https://www.frontpagemag.com/reflections-on-the-coming-days-of-rage/
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was already positively impacting the world with his indefatigable, peaceful, joyful, godly work to change hearts and minds, but in mere days, his assassination by a cowardly sniper’s bullet has already launched a tsunami of change he likely could not have imagined. The world is entering a different epoch now, and as with all shifts into a new age, there will be birthing pains.
I can’t recall whose insight this was, but someone online observed that Charlie’s murder was an “Archduke Ferdinand moment” – referring to the assassination that triggered World War I. I think that captures the sobering magnitude of Charlie’s martyrdom (yes, literal martyrdom; as others have pointed out, Charlie was killed not for his politics but for his Christian faith, which shaped his political positions). But his brutal murder drives home the point that we are already in a hot civil war in this country – not just a culture war, not a figurative civil war, but a hot civil war.
But so far only one side has been waging that war. From the assassination of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson at the hands of a terrorist-turned-Left-wing-folk-hero, to the slaughter of Catholic schoolchildren at the hands of a demonic trans terrorist, to Charlie Kirk at the hands (allegedly) of a Left-radicalized young man (with a trans partner) who declared that “some hate can’t be negotiated out,” the Left has already declared war on the political opponents they deem to be fascist threats to democracy who must be exterminated like vermin (hence their dehumanizing rhetoric over the years since the reign of Barack Obama, intensified under Joe Biden).
I am old enough to remember another time when the Left normalized political violence in America. As Bryan Burroughs notes in his book Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, “radical violence was so deeply woven into the fabric of 1970s America that many citizens, especially in New York and other hard-hit cities, accepted it as part of daily life.” Burroughs quotes a retired FBI agent who noted, “People have completely forgotten but in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States. It was every day. Buildings getting bombed, policemen getting killed. It was commonplace.”
My record at predictions is mixed at best, so I hope I’m wrong about this one, but I believe we are about to enter a new Days of Rage. Political violence is about to become even more “commonplace.” The Left’s repugnant response to Charlie’s murder has already demonstrated that they are not going to be shocked into policing themselves and de-escalating the violence, much less their demonizing, vicious rhetoric. Some Democrat leaders, like Barack Obama, have issued obligatory, tepid statements denouncing political violence, but do not expect that any “moderate” elements on the Left will prevail. The Democrat Party is controlled by the radical Left, and has been since well before the calculated, meteoric rise of Barack Obama.
