(Warning: long rant)
My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue.
I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues.
Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious.
And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left.
Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly.
I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own.
Here are the facts:
Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over.
Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept.
Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it.
These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements.
Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this:
These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not.
These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened.
When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice.
They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit.
And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety.
When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.”
They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep.
And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes.
When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person.
And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them.
For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit.
In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations.
In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism.
> “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.)
> “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.)
> “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?)
> “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.)
In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection.
> “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.)
> “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.)
All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells.
You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it.
Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do.
If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.
I am against violence. I am against celebrating violence. I’m praying for peace. I’m praying for healing. I’m praying for the family, especially the children. I know what they’re going through. I’ve been through it.
I’m deeply scared for this country. The way some people are reacting on both sides is dangerous. If I had one wish right now it would be for everyone to please just step back and take a breath and remember we are all just sophisticated apes trying to coexist on a rock hurtling through space.
If we cannot tolerate polite and reasoned disagreement then there is no hope for our society.
There is a famous quote falsely attributed to Voltaire that however does sum up a principle of enlightenment philosophy, ‘I disagree with what you say, but I would die to defend your right to say it.’
The ideas of people like John Locke and Voltaire and Thomas Paine are what lead to the American Revolution which then inspired the French Revolution. They introduced the World to the idea that individual rights were important and should be protected from Monarchs (tyrants and dictators), and ultimately led to the idea that a country should be governed by its people NOT by the Church and NOT by a King.
If citizens don’t protect and respect each other’s right to disagree, then we cannot have a democracy. If we do not protect our right to disagree then we’ll get violence.
We do NOT want a society where violence is the way we win arguments, because then nobody wins. Everyone loses.
We are ALL losing right now. The whole society is losing together. Losing to violence. It’s unbelievably sad. It took so much work to get us here. We can’t throw it all away like spoilt children.
I did NOT agree with Charlie Kirk’s views on MANY important topics. I know he helped get Trump elected and people hate him for that. But he was a conservative Christian. What do you expect a conservative Christian to believe? How can those views surprise you? He argued those views calmly, reasonably, and considerately as far as I’ve seen.
But no matter what he did not deserve this. His wife did not deserve this. His kids did NOT deserve to have their world torn apart!
The way some people are being so cold and uncaring and even celebrating is disturbing and repugnant to me. It is making me physically ill. If you are celebrating the murder of a non-violent man for his opinions then you are NOT the better person. Look in the mirror. Imagine telling his kids how you feel. Step back. Take a breath. Remember we are all humans. We are all just flickers of consciousness in an endless eternity. Love IS the answer. I really mean it.
We are quite literally ALL in this together. If this ship sinks we ALL drown. Look around you. Everyone you see is a shipmate. We have to figure this out. We have no other choice.
What happened to Charlie is one of the reasons why people like myself like to keep a low profile.
This is not a game.
The Left are violent and deranged people who will try to ruin your life, get you fired from your job, or even kill you, if you say things they don’t like.
If you become popular or effective in this information war, you become a target.
Charlie was effective and highly influential with the youth, so he became a target for the Left. They couldn’t beat him in debate, and he was winning over the hearts and minds of the American youth, so they shot him…
If you pose a threat to their power, they will seek to destroy you, even if it means taking your life.
When I see all these senators trying to lecture and "gotcha" Bobby Kennedy today all I can think is:
You all support off-label, untested, and irreversible hormonal "therapies" for children, mutilating our kids and enriching big pharma. You're full of shit and everyone knows it.
"Everything in our world is fake... Everything is a scripted movie."
Smart lady sums up our entire reality in just 90 seconds.
"Our food is fake, our news is fake, our politicians are fake, our history is fake, even our financial system is fake."
"I do not believe anything that I see anymore because, after the last five years... I realise that there are narratives being pushed, there are distractions being pushed, and we are watching a movie, so that the people in control can move the chess pieces."
I've lived through market corrections my whole investing life, and they're very uncomfortable when they occur. Although it's impossible to time the market. You've seen volatility as much as 7% in four hours on the indexes just in the last 10 days. 20% corrections happen all the time. When this issue gets resolved, markets will align back into their normal advance as they have for almost 200 years, generally providing eight to 10, 12% returns on average.
Yes, there's volatility and people are uncomfortable. People don't like watching sausage being made in these negotiations, but if we don't fix this problem now while we have the leverage, we're gonna be in a lot more trouble down the road.