I Would Be Denied Entry to “The Beacon Of The Free World” for Saying Most of This, But…

Luckily, I am not an American. In the past, I often felt quite the opposite sentiment, as anyone who has ever read my public writings from the pre-Trump era would know. One of the most flattering things that was ever said to me came from an American reader-correspondent many years ago, an elderly veteran with a highly independent and inquisitive mind, who defended my frequent focus on American politics, against critics who resented my foreignness, by remarking that in spirit, I am far more genuinely American than many of the people who were born and raised in that country. Today, however, I thank my lucky stars that I was not granted the erstwhile honor, but now fateful curse, of being an actual American, and thus having to live through the death of what was until recently the greatest country on Earth as a citizen of that sinking ship, and worst of all of having to watch up close as so many millions around me, including men and women I would at one time have perceived as friendly allies or beneficial compatriots, joined the side of unfreedom with so much bravado and enthusiasm, all in the name of the most embarrassingly trivial despotic cult leader the mire has ever spawned.

This week, a popular youth activist for Trumpism, Charlie Kirk, was murdered. As of this writing, we still do not know the identity of the killer, but it is a fair bet that he (presumably he) is or was a worthless human being with an agenda undeserving of any attention at all, let alone deserving of the destruction of a young family. However, as I predicted when I wrote of Kirk’s murder during the early hours, Donald Trump and his sycophants have quickly set about exploiting this ugly event for their own ugly purposes.

Already, there is news that several people, in the media and academia, whose initial responses to Kirk’s death were not sufficiently warm and fuzzy to satisfy the brown-shirt-ish factions of the MAGA mob, have been exposed to online “doxxing” or mass social media outrage, in response to which these individuals were fired or suspended, losing their livelihoods and professional reputations in an instant, over a few carelessly chosen words during a politically charged time. In short, cancel culture rages on, stronger and more government-sanctioned than ever, in the Trump era, all the cult’s puffery about “the death of woke” be damned.

Already, we hear that the Trump administration — not the fanatics on social media, but the actual executive branch of the U.S. Federal Government — is warning all foreign visitors, current or prospective, that they will be vetted for any negative comments made, publicly or privately, about Kirk, and denied the privilege of studying or working in the U.S. if they are caught violating this outright ban on saying anything disrespectful about…a private citizen who happened to support Donald Trump.

The exact wording from Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau:

I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action.

“Rationalizing.” “Making light of.” An administration official is personally “disgusted” by certain sentiments, including those which “rationalize” or “make light of” Kirk’s death, and on the basis of this personal disgust, the government is going to “undertake appropriate action” against visa holders or applicants. Think about the broader implications of that — not with your self-righteous pearl-clutching “Can you believe someone said that?” hat on, but as yourself, your real, private self who has immediate reactions to real events every day.

“Oh,” scoffs the earnest apologist for tyranny and cowardice in the land of the free and the home of the brave, “but that’s only for foreigners, for whom entering America is a privilege, not a right!” You keep telling yourself that, since it has obviously helped you sleep well until now.

Meanwhile in the waking world, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has announced that his department is “tracking” U.S. military personnel, uniformed and civilian — all American citizens in good standing, the last time I checked the rules — seeking individuals who responded to Kirk’s death in a way not comporting with the Trump administration’s official policy on the proper way to speak of the death of a Trump supporter.

We are tracking all these very closely — and will address, immediately. Completely unacceptable.

Would they be saying any of this, let alone taking action against individuals, if the dead man being spoken of disrespectfully were an anti-Trump media figure? A transgender activist? Or Senator John McCain, for that matter?

“But our side is right!” just doesn’t cut it, and it never did. Freedom is worth defending, or it isn’t. Non-violent folly, or opinions you find “disgusting,” are worth tolerating (and arguing against) as the price of one’s own liberty, or they aren’t. Those who have forsaken that simple and very American premise are now acting as a tyrannical lynch mob, “never letting a crisis go to waste” (as, Rahm Emanuel, a past beneficiary of Trump’s big donor largesse, once put it) in the process of laying waste to their formerly great nation and its lovely Bill of Rights, which now lies in tatters and trampled underfoot.

If Barack Obama had died during his second presidential term, would those people who now comprise the Trump administration and its support base have been uniformly and unanimously respectful of Obama and his legacy in the early days after his death? Would they all have shown perfect decorum and “Christian compassion” in expressing sadness over the loss, described it as a national tragedy, demanded all solicitude and sympathy for poor Mrs. Obama and their two beautiful children, and solemnly insisted that whatever political disagreements they may have had with Obama the day before must be set aside now with the reflection that Obama was a good man who loved his country and genuinely tried to make America a better place for everyone?

And if, by chance, anyone on the “right” had been callous enough to comment online or in a classroom (such as at Liberty University for example) that Obama was a Marxist fellow-traveller who was trying to fundamentally transform America into a socialist country, who infamously played footsie with Vladimir Putin via his henchman Dmitry Medvedev in the months before his reelection, and who was trying to undermine individual liberty and the free market in irreversible ways, and therefore that his premature death might have saved the country from more of the damage he could have done — if, I say, someone had written or said such things in the immediate aftermath of Obama’s death in office, and the Democratic Party had proposed pursuing such people with the force of law, through intimidation or direct penalties aimed at anyone “making light of” this death, what would the “right” have thought of those efforts? How would the “right” label such overt censorship of speech criticizing Obama?

Or what if, instead of Obama, the dead person were the leader of an Obama-supporting organization such as Code Pink, and therefore a more direct analogue with the position and status of Charlie Kirk? And what if Obama, as president, had ordered the nation’s flags to be flown at half-staff for that person, threatened to cancel the visa of any foreigner in the U.S. who spoke out harshly against her or against Code Pink’s platform in the aftermath of her death, tracked and punished military members who mocked her, and used his formal address to the nation, on the day of her death, to blame the crime on “all the right-wing Republicans who have been calling her a communist, a Maoist, and a dangerous anti-American activist for years”? Would those who have become today’s Trump faction have regarded such responses from the Obama administration as a reasonable and acceptable response to “disgusting” speech?

I see that at the Bulwark, an online media outlet which at least pretends to be a home for anti-Trump former Republicans — though in fact everyone there appears to me to be a stalwart and purely partisan Democrat now — the main hosts, specifically Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell, followed the “compassion-for-a-fellow-online-media-star-even-though-we-had-disagreements” playbook to a T in their initial podcast responding to the news of Kirk’s murder. Gradually, however, they, and particularly Ms. Longwell, began to shift into a repetitive chant about how the atmosphere for political discussion “is really scary right now,” as though the proper response to this atypical event were “My god, it could have been me!” Both hosts, though particularly Longwell, reminded me in their tone of all those people who, during the early months of Covid-19, were so quick to throw every idea of individual freedom, not to mention logic and open discussion, out the window in pure fear for their own personal safety. “I don’t want to die, so if you don’t wear a mask, respect the lockdown rules, and get your vaccination, then you are evil and I hate you.”

Inevitably, the discussion turned toward the standard fall-back position in all Democratic ruminations about violence: gun control. Too many guns, too many people allowed to have guns, and my nominee for Confusion of Cause and Condition of The Year: “the common denominator in all these situations is easy access to guns.”

In all gun crimes there are guns. Very true — trivially true. But it is also true — inconveniently true — that in a military milieu for example, where often everyone has a firearm, guns are “the common denominator” among men who are trained and psychologically prepared to kill people, but who nevertheless live and sleep for months in close quarters under stressful conditions without a single one of them ever shooting a compatriot in anger.

Personal fear causes many dangerous effects, to be sure, and bad reasoning tops the list. And of course, not coincidentally, people with tyrannical leanings or agendas, on either side of any fence, always regard personal fear — your personal fear — as their most valuable weapon. For they know that bad reasoning leads to weak choices, and that without such poor reasoning and foolish choices, they would have to resort to more overt and difficult means to bend their various “masses” to their wills.

A question directed in fact to the ether, but prospectively to those on the American left seeking to exploit this single crime to promote their political wishes: If Charlie Kirk were to visit us from the dead today, in light of what has happened, and were asked whether he now supports gun control, i.e., the repealing or overriding of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, what do you think he would say? After all, if anyone has a vested interest and personal reason for denying private gun ownership, surely it would be a man just shot to death. I am inclined to think I could guess his answer — at least if he was half the man his Trumpian cheerleaders are now ordering the world under threat of law and the lynch mob to believe he was. For what it is worth, were such a miracle to happen, and he were to answer as I have imagined, I would be among the first to thank him for sticking to his principles. It would be my first time to thank him for anything, or even to care much what he thought for that matter. But I would indeed thank him.

A personal note:

Just yesterday, I arrived a few minutes early at my classroom in the university where I teach, and was asked, by an earnest young man reading the international news on his digital device, what I thought about the political assassination in America, referring of course to Charlie Kirk. When I inquired why he was asking, he said, disapprovingly, that “everyone” on the radical left was saying Kirk deserved to be killed. Normally, I assiduously avoid topical politics in the classroom, but the room was still mostly empty, and the questioner was asking out of sincere interest in the issue rather than with a personal agenda, so I offered a brief answer.

I began by noting that not everyone was saying Kirk deserved to die, but merely “everyone” joining certain social media comment sections populated by people encouraging each other to say ugly things. Beyond that, I said, essentially, that I thought the murder was horrible, that Kirk’s two young children surely did not “deserve” to grow up without a father, and that regardless of whether one likes or dislikes anything Charlie Kirk ever said, he was not committing any violence, and in fact was inviting people to discuss politics with him in a public, and very open, forum, outdoors at a college campus. A society in which killing a man in such a situation is considered acceptable political action is one in which rational, civilized discourse about public issues is dead, and such a society can no longer be called free. Later, during the lecture, while explaining the importance of language in civilization, I noted that without the ability to analyze one’s pre-linguistic thoughts into parts which may then be recombined, by means of symbols and logic, into verbal and written communication, humans would have no way to share their private minds with others — or rather, as I noted with a little grin to my news-reading student, we would have only one way, and not a way that works for people who have to live together.