The Outsider Perspective Issue 459 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! It’s something of a sobering week, so I don’t have it in me to do the usual fun intro on something dumb in the news cycle. But I am grateful for everyone who has reached out to chat through the week, it’s appreciated.

The story this week is obviously the assassination of Charlie Kirk – links to follow.

Quick Hits:

The “Abundance” Agenda is DOA. The Liberal Patriot has a good piece on the new “Abundance” theme from certain segments of the Democratic Party. It’s a good takedown of the themes of that book and movement. I will add the next point to that analysis. One of the Abundance measures is to achieve “net zero emissions” by 2050. That’s not going to happen. The energy demands from AI and quantum computing will trigger an explosion of electricity demand. Governments will be forced to generate electricity however they can to offset prices to everyday citizens.
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Where you can find me this week

Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter and The American Almanac.

Murderers Run Free In Democratic America – Conservative Institute

Biden’s Strong Economy Evaporates In One Report – Conservative Institute

Democrats Fake Sincerity Over Charlie Kirk – Conservative Institute

Charlie Kirk’s Murder: The Day America Changed

Charlie Kirk was shot and assassinated, which was something I never expected. Political assassinations happen, of course. We all lived through the Trump assassination attempts, and I wrote a lot about that. Kirk was in the arena debating on television, radio, podcasts, YouTube, and college campuses.

He was not an elected official. He was a college dropout who got into politics during the Tea Party movement and rose through the ranks from there. I know that story because I’ve lived part of it myself.

I was trying to figure out why his death hit me so hard, despite never really engaging with him on any level. Jeff Blehar at National Review hit it on the head:

What I don’t think people on the left understand is that *every single one of us* out there on right making arguments and debating politics feels like they were targeted too. The message is intimidation. The penalty for successful participation in the public debate? Death.

No.

And that’s it. I’ve been active in politics for decades now. Like Charlie, I began in high school, door-knocking on campaigns and engaging in online debates. Charlie liked to talk directly to people, but I prefer writing.

He’s obviously far more successful. But it’s hard to miss what he was, and why he was targeted. His beliefs aren’t anything special. He wasn’t some crank. He was a standard-issue Christian conservative.

That’s why he was killed. If you hold those beliefs, the shooter wants you dead, too.

The message is crystal clear. I got it. As did every conservative commentator I know, and friends who are just conservatives in politics.

Once I realized that, I did the stupid thing: I opened Facebook.

My Facebook following is not large. I haven’t bothered to cultivate or grow it because it’s been mostly useless to me, unlike other platforms. Most of the people there are those I’ve met over the years through school, work, or life (although I’m somehow Facebook friends with WKRN’s Bob Mueller – apparently, you can just click that friend request button).

But even with that small following, I was immediately greeted by two kinds of my liberal acquaintances. The first group was calling for gun control and blaming Kirk for not supporting it.

This group, as I note in my CI column, is stupid. The weapon used was a .30.06 caliber bolt-action hunting rifle. There is not a single liberal approved gun control law that would have prevented this. Charles C. W. Cooke tweeted that it would be legal to own in the United Kingdom, which is actively jailing people over knife ownership and “bad tweets.”

The people calling for gun control are presenting a red herring to avoid the obvious: this was a political and religious assassination.

Empty platitudes are preferable to acknowledging reality: we’re in another period of rampant left-wing political violence. The twentieth century had two big periods of this. The first period was marked by the rise of communism in the early 20th century, and the second period was the 1970s.

I know many don’t know about the 1970s; here’s how bad it was:

In that decade, 1,470 incidents of terrorism unfolded within the nation’s borders and 184 people were killed. When William Webster became director of the FBI in 1978, more than a hundred terrorist attacks a year were taking place in the United States. By the mid-1970s, terrorist bombs were being set off in the country at an average rate of 50 to 60 a year.

This was the era of the Weather Underground. Many of those left-wing radicals went on to get university gigs, where they spread their terrorist ideals, and where we see the seeds sprouting today.

When Charlie Kirk debated people at these universities, he was debating the deeds of 1970s radicals. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that the people who were willing to kill other Americans over politics in one era would return to their roots in another.

In the 1970s, they fell back on the Vietnam War as the means to justify everything. They claimed the war was an existential threat to the country and the world. Now, they claim the same thing about Donald Trump.

What is triggering an extra round of chaos in our moment is the rise of the trans movement. The left now claims this group is sacred, and anything against them cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. The trans movement has replaced any other minority group in America in terms of status.

Other minority groups have noticed this, which is partially why Donald Trump, of all people, made inroads with black and Hispanic men.

Most people don’t know about the 1970s left-wing terrorism and the evils of communism because liberals don’t want to talk about it. They’ll happily talk about the evils of Nazism and Fascism. Still, in the liberal mind, they can’t do anything wrong. Joe Biden’s DOJ armed itself to the teeth to combat a right-wing terrorism problem that never showed up.

The Biden administration literally targeted school parents at school board meetings who were speaking out about left-wing propaganda. Meanwhile, we had assassination attempts against conservative Supreme Court justices, two attempts against Donald Trump (not to mention Iran targeted him), and now Charlie Kirk. And I’m just hitting the recent highlights.

We’re in a period like the 1970s again. And it fits that we also have an inflation issue, and Trump represents a Nixon-like figure on the global stage. If only the music were as good!

But this is a watershed moment, especially for Gen-Z. In our fractured media environment, while Charlie Kirk wasn’t a guy regularly on my radar, he dominated it with them. I’ve heard or read dozens of stories of deeply impacted Gen-Z kids who are in a stupor of disbelief at what happened to Charlie Kirk.

I don’t know what will happen from here. It’s hard to predict anything. But I will note this: Charlie Kirk was the peaceful messenger. The backlash happening right now, where people on the right are hunting down anyone praising the death of Kirk and actively hammering their employers, triggering firings, is not an accident.

This was the tactic of liberals for decades. I wrote numerous columns, essays, and newsletters warning of the dangers of cancel culture. I wasn’t alone on that. Conservatives mounted a hard defense of the First Amendment. I lost that argument with the left. They gleefully destroyed anyone in their way to cultural supremacy.

Here’s a Rolling Stone headline from February 20, 2023:

“Why Cancel Culture Is Good For Democracy: History has shown us that those in power are obsessed with turning any form of accountability into a phenomenon that is intended to bring us into sudden doom. Following is an excerpt from the upcoming book, The Case for Cancel Culture: How This Democratic Tool Works to Liberate Us All.”

I say that because Rolling Stone is complaining that people are losing their jobs for glorifying the death of Charlie Kirk.

Welcome to liberation.

The 1970s left-wing terrorism destroyed the Democratic Party for a generation. With the exception of Jimmy Carter, Republicans kept the White House from 1968 to 1992 – and there were five landslides in there (1968, 72, 80, 84, and 88). We’ll see what happens this time, but I do know this: Charlie Kirk’s assassination is going to impact the generation after me dramatically. And it’s the left who is cheering the death of Gen-Z’s hero.

And just like the message to me was clear: these leftists want me dead. Gen-Z is getting the same message. If you’re a conservative Christian in America, those who cheer do not want you alive.

It is a tragic time for America. All I know to do for now is pray for the country, repent, and push forward. Charlie Kirk’s death won’t leave the area empty. Others will take his place. But his impact will last for a long time.

I’ll leave you with this thought. In 2016, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote one of the more prophetic tweets you’ll read. It said:

A thought sent back in time to the theocracy panic of 2005: If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.

I want Kirk’s vision for everyone to seek God, Family, and Country above all to be the vision that wins out. It’s what I believe after all. But if his death leads to a continuing break, the shift of this country into a post-religious one will be bad for everyone.

The only way that happens is for God to fix. But the only way that happens is if people seek Him. America is a country that was founded on Christian values, so we can travel without touching base to that through sheer inertia for a while. If Charlie Kirk’s vision loses, you will get to meet not only a post-Christian right, but a post-Christian America. And no one is ready for that.

The direction Gen-Z breaks on this issue will determine everything in the coming years.

Quick Hits:

Where you can find me this week

Charlie Kirk’s Murder: The Day America Changed

Links of the week

X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week

Satire of the week

Thanks for reading!