What Have We Learned In the 2 Weeks After Charlie's Murder?
My new column in Taki's Magazine offers some lessons.
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
September 24, 2025
What have we learned since the murder of poor Charlie Kirk two weeks ago?
First, it’s an open-and-shut case. Tyler Robinson’s own parents turned him in.
Perhaps some other young creeps were involved, but, obviously, the assassination didn’t require a vast conspiracy utilizing the extraordinary talents of the Impossible Mission Force. Since rifles became common just before the Civil War, it’s never been terribly hard to shoot a man giving a speech. (What’s gotten harder lately is getting away with it, due to all the cameras.) …
My guess is that a declining fear of going to hell plays a role in these kinds of suicidal shootings, along with a declining dread during the Internet Age of being sentenced to life in prison and thus stuck in a small room for the rest of your life. One way to discourage the handful of young men who commit these kinds of crimes would be to make clear that if convicted to life in prison they won’t get access to their phones for the next sixty years.
On the other hand, after two weeks, there still isn’t much evidence that Charlie’s killing had much to do with left-wing movements besides transgenderism. …
The Trump administration has announced a crackdown on Antifa, which, in general, is well overdue. …
But the Trump administration will likely need to justify its crackdown by all the bad things that Antifa have been up to over the past ten years or so, rather than by this particular assassination case.
Read the whole thing there.
> "there still isn’t much evidence that Charlie’s killing had much to do with left-wing movements besides transgenderism."
Maybe, maybe not: we don't know what the authorities have. But in any case, transgenderism has become a core tenet of leftism, such that the rest is commentary anyway. As you note in the next sentence, "you don’t even have to be terribly left-wing to be into trans": if you accept a little leftism, you accept a lot of transgenderism, so which is dog and which is tail is practically moot.
Fortunately, we don't have to interpret the hermeneutics of the suspect's trans fetish. M. Gessen is hardly an outlier among Mainstream Media. Their almost universal lockstep supposition is that mild mannered Charlie Kirk deserved assassination because he declined to accept Leftism as his Lord and Savior. Then they rely on Antifa generally, or loose-screwers like Robinson or Routh individually, to carry out the logical consequences of their implicit supposition. They are the terrorists they accuse others of being.
The most important thing to understand, not just from the last two weeks but from the last two decades, is that the political and thought leaders of the left do not believe anyone but themselves has the legitimate right to rule society. They often bleat about “our democracy” but when they lose, it is never treated as an acceptable outcome of a two party system or a genuine expression of the majority of the public that the left’s priorities our policy outcomes are unsatisfactory. No, it means dark and hateful forces have pushed the country off of the path the Arc of History intends us to be on.
What Steve says about the trans movement is broadly true of the left - it’s made up of smart, nasty people driving the herd of dumb or gullible masses on multiple cultural issues, since the left really doesn’t care about economic ones anymore. And although they are on the wrong side of public sentiment by lopsided margins on trans, immigration, crime, DEI they obviously have no intention of backing off, and if they regain political power we are getting the Biden Administration on steroids. Knowing that, I think a growing share of Americans are open to unorthodox measures to prevent a return to power of the left at a national level.