They caught Charlie Kirk’s killer. We knew they would. And while I’m glad this murderer will face justice, I nonetheless don’t feel any better. Honestly, I don’t think most of us do.
If they showed his mugshot and it was Buffalo Bill or Hannibal the Cannibal, that would be something we could make more sense of. But we were shown exactly what all of us had predicted we would see. Tyler Robinson. A boring name. A boring person. Some puny geek granolahead barely old enough to shave, and with precisely zero amount of life experience from which he could glean a modicum of practical wisdom. He knows nothing about Abraham Lincoln or Saint Augustine other than they were obviously white supremacist transphobic fascists, but he can recite every word of Rage Against the Machine.
If ever there was a mere cog in that machine, it was Tyler Robinson.
In 1963, Hannah Arendt caused a ruckus by describing Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann as the “banality of evil” after the latter’s criminal trial in Israel. Her critics mistook her for downplaying Eichmann’s crimes, but they missed the point. Her point was that Eichmann was a monster…but he was also not a monster, at least not in the sense that we understand monsters. He wasn’t one of those humungous, sleeve-rolled, jackbooted SS thugs screaming and frothing and lashing his riding crop against the backs of quivering prisoners. He was a bureaucrat. An office dweeb. An educated, intelligent person. He moved millions of people to their deaths, not with a machine gun, but on paper.
Like most Nazis, Eichmann was not the goose-stepping automaton of Hollywood lore that simply “followed orders” without question. And yet he had convinced himself, methodically and patiently, that the logical course of action was mercilessly slaughtering his perceived “enemies.” All of them. Men, women, and children. He was absolutely certain that the Jews, no matter how unassuming, peaceful, or harmless, were an eternally mortal threat to his world. He walked to the gallows “knowing” beyond the shadow of any doubt that he was undeniably correct in every single one of his presuppositions.
The question is: how much was his ideology unconsciously shaped by societal indoctrination, and how much by the fact that all this was what he wanted to believe?
Likewise, watching the videos and reading the statements of teachers, doctors, businessmen, government workers, and college students react with savage, mocking glee at the murder of Charlie Kirk, I don’t see neat rectangles of crisply dressed drones, marching in lockstep and simply “following orders.” I see highly motivated, frenzied, bloodthirsty cult members who would slash your kids’ throats in front of you if they felt they could get away with it. And in doing so, they would have completely convinced themselves that they were taking the moral high road. They aren’t robots. They want to believe this.
To use Ward Churchill’s phrase much more accurately than that fake Indian plagiarist hack ever did, they’re a bunch of “little Eichmanns.”
And they walk among us.
So while I’m glad they caught the very banal Tyler Robinson, that’s just one of them. One. How many American citizens agree with their until-very-recently-employed cohorts rejoicing online, but retain enough of a sense of job security to not publicly broadcast it? At least not yet?
Are there thousands of them? Millions? Who knows? Much like members of terrorist groups, most of them don’t self-identify until the bullets start flying. And maybe a significant number of them wouldn’t be willing to pull the trigger themselves. But they also wouldn’t object to one of their more impulsive fellow ideologues doing it.
If you’re looking to send chills down your spine, there is an excellent book by Jan Gross. It’s the historical account of Jedwabne, a town in Poland that was occupied by Nazis. On a single day in July 1941, over 1600 Jews were brutally massacred. But not by the Nazis. Rather, they were tortured and murdered by their fellow villagers, their coworkers, their schoolmates, the people they’d spoken to every day of their lives, the people who until the day before had been assumed to be friends.
The ongoing massacre got so berserk and out of hand that the Gestapo forces patrolling the village had to step in and put a halt to it. Let me repeat that. The Nazi secret police had to stop the Jedwabne townspeople from being overly harsh to the Jews.
The book is called Neighbors.
We have neighbors. Lots of them. Are they more like Charlie Kirk? Or are they more like Tyler Robinson? The schoolteacher entrusted every day with your kid’s wellbeing…did she react with horror or sadistic joy at Kirk’s murder? How about the Uber driver taking your spouse to the airport? How about the doctor responsible for properly diagnosing you? How about the kindly gent next door who waves to you as he mows his lawn? How would they react if they knew you were a conservative? Would they secretly pine for your murder?
We caught Tyler Robinson. One.
On our grandparents’ watch, on our parents’ watch, and on our watch, we let this nation arrive at the crossroads we always told ourselves we would never let it reach. We watch the World War II documentaries and wonder aloud how Germany ever let itself get to the state it did in 1933.
Now we know. A lack of vigilance. A lack of urgency. A creeping normalization and tolerance of our oppressors. And a naïve assumption, strengthened by the brief post-9/11 patriotism and subsequent MAGA victories, that our nation’s virtue would sustain itself on its own recognizance. What happens in other places could never happen here, we thought. Including me.
But it did.
The pathway to a peaceful resolution to all this grows narrower literally by the hour. The sociopathic left has dragged this country to the edge of the abyss, and it only gets darker as we descend into it. I have no idea how we collectively deprogram millions of avid cultists without unleashing a civil war, one which its instigators foolishly think they’ll easily win, and one which will leave this magnificent nation a bloody wasteland of chaos and destruction the likes of which we cannot fathom.
God help us.
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