September 12, 2025

WHAT KILLED CHARLIE KIRK: And, more importantly, can we stop it?

The list of iniquities, sadly, goes on and on. In the name of “criminal justice reform,” for example, hordes of violent criminals were let loose, backed up by progressive attorneys general and activist judges and local legislators who robbed law enforcement officials of any means of meting out justice. Bail, we were told, was modern day Jim Crow. Prison was slavery in other forms. Policing was racist. And when savages like Decarlos Brown Jr., with 14 prior violent convictions to his record, were set loose, it was only a matter of time before they produced a knife and slaughtered Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian refugee, on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina. When brave men like Daniel Penny, who successfully neutralized a deranged violent criminal threatening to harm fellow commuters on the New York subway, intervened, they were dragged through the coals in court and on TV. When a police officer detained a repeated violent felon high on fentanyl and methamphetamines, leading to his death, American cities burned for days, with Democrat politicians taking a knee and corporations paying vast fortunes to a group, Black Lives Matter, that vowed to dismantle the nuclear family and failed to report what it was doing with its vast funds. Put bluntly, then, we have angry, violent, and hopeless people because many of our societal institutions worked assiduously to produce them since at least 2008.

All of this should be entirely coherent to any serious student of politics. What we have here is a group of people assembling an entirely coherent construction for the purpose of holding and maintaining power. And to keep this charade going even when it got patently ridiculous—arguing, say, that there were 57 genders, or that houses of worship had to be closed during COVID but liquor store and nail salons were welcome to do business as usual, or that the race riot that torched up your town was a mostly peaceful protest—the left applied its most trusted weapon, that of the permission structure. When every academic and every late night talk show host and every newspaper editorial told you that Trump was Hitler, good luck wearing your MAGA hat to the neighborhood picnic and not facing severe consequences.

At the NRO Corner, Jeffrey Blehar has a breezy look at Kamala’s campaign memoir, 107 Days, headlined, “America’s Most Famous Female Fredo Speaks,” in which he concludes:

And in the end, I am overwhelmed with the pathetic meaninglessness of it all. Reading the excerpt from 107 Days is like listening to the complaints of America’s most famous female Fredo: a washed-up loser complaining that she failed because she was given only low-stakes assignments and a lack of support from the Biden “family.” With every word, I hear her voice whining that she’s smart — not stupid, not like everyone says. (See what I mean when I say we may be in the presence of a genius ghostwriter?)

She has failed to convince anyone. In fact, she would be wise to observe the opposite of her own sage advice from above: Kamala Harris was given much; she should feel free to give us all a little bit less from now on.

But it’s worth noting that, likely with terrible internal polling data coming in, by the end of her campaign, she too willingly went along with being part of the aforementioned “permission structure” that led to Kirk’s assassination:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll