On August 22, 2025, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian woman on her way home from work, was brutally murdered on a Charlotte, NC light rail car. The murder was captured on video and shared. A few weeks later, Charlie Kirk was assassinated on video on a Utah campus. Both these horrendous acts were set in motion by events of a decade ago, and it is time that is acknowledged or it will be repeated.
The political protests against Donald Trump as a candidate or Presidential victor have been unprecedented. On the day of his first inauguration, the limousine of Lance Wallnau, a Trump supporter, was burned.
Madonna spoke saying she fantasized about blowing up the White House. In June 2017, Shakespeare in the Park in New York depicted the stabbing of Julius Caesar with a Trump look alike. Days later the “comedian” Kathy Griffin posted a picture of her holding a model of Trump’s severed head.
She apologized for this, but later retracted the apology.
Maxine Waters urged people: "Let's make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere".
Following the death of George Floyd, the country erupted in violence. At least 19 people died and 1-2 billion dollars damage was done, largest of any civil unrest in US history. Antifa took over Portland for months, police were vilified and attacked in Chicago. The result was a successful push to defund the police, reduce cash bail and usher in a spate of prosecutors with a much softer approach to violent crime. The US has become a much more dangerous place since then. For example, Chicago is now more dangerous than Beirut.
For the past 5 years, President Trump has been continually likened to Hitler and his followers to Nazis.
Is it any wonder that impressionable individuals who lack critical thinking skills will think that violence is appropriate? We are now at the point where a majority of left-of-center people think political violence can be justified. This is not a “both sides do it” thing. The left owns justifiable political violence. Fifteen percent said the murder of Trump would be completely justified!
Although there were some national democrat leaders who condemned this heinous act, Governor Pritzker blamed political violence on Trump. This is absolutely tone-deaf! After years of calling Trump Hitler and people like me Nazis, when a left-wing radical acts on those accusations, Pritzker blames the victim. This is not unlike blaming a woman wearing a short skirt on causing her sexual assault!
Reports of huge numbers of people who celebrated Charlie Kirk are all over the internet. What really flabbergasted me, though, was the number of my own friends, some of whom I have known for over 60 years, who blamed Charlie Kirk for his own murder and celebrated it! And these were not “marginalized” people. They are the same people who couldn’t imagine anybody holding a political view other than their own and called me a fascist for years for voting for Trump. One even wondered how a man who posts pictures of the bread he bakes (me, in other words) could possibly have turned fascist and voted for Trump!
Jonathan Alpert addressed this paradox, “Splitting” in his Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He calls it a psychological defense mechanism when anger hardens into fantasy and the patient operates in a black and white universe. Alpert claims he sees it on both the right and the left, but let me ask you: How many on the right have launched screeds on social media gleefully celebrating Biden’s mental decline? How many Facebook cheered at the death of George Floyd? I know of none. Yet among my own progressive “friends” Trump-as-Hitler is a common topic and those who voted for him (me) as a fascist are common and praised in their echo chamber of hate.
At the start of this, I proposed a connection between the political assassination of Charlie Kirk and the murder of Iryna Zarutska. I’ll go one better there is also a link to the professional character assassination of those brave physicians who attempted to actually treat patients with COVID and warned against the toxicity of the COVID “vaccine”. I will use one of the left’s favorite word, intersectionality.
There is a high likelihood that many of my “friends” who think Charlie Kirk got what he deserved also: 1) Think Trump is Hitler; 2) Think I am a Fascist for supporting him; 3) Supported Fauci and all of the irrational actions of our public health elite in COVID; 4) Think that physicians who did not go along with the wishes of Big Pharma are guilty of “misinformation” and are justified in losing their license; 5) Sympathized with BLM and thought “all lives matter” was a racist trope; 6) Chant “From the River to the Sea and see nothing wrong with the antisemitism on our “Poison Ivy” universities and celebrated the atrocities on October 7, 2023.
The intersectionality is not perfect, but pretty good accurate, nonetheless. Although Jonathan Alpert would no doubt say I am guilty of “Splitting” myself, the fact remains that real people like Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk are dead because of the world view of the progressives over the past decade, and they don’t care or see they are complicit in their deaths.
We have an invasion of illegal immigrants, a legal system that protects criminals and penalizes innocent US citizens, an educational system that is unresponsive to parents and indoctrinates students in hatred of their country and heritage and members of the Senate and House who hate the very idea of the United States. This is no longer a situation where the two political parties love this country and just have a different idea on how to make it better. The very idea of ‘Make America Great Again” is offensive to them.
The question is: how do we deal with the large number of people who hate us and believe violence against us is not only acceptable but justified? Is it still possible to just ignore it and hope they will change? We have tried that, and it has only gotten worse. Charlie Kirk tried to dialog with them, and they killed him for it. Is compromise with true evil even possible? Is it “Splitting” to say compromise with those who murder people because they don’t like their political opinion is impossible?? What would that compromise look like? I ask this because of posts like this on Instagram and linked on X:
“Don't let it stop with him. Get rid of the whole family, his wife and kids, too."
We have the historical evidence of what happened in other countries during the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the German Revolution of the 1930’s. In each case the EVIL just increased and reached a crescendo of horror, seemingly feeding on, and being fed by, an Egregore, or a non-physical entity that adds enormous power to the EVIL.
This term was applied to the French Revolution and in 2015 was termed Weaponized Sacredness. In my own view, the aggressive hatred expressed towards Jews and Christians by this mindset points in the direction of Dark Angelic Powers. Appealing to Judeo-Christian concepts of good and evil will most likely have minimal effect as those captured in an Egregore will not listen to such arguments. There anger seems as much directed at the LORD as it is towards the people they hate because of their ideas. Prayer seems to be needed, as if the Egregore is real, and I believe it is, the LORD is stronger. Those captured in this Evil need our help…. They cannot escape it by themselves.
The ultimate and tragic irony is that those who celebrate the physical death of Charlie Kirk are dangerously close to sealing their own spiritual death. They are the goats separating themselves from the sheep. The LORD will not have to do it—they have done it themselves.
And spiritual death is forever..
I would appreciate your thoughts.
Always appreciate what you write. Always thoughtful. On C21x a video was posted that just reminded us that there clearly has been psychological operations going on for decades to divide us , to make us hate one another and ultimately kill one another. I don’t disagree that this is intentional and is truly happening. But equally as true, this is not a political issue and it’s often reduced to that argument. At its core we are an increasingly debased culture who hates truth. Gods truth. We should not be surprised. Jesus said we’d be hated like He was and killed like He was. As our culture continues its spiral into moral decay there is only one solution. It’s not political to reach across the aisle. It’s not civil debate. It’s recognition of our desperate need for salvation. Salvation from self destruction only comes from Jesus Christ. We need a heart transformation as a people. There are NO other answers. Transformed hearts don’t rejoice in evil. Without internal restraint the need for external restraint to maintain a society increases exponentially. The Holy Spirit gives internal restraint. Our republic was only meant to survive if we were a moral people. We no longer are and we are on a self destructive path. Why we are not on our knees in our churches praying and pleading about our current desperate situation breaks my heart.
So well said. We WILL win. “Why are you downcast oh my soul. Put your faith in God”