We Are Not Going To Have A Debate About Free Speech

he national conversation we need to have right now is not about free speech.

The conversation we need to have is about the normalization of political violence on the left. We need to be talking about left-wing Antifa/trans terrorists gunning down Christians in broad daylight while Democrats and the corporate press justify it and the online left celebrates it.

That’s the only conversation that matters right now. The manufactured outrage over ABC canceling Jimmy Kimmel’s show is an attempt to change the conversation, to flip the script so that instead of talking about the first major political assassination in America in sixty years, instead of talking about the mainstream left’s embrace of political violence and the institutional ecosystem that foments and funds that violence, we can talk about whether President Trump is using Kirk’s murder as a pretext to crack down on free speech and silence his enemies.

What nonsense — and what a tell. It speaks volumes that Democrats, liberal media, and online leftists are so desperate to pivot away from talking about Kirk’s assassination that they have chosen to take up the transparently stupid cause of Kimmel’s free speech rights. Remember, these are people who don’t care at all about free speech. Some of those rending their garments this week over Kimmel’s cancellation were the same people who cheered on government censorship during Covid. They love censorship, so long as it’s their side doing the censoring.

And it hardly needs to be said that nothing about the Kimmel story implicates free speech in any way. Kimmel didn’t just mock MAGA or criticize Kirk, he patently lied about the ideology of Kirk’s alleged assassin, and by allowing his comments to air, ABC arguably violated the terms of its FCC license.

During his Monday show, Kimmel said this: “The MAGA gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

Anyone with an internet connection and half a brain cell knows that Kirk’s alleged killer was deeply into Antifa and transgender ideologies, and that he specifically targeted Kirk for speaking out against these things. He was a creature wholly of the left, and to declare otherwise, as Kimmel did, is a deliberate falsification of the facts surrounding the most high-profile political assassination of our time.

That means Kimmel blatantly violated FCC regulations. Public broadcasters like ABC are prohibited from spreading false information about a crime or catastrophe, and they can lose their licensure if they don’t adhere to the relevant federal regulations.

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Woke Illinois gov. posed with ‘violence disruptor’ who days later ‘killed young dad-to-be while fleeing Louis Vuitton robbery’

Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker was seen posing with a man who worked as a ‘Peacekeeper’ in the state, less than a week before he was arrested for allegedly killing a father while fleeing a robbery at a Louis Vuitton store. 

Keller McMillan, 35, was one of seven men charged with murder, burglary, and retail theft after they robbed a luxury retail store and allegedly killed a father who was driving to work. 

It has now been revealed that McMillan was working as a ‘Peacekeeper,’ a trained community member who is sent to violent hotspots to de-escalate conflicts. 

Pritzker met with the Peacekeepers at the start of the month, sharing photos in a press release from the event, including one with McMillan. 

The photo was removed after McMillian’s arrest, but had already been circulated on multiple media websites. 

Pritzker shared a video on his social media from the event, where he sat at a roundtable and listened to the Peacekeepers describe their experience in the program. 

The governor noted that the Peacekeepers create a safer community and wrote in the caption, ‘It’s folks like these that we need more of doing the hard work of community violence prevention, not troops on the ground to undermine efforts fighting crime’.

‘The Governor meets hundreds of people in communities every week and is often asked to take photos,’ Pritzker’s office said in a statement.

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Sick: Oberlin College Student Leader Wants to “Bring Back Political Assassinations” Following Politically Motivated Murder of Charlie Kirk

Julia Xu is a radical leftist student at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, who serves on the college’s advisory board of the school’s Gender, Sexuality, and Attraction Initiatives and participates with Students for a Free Palestine.

Following the politically motivated murder of Charlie Kirk, Julia voiced her support for political assassinations as a way to silence political opponents.

In a social media post under the handle @bringbacktheguillotine, she said, “We need to bring back political assassinations.”

She continued, “I don’t feel bad and I don’t think that everyone deserves the right to free speech. Some people should be afraid to express their opinion in public.”

The Post contacted Xu, who appeared to backtrack, saying she apologizes and is “deeply remorseful” for her statements.

Although Oberlin condemned Xu’s apparent support of political violence, it does not appear that she will face any formal consequences.

Oberlin’s President Carmen Twillie Ambar said, “Last week, in an open letter, I wrote ‘there is no place for political violence in the America that I love.’ It threatens our sense of safety and well-being and it violates the sanctity of the nation’s civil discourse.”

“I want to emphasize that the views expressed in the student’s post do not reflect those of the faculty member who teaches the class referenced. Nor does the student’s post reflect the views of Oberlin College.”

The college has not addressed how it will keep conservative students safe on its campus in the face of a fellow student advocating for executions.

The Gateway Pundit has reached out to leadership at Oberlin and will update this story if they provide a comment.

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The Unique Evil of the Left

Is it too much to say that since the French Revolution, the left has been the source of virtually all political evils, and continues to be so in our day?

There can be no doubt that great cruelty and violence can be and have been inflicted in the name of preserving the existing order.

But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more distant past with the leftist totalitarian revolutions and total wars of the twentieth centuries, they are in general a mere blip. The entire history of the Inquisition, said Joe Sobran, barely rises to the level of what the communists accomplished on a good afternoon.

The French Revolution, and particularly its radical phase, was the classic manifestation of modern leftism and served as the model for still more radical revolutions around the world more than a century later.

As that revolution proceeded its aims grew more ambitious, with its most fervent partisans demanding nothing less than the total transformation of society.

In place of the various customs and settled ways of a France with well over a millennium of history behind it, the radical revolutionaries introduced a “rational” alternative cooked up in their heads, and with all the warmth of an insane asylum.

Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of saints were actually guillotined. (These people guillotining statues were the rational ones, you understand.) The calendar itself, rich with religious feasts, was replaced by a more “rational” calendar with 30 days per month, divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday. The remaining five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards.

Punishments for deviations from the new dispensation were as severe as we have come to expect from leftism. People were sentenced to death for owning a Rosary, giving shelter to a priest, or indeed refusing to abjure the priesthood.

We are plenty familiar with the guillotine, but the revolutionaries concocted still other forms of execution as well, like the Drownings at Nantes, designed to humiliate and terrorize their victims.

Given that the left has sought the complete transformation of society, and given that such wholesale change is bound to come up against the resistance of ordinary people who don’t care for having their routines and patterns of life overturned, we should not be surprised that the instrument of mass terror has been the weapon of choice. The people must be terrified into submission, and so broken and demoralized that resistance comes to seem impossible.

Likewise, it’s no wonder the left needs the total state. In place of naturally occurring groupings and allegiances, it demands the substitution of artificial constructs. In place of the concrete and specific, the Burkean “little platoons” that emerge organically, it imposes remote and artificial substitutes that emerge from the heads of intellectuals. It prefers the distant central government to the local neighborhood, the school board president over the head of household.

Thus the creation of the departments, totally subordinate to Paris, during the French Revolution was a classic leftist move. But so were the totalitarian megastates of the twentieth century, which demanded that people’s allegiances be transferred from the smaller associations that had once defined their lives to a brand new central authority that had grown out of nowhere.

The right (properly understood), meanwhile, according to the great classical liberal Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “stands for free, organically grown forms of life.”

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J.D. Vance Says 26 Percent of Young Liberals Justify Political Violence. Here’s What the Data Really Say.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has elicited egregious reactions across social media. On the left, some have reacted to his murder by calling Kirk a Nazi and likening him to Adolf Hitler. Others callously mocked Kirk and celebrated his assassination. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has assigned responsibility for the tragedy to those who demonized Kirk, and Attorney General Pam Bondi said Monday that the Justice Department will go after those “targeting anyone with hate speech.” The Daily Wire‘s Matt Walsh has gone so far as to say he “cannot ‘unite’ with the Left because they want me dead” and “will spit on my grave when I die and laugh in the faces of my wife and children.”

On Monday, Vice President J.D. Vance echoed this us-vs.-them mentality while hosting Kirk’s podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show. During the episode, Vance said that America must confront the difficult truth that “24 percent of self-described quote, ‘very liberals,’ believe it is acceptable to be happy about the death of a political opponent” and “26 percent of young liberals believe political violence is sometimes justified.”

However, Vance cherry-picks data from a YouGov poll released two days after Kirk’s assassination to paint an inordinately bleak picture of the state of American political discourse.

According to that poll, which was conducted immediately following Kirk’s murder, the majority (55 percent) of “very liberal” respondents said violence is never justified to achieve political goals. An even larger majority of self-described liberals (68 percent) shared this view. Similar majorities of “very liberals” (56 percent) and liberals (73 percent) said it was always or usually unacceptable for “a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose.” (It’s possible that at least some of the liberals who answered “yes, violence can sometimes be justified” had in mind edge cases like armed resistance by Jews against the SS, not the assassination of peaceful political pundits with whom they disagree.)

It is true that larger majorities of “very conservatives” (88 percent) and conservatives (83 percent) said political violence is never justified. Likewise, 90 percent and 91 percent, respectively, said it is “always or usually unacceptable” for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose. While the disparity between American liberals’ and conservatives’ condemnation of political violence and its celebration is notable, the fact remains that a majority of even “very liberal” Americans reject political violence outright and denounce its celebration.

Concern about political violence is bipartisan: 90 percent of Democrats regard political violence in the U.S. as a problem, as do 89 percent of Republicans. Considering that even more Democrats regard political violence as a “very big problem” following Kirk’s murder than they did following the murder of Minnesota’s Democratic Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman, it cannot be said that they only care about political violence when it’s enacted against their political allies.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, it’s important to recognize that the majority of Americans are united in denouncing political violence and those who celebrate it.

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Teacher LIES About High School Student Who Was Suspended After Being Assaulted For Wearing MAGA Hat in Honor of Charlie Kirk

A high school boy in Laguna Beach, California, was suspended after being accosted for wearing a MAGA hat in honor of Charlie Kirk.

Laguna Beach is a liberal enclave in mostly conservative Orange County, California.

Zach Hornstein wore a MAGA hat on campus at Laguna Beach High School last Thursday to honor Charlie Kirk, just one day after the TPUSA founder was assassinated at an event at Utah Valley University.

Hornstein said a girl grabbed his MAGA hat and threw it into the trash in the girls’ restroom. The girl used profanities to attack Trump.

He then jokingly told a group of girls to leave the country if they didn’t like the US.

“I made a joke towards them and said, ‘If you don’t like it here, Canada’s open borders, feel free to go,’” Zach Hornstein told Fox 11.

This is when a teacher lied about what Zach Hornstein said to the group of girls.

“They’re saying I told a group of girls to go back to where they came from, which I never said that,” Hornstein told Fox 11. “When they called in the girl that was involved, she literally told them that I never said that.”

Hornstein’s mother blasted the school and said her son was targeted for his conservative political beliefs.

“I think it’s a double standard,” Hornstein’s mother, Janet Semenova, said. “I think kids who have certain political beliefs are held to a different standard than kids who have other political beliefs.”

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Man With Rifle Looking For Louisiana’s Republican Attorney General Taken Into Custody

A man with a rifle was taken into custody after he showed up to the Livingston Building looking for Louisiana’s Republican Attorney General on Wednesday.

“There is not an active shooter in or around the Livingston Building. The situation is under control. An individual in custody. There are no other details at this time,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said on X.

The suspect has not been identified at this time.

Per WBRZ:

Officials from the AG’s office said the Louisiana Department of Justice received information that a subject possibly suffering from emotional distress was coming to the Attorney General’s Office and was believed to be in possession of a rifle. Security protocols were initiated and the subject was located near the State Capitol.

The person was “very cooperative and just wanted to speak to agents about a situation and to file a complaint.” They were then interviewed by the AG’s office. He lawfully possessed a firearm in his vehicle and he committed no criminal acts, so he was later released.

There was no police presence at the Attorney General‘s office shortly after Murrill’s social media post.

There is not an active shooter in or around the Livingston Building. The situation is under control. An individual in custody. There are no other details at this time.

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It’s Not the Technology

By the standards of a dispassionate observer, the American political left has undergone a transformation over the past few decades that is as alarming as it is undeniable. Once it was a coalition of pragmatic reformers, undercover communists, labor advocates, and young idealists. This ensemble can be sold as reality to only the most out of touch American. The Democratic Party and its broader ecosystem have drifted into a fever swamp of ideological radicalism, fueled by a toxic brew of conspiracy theorizing, moral panic, and a deliberate cultivation of fear. Gay race communism and rioting replaced liberation of the individual and mass GOTV drives. This is not a phenomenon driven by the machinations of technology. Tech is the current pitch to explain away what lies at the heart of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Social media and digital platforms are mere tools of coordination, amplifying what is already afoot. The root of this radicalization lies in the left’s intellectual and moral decay, a decades-long indulgence in unhinged narratives and unchecked hysteria, encouraged by a party and its media allies who thrive on a perpetually anxious voter base. The consequences of this trajectory are profound and will be with us for years, threatening not only the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects but the broader health of American political life.

To understand this shift, one must first trash the notion that technology is the primary culprit. The internet, for all its flaws, is a neutral instrument. It is a medium that can amplify both reason and madness. It is a tool. All sides in all nations deal with this. The left’s radicalization predates Twitter’s character limit, Reddit threads and Facebook’s algo. It is not the medium but the message that has poisoned the increasingly fragile minds of the left’s base. The left’s embrace of apocalyptic rhetoric and conspiratorial thinking began in earnest during the George W. Bush era, when the Iraq War and the Patriot Act provided fertile ground for narratives of government malevolence. Anti-Trump messaging is insane, but liberals were going to group therapy to shout at W dolls two decades ago. Those old concerns were not without some basis (civil libertarians had points about government overreach), but the left’s response was not to critique with precision but to spiral into fantasies of dystopian cabals. Bush was always poised to cancel elections. The Bush administration was not merely wrong. It was evil. It was a shadowy regime orchestrating global domination. Such hyperbole became mainstream fodder, seeded by activists & academics and abetted by a media eager for viewers, clicks and outrage. This is why the rehabilitation of W is such a joke to those on the right old enough to remember the ‘00s.

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American History’s Stark Warning Against Tolerating Political Violence

In the days since Charlie Kirk’s murder, many have expressed incredulity about the condition of the country. Our circumstances may be unique but the movements of political societies follow clear patterns. We have been deeply polarized before and the cause, now and then, is the same. Disagreement about the fundamental type of country we believe that we should be is what divides us.

In May, 1856 Charles Sumner of Massachusetts took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to denounce the use of force and fraud to plant slavery and its inevitable offspring, oligarchy, in the territory of Kansas. Southern statesmen who composed the inter-state oligarchy in the slave states sought to admit Kansas with slavery into the Union, expanding their power.

Since at least 1854 Sumner was among a few who had recognized that the fight over slavery had taken on a new character. Not only did the fate of slavery depend on the outcome of that fight, but also the future form of American government – whether all America would be republican, as the Founders intended and as the northern states were, or whether America would be converted to an oligarchy, the prevalent form of government in the South.

Sumner’s “Crime Against Kansas” speech was long, direct, and forceful. A few days later, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina entered the Senate chamber with his lieutenants, Representatives Laurence Keitt of South Carolina and Henry Edmundson of Virginia, and commenced caning Sumner, who was sitting, his legs locked beneath his desk.

While Sumner could not defend himself from the blows, Keitt (brandishing a pistol) and Edmundson stood by, Antifa-like, and prevented anyone from coming to Sumner’s aid. Brooks beat Sumner over the head nearly to death and left him unconscious in a pool of blood. Southern newspapers, the mainstream media at the time, praised the attack and blamed Sumner’s words for bringing the violence upon himself. Supporters of Brooks feted him in person and mailed him new canes and congratulatory letters.

Ironically, the violence and the approving response to the violence verified exactly what Sumner claimed at the beginning of his speech. Everyone could feel that the country was polarized down to its core. But why? Sumner contrasted ordinary and extraordinary politics, ordinary and extraordinary political disagreements. Statesmen representing the country were not merely debating whether a number on a tariff schedule should be 5 or 10 percent.

Kansas was a flashpoint in a more consequential, extraordinary struggle. Each side was contending for a way of life and form of government abhorrent to the other. The general consensus had broken down; the American political regime was seriously destabilized. The oligarchy of the South rejected the basis of American republicanism, natural equality and fundamental liberties, including freedom of speech. The violence and the approval of violence in reaction to Sumner’s claims had proven Sumner’s claims that the southerners were oligarchic in character.

Both Sumner and Kirk advanced their particular causes in the way of American republicanism. They used words; they exercised their freedom of speech to persuade. On the other hand, the attackers and their supporters showed their contempt for free speech in favor of force, and therefore showed that they actively rejected the principles and general consensus that had underpinned the American political regime.

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DOJ Quietly Deletes Study After Charlie Kirk’s Death That Says Right-Wing Extremists Engage in ‘Far More’ Political Violence

  • A study on the growing frequency of “far-right attacks” was removed from the Department of Justice’s website
  • The removal happened after right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on a college campus in Utah
  • An archived version of the study is still available online, and states that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides” than the left

The U.S. Department of Justice appears to have quietly removed information online regarding right-wing violence following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

As of Friday, Sept. 12, a 2024 study titled “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism” no longer appears on the DOJ website under President Donald Trump‘s administration. However, it is still viewable as an archived post on Wayback Machine.

“Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism,” the first two lines of the study read.

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