This week, my friend Charlie Kirk was murdered in cold blood in front of a crowd of thousands at Utah Valley University. He was assassinated while debating with students -- something Charlie did frequently, and with aplomb -- by a radicalized leftist with a trans boyfriend. That assassin decided to kill Charlie because of Charlie's belief that men cannot become women, and vice versa; as he allegedly wrote in a text message to that trans boyfriend, "I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be negotiated out. If I am able to grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence."
I was in Los Angeles when Charlie was shot. My first reaction was shock; my second, horror; and my third, the realization that the shooting was almost certainly the result of a radicalized leftist, probably associated with transgender ideology. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we all have such reactions upon learning of acts of evil: We jump to the most likely conclusion about the source of that evil. If a synagogue is targeted in a mass shooting, the suspect will almost certainly be either a radical Muslim or a white supremacist; if a church is targeted, a radical Muslim or a trans activist; if a CEO is shot, a Marxist radical of some sort. There is a reason for such suppositions: Not all ideologies are equally likely to produce violence at the margins.
Ideologies that breed violence share three specific elements.
First, they share a conspiratorial view of the universe in which a shadowy cabal of powerful people are responsible for all of your failures and shortcomings, and in which their arguments are not in fact arguments, but instead, a la Michel Foucault, a facade for power.
Second, such ideologies share a belief that you or your group are being targeted for destruction by that shadowy cabal.
Finally, such ideologies hold that violence is justifiable self-defense.
All the ideologies listed above fit this model. Trans ideology argues that trans people are victims of a conspiracy -- a conspiracy to deny their identity; that such denial is responsible for all their life problems and amounts to a form of "erasure" or "genocide"; and that the proper response to such "hate" is violence. Radical Marxism argues that poor people are victims of a conspiracy of the wealthy, who exploit them; arguments on behalf of free markets are merely false consciousness promoted by the powerful; violence is therefore an appropriate response ("FREE LUIGI!"). White supremacy argues that whites are being targeted by people of color, Jews, and other minorities and fellow travelers; their very existence is a threat, and force is thus a justifiable response. Radical Islam argues that the failures of Islamic civilization are due to imperialism and colonialism; that the success of the West is inherently violent; and that violence is the proper response.
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When politicians say, therefore, that they are against "political violence" but then move to justify violence by massaging these ideologies, their words are useless. They are a prettification of reality, an attempt to gloss over radical evils gnawing at the intestines of a functional society. Even worse, politicians who continue to foment such ideologies provide a permission structure for violence, excusing it and even valorizing it.
The only way to truly fight political violence is to denounce the ideologies that breed it. Anything less means that more radicals take their ideologies to the logical extreme -- and the result is blood in the streets, innocents dead and an ever-widening cycle of violence.
Ben Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of "The Ben Shapiro Show," and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author. To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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