We Can No Longer Ignore or Dismiss What the Left Is Doing To Our Kids

Before Kirk, we feared our kids were being indoctrinated; after Kirk, we know they are. I see it in my little corner of the world. It must be stopped.

I don’t need to repeat for you all of the Democrats, media figures, and other sycophants on the Left who have over the last ten years called Donald Trump and his supporters Nazis, Hitlers, fascists, and other scurrilous names almost always accompanied by the claim that he and we are “threats to OUR democracy.” Forget for a moment how many of those people feted Trump when he was just a real estate mogul and television star who gave them money or that the Clintons happily broke bread with Trump for many years. I ask plainly: what was the goal of using those slurs along with the "threat to our democracy" rhetoric? Win elections? It didn’t stop when Trump won in 2016 or when he lost in 2020 or when he won again in 2024. Before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, did anyone realistically believe they wouldn’t continue to do it come 2028 to slur J.D. Vance or whomever is the Republican presidential candidate? Shockingly, they didn’t stop using it after the first assassination attempt on Trump when it was clear their rhetoric was inflaming the fringes on the Left to stop this “threat to our democracy." Or the second attempt on Trump. Or the earlier attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Or the even earlier attempt on Steve Scalise and his Republican teammates.

Yes, there have been attacks on those on the Left like Gabby Giffords and Paul Pelosi, but those attacks were never established to have been motivated by partisan politics. The plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was riddled with entrapment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Nothing done to the Left, however, compares with the litany of what has been borne by those on the Right. To my knowledge, though I assume there were threats, America’s first black president, Barack Obama, went eight years without an assassination attempt being tried by the fringe Right. That seems like an important data point when folks engage in “both sidism” regarding political violence. Other than the January 6 four-hour riot at the Capitol in which only rioters died, the mass of political violence and death in America since January 1, 2017, has almost entirely been committed by the Left against the Right.

Here at its crux is the major difference between the Right/Republicans and Left/Democrats: we on the Right expressly condemn and reject our fringe elements be they white nationalists, sovereign nationals, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and their brethren, whereas the Left condones or, at worst, remains silent about their fringe elements be they Antifa, transradicals, socialists, environmental extremists, alt-left, anti-Semites, and their brethren. The former suppresses political violence, as the latter foments it. As someone who has driven to the hinterlands of Ohio and spoken to more than ten thousand Ohioans over the last fifteen years, I have yet to come into contact with the fringe Right. If it was pervasive, I would have. Most famously, the repudiation of the fringe Right by the Right occurred after the Charlottesville tragedy by none other than Trump. Quite contrary to the media's and the Left’s monumental effort to use an edited snippet of Trump’s remarks to make it look like he had embraced white supremacists and neo-Nazis, Trump clearly rejected those people:

Those people -- all of those people -- excuse me. I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue, Robert E. Lee. So -- excuse me. And you take a look at some of the groups and you see -- and you’d know it if you were honest reporters, which in many cases you’re not, but many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you all -- you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop? But they were there to protest -- excuse me. You take a look, the night before, they were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.

…

And you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. OK? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats.

Even after Kirk’s assassination, the Left and Democrats STILL push the lie that Trump’s “fine people” comment included white supremacists and neo-Nazis (and shamelessly blame the far right for Kirk’s assassination). It is reprehensible.

We’ve seen this same practice of selectively editing clips in an effort to paint Kirk as a racist, sexist, Nazi, and worse. They also pervert core conservative ideas by painting them as illegitimate when those ideas are well within the guardrails of democracy. For example, opposition to affirmative action and quotas is labeled racist and sexist when even minorities oppose such policies. It was no more racist when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his famous dissent in Adarand Construction v. Pena noted that affirmative action stamps minorities with a “badge of inferiority” than it was for Kirk to have made the same point. In his dissent, Thomas stated:

But there can be no doubt that racial paternalism and its unintended consequences can be as poisonous and pernicious as any other form of discrimination. So called "benign" discrimination teaches many that because of chronic and apparently immutable handicaps, minorities cannot compete with them without their patronizing indulgence. Inevitably, such programs engender attitudes of superiority or, alternatively, provoke resentment among those who believe that they have been wronged by the government's use of race. These programs stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority and may cause them to develop dependencies or to adopt an attitude that they are "entitled" to preferences.

Thomas’s dissent in 1995 has now become the majority position on the unconstitutionality of affirmative action and quotas.

Some have tried to misquote Kirk’s comments on the 2nd Amendment and shootings by claiming he justified the right to keep and bear arms due to the existence of shootings. A few grossly misuse this misinformation to say Kirk deserved what he got. Kirk’s comment rightly made the point that the price of having the right to keep and bear arms was that some would abuse that right by criminally shooting others. This position is identical to the reality that the price of the 1st Amendment right to free speech is that some will use that right to say offensive, obscene, or abhorrent things. In both cases, it is better to have the right that the vast many use properly than to extinguish the right because the very few abuse it. It is the price of liberty we pay as Americans. Kirk paid that price.

The Left uses the same tactic to paint religious conservatives as homophobic when they preach “love the sinner, condemn the sin” re homosexuality. Theologians can debate whether or not the Bible makes homosexual acts sinful, but sincerely believing it does is not inherently wrong. Should that belief dictate how government treats same sex civil unions? Absolutely not, no more than government should dictate to religions that they MUST marry same sex partners (or bakers bake their cakes). We can debate whether the equal protection and due process clauses apply to same sex civil unions, but only religious leaders can determine what their respective orders do re same sex marriages. Again, Kirk’s religious position on the issue didn’t render him a homophobe.

Transgenderism is NOT like homosexuality in which a man or woman is attracted to members of his or her own sex or even bisexualism in which a man or woman is attracted to both sexes. Transgenderism has always been a mental disorder until wokism on the Left pushed to normalize it by ignoring the mental contortions needed to see it as “just like being gay.” These mental contortions are most evident when it comes to transgender fluidity in which a person can switch his or her gender back and forth throughout the day. You are born a boy or a girl. While you may be attracted to those similarly gendered, the idea that you are a boy in a girl's body or vice versa is, sorry, abnormal and indicative of a mental disorder we’ve long called gender dysphoria. It really is no different than believing you are a furry born in a human body. Someone may not like their gender or prefer to be a different gender (or animal), but those belief don’t make it so. Sorry.

Nonetheless, we should treat those people with compassion and grace. And let me be crystal clear: if you believe, as I do, that transgenderism is a mental disorder, then it is axiomatic that you show them the same level of compassion as you would a schizophrenic, bipolar sufferer, or clinically depressed friend—do not mock them, make fun of them, or belittle them. They need help, not hatred. If their mental disorder doesn’t impact others, then most of us would agree they should be left to live as they want, as many people live with mental disorders. As adults. Those maxims shouldn’t mean we should allow minors to be treated with puberty blockers or, God forbid, surgically altered. When transgendered people exhibit signs of extremism or violence, as was the case with Aiden Hale and Robin Westman, they should be dealt with exactly as we’d deal with other people evidencing violent tendencies, threats, or actions via law enforcement, the judicial system, and mental health providers. We simply cannot let political correctness, wokism, or fear stop us from stopping mentally disturbed people from harming innocent Americans.

My biggest concern with Tyler Robinson is that other than making comments about his hatred of Kirk, there don’t appear to be signs that would have indicated he was capable of and preparing to assassinate Kirk. It appears he simply marinated in the stew of Left and Democrat slurs of those of us on the Right fomented by his teachers’ leftisms beginning in middle school, continuing into high school and college, and culminating in non-stop media segments carrying the Left’s and Democrat’s messages that Trump, Kirk, and MAGA voters are Nazis and Hitlers who are "threats to our democracy." Evidence of this toxic stew came out in spades following Kirk’s assassination when teachers and professors felt perfectly comfortable celebrating his demise. As others have noted, the mere fact that they felt comfortable expressing their hate shows how mainstream their views are on the Left and among Democrats.

Lest you think mass indoctrination by teachers isn’t happening in our schools, the sheer skyrocketing of the number of kids claiming to be transgender is proof positive of it. In many ways, the transgender fade among America’s youth is akin to the hysteria among the girls during the Salem Witch Trials in which girls made allegations because other girls did and got attention for doing so. It is too early to tell what other factors are contributing to the upward trend—is the explosion of left-wing Social Emotional Learning periods in school and/or the jump in left-wing school counselors funded by federal COVID funds driving the numbers? I don’t know, but statistically the transgender jump just doesn’t fly.

Regardless, when you combine the hate and grooming coming from teachers during the peak developmental years of America’s youth married with what Mollie Hemingway coined as "assassination prep" from the Left along with the bile streaming across the Internet, maybe the jump from being a smart kid raised in a loving home to a cold-hearted assassin who would murder a man in front of his wife and young kids isn’t that hard to make. What scares me the most today is that millions of American kids in middle school, high school, and college are right now marinating in this corrosive stew. Before Kirk, we feared our kids were being indoctrinated; after Kirk, we know they are. I see it in my little corner of the world. It must be stopped.

P.S. I have received FOUR fundraising texts in Erika Kirk’s name today. Four. I am hoping she did not authorize fundraising off her husband’s death before he has even been buried. There is a time and place for fundraising. It is not now.