The Hate Speech Murder

A Soviet concept works as intended

Helen: This piece is a cooperative effort, although the individual sections—which are labelled accordingly—were written separately. This is because one of us (Helen) met and knew Charlie Kirk, although not well. The other (Lorenzo) never met him, and watched his assassination and subsequent reactions from a polity with a much lower political “temperature” than the US, UK, or any EU country (Australia).

Charlie Kirk on the set for the YouTube show Surrounded, where one individual holding a particular set of views (here, Trump-inflected national populism) debates 25 others holding opposed views (here, left-progressivism and “woke”).

Lorenzo: Inferring something general from an individual killer is usually a mug’s game. Individuals do things, including kill, for all sorts of specific-to-them reasons. This is particularly so with political assassins.

Violence does have general patterns—its perpetrators are usually young men. Their victims are usually male. Patterns exist precisely because they aggregate cases.

The apprehended man accused of Charlie Kirk’s murder used the concept of hate speech to motivate and justify his murder. In a text to his roommate—a trans-identifying biological male with whom he was in a romantic relationship—he said, in explaining why he had committed the murder:

I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.

In explaining his act to his parents, the accused said:

there was too much evil and Charlie Kirk spread too much hate.

In other words, Charlie Kirk’s “hate” was so evil, it was a good act to kill him.

If we take the words of the accused killer both seriously and literally—which we must, a man is dead—the assassination of Charlie Kirk instances how the concept of hate speech becomes a vehicle for hatred. Even so, it is still the act of a single person, however appalling.

What is much more broadly significant has been the response from others. Thousands of people have applauded Charlie Kirk’s murder online. These posts have received hundreds of thousands of likes. It has been revealed for all to see that thousands upon thousands of left-progressives are not only fine with—but applaud—political assassination and do so on the basis of hate speech.

The concept of hate speech attaches extreme significance to words. It uses word-categories to strip people of the authority to speak and to categorise the speakers as hateful. In this case, words were given such significance as to justify killing.

There is no more complete way to stop someone speaking than to kill him. There is no more complete significance to put on words than using them to justify killing someone. There is no more complete way to categorise someone as hateful than to hold them worthy of death.

It is deeply pathological and morally perverse to claim that the “hate” in someone’s words is so serious that the person should be killed. As psychologist Rob Henderson points out, while anger is a “push-back” emotion, hate is a “you should not exist” emotion.

The concept of hate speech enables the ostentatiously compassionate to engage in rage and contempt. As writer Aldous Huxley observed:

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. … To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Aldous Huxley, Introduction (July 24, 1933), Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1934).

Alongside those who openly applauded the killing, are those who engage in denigrating the murdered on the basis of what he said, or has been alleged to have said. There are thousands of hours of Charlie Kirk speaking and debating online. These are rarely linked to or directly quoted. This is because so many of those denigrating Charlie Kirk, denigrating the murdered, are misrepresenting his views. Hence other folk are putting up online corrections—such as here—which show Charlie Kirk expressing his actual opinions.

Left-progressives misrepresenting the views of those who disagree with them is hardly new. On the contrary, it is a general and persistent pattern. But such misinterpretations in general—and those of Charlie Kirk in particular—regularly do so on the basis of hate speech. They do so on the basis that uttering wrong words, expressing wrong beliefs, makes you hateful.

Then there are the cases of quoting something Charlie Kirk did say, but stripping it of context, including any added qualifications or nuance. This is a more subtle form of misrepresentation, but it is still misrepresentation. Novelist Stephen King, to his credit, apologised for doing this. Once again, such cases invoke the concept of hate speech, that uttering certain words makes one hateful. Finally, there are cases where Kirk is quoted accurately but his words are decried as manifestations of “hate” without any attempt to prove the point.

All this is the concept of hate speech doing what it was revived in the postwar period to do: to destroy the culture of free speech. I say revived, because the first polity to criminalise hate speech was Weimar Germany. This effort in policing politics by policing discourse was, needless to say, a complete failure.

Charlie Kirk was against banning hate speech and—although he does not explicitly refer to the case—his argument against banning hate speech is a good summary of how hate speech laws went wrong in Weimar Germany.

What undermined Weimar Germany far more than the failure of its hate speech laws, however, was its grotesque failure to suppress politically motivated street violence. The US also failed similarly in 2020, with the Black Lives Matter riots. The history here is not good.

Science writer Michael Shermer points out that—not only was Charlie Kirk an effective debater—he was a notably amiable one, being unfailingly polite with people, even when they were screaming at him. Shermer further notes that Charlie Kirk’s Gen Z killer was from a generation repeatedly told that words are violence, that silence is violence. Meanwhile, our evolved psychology programs us—particularly status-seeking young males—to respond aggressively to threats of violence.

A psychologist commenting on the case remarks of the killer:

13:24 Tyler absolutely believed that he was correct. He was 100% confident that Charlie was wrong about the transgender ideology. What’s so frightening about this case is this level of confidence. There was no reasoning with Tyler.

This is, of course, in stark contrast with Charlie Kirk, who built his career on his willingness to debate. But the whole point of hate speech as a construct is to close down debate and to do so on the basis of an arrogant and destructive certainty—the certainty that error has no rights and can reliably identified by special persons. Offering refuge from the burden of fallibility is part of the appeal—and central to the destructiveness—of more virulent ideologies, particularly totalitarian ones.

Progressive politics—the politics of the imagined, golden future—is based on political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon’s principle that:

The golden age lies not in the past, but in the future.

(L’âge d’or n’est pas dans le passé, il est dans l’avenir.)

The imagined, golden future becomes the benchmark of cognitive judgement, regularly generating dismissal of past experience, of the painful lessons of the past, of embedded knowledge in institutions. The imagined, golden future becomes the benchmark of moral judgement. So the splendours in progressive heads become benchmarks of moral judgement. So progressives own morality.

This is a false claim, but it is a fundamental prop of left-progressive identity. As a foundational false claim about the world, it needs an ever-expanding bodyguard of lies to sustain it—it may require misrepresenting a murdered man’s opinions, for example.

This requirement for a bodyguard of lies is aggravated by the use of moralised claims about the world to motivate, differentiate and coordinate. Toxic untruths operate effectively to mark out the good people prepared to engage in the level of rationalisation required to uphold such claims: that a person with a penis is a woman, or that one shows “care and compassion” by the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of a gender non-conforming child.

What is also required to make this status game work on any scale is insulation from the consequences of being wrong about reality. The social consequence of defecting from the shared moralised status game have to matter more than the consequences of the claims not being true. Hence, this is very much the politics of the unaccountable classes, of those paid to turn up. It is the politics of bureaucracy, of content-free management, of non-profit organisations, of academe, of teachers, of activists, of reality-editing zealots.

It is precisely because the unaccountable classes are shielded from reality in various ways that social feedback from within their networks becomes dominant. The dynamics by which network goods tend to be monopoly goods—the larger the network, the greater the benefits of membership and the easier it is to add an extra person—encourage coalescing about shared moralised status games based on performative beliefs. Affirming X makes you a good person, while saying not-X makes you a bad one. If the politics of X is the politics of ostentatious compassion, then the politics of not-X must be the politics of “hate”.

A discussion between psychologist Jordan Peterson, law professor Bruce Pardy and comedian and commentator Konstantin Kisin explores the deep problems with criminalising hate speech. You don’t have access to people’s inner emotions, so you have to accept reports from those reacting to speech, which opens the door to manipulative liars. With criminalising hate speech, law no longer concerns itself with the intent (mens rea) of the transgressor and truth is not a defence, so you create illegal “hate facts”. These laws notoriously target jokes and humour—a classic indicator of tyranny—and break down the distinction between role and actor.

To take these points further, speech can declared hateful by those purporting to speak on behalf of some group, removing it even further from anything other than the policing of wrongthink. The abandonment of intent, and of truth—while policing wrongthink—is how Transactivist purity spirals convert would-be allies into bitter enemies by abusive enforcing of rigid taboos and doctrinal adherence tests.

Blocking disagreement is, in itself, deranging. It blocks correctives. It drives patterns of discourse in one direction, setting up purity spirals, where intent and truth do not matter, just more and more intense signalling and anathematising.

The lack of effective character tests—especially in social milieus insulated from reality-tests or other correcting feedbacks—produces malfunctioning status mechanisms. Status built around enforcing a fierce cognitive divide between good people and those designated as “full of hate” then creates echo-chambers and cognitive bubbles, which easily lead to what political scientist Russell Hardin identified as the crippled epistemology of extremism.

Hardin observes that:

Fanaticism is not a kind of belief; rather it is a characteristic of the way beliefs can be held, including obstinate ignorance of alternative views. Fanaticism requires exclusionary group practices for its maintenance because it requires the isolation that allows spurious beliefs to escape challenge.

The designation of speech as hate speech operates as such a mechanism for information exclusion, for generating “obstinate ignorance of alternative views”. This is even more so when beliefs are used as markers of moral status. Indeed, doing so requires that dissent be immoral, illegitimate; it requires a concept such as hate speech.

The entire history of Revolutionary Marxism—of Communism—demonstrates how toxic untruths can coordinate, differentiate and motivate. After its grotesque failure in Weimar Germany, hate speech was revived by the Soviet Union, by a Communist state.

What folk call “wokery”—technically, Critical Constructivism—is the popularisation of Critical Theory. Critical Theory is a derivative of Marxism, applying its Oppressor/Oppressed template to cultural issues and categories. Critical Constructivism explicitly grades all claims by their alleged consequences for various groups; so, according to the oppressed/oppressor, dominant/marginalised, moral caste system of intersectionality—where coloured is better than white; female is better than male; gay is better than straight; trans is better than cis; migrant is better than local.

The murder of Charlie Kirk was not the act of a trans person—the killer’s trans lover was horrified (he appears to have had a genuine oh shit moment) and cooperated with police—but of a trans ally. Trans ideology—coming from Queer Theory, one of the derivatives of Critical Theory—is based on a series of false claims, so cannot tolerate open debate. Transactivists attempt to close down debate as much as they can, including by punishing dissenters, treating dissent as “transphobia”, as hate speech.

A recent study quantified differences in the moral focus of conservatives (more particularist) and of liberals/progressives (more universalist). The study also found that:

liberals and conservatives differ not in the total amount of moral regard per se but rather they differ in their patterns of how they distribute their moral regard.

The arrogant belief among left-progressives that they own morality is a profound falsehood and, like all profound falsehoods about the world, needs a bodyguard of self-deceit, falsehoods and misrepresentations to sustain itself. A consequence of these shared moralised status games—based on the sense that they own morality, due to the splendours in their heads—leads to what writer Chris Bray calls the institutional left’s abandonment of persuasion. Persuasion is replaced by moral abuse. You then get what Canadian journalist Trish Wood nicely calls depersonalising rage at disagreement.

Charlie Kirk differentiated firmly between a liberal—with whom one can have disagreements—and a leftist, who attempts to close down all debate. In his sad and thoughtful recent pieces here and here commenting on Charlie Kirk’s murder—and reactions to it—commentator Ezra Klein exemplifies that distinction.

As part of left-progressive shared moralised status games, words—as manifestations of righteous or unrighteous belief—are used to rate people. Words are used to give and deny status. Words are used to give and deny authority.

Notice how often the response of left-progressives to the murder of Charlie Kirk has to been to attack, or otherwise express their contempt for, the murdered. Not only have they done this, they clearly think that doing so shows their moral seriousness, and is morally worthy.

Such behaviour flows directly from their shared conceit that they own morality. That the benchmark of morality is determined by whether one agrees with their politics or not.

This is a politics that selects for bad character and—as we can see in the public gloating—that rewards bad character. A recent study found that US liberals dehumanised conservatives more than conservatives did liberals. It also found that:

whereas liberals overestimated how much they were dehumanized, conservatives underestimated how much they were dehumanized.

The response to Charlie Kirk’s murder may be shifting that. One conservative student not knowing what to do with minority but nonetheless widespread support for violent reaction to speech evinces a very human reaction. YouTuber Rudyard Lynch points out that killing folk for what they believe destroys incentives for cooperation, especially when so much of the Left has revealed itself to be bloodthirsty.

Comedian Dave Smith notes the madness of killing the most prominent moderate voice in the MAGA/conservative/right side of US politics while expecting that any descent into violence will turn out well for the US left. Virginia legislator Nick Freitas made the point that Charlie Kirk offered civilisation—civil debate—and was met with savagery.

As various folk are pointing out, Left-progressives got to enforce their concept(s) of cancel culture for the last decade or two. Now conservatives are doing so, as people send screenshots of gloating-over-the-killing social media posts to employers, getting folk fired. Shaming and shunning people who openly embrace political murder is very different from shaming and shunning people for saying that men can’t be women or that immigration and refugee policy is complicated by the reality of average differences between groups.

Helen: Charlie Kirk was a deeply religious person, and while I don’t find religion rebarbative the way some atheists do, I do find the impulse strange. One of the reasons I called transactivism and its academic progenitor (“queer theory”) a new religious movement as far back as roughly 2017 was the absurdity of its core premise: that men can be women. I was reminded of Tertullian’s exclamation—I believe it because it is absurd!—in response to a pagan critic querying the plausibility of someone coming back from the dead after crucifixion.

As soon as people have to defend claims like that, all bets are off and the normal rules of debate no longer apply. Charlie wore his religiosity lightly by American standards, however. He didn’t fling it at people in social settings, and as the thousands of hours of video where he debates university students disclose, he tended to bring it up only in response to other people’s verbal jabs. At the function where I met him, he listened more than he spoke, and did not buttonhole people.

Yes, he was more doctrinaire among friends—there are plenty of clips showing this aspect, too—but that is the way of all religious belief. I went to school with a young woman who attended a pentecostal church that at one point became the subject of controversy. When reporting the story, various media outlets showed footage of the congregation engaging in the physical, enthusiastic worship for which pentecostals are known, and she was easily identifiable at the end of one pew. She was mortified. She told me in a moment of weakness she wanted to die of shame. The difference between this Australian woman and Charlie Kirk is cultural and social: Australian culture still values public emotional restraint—even among the religious—in a way the US does not. When Australian news outlets broadcast that footage, they inadvertently crossed the streams—something much easier to do these days than historically, by the way. Thanks, internet.

Lorenzo: The social media posts celebrating or endorsing Charlie Kirk’s murder have notably come from teachers—so, the products of education faculties—plus academics, and relatively recently graduated professionals. The toxic untruths that have been used to coordinate, motivate and differentiate left-progressive networks have disproportionately come out of academe. All this gives further support for former professor Peter Boghossian’s response to the accelerating failures and decay of contemporary academe: burn the whole lot down as they seek to kill debate, dialogue, conversation; they teach false things; they are indoctrination mills.

Helen: There has been a lot of back and forth since Charlie’s assassination on the extent to which the now politically ascendant US right is both engaging in cancel culture and undermining the First Amendment. In my view, evidence for the latter is much stronger than it is for the former. When people like the US Attorney-General start banging on about “hate speech” at a presser, there is a problem. This woman has a good law degree and extensive practitioner experience. She will have learnt the ruling in Brandenburg v Ohio in first year law (what Americans, in their lapidary way, call “1L”). She—and the others who followed her over the same cliff—need to take a good long look at themselves.

When it comes to support for political assassination, however, we really are dealing with something qualitatively and quantitatively different from left cancellations over “but men aren’t women tho”. I take Rob Henderson’s point that a belief in the justified assassination of political opponents is much closer to being an active member of the Ku Klux Klan or Muslim Brotherhood. You may believe—and yes, I concede this is also an arguable position—that my hypothetical Klansman or Islamist will still be perfectly capable of doing any number of different jobs. I suspect, however, you’ll still be adding the rider “as long as he keeps those beliefs to himself”.

Lorenzo’s point about teachers being prominent among the assassination-enjoyers is relevant here. The US is awash with guns and has a known school shooter problem. American teachers in American schools cannot, for this reason, continue to teach while articulating the view that political assassinations are justified. This is a basic child safeguarding issue, on par with keeping child sex offenders or paedophile rights activists out of schools.

Lorenzo: The ever more intense conformism of academe means that it provides ever-more degraded “education”. This is for many reasons, but a large one is the point philosopher John Stuart Mill made:

He who only knows his own side of the case, hardly knows that.

So-called “education” which embraces crippled epistemology is destructive, is intellectually and socially corrosive, and should not receive taxpayer funding.

The concept of hate speech is wielded to block dialogue, to block knowing. Comedian and commentator

Konstantin Kisin

expresses very well the madness the concept of hate speech has visited on our societies.

This is one of the biggest problems with the position that we now find ourselves in, which is that anyone who in any way challenges the radical progressive leftist narrative in any way is automatically right-wing. A lot of these narratives, whether it’s intersectionality or these structures of oppression or all this stuff, they don’t actually have any logical or reasonable underpinning. And so the only way you can defend them, the only way you can defend them, is by shutting down people who don’t agree with you. Because if you have a reasonable, rational argument, their views crumble like a house of cards because they’re not built on anything. They’re built on fallacious logic and just assertions without any basis in fact. So that’s why I think now the left, the radical left—not all of the left, but the radical left—have come to this place where they have to shut down and label and smear anyone who doesn’t agree with them because their ideas are not based on anything. It boggles my mind that we are now in a position, that freedom of speech—which is a fundamental cornerstone of Western civilization—has become a conservative value. That is an absolutely insane position to me as someone who came from a society where freedom of speech did not exist.

Celebrating violence

Amidst the celebration of political murder from left-progressives, there has been touting of claims—such as in this 2022 paper—that there is more right-wing than left-wing violence in the US. This is a startling claim.

It is surprising in terms of world history. Communism—Revolutionary Marxism—is by far the most murderous political ideology in human history. It achieved this record of mass murder in only a half century post the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917.

It is surprising in terms of observable violence within the US. There have been two politically significant live-to-video political killings within the US in the last 5 years. One was the May 2020 death of petty criminal George Floyd at the hands of police. There followed a massive wave of rioting and an even bigger surge in homicides than there had been after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014.

The other live-to-video politically significant killing was the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in front of his wife and children in September 2025. The response among his supporters was a wave of candlelight vigils and among his opponents thousands of social media posts celebrating his death, posts which received hundreds of thousands of “likes”. It is simply observable that there has been far more left-violence than right-violence in the US during and since the BLM riots.

It is notable that the same elite universities who made such a fuss over the death of petty criminal George Floyd have not done anything remotely similar over the murder of Charlie Kirk on a campus—and an individual active on campuses across the country. In the moral caste system of “wokery”, a petty criminal of colour is clearly more to be grieved than a heterosexual cis-male with low melanin count who was openly conservative.

Remember, the more you have to rationalise, the better the test of loyalty to shared moralised status games—hence the continuing racism in US university admissions and hiring policies. Yes, this is all blatantly illegal—some of it was illegal even before SFFA v Harvard—but if you own morality, you do not have to concern yourself with such things. One can see the same socially corrosive arrogance in widespread refusals to abide by the unanimous ruling of the UK Supreme Court in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers.

The claim that there is more right-wing than left-wing violence is also surprising because we now know that US “liberals” (i.e. progressives) tend to dehumanise conservatives notably more than vice versa. Moreover, a recent poll from YouGov—a reputable outfit not given to overestimating extremism—found that US “very liberal” respondents (i.e. progressives) are far more likely to support political violence than are US conservatives, especially when young.

There are also the memes about killing billionaires, the lauding of the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, burning parked Teslas and even Tesla dealerships. Once again, support for political violence among US citizens skews strongly left:

The strongest predictors are far-left political identity and Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA)—suggesting this justification of violence is underpinned by politics and ideology. Time spent on BlueSky also emerged as a significant predictor.

So, the “most political violence in the US is right-wing” is surprising for lots of reasons.

Helen: For my sins, I spent some time on the alt-tech platform Gab, where the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting was incubated. I am also familiar with—partly through the research necessary to write my first novel and partly through significant time spent in the Middle East—what radicalisation looks like. Bluesky is starting to look like Gab did before that shooting, and I think the people who spend a lot of time on there—and who aren’t nuts—need to disengage from it or at least exercise greater caution.

Lorenzo: It is startling because it is not true. First, the 2022 paper engages in the bullshit social “science” of classing authoritarianism as a “right wing” phenomenon, which is obvious bullshit, something one can spot by dint of observing world history. Recent scholarship has identified left-wing authoritarianism—moral absolutism, punitive attitudes toward ideological opponents, and a willingness to use coercion for progressive aims—which:

powerfully predicts behavioral aggression and is strongly correlated with participation in political violence.

Second, the databases that are cited in claims about right-wing violence are deeply flawed. Prosecutions for political violence are seriously skewed by the willingness of many progressive DAs to overlook, dismiss or downgrade prosecution for the BLM riots. The ADL database for political killings is politically-skewed rubbish (see also). Black nationalist killings, for example, are coded as “anti-government” so “right-wing”. Prison killings by white-nationalist crime gangs are also coded as “right-wing”.

The PRIUS (Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States) database drawn on in the 2022 study also relies on who is or is not prosecuted and how events are reported in mainstream media. If one consults the PRIUS codebook, one finds that the criteria for inclusion is (emphases in original):

In order to be eligible for inclusion, each individual must meet one of the following five criteria:

1. the individual was arrested;

2. the individual was indicted of a crime;

3. the individual was killed as a result of his or her ideological activities;

4. the individual is/was a member of a designated terrorist organization; or

5. the individual was associated with an extremist organization whose leader(s) or founder(s) has/have been indicted of an ideologically motivated violent offense.

In addition, each individual MUST:

1. have been radicalized in the United States,

2. have espoused or currently espouse ideological motives, and

3. show evidence that his or her behaviors are/were linked to the ideological motives he or she espoused/espouses.

On the last criteria, the codebook elaborates:

Note: this includes crimes committed in furtherance of an ideological goal, such as an attack, trespassing as part of a protest and logistical support due to ideological affinity with the group. It does not include crimes that are connected to a DTO [Designated Terrorist Organization] or VEGA [Violent Extremist Group Association] but that the individual committed for non-ideological reasons; for example, an arms dealer who sells weapons to an extremist group but also sells arms to criminal gangs and other non-ideological actors would not be counted for this.

In other words, any violent act—including any homicide—by a member of, say, an Aryan Brotherhood crime gang, in logistical or other support of the gang, becomes “right wing violence”. If you have crime/prison gangs that are coded “right wing”—because they use “white” race as a membership criteria—but no crime/prison gangs are coded as “left wing”, then of course it will skew the figures.

One can also query the following statement in the codebook:

the far left differs from the far right in that its identity is grounded in economic grievances and not race-based issues

The claim that the contemporary far left does not engage in race-based activism (or violence) in an age of Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter riots is, well, contestable.

The 2022 study in particular, and various data being cited elsewhere, are a mixture of activist number-massaging and the sort of skewed “scholarship” that academe has produced in ever-greater quantity, leading to serious falls in the public standing of higher education in the US.

A 2021 study of specifically politically motivated homicides from 1990 to 2020 finds a higher rate of extreme-right than extreme-left homicides, though it notes that far-left homicides have been increasing. Homicides are a subset of violence and it is unclear from the paper how much its data suffers from the “Aryan Brotherhood” prison/crime gang problem. If “extreme right” homicide spurts in the paper coincide with wider surges in killings over drug “turfs”, that would indicate it is an issue.

The paper uses the Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), which is partial in its coverage (as the 2021 paper acknowledges and so supplements with other sources):

The ECDB collects information on violent incidents & financial schemes committed by the extreme far-right, Al Qaeda and similar groups supporters, and animal and environmental rights extremists in the U.S.

The ECDB excludes the far-left, a curious omission from something calling itself the Extremist Crime Database. It is not encouraging, regarding the “Aryan Brotherhood” prison/crime gang problem, that its website states:

the data allows for the comparison of criminal and extremist groups that do not employ “terrorist” methods with those that do. In addition, the ECDB is uniquely positioned to study the “criminal careers” of the suspects it codes. Once a suspect is included any prior or subsequent criminal incident (s)he committed are also noted in the study. The data will also be used to examine important theoretical questions such as whether ideologically motivated offenders also commit non-ideological routine crimes.

More generally, the largest takeaway is that political killings are rare in the US. The paper identifies 601 victims of politically motivated homicides from 1990-2020, of which 168 are from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The US is a country of 340m people that suffers around 20,000 homicides a year. Experiencing six-to-twelve politically motivated homicides a year—again, excluding the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing—is a very low rate of political killing.

If you sincerely believed the Right were so much more violent than the Left, increasing violence in politics would seem to be a particularly otiose form of political fantasy.

So, in that trends in violence are conflated with homicide patterns—and there is a problem with selective data and skewed figures—left-progressives are gaslighting us about political violence in the US just as the mainstream media systematically gaslit their readers and audience about the scale of police killings of African-Americans, so much so that American “liberals” have profoundly divergent from reality views on the issue.

Psychologist Dr Todd Grande concludes his comments on Charlie Kirk’s assassination with:

14:53 There will always be someone who justifies committing violence based on political beliefs. I think one of the keys to reducing political violence is the widespread and universal rebuke of this behavior. That is the real problem with this case, the real danger. Many people have celebrated Charlie Kirk’s demise and perhaps inadvertently encouraged the next killer, whoever that might be. If violence against political figures becomes normalized, those who callously celebrate death will suffer along with everyone else.

All those celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder—and endorsing such celebration—are showing themselves to be enemies of civil society, to be enemies of debate, and to be enemies of democracy, famously defined by British politician and PM Clement Attlee as “government by discussion”. Actively endorsing political murder is absolutely something people should be shunned for, should be shamed over.

In celebrating political murder they are also fulfilling what the Soviets intended when they revived the concept of hate speech postwar. It was meant to undermine freedom of speech and discourse. The killing of Charlie Kirk is explicitly a hating-speech-murder for it was the killing—not of an official or politician—but of a regular citizen while he was engaging in public debate.

A person invokes the concept of hateful words, of hate speech, to justify killing someone who built his career on a willingness to debate. Thousands of people have openly endorsed this. Hundreds of thousands of people have ticked such endorsements. This exposes the concept of hate speech for the social cancer it is and was intended, from its postwar revival, to be.

References

Celinet Duran, ‘Far-Left versus Far-Right Fatal Violence: An Empirical Assessment of the Prevalence of Ideologically Motivated Homicides in the United States,’ Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society 2021, 22 (2): 33–49. https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/26973-far-left-versus-far-right-fatal-violence-an-empirical-assessment-of-the-prevalence-of-ideologically-motivated-homicides-in-the-united-states

Thomas H. Costello, Shauna Bowes, Sean T. Stevens, Irvin Waldman, Arber Tasimi, Scott O. Lilienfeld, ‘Clarifying the structure and nature of left-wing authoritarianism,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2022 Jan;122(1):135-170. doi: 10.1037/pspp0000341. Epub 2021 Aug 12. PMID: 34383522. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341306723_Clarifying_the_Structure_and_Nature_of_Left-Wing_Authoritarianism

Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2.

https://raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/issue-index/all-volumes-issues/volume-06/volume-06-number-2

Roland G. Fryer, Jr., ‘An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,’ July 2017. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_analysis_tables_figures.pdf

Russell Hardin, ‘The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism,’ in Breton A, Galeotti G, Salmon P, Wintrobe R, (eds.) Political Extremism and Rationality, Cambridge University Press; 2002:3-22. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/political-extremism-and-rationality/crippled-epistemology-of-extremism/ECB163C524075DA730B73AFC7C5753F7

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