WBCQ - Je Suis Charlie, Part 2

I’m trying something different, hoping to shake the rust from my writing tool! Notes are longer; sort of an essay. Still from this episode.

I’m not sure when it happened, maybe it was this past week, maybe 15-years ago, but whatever “shared reality” we used to have has dissolved. Facts are now little more than props; virtually no one gives a damn about what really happened, only about which narrative needs to become “the official truth.” From the Unite the Kingdom march in the UK, where one side shrieks about “far-right Nazis” and the other insists it’s nothing but good old-fashioned patriotism. Want an honest headcount? You’re fucked. Both ends of the spectrum inflate and deflate figures depending on which tribal banner they're flying. The same press image might yield millions for one side and barely six figures for the other.

Math, it turns out, is deeply ideological.

It’s not just the media, and it’s not just the left or the right; even the “conspiracy crowd,” for whom every event is an encrypted signal, will twist evidence; refute what’s in front of their faces trying to force the world to bend to their fiction. Liberals are no different from conservatives; we are all, first and foremost, storytellers, not truth seekers. We don’t hunger for truth; we yearn for the comfortable myth that flatter us, demonize The Other, and adorn our own biases with the self-righteous cloak of cosmic justice.

The events of this week, Charlie Kirk’s assassination not least among them, have been a festival of this kind of narrative laundering. The only thing anyone will agree upon is that the man was shot and he died. Beyond that? Ha! Forget consensus. Any attempt at common ground is instantaneously obliterated by the next digital spin cycle.

What sickened me more than the assassination itself, if that’s possible, may be the gleeful barbarism of the reaction. The left, or what passes for it now, has been trampling not just on Kirk’s memory, but on the raw, universal pain of loss; mocking his supporters, sniveling at basic human decency, and gloating before the body was even cold. That tells us something dark: the culture of restraint died before Charlie Kirk.

What may prove to be worse is that is the counter-effect: over the last five days, the polite and perceived obligation to keep thoughts buttoned up, has vaporized on the other side. Conservative rage over Kirk’s killing, coupled with the left’s ensuing ghoulish behavior, may conspire to release the suppressed bigotry and “phobias” that we once willingly suppressed. It’s coming back out into the open now.

Why? Because if you’ve been called a racist or a bigot long enough, what’s the point of hiding it? Why keep it bottled when you’ll be labeled, tried, and sentenced anyway? Why accommodate these cultural Marxists ghouls one minute longer?

Once, I believed dialog was possible. That we could find common ground. But just as you can’t save someone who refuses to be saved, you can’t “discourse” with puritanical totalitarian fanatics. What I see now are camps who have sat down in the cultural ditch inside fortresses built of arrogant, religious-grade moral certitude. This is the legacy of messianic thinking; once your own righteousness is absolute, there’s no room left for compromise or even argument.

They’re unwilling to budge, debate, or even to listen. But they are increasingly willing to kill.

What’s left? Silencing, mockery, and, inevitably, violence. They shot the moderate. They shot the guy willing to stand there and argue, not because he was dangerous but because he made dialogue possible. For some, that was heretical enough.

If words are violence, and hurt feelings are a violent assault, then violence becomes and “appropriate” response and inevitable. Worse, the left has been groomed to see political violence as a virtue. The effects are clearest among young people, who increasingly see violence as an appropriate political tool that’s justified as long as the villain is painted with the right brush. The new logic? Anyone feeling pride for their country or flag is a “fascist.”

The case of “Armed Queers of Salt Lake City” is a symptom, not the disease. Here’s a group that calls itself a “socialist militia,” whose iconography is a rainbow flag with rifles and a hammer and sickle, and whose program, regardless of what the mission statement says, has walked straight from left-wing meetings into the business of open militancy. Call it “community defense” if you like; it’s still escalation. The simple normalization of armed “queer militias” signals a Rubicon crossed: culture grievance and identity have mutated into militancy.

Are they connected to Kirk’s assassination? The investigations are ongoing, no smoking gun yet. But this is about culture, not a criminal conspiracy. Once a fringe subculture frames itself as existentially threatened, thus morally justified, taboo becomes a quaint relic. Radical violence is twisted and rationalized as “self-defense.” The LGBT cause, once rooted in appeals to universal rights, now reeks of revolutionary flatulence. It’s no longer about inclusion; it’s about the tribe arming itself for battle.

There’s a deliciously ironic twist to all this. The left, so recently in the business of mass firings, cancellations, and public shamings, is now tasting its own digested moral feces. When Charlie Kirk’s death spawned dancing-on-the-grave performance art, the right pounced. Using the left’s own 2020 playbook, they began exposing teachers, journalists, and others to their employers, who were rightly horrified to see what they’d actually hired, and how they reflected on the business or institution!

Behold! Cancel Culture 2.0. Hundreds, maybe thousands, were fired or disciplined for public statements once celebrated under the banner of “speaking truth to power.”

The joy with which I’ve watched this boomerang return is only slightly tempered by the understanding that it accelerates our downward spiral. This is why principle matters, whether or not it’s expedient. Sooner or later the mob changes hats and are eager for revenge. This week they’re showing as much empathy as was shown to Kirk’s family; precisely none.

I can’t help but take joy in it, despite myself.

Where does any of this leave us? Spinning in a vortex of informational anarchy, where trust, not just in institutions, but in each other, has been ground into dust. There are no common truths left, no common reality from which to discuss or debate, just warring tribes demanding their mythology be accepted under pain of excommunication or even execution.

We’ve entered the cold twilight of shared reality. I’ve been saying for years: Winter Is Here. I’m afraid, convinced really, that there’s no going back; that adaptation is all that’s left.

But here’s the warning looming over everything this weekl: when the rainbow flag mates with the rifle, when every grievance arms itself, the future isn’t civil rights or justice, it’s another front in the culture war. But now nobody’s even interested in peace.

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