[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
The idea of a reign of terror in the modern sense began with the first modern leftist revolution, the French Revolution. Not very long after they seized power, the French Revolutionaries began publicly executing all the critics of their new regime that they could find. Bertrand Barère, one of the leading French revolutionaries, exclaimed: “Let’s make terror the order of the day!” He and his colleague were only too happy to do so. And ever since then, the left has initiated a reign of terror every time it took power. It is attempting to do so even now, in the United States of America: the murder of Charlie Kirk was not just a barbaric act. It was a signal.
When the Bolsheviks established the Soviet Union, they initiated a reign of terror as well, first against the propertied classes of Russia, and even those who appeared to be relatively prosperous, and then against even founding Bolsheviks whom Stalin feared would be a threat to his absolute power. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn notes in The Gulag Archipelago that the Soviet regime even arrested innocent people and threw them into the gulag without regret or apology.
This was because the destruction of the lives of innocent people was not an accident; it was a core element of the communist regime’s hold on power. If ordinary citizens could never know whether or not they would be arrested on arbitrary, flimsy charges, or even on no charges at all, and that if they were arrested, the mistake would not be rectified, they knew they better toe the line in the most exact way possible, and hope that they didn’t run afoul of the authorities anyway. That’s what a reign of terror is all about: it’s designed to make the people too afraid to mount any resistance. The terrified populace knows that resistance will be met with such draconian, inhuman harshness that it doesn’t dare step out of line.
That’s the way the left has always operated, and that’s the way it operates today. Charlie Kirk is dead because he stood forthrightly and unapologetically for freedom, for America, for Judeo-Christian values, for sanity against delusion, for love against hate. That is all undeniable, however much leftists insist, as they always do, that he and his fellow patriots were and are the hateful ones.
In fact, the charges that Charlie Kirk was “hateful,” or “far-right,” or an “extremist” are all part of how the left’s reign of terror is currently operating in the U.S. His murder represents an escalation of the terror to the next level. The left’s first tactic was to terrorize the populace into submission by putting public dissidents on lists of “hate group leaders,” thereby severely limiting their reach and impact, and making people of good will too afraid to host them or listen to them.
The threat was clear: get out of line, and you, too, will be labeled a bigot, or a racist, or an Islamophobe, or a hatemonger, or all of the above. You’ll not only be publicly tarred with these labels and vilified accordingly, but you’ll suffer personally and professionally as a result. Many people who have been thus labeled have lost their jobs or been denied opportunities. They have lost friends, and even family members have cut them off from all contact. Others see their fate and realize that they cannot and must not get out of line. They learn to go along with the left’s lies: Islam is a religion of peace, socialism is benign and beneficial, the Covid vaccines are necessary and salutary, Rachel Levine and Caitlyn Jenner are females and should be referred to accordingly, on and on and on.
If all that social opprobrium fails, then, well, we all just saw what happened to Charlie Kirk. The signal was meant to be unmistakable: if you think you can start speaking out about what is true and right, and that your views will be given a fair hearing, think again. If you weren’t cowed by deplatforming, debanking, and public shaming and vilification, then you’ll quite simply be killed.
That’s the threat, anyway. But leftists will discover that they can’t kill us all. The more patriots who speak out and stand for the truth, heedless of their threats, the less assured the left’s victory becomes. Many have been saying that in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, we all have to become Charlie Kirks. Yes, we do. No one will do it for us. Our freedom is on the line. Let us stand now, for if we do not, we know exactly what the left has in store for us.
