and insist on re-engineering it in accordance with outright insanity like women have penises, all whites are racist by definition, science should be subordinate to politics, words we dislike are violence, and all our political opponents are Hitler...

Sane people on each side must move to calm that side's lunatic fringe. It's possible--even if not terribly likely--that we could get out of this without more bloodshed.

So get to work, please.