A 'Je Suis Charlie' Apocalypse
What We Have Seen -- And What We Must Not Look Away From
You’ll remember the phrase “Je Suis Charlie” (I Am Charlie), from the 2015 Islamist massacre of the staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. People marched through the streets of Paris with signs saying that. It defeated Islamists, who were never heard from again. (If only!)
The phrase came to mind yesterday when reading this reflection:
That, and this from Michael Brendan Dougherty, is why the Charlie Kirk assassination gets to me like nothing else, even though I wasn’t a particular follower of his (on account of being OLD, bro, and not very engaged in GOP politics):
I realized that I am from a country, and will return one day to a country, where more than a few people would just as soon have me killed for believing the same things that Charlie Kirk did, and talking about them in public.
We are not the same.
Samuel James is a conservative Christian who has been critical of his fellow Christians who have, in his view, been too quick to tie Christianity to the Trump movement. But the murder of Charlie Kirk changed him somewhat. Because Kirk was a private citizen, not an elected official, and because Kirk tried to change minds through engaging his critics in a democratic — dare I say liberal democratic — way, James took his death personally. Excerpt from his great short reflection:
I did not always like what I heard Charlie Kirk say. I’ve been consistently critical of Donald Trump and the nationalist conservative movement behind him. But those disagreements are hard to hold in view given where things have gotten. I told a family member today that Kirk’s death feels dark to me in a way that few things have. The injustice, the carnage, the naked terrorism against free speech—all of these things leave me with a cold dread for the state of our country in general, and the state of my own family and community in particular. In this moment, I see myself in Charlie Kirk, not because our views were identical, but because I too sense the spiritual and social evil that Kirk gave his life trying to identify. And reader, I have to confess, I don’t think this kind of evil exists equally on both sides.
The failures of American liberalism have gone far beyond the theoretical. Progressivism’s contradictions permeate the country’s education, media, and mental health infrastructure so completely as to be unavoidable. When Kirk was shot, he was reportedly talking about rates of gun violence among transgendered Americans. This seems like a spicy topic, only because the psychological disorder of gender dysphoria has, like so many mental health problems, become an unassailable identity instead of a treatable ailment. The complete and utter failure of the American left to define man and woman has not just created moral chaos. It has abandoned mentally sick Americans, many of them teens, to the caverns of their illness.
Did you see this from the Triggernometry podcaster Konstantin Kisin?
No, we are not the same. And yes, that is worth thinking about.
Of course not all liberals and progressives are like this. It has been heartening to see some online denouncing the murder of Kirk and those who celebrate it. But how can you tell the difference between the decent ones and all the others? Does it take a man being shot to death practicing free speech and open dialogue to find out?
That’s not the kind of country I want to live in. Here in Hungary, which liberals and the media (but I repeat myself) tell us is a fascist hellhole, you can publicly denounce the Orban government, or anything else, from dawn till dusk on every streetcorner, and nothing will happen to you, and nobody will care. But that’s not America. That’s not Britain. And that’s not most of western Europe.
Something has to change, and change hard. As of this writing, law enforcement says it has found the rifle and ammo Kirk’s assassin used and discarded. It reportedly had pro-trans and Antifa graffiti on it, though this needs to be confirmed. If true, I expect the Trump administration to come down very, very hard on these people. I hope so, anyway. Enough is enough. This moment cannot be lost. We need to put an end to Antifa, and an end to the trans cult, without mercy or apology. I received a frantic message yesterday from a friend in the US, a mom who wants to put her young child in a Christian school, but is terrified that that might make her a target for gun-toting trannies. This is not an imaginary threat. This same child lost classmates when a tranny shot up Covenant School in Nashville.
The Left — particularly the sacred transgender faction — has made a mother fear that sending her little girl to a Christian school might get the child shot dead.
We are not like them.
Last night in Budapest, I participated in a panel with the UK scholar David Betz, the academic expert on civil wars. I’ve been promoting his work all year, since I first heard it (see here for a podcast interview in which he lays out his theory about why the West is ripe for it). The event was not recorded, I’m sorry to say, but if you watch that interview, or read my past writing here about Betz, you know what he said. But there was more.
“Civil war is coming,” he said, beginning his talk. And later: “Sorry, but I don’t think there is a peaceful solution at this time.”
A “peaceful solution,” he explained, would mean a political way of resolving these conflicts. He said that the Left in power — here he was speaking about the UK and Europe, I think — has closed off all avenues through cancellation of dissidents and other means. “We are entering into a new era of dirty wars, of Years Of Lead.”
(Years of Lead is what Italians call the violent period of the late 1970s and 1980s marked by left-wing assassinations and kidnappings in that country.)
Betz compared what’s coming to the Thirty Years War, the unspeakably violent period of religious war between European Catholics and Protestants, in which millions died. Yes, he said, millions of Europeans are going to die, and millions more will be forcibly displaced, including mass forced deportation. It’s going to destroy economies. And it is coming. Bear in mind that Betz is the director of the War Studies department at Kings College London, and an academic expert in how civil wars start. He has said that all the criteria that academic research identifies as necessary for them to begin have been met. All we await is the spark.
At one point, he mentioned that people who in some sense look forward to this, as a settling of accounts, have no idea how savage civil wars are, and how fast they can kick off. He said that just before the civil wars that came with the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, an overwhelming majority of Yugoslavs polled said that they got along well with their fellow citizens who were not of their ethnicity or religion. It all changed in a flash.
Last night after I got home, I ran across this tweet from a Croat, making that same point. Excerpt:
But what set off the Homeland War—the conflict between the new Croatian state and Yugoslavia—was a single bus attack. A group of Serb paramilitaries opened fire on Croatian police officers near Pakrac, killing several and wounding others. That moment lit the fuse. From there, everything erupted. The war turned brutal very quickly, with civilians swept into atrocities. Imagine being raped in your own bedroom, beheaded in front of your family in the garden. Grenades thrown through your window, your bones later collected and dropped into a village well.
And when I see a young woman today mocking the death of someone she disagrees with, or speaking with ambivalence about an assassination, I can’t help but think she has no idea how fast things can change. She doesn’t know that violence, once unleashed, doesn’t stay contained. I feel sorry for her, and for people like her, because they don’t realize what may be coming.
The truth is, it’s almost impossible to imagine. The shift happens too fast, the violence too unforgiving and traumatizing. The pain lasts generations. I see it even in my own family. My grandparents still pinch pennies, mistrust everyone, swear that people are out to rob them. That fear has been passed down, and it lingers.
If, God forbid, it comes to America, it will not be the followers of Charlie Kirk that start it. If it were, we would have seen them burning down cities, like the Left did post-Floyd. It will come because of the violent Left, and right-wing extremists, as well as young men of the Right who have become violently radicalized, because of things like the Kirk murder. (They hate Jews too; anti-Semitism has become normalized on the radical Right as well as the radical Left.) These people are out there — and they’re ready to fight. I know conservative fathers who are this very day trying to de-radicalize their sons, who are ready to take up arms. God help them. God help us.
I told the audience last night that one particular American twist on a potential civil war will be the race angle. In the UK publication Daily Sceptic, an anonymous writer called Eugyppius touches on this. He’s talking about the murder of Iryna Zarutska, and the pathological efforts by the legacy media to ignore it. Excerpt:
What we are seeing here is an ideological and also a psychological reaction to a very dark truth at the heart of American society. This truth is that the American black population commits violent crimes at rates that are so high, many Ukrainian refugees would be safer staying home than fleeing to certain US cities.
Consider this: aside from Mariupol, the war in Ukraine has directly caused around 11 civilian deaths per 100,000 people every year since the Russian invasion in 2022. That is less than the intentional homicide rate of the city where Zarutska was murdered in August.
… And Charlotte is far from the most dangerous place our young Ukrainian could have fled to. Detroit (32 per 100,000), Baltimore (35 per 100,000), San Juan (37 per 100,000), Memphis (48 per 100,000) and New Orleans (54 per 100,000) are all vastly worse. To put it as bluntly as possible – and with as little racial sensitivity as I dare – the US black population is largely responsible for imposing on many American cities a civilian homicide rate equivalent to or far exceeding that seen in a modern country fighting a war on its own territory.
This fact has made the progressive American political establishment crazy, and it has developed an entire ideological system to avoid confronting this terrible, ruthless reality.
I have a sense that that is coming to an end. If not now, then it will. People will only deny reality for so long. What will they do about it? God only knows. It frightens me. But if the US falls into a dirty war, this will factor into it. It gives me no pleasure to point this out. I wish it weren’t true. Racism of all kinds is evil. But we need to look at the situation with cold, realistic eyes. We can’t wish it away. I know; I’ve tried.
As Wes Yang pointed out this week:
He was talking specifically about the entire BLM narrative, but he could easily have been talking about the trans narrative (his X account mostly focuses on this). David Betz said in his talk last night that the ruling class has “tricked, sedated, or bullied” entire populations into believing the multiculturalism narrative — of which (say I) BLM and trans were a part.
They lied to us. Live not by lies!
Charlie Kirk’s murder is a Rubicon. We now know — the evidence has been widespread on left-wing social media this week — that the USA is home to lots of people — including teachers, nurses, soldiers, and others in positions of responsibility —who are prepared to murder, or to support the murder, of people like us for the crime of believing in what Drew Pavlou quaintly termed “old-fashioned values.”
We can’t live like this. We must not live like this. Whatever it takes to cast this demon out from the body politic, we must do. Now.
I’ll leave this topic with a hopeful thought from Bethel McGrew, whose Substack essay focuses in part on the widespread celebration on the Left of Kirk’s murder, and the fact that all of us conservatives and Christians who work in the public sphere doing, in our own way, what Charlie Kirk did, now face. She concludes:
“My son is 18,” a mother reflects. “He loved listening to Charlie Kirk. He was heartbroken to hear of Charlie’s death. But there was one thing I have to share that I know Charlie would love.” And then she tells about one of her son’s closest friends, a leftist who’s drunk various flavors of leftist koolaid. Her son has tried reasoned argument after reasoned argument, but nothing has seemed to work. Until yesterday, when his friend finally saw. He finally understood. And “they had the best conversation they’ve ever had.”
When her son told her this, she cried all over again. Because “even in death, Charlie is helping young people figure things out.”
Spiritual Warfare Is Real
Earlier this week, the radical feminist website Jezebel posted an article talking about how they hired witches to curse Charlie Kirk. Excerpts:
…
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Two days later, an assassin’s bullet tore through Charlie Kirk’s carotid artery. He leaves behind a widow and two fatherless children, all three of whom saw their husband and father shot to death, and who have to live with that memory for the rest of their lives.
Go to church. Or go back to church. Spiritual evil is real. We are at war. There is only one defense. Read Chapter Five of Living In Wonder if you doubt me.
I'd like to remind you that to truly defuse the Antifa-Leftist engine, you need to disable what feeds it. The recruitment ground for this is cultural and economic misery. So you tell me, how would you solve these problems:
1.) Cultural misery - these people are massively nihilistic and trust nobody. They are likely not to listen to anybody telling them to go to church. They are acclaimedly atheist, although in practice they believe in a secular religion - a kind of milquetoast LGBT cultural progressivism that they think now must (due to Trump) be facilitated via extralegal means. Finally, fueling all of this is the fact that the males among them are all addicted to porn and are in fact being funnelled via porn into the queer/trans pipeline (that's the origin story of the LGBT movement boom).
2.) Economic misery - like many other Americans, these people are members of the first generation that can expect their future to be worse than that of their parents. Very few (left or right) can buy a house. Unemployment is high (if you include NEETs/failsons, who are ignored by normal statistics since they no longer even *seek* employment) and the forms of employment that do exist often miserable or unstable. For both left and right, there is the general yoke of debt, including college debt.
I know that today is a time when many are sorting their emotions, but if you want to do something about the problem (and don't want civil war), the above two problems need to be solved. What are your solutions?
The photos of the assassin that were posted are more than enough to identify him to those who know him. If they don't come forward, they are protecting him and are implicated in the assassination. The assassin has confidence that his associates approve of the murder and will help him escape. If he does escape, that will tell others they can murder and not have to suffer any consequences.