Tyler Robinson: Post-Modern Patsy

In the US, as here, the voluble Left suffers from what you might call a “determinism of malice”. No gobbet of spite gets wasted; that’s just the way things are. They can’t help themselves. Perhaps the motivating assumption is that to be a free thinker, you must applaud every moral obscenity that pops up on your social media timeline. The more disgusting the transgression, the more radical chic you are in celebrating it. Especially if there’s loads of you being edgy all at once by simultaneously saying the same vile thing.

“We are all individuals” they chant in unison, in that scene in Life of Brian.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not berating them for not being “nice” – niceness is superficial. I’m calling them on their lack of decency, a more honest and fundamental virtue

So, the reaction (you could hardly say response) to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, ostensibly by some wretched 22-year-old Trans-cultist, but facilitated by a wider, disintegrating political and cultural hegemony, was pretty much as expected.

Inevitable, also, was the Left’s “there is violence on both sides” whataboutery; the familiar crude and convenient relativism, intended not to engage with the opponent so much as wear him down. Tedious at the best of times, and this is very much not the best of times.

There isn’t violence on both sides in any way that adds up to moral equivalence. There is on the contrary, an empirically undeniable asymmetry in play. Leftist violence in the US is a syndicate, funded by the Soros cliques, seeded and curated in the institutions of higher education, celebrated by the legacy media, and enacted by a scattered and embedded army of activists.

The “both sides” argument is attractive to the dangerous nice, the people for whom reasonableness is the same thing as reason, when at best it’s a very distant cousin.

For once, this hasn’t cut through, because of the terrible uniqueness of the assassination. Kirk wasn’t murdered by a political opponent. He was eliminated because he had peacefully infiltrated the liberal space of the college campus. He was physically “on their turf”, and this was an intolerable affront to those who run things.

Charlie Kirk’s lack of a college degree had always offended them, his willingness to talk to people he disagreed with often confused them, and his deep Christian faith, existential not theoretical, usually baffled and indeed scared them.

Last week they miscalculated, and green-lit a contagion of indecency, disseminated through social media, by the sort of morally weak people whose courage comes from being part of a crowd, and which therefore isn’t really courage at all.

These people were goading MAGA to react with riots and violence. Because that is what they would do, and they project. Instead, they have seen vigil and prayer, a creative radicalism, which has activated the impulse to decency in the American soul which decades of Leftist authority has failed to extinguish.

The cultural Marxists, secular materialists and their followers have their own rituals, liturgies and rites of acceptance. These include the enforcement of speech, the suppression of dissent, the valorisation of acceptable “academic” texts, and the routine othering and repudiation of those unwilling to join the cult.

This is powerful but fake sacramentality, and no match for the real thing.

And so, better late than never, there has been pushback. The cancel monster is turning on its own, and the regime media is struggling to adjust its narrative in real time as it gradually dawns on them that people have been shocked out of buying their crap anymore. In an awful week Jimmy Kimmel was cancelled for lying. Scant consolation, but some comfort, nevertheless.

So we’ve gone from “Tyler Robinson is from a MAGA family so his motive has to be traced back to that” to “We will never know his real motive, so it’s unhealthy to speculate” in less than a week, as the usual pre-written plotlines of Establishment storytelling have been confounded by the rightful scepticism of a country united in grief.

And in a way, on that last point, they are right. Robinson is a post-modern patsy, the guy who did pull the trigger, yet whose motives for doing so are in a sense completely irrelevant. It was always going to be someone, some Manchurian victim of ideological capture.

If it is true that he started college as a MAGA supporter (and there is no evidence for this, kids being known for not necessarily having the same views as their parents) then what does that say about what he found when he got there? And what that did to a young brain still in development?

Charlie Kirk was murdered for conversation, not for anything he said, or not primarily. I’ve written about the deeper theology of this already. But it’s worth making the following point: Truth isn’t just a correspondence between what you say is the case and what is the case, it’s also about finding how that correspondence comes about. That’s the mysterious bit. It’s in conversation that the mystery is sometimes brought into focus.

The political implications of both the assassination and the subsequent Soros/far Left grotesquery are unfathomable. Whenever a conservative is murdered there are calls for a “pause to the political violence” and the lament goes out that the “rhetoric” must be “dialled down”.

I’m not sure it’ll work this time. The old orthodoxies are unravelling. Charlie Kirk had more than a little to do with that by being decent, in a culture happier with “nice”.

Sean Walsh is Associate Editor of Country Squire Magazine. You can follow him on Substack.

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(Photograph: CCTV / Released bv the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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