09/12/2025
This is a post on X that better illustrates my point:
I'd like to comment on a little-recognized effect I believe Charlie Kirk’s assassination is having on certain corners of the Right.
About ten years ago, I escaped from living in the SF Bay Area. The outright, visceral, violent hatred that so many Bay Area residents had towards ANY political dissent shocked me when I moved there, and was one of the main reasons I left.
When I moved, I moved to a deep, deep red state. I made conservative friends here. These are nice, decent people who live by a mantra of you leave me be, I’ll leave you be. But what shocked me about them was their unwillingness to believe just how deeply Democrats hate them. I tried explaining to them that most Democrats want them and their way of life dead and destroyed; that Democrats offer no political quarter and will not tolerate dissent of any kind from their neo-Marxist orthodoxies; and that comity is dead on the Democrat side and all they want is power over everything we conservatives hold dear, and that they would do literally anything to achieve and maintain that power.
They didn’t believe me. They said I was exaggerating. They said what I was saying was not possible.
They thought this because they had lived their whole lives in their red state, and in their red state Democrats were far more conservative than the vast majority of Democrats nationally, and in this state Democrats were such a small minority that they were forced to show the comity that the rest of that party long ago abandoned.
My red state friends just assumed this was the same everywhere.
No longer.
Charlie Kirk’s death has galvanized them and made them believers.
Literally millions of peaceful, law-abiding conservatives who just want to be left alone have been woken up and suddenly realize that most Democrats would gladly see them dead.
