I was going to ignore the Charlie Kirk assassination entirely. But I keep having the same conversation with left-leaning friends, and I’m noticing that they all have synchronized takes on the matter. They of course would view this as seeing the same reality and arriving at the same truth. I see it quite differently And that difference is interesting enough to be worth writing about.

I am not talking about the psychotic fringe of the left, which has become depressingly mainstream. One of my daughter’s friends who reads as fairly normal, at least by Gen-Z standards, was one of the open celebrants of Kirk’s death. There’s more of them than most leftists want to acknowledge. But that’s pretty boring.

What I am interested in is how mainstream, conformist, workaday corporate drone “leftist radicals” respond to this murder.

I’m seeing two synchronized takes.

The first is that same “of course, but maybe” response we saw in the murder of Brian Thompson. I literally listened to a colleague of mine say “of course a political assassination is abhorrent,” and then proceed to progsplain to me how this is sort of a natural consequence of violent speech. I saw this same memetic pattern in comments on social media threads. “this is the natural consequence of spreading hate propaganda” or of whatever your news source of choice told you that Kirk allegedly believed when you first learned of his existence  the day he was shot.

As I said before, this is yet another step in the direction of the left embracing terror. Almost all left media report this story as a dark event, but one with a silver lining: the guy had it coming. This is operationalization of terror. The message is clear: if you believe things that we do not, and you try to convince other people that you are right, we will try to destroy your life, and if we fail, someone come along and  end your life — and you know? Shit happens.

A several conservatives have talked to me about their inexplicably intense despair over this shooting. They don’t understand why this has shaken them worse than the attempted assassination of Trump. I think my explanation accounts for this reaction. This is not about the politicians. This is about the media and the everyday casual progressivist’s attitude about free speech: Free speech is a sacred right for those who say what is true and just, but those who lie and spread injustice? It is open season on them. It has been open season socially and economically for over a decade. But now, as of this week, it is open season on their lives. That is what they perceive, and I think they perceive it correctly.

That is the first of the synchronized takes. The second is a little subtler. This take claims that the moderate right is no better than the moderate left in its embrace of violence. There are, according to them, many more violent hard right white nationalists ready to spill blood in the streets than there are antifas, and they are more violent and more evil. And if they kill someone, all the crypto conservatives hiding out in cubicleland will celebrate the violence, without even a courtesy “of course, but maybe” to soften it.

This, to me, looks like the same move they use on Israel. Hamas has a long, long documented track record of explicit genocidal intent. Zero progressivists are willing to read the Hamas charter under which Hamas won the popular election that put them in charge of Gaza back in 2007. And they are entirely incurious about the actual, for-real, non-metaphorical/accusational Nazi collaboration at the root of Palestinian nationalism. Because that would make them the Nazi sympathizers in this genocide, and that would collapse their whole moralistic house of cards. They just cynically assume that Israel is just as bad and that just as many (or more) Israelis hate Palestinian Arabs as Palestinian Arabs hate Israeli Jews, and then freely invert the Holocaust to support their racist oppression theories and absolve themselves of ancestral guilt for participation or complicity in the real Holocaust. Of course, ancestral guilt is imaginary, but they believe in it. Plus, they actually did inherit this attitude, however fragile they are about it. But they alone decide who’s fragile and who’s legitimately offended at unjust, ungrounded accusal. So if they say “I’m not antisemitic” that’s not at all the same as saying “I’m not racist”, because they say so.

When you are a certain way, it is hard to imagine that anyone might be different. Cynics assume everyone is a cynic, but that some cynics are just more honest about it than others. Unprincipled people think everyone is unprincipled, but some people are deceptively unprincipled, where others are frankly unprincipled. Progressivists think everyone is as craven and dishonest as they are, especially when they appear to be the opposite. People who think and feel racistly (as Progressivists all confess!) cannot imagine that everyone isn’t plagued with the same compulsive unwanted thoughts and feelings.

This is why Progressivists project their worst qualities on everyone else. Their imagination is too limited to conceive how someone could be otherwise. And they need their enemies to share these worst qualities — (minus the insight and honesty to admit it!) — or they’ll feel morally inferior. Progressivists desperately want to imagine themselves to be morally superior.

But the fact is, some people are principled. Some people will follow their highest principles even when that involves great sacrifice. And those are the only people worthy of any respect at all.

I believe there is a significant number of principled conservatives. I also think there are principled left liberals. I’ve been dreaming of a future where principled conservatives and liberals ally against their former fringe and fringe-friendly allies. Turn the horseshoe on its side and unite the reasonable, decent center against the left-right illiberals.

My problem these days is always quantitative: How many reasonable, decent centrists are there out there?

I was asking myself yesterday how the right might behave in an analogous situation, where some Charlie Kirk figure of the left died. Someone like Greta Thunberg.

If Greta Thunberg died doing something idiotic like sailing to Gaza and actually making it to shore, how would the rightward world react?

I think the conservatives I respect most would resist all schadenfreude (maybe even successfully). Those slightly to the right of them, but left of groypers would shrug and half-conceal their smiles, and the groypers would have lots of nasty fun with her death.

But that is only if she died doing something stupid like sailing to Gaza and actually making it to shore.

If a white nationalist gunman assassinated her, I think there would be a very, very different reaction. I think the conservatives I most respect and some significant portion of the non-groyper right would be horrified and distance themselves from the violence.

The groypers and near-groypers would form a new solidarity supporting the violence.

But I suspect this number is smaller than the number of leftists whose liberalism has deteriorated to the point where they now support terrorism.