it's time to talk about charlie

the passing of a good man and the turning point to come

i did not always agree with charlie kirk. often i did, sometimes i did not. but i respected him. i deeply, seriously respected him. i respected charlie because he was a real, genuine human, true to himself and courageous in his convictions. and we need more like him.

and you do not have to agree with him to know that this is true.

perhaps the greatest test is “can you know that this is true without agreeing with him?”

pass that one and congratulations, you’re a real human, a person who has ideas rather than a husk that has been consumed by them.

charlie was not an icon by accident. charlie was an icon because he was charlie. you cannot fake what he was.

i suspect that a great deal of what made him such a rage magnet for the left is that he was something they not only had no answer for but something they lacked even a fundamental framework to conceive of: a genuine, grounded, honest man secure in himself and his beliefs, a man who ran on a powerful internal compass and sense of self and ethics.

those with externalized identities rooted in allegiance to doctrine and dogma quite literally have no idea how to model a person with internal identity. they assume that others, as they do, lack internal structure and sense of self. it must be like someone with no internal monologue trying to imagine what it’s like to have one. they saw charlie and could not conceive of “real.” they presumed this was just another theater kid act, a selected ideology as fragile and frail, as bigoted and insular as their own.

it was not.

they made up their views of this man’s views because he was incomprehensible to them. how can he disagree with us and dispute us but still be a creature of love?

how can he break bread with black, white, yellow, brown, gay, straight, religious, atheist and be willing to befriend them all?

how can he touch lives, change lives like this?

of course they hated him.

“i will always stand against people who wish to establish their own personal values as a reason to kick others out of our movement.”

imagine how that must play to insincere people whose power is underpinned by cancel culture, struggle session, and disinclusion yet who style themselves “tolerant.”

they hated him because he was a creature of love, because he walked a path most can only mouth as platitude.

deep, abiding envy for that which one can never be will do that.

you know how charlie had such effect? he did it by refusing to preach to the choir, eschewing safe spaces and traveling endlessly to the lion’s den to speak to the panthera leo.

he traveled the country as a one man happening. he sat and offered you the mic. you got to start. “what shall we talk about?” state your case. ask your question.

that this is so extraordinarily rare does not speak well of us. this should be the gold standard. hell, this should be the minimum acceptable standard, the foundational stone of open and honest discourse.

and to oppose it is a near perfect acid test for “you cannot be trusted.”

you want to disagree? great.

but you do not get to shut down the discussion.

lines of students would wait to hurl accusation and invective at him. he’d respond (mostly) calmly, logically, and with genuine sentiment, reason, humor, and if perhaps sometimes sophistry, at least also a willingness to be called out on such logical sleights of hand.

you did not have to agree with him to see that he spoke from the heart and from reason, that he was a good man and genuine. watching him laugh about his own depiction in southpark and call it “a win” and advocate “having thick skin” and learning to cock a snook at yourself spoke volumes and stands in profound contrast to the shaved cat touchiness of so many cancel culture ideologues who would have been burning cities over far less.

this seemed to be a fact that much of self-anointed “team tolerance” simply could not abide.

i remember (but cannot seem to find) an episode of charlie on campus where he was debating a young woman and had calmly and logically cornered her and moved her off her spot.

her response was rage, pure emotive-outburst rage and malice.

it culminated in something along the lines of “i hope you die.”

i wish that i could say that such ideation is rare, but seemingly it is not.

from 2016 to 2020 “violence as the path to our political goals” became even less popular on the right, but look what has happened on the left, especially the far left.

this is what “losing the argument” does to ideologies.

very liberal went from 13.1% justifying violence to 33.5%. liberal went from 11.9% to 17.2.

this is the deep danger of “people who are their ideas” and who hold them as identity. they experience disagreement as personal attack, even erasure.

and many lack the emotional structure to manage such ideas.

and this rapidly grows out of control.

you always have to be a little careful of these polls, but what looked like something between 17-33% being OK with violence in 2020 now looks to be 48-55% being OK with actual murder of those whose politics they do not like.

and it certainly foots with what we are seeing.

this is not cultural difference, this is culture war.

and this was just this april.

charlie’s take from this april resounds with eerie and awful prescience, a prophecy almost too exacting to believe.

but let me put it this way:

when a movement's core tenet is that "the speech of people who disagree with me is violence" is it really any surprise that they start to view their own violence as speech?

because once you frame it that way, the rest rapidly makes sense. suddenly you can see this and realize that a faction that has for decades been allowed to tantrum and wail, threaten and cancel has lost all sense of decorum, civilization, reason, or decency.

“the meme” has been updated.

this is not isolated, it’s widespread and media amplified.

people are drunk on it and truly terrible things are emerging from the echo chamber which has for so long relied only upon itself for its ideas of what the other side believes until their entire conception of anyone who disagrees with them has been boiled down to a cartoon level morality play in which anyone who is not us is literally worse than hitler.

20 years of endless and ubiquitous political hectoring and accusations of “fascist” and adolphean ascription to all opposition has left much of this movement utterly brainwashed, an instant-on cadre of useful and violent idiocy raging its way through a life it has mistaken for virtuous.

the best analogy i can come up with is mass hypnosis. this is like the part of a stage show where the mesmerist has asked the audience to close their eyes and relax etc and then 2 minutes in sees who is already under and brings them up on stage. it’s how you find the easy ones to affect. and oh how they have been affected. they quite literally think they are all trying to kill hitler. their conception of reality and consequence has been effaced.

that’s where this comes from:

this is what assassination culture looks like.

the sheer number of people who cheered this death has been appaling. the fact that they thought that this was acceptable or even laudable in public was even more so.

and everyone saw it.

this was the day the last of the middle had the scales fall from their eyes. i cannot tell you how many people i got calls from, people who are not generally political, the men and women who just wanted to be left alone. “how can this be real?” “how could they take a guy like that, a literal champion of “let’s talk it out.” “is this really what my party has become?”

“how are we supposed to live next to this?”

these were not my right leaning friends, these were my friends from center left and further left.

in one vast watershed, suddenly this was the picture.

people speak often of "suicidal empathy" but perhaps a better framing for much of this is "empathy predator."

such practice takes advantage of the good will of others by abusing it.

the entire essence of this ideology is inversion.

it's the domination of the empathetic by the unempathetic, the abuse of tolerance by the intolerant.

the "tolerant left" is a tribe of impositional bigotry masquerading as pluralism and projecting its own failings onto its victims. they do not believe in ethics in any genuine sense. they beleive in power and "always accuse the other side of that which you are guilty" is the way to get there.

but facts are facts. one side is censoring the other, calling its speech "hate crimes" and coalescing around violence and police state suppression of dissent.

for that side to claim "tolerance" or "coexistence" is such an obvious lie that it breaks even the "big lie" propaganda praxis and makes matters plain.

it's the bridge too far.

these regimes work because of the empathy and tolerance of those they victimize.

and such empathy can be exhausted.

cancel culture falls apart rapidly once the dam gets a crack. speech spreads, the suppressed realize that they were the majority all along.

the minority who mistook itself for being both moral and a majority then goes mad. it's the time of existential stress for them as their cognitive dissonance breaks and their illusions cannot be sustained.

and they still have no idea what just happened, the rubicon that was crossed.

you want to see my candidate for “absolute, ne-plus-ultra, worst take on the whole charlie killing?”

it’s this.

you have no idea what you just radicalized.

this is going to age like custer saying “i don’t think there are that many indians over the hill.”

cancel culture is now rounding upon the vicious left. they assumed that they would always hold the handle of this sword, but now they get the blade. i have seen hundreds of cases online of “mouthy violence monger loses job.”

teachers thought they could express glee about this to their classes.

they got fired.

political staffers danced on charlie’s undug grave.

they got fired.

people lost jobs in public and private sector over their nastyposting.

lists were made, people exposed.

“but you cannot cancel us! you oppose cancel culture!” said these unbound ideologues seeking protection from the contract they would not honor.

LOL. said the right. LMAO. actions have consequences and you are outlaws. no one cares about what you think you have a right to anymore.

you people made death threats to everyone who opposed you, doxxed, deplatformed, got people fired from jobs over politics, vaccine choices, and daring to call a mentally ill dude in a dress “he/him.”

no one cares what you want. we’re done. you broke the social contract and your victim card is overdrawn.

you guys made overt threats to internet cats because they told you masks did not work to stop covid.

welcome to the world you made.

welcome to punch WITH punchbacks.

you’ll get used to it.

we did.

we have long had an acute mental health crisis among many of the "progressive" vanguards.

losing power will break people.

the cognitive dissonance of needing to believe that they are the majority when they clearly are just a tiny faction will overwhelm their minds.

it's started.

you can see how haywire people are going. they have no idea how far out on the lunacy and hallucinatory reality curves they are. they have f*cked around for decades and not only never had to find out, they have been given ever more power for it, and as such their entirely world view has become a most dangerous fiction.

like the near entirety of their world view, 90% of what these people thought they knew about charlie was made up theater kid drama learned from those who hated him and their dishonest diatribes and straw men.

the simple question of “so when did he actually say this thing that you claim he said?” has been a devastating divide by zero error for the more rational and honest of the left. so many people got caught out. some even admitted this and apologized and seemed to mean it. about others, i have my doubts.

some of this just looks like a choice to be angry and ignorant.

stephen king got clowned like his name was pennywise.

he expressed contrition and highlighted the danger of “getting your facts about the other side only from your own side.”

but in the end, he keeps taking digs. i have my own views about his sincerity vs his fear of backlash. i shall leave you to generate your own.

but the generation of such views will be the key undertaking of the days and weeks to come.

now comes a time for final civilizational selections. many even most within america are redeemable, are and always were good people they just got dragged into the garbage-in garbage-out hall of propagandistic mirrors of believing 1000 things that were not so and mistaking echo chamber repetition for reality.

this has always been the vast majority and its tacit support for these utter and abject loons and misanthropes has allowed such lunatic misanthropy to persist.

this support is gone.

the denial is over.

this is the last chance to get off this ship and if you cannot figure it out now, you probably never will.

this is the final sorting hat and it’s a time when i think we all need to be asking about how to make the big tent of decent, high trust, golden rule people and once more establish and expand the social contract under which we want live.

like the times covidian, it’s the time to pick a side and to learn who your friends are.

it’s a time of consciousness once more expanding and of datapoints that cannot be ignored.

and some rocky times are coming.

make no mistake.

let me tell you how this plays out:

over time, cancel culture leads to a rarification of edge-lord extremism. the ideological purity tests within a movement get harder and harder to pass. this is inherently radicalizing and zealots and crazy people always have more energy and more commitment than moderates. the toxic cream curdles to the top.

this is how you turn student groups into maoist red guards, drunk on power, believeing absudity, and ready to commit atrocity.

and it's also how you turn "the men who just wanted to be left alone" into murderous pogroms of populist fire that claims to be cleansing but always goes too far.

everyone needs to police this because the seduction of edge-lord reaction, especially when amplified by the always on anger engines of the social media algorithms that force feed you ever more of whatever is pissing you off and making you click while messing up your internal sense of the prevalence of your views and their intensity until 5 different minorities all think they are some sort of moral majority being called to righteous jihad.

i get it. i feel it too.

i too sit and say “if they would kill charlie, the one who handed them a mic and asked them to say their piece then what will they do to me?”

and that risk is real.

that question is real.

and perhaps we need to ask it.

but to ask it from an echo chamber is NOT the way to get a good answer.

we must ask it as charlie would have: from the arena, from the agora, from within the scrum of ideas.

we must hear the other side and hear their own words even if only to know what to disagree with and what to oppose but mostly because this is how we learn and grow to know our own ideas and our own world.

we must identify the real people with ideas other than ours with whom dialogue and peaceful coexistance is possible and reasonable and to separate this wheat from the rancid chaff of the assassination nation of sputtering external identity drones with whom no contract is possible.

i, for one, have been surprised (and pleased) at the way my tent and circle have expanded over the last 5 years. i have become friends with many people i presumed to be too different from me but with whom i have found intense and abiding commonality. we got thrown together from unexpected angles and walked on together in unity but never lockstep. we agree, we dispute, and our friendships and trust deepen.

disagreement is not division, it is strength.

the confidence that those of good character and good heart can be people first and have ideas second and find different paths and even destinations while still all being moral and living in good faith is what builds a strong society.

to do this takes talking.

and listening.

no group is smart enough to have a monopoly on knowing the minds of everyone else.

i have, over the years and seemingly more so of late, had many people ask me to close the comments on bad cattitude to non-subscribers because they did not like what people were saying.

i’m not going to do that.

i do not think it’s the right thing to do.

i would not wish such insularity upon myself or upon this community.

that is not who we are, not who i aspire for us to be, nor the road to anyplace i think that any of us should want to go.

if anyhting, i want to take this the other way.

we need more, not less engagement with those of differing views.

i commit to find and to encourage it.

until one has heard the other side, one cannot understand it.

one cannot know if one is right without understanding the opposing case.

battle with straw men degrades and debases the mind and the reach of one’s horizons. only the real challenge of taking on the perspectives of others expands our understanding.

i beleive in dialogue to reach truth.

we do not have to agree, but to refuse to listen is the act of the zealot determined to become a fool.

and there are none so ignorant as those who refuse to take in perspectives outside their own.

and so we mourn charlie and his fearless spirit of engagement and his honest and committed devotion to making his case while encouraging others to make theirs.

and perhaps we try to be a little better.

this is the way.