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As prominent Democrats like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were offering condolences and grace in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk yesterday, the usual ugly side of the modern-day Left emerged quickly behind. I wasn’t all of them. Plenty remained silent. They said nothing. They hate Charlie Kirk with every fiber of their being, but somewhere deep down there is still a tiny kernel of humanity left that made them think, maybe I will just say nothing.
Far too many of them, however, were out in force, surfing the algorithm for likes, driving the hate tsunami characteristic of the side with all of the power that is now losing that power as their empire slowly collapses. It’s a hard thing to watch, but you can’t stop what’s coming.
I first detected the hate back in 2020. It felt like thick, oily sludge in my veins. It made me almost sick. What am I doing, I thought. What am I participating in? What is this? It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in all of the 30 years I’ve been online. It was sustained, unending, bottomless hate and rage all aimed at one man and his supporters.
It was unusual to me because so much of it revolved around his hands, his dick size, his weight, his hair, his skin, his family, his words, his jokes, his music choices, and his taste. It was “Two Minutes of Hate” Orwell style every second of every day.
Orwell had it so right. He predicted what would become of our utopia, one we didn’t even realize we were building. Once that utopia was threatened, as it was in 2016, that was the moment our movement began to collapse.
Like everyone else in 2020, I was emotionally bereft. I only had social media because we were locked down, and yet every time I logged on, it was that tsunami of hate. At some point, I could take it, and I began to pull away. I’d already been the target of hate for years by then. At some point, right around the time Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was called “racist,” and then later, with Green Book, I began speaking out. That made me a target. As the hive mind on Twitter became more fascist (yes, fascist) and mandated everyone use the “correct” language and have the “correct” thoughts, I began to push back.
I remember organizing a podcast with Oscar bloggers at some point. But I was the target of a bullying swarm, and almost all of them backed off because they were afraid of the Eye of Sauron (or Big Brother) falling upon them. It was sticking up for someone accused of assault, or JK Rowling or whatever it was — all of it under the category of “thought crimes.” Orwell, again.
For me, I had to know how much of what I was being told to believe was actually true. Did I really share this country with that many “Nazis” and “racists”? If they were calling me a racist, a white supremacist, and a transphobe, among the usual slurs — ugly, old, fat, etc — then maybe what they said about the rest of America wasn’t true either. What I found was that we’d built a 1984-like “inside” that abandoned most of the America “outside.”
Trump supporters and many on the Right are what America used to look like before the internet, before the Obama coalition, before utopia. We just forgot that it exists, but it does exist. Our utopia, we believed, was America. But it wasn’t. They might be Christians. They might not have gone to universities, and they’ve long since stopped watching movies and television shows pushed out by Hollywood. But that doesn’t make them evil.
Once I knew this, that we were awash in madness and delusion on the “inside,” I didn’t know what to do with that information. Speak out, speak honestly, and risk career annihilation, or suffer in silence. Say nothing. I decided that I didn’t want to live in a country where one group told me what I had to believe, what I had to say, what I had to think, OR ELSE. That is fascism.
Fascism is a system of power that demands conformity and compliance. Sound familiar? Can you imagine what would happen if people just started saying what they really thought, even if it might offend some people? Remember Black Mirror before the Great Awokening? Remember Nose Dive? It was the right message at the wrong time. It is the formula for how to survive right now. A world where people are free to say offensive things, and may the best argument win, is better than a world trapped inside some kind of social credit system, where you can be locked out.
I love Nose Dive and I wish Black Mirror — and Netflix writ large – and Hollywood write large — were still able to scratch at the surface and get to the truth. THE TRUTH, not the manufactured delusion everyone wants to be true.
The people with the power have the power to destroy. That doesn’t mean Trump’s administration is not overreaching or that there aren’t free speech issues, but no one’s career will be destroyed overnight for criticizing Trump. Neither side is perfect or even “good.” Each party, like each person, is a combination of good and bad. We wrestle with our better angels every day.
But totalitarianism is dangerous. It has destroyed American culture, which is trying to pull itself out now. The reason it isn’t happening faster is that the hive mind online still has them — the people at the top — by the balls. And as the famous line goes, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.
The death of Charlie Kirk has reminded me of where the Left has arrived with ten years of mass hysteria, a ten-year dehumanization campaign against half the country, ten years of having a movement largely rooted in online spaces, ten years of algorithms, platforms, and likes has gotten them. It’s taken them to a similar place we arrived in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
If you live through assassinations and then the Manson murders, you start to change your mind. It’s not as catastrophic as a world war to bring a society to its knees, but it’s close enough to red pill a country, which is what is already happening.
The Right doesn’t have ongoing fantasies about anyone on the Left dying. Here is a video of people on TikTok fantasizing about what they would do “when it happens,” aka when Trump dies.
And here is a video of people urging someone to “just do it,” which means Trump being killed. So, needless to say, in a fascist country, such speech would not be allowed. They have nothing to worry about, of course, because our culture supports their ongoing hatred and dehumanization.
Here is a video of that weekend when so many of them falsely believed Trump had died.
It was like a fantasy that reached levels of euphoria that were almost sexual.
What would drive them to this point? They’re probably decent people, right? You could blame the algorithms. You could blame social media. You could blame the media for their constant cycle of sending out the worst about the other side (both sides do that). But ultimately, it comes down to your own common decency. You heart. Do you still have one? Do you have your humanity intact? Here are some people who do.
What would drive young college-aged women to creepy through the Hollywood Hills and butcher the rich, then draw words on the walls to start an imaginary race war? What would cause Susan Atkins to stare down Sharon Tate and stab her in her pregnant stomach? Dehumanization, self-pity, and sociopathy. A toxic combo, to be sure. We’re almost there now.
The Left can’t absorb it because for ten years, they’re used to demonizing the Right as the extremists. They caught a lucky break with January 6th to provide them with the perfect piece of propaganda. But the truth is more complicated, as the brilliant Niall Ferguson talks about in this interview with Charlie Rose (yes, the man is still alive):
All that’s required is a tiny bit of critical thinking and a willingness to escape the mass delusion of this supervillain the Left invented. It is entirely their fault, the Democrats, that they could not and did not defeat Trump. They had four years under Biden to show the American people they could lead this country. They failed. The election was a disaster for them. But just as they, we, did not learn the lessons of 2016, they did not learn the lesson of 2024.
It isn’t that the Left or the Democrats are responsible for Charlie Kirk’s death. I don’t know who is. But I do know their response to it will red-pill a lot of people because it will be easier and easier to see who they have become in their ten-year odyssey to stop a person who doesn’t exist except in their collective imaginations.
How do you reward this, support it, justify it, then turn around and pretend you’re the good guys? The worst thing you can say about Donald Trump or Charlie Kirk must be followed with “and they deserve to be shot and killed for that.”
To justify their dehumanization, they do what they always do. They imagine things and then convict people in their minds. Because the legacy media rarely challenge them on any of it or call them out on any of it, they are never motivated to try to change. That gives people like me no choice but to run screaming away from them. I am not alone in this.
They repeat all of their beliefs like a mantra handed down from a cult, and they force everyone to follow those rules, and if you break even one of them, out you go. The crazy reality is that they’ve been misusing the word fascism to describe, say, Charlie Kirk when their behavior towards Charlie Kirk or anyone who doesn’t obey their doctrine looks a lot more like fascism.
One Battle After Another, Sinners and the Best Picture Race
Political violence is the kind of thing that sometimes sits well and sometimes doesn’t. Around the time that Joker was released, there was a mass shooting. I remember when Django Unchained was released, there was another mass shooting. So many of them have inspired the Left to blame only guns — but they’ve also blamed movies, Joker being one of them. What they will never address, none of us will, is why there are so many lonely, isolated men who feel the need to kill so many people — children — just to have someone see them, notice them, give their lives purpose. It’s a horrifying state of affairs, and taking away guns won’t solve the problem. A woman was just murdered on a train with a knife, for instance.
That said, both of these films are films that feature some kind of spray of gunfire or vigilantism, which is kind of funny when you juxtapose it against the gun debate, but I digress. Both of them fulfill the needs of the left’s collective rage and aim their rage at the right targets — Sean Penn as a white supremacist in One Battle, and Southern crackers in Sinners.
Both of these archetypes are rooted in reality, especially Sinners. It takes a page from the life of Robert Johnson, whose stepfather was a successful farmer and was chased off his land and forced to change his name and live in the city. There is no question that there has been a history of racism in this country.
The problem is that Hollywood and the Left believe half the country is racists and white supremacists, so when someone they view that way, Charlie Kirk, is assassinated, it will make them feel a certain way. That means it might disrupt the Oscar race in unintended ways. For instance, in 1968 Oliver! won. It seems an odd winner to have won that year. But if you look at that era, you’ll see how things calmed down after 1968 dramatically:
I mean, it almost seems like a totally different country, doesn’t it? Hello, Dolly? By the 1970s, the rage dampened into hopelessness and despair, making for some of the greatest films ever made and the best era for the Oscars.
With dogma and doctrine blanketing Hollywood now, leaving little wiggle room for truth-telling, you are stuck in a binary of “those people over there are bad and we are good.” I’ve even seen people try to stuff Weapons into this category -making Trump a Gladys-like figure. He is the sum total of their collective sins. He’s been everything else, so why not make him a witch too? Seems fitting.
There is no way out of this mess. The Left isn’t going to fix itself. They believe their very existence is at stake now, just because the pendulum is swinging away from them, and America wants to change. Whether or not Hollywood can keep up with that change is the real question. They don’t really have to change because they’ll always have streaming to fall back on.
All I can hope is that One Battle and Sinners and Weapons can exist on their own without becoming “weapons” for the Left. I won’t hold my breath. Don’t be surprised if the movie that wins, though, is Hamnet. Just saying.
