Lone Gunmen vs. Mob Violence

Lots of people blamed JFK's assassination on the "climate of hate" among conservative Texans. So, don't jump to conclusions.

I don’t know who the assassin of Charlie Kirk is yet, so I will write here about a general distinction that should be borne in mind between the implications of a lone gunman versus the implications of mob violence.

My view is that it says worse things about society when large mobs of semi-organized people, such as Antifa/Black Bloc in 2015-2020, are allowed to repeatedly shut down speakers attempting to exercise their right to free speech.

During the last decade or so, it became common for masked leftist mobs to attack conservative speakers on campus, such as Charles Murray at Middlebury, Heather Mac Donald at Claremont, and Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley.

This was a massive example of the Cancel Culture that was undermining American discourse and led to so many disastrous policies, but it got little coverage in the mainstream media at the time. In fact, it tended to be actively covered up.

Antifa impunity eventually led to the burning of the police station in Minneapolis in May 2020, which seemed to set off the national George Floyd racial reckoning riots, along with the widespread stifling of free speech of Trump supporters in 2020. For instance, in Southern California in the fall of 2020, Trump rallies could only be held in Huntington Beach or Beverly Hills because anywhere in between, Trump supporters couldn’t count on police protection from violent leftist mobs.

In contrast, horrifying as lone gunmen are, quick attempts to draw broader lessons from them often go awry, as happened during the 1960s. For instance, JFK’s assassination was initially blamed on a “Climate of Hate” in conservative Dallas by NBC news anchors Huntley & Brinkley. Much of the rise of leftism in America in the 1960s was influenced by misperceptions like that.

Similarly, when RFK was assassinated by a Palestinian terrorist in 1968, virtually nobody got the story right.

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