In 2015, a group of Jihadist terrorists massacred the editors and writers at the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Why? Because they had mocked Mohammad, and that, to them, was blasphemy. It was worthy of death. Who would have ever thought we’d arrive somewhere close to that in 2025, when not one but two different assassins who had been Republican but then were radicalized on the Left amid 2020 and lockdowns to climb atop rooftops and take aim at the blasphemers?
The Left has yet to reckon with what’s happened in this country because Charlie Kirk was on the Right and from their perspective, a blasphemer. We might as well not dance around that. He was punished for words, nothing more than that, just as Charlie Hebdo was punished for satire. There is no difference there. In both cases, sacred symbols were violated and revenge had to be taken.
It’s just that they won’t see it that way because Tyler Robinson grew up in a Republican household. It’s clear from his texts and his recent politics (per his parents) that he was very much on the Left, in a gay relationship with a tortured young man who dabbled with transitioning for a time. Maybe Robinson was quietly seeking revenge on his own family, but his motive in killing Charlie is clear. He stated it in text messages with his lover.
Their texts are loving, romantic even.
Note the use of the word “hate.” Does that sound familiar?
It is what Amanda Seyfried said about Charlie Kirk after his murder.
She claims he “incited violence,” but he never did. She can’t find one example of that, not that she would ever bother trying. And honestly, she might as well say the same thing to the journalists at Charlie Hebdo. You can’t pick and choose when to silence thought and speech. Or when your own personal beliefs are sacred and can’t be criticized or mocked.
No one who knew Charlie Kirk would describe him as hateful. He was, in fact, the opposite. He only wanted to debate people and yes, sometimes he said things people would find offensive. Just as the cartoons at Charlie Hebdo were deeply offensive. That doesn’t mean they were violent or hateful. Amanda Seyfried is wrong.
The word “hate” was used again by Tyler Robinson’s defense lawyer. So you tell me – Robinson, Seyfried and everyone on the Left, from AOC to Barack Obama, insisted Charlie said “hateful things,” and then that was echoed in the courtroom. Don’t think the prosecutor did not notice.
One of Hollywood’s biggest problems is that they’ve not only become disconnected from reality, but they can’t use words the way we all used to. No word is safe from being co-opted and nothing means what it really means anymore. They’ve adopted soft language to describe things that might be painful, like “rehoming a pet” or “unhoused people” or “Gender Affirming Care.” But at the same time, they’ve distorted important words like rapist, rapist, fascist, pedophile, criminal, dictator, Nazi and yes, HATE.
Why? Because online, that’s all they have: words. Words as weapons to fight their war. That is, until they started picking up guns. Political violence is now suddenly a Leftist thing, but do you think, for one second, Hollywood will ever get anywhere near telling that story? No. They are too afraid. They have been cowed into silence. It is blasphemous to mock or criticize a sacred marginalized group.
Je Suis Charlie
We Are Charlie Kirk
Hate should mean the emotion all of them feel when they think about Charlie Kirk, MAGA, or anyone who disagrees with their strident worldview. They hate me. They know what it means. Yet they must project that onto a guy who was never defined by hate, not even to people who called him a racist to his face and mocked his looks. That’s what dehumanization looks like, and it’s why they celebrate his death with impunity.
But hate stopped meaning hate a long time ago. It began in the 1990s with “love is love.” That was used to warm people up to the idea of gay marriage.
That meant if “love is love,” then “hate” would be the opposite. It wouldn’t describe what people actually feel, what the word really means, as in I HATE YOU! Instead, it meant: you are against gay marriage. That expanded as the movement expanded. Hate means any kind of pushback at all against any of the LGBTQIA ideology. And “love” means you go along with it.
Amanda Seyfried hated Charlie Kirk because the small sound bites she saw of him expressed the worst things he ever said, cherry-picked and stripped of context. This is how the dehumanizing machine works on social media. It’s why everyone thought I was a “racist” or a “bigot.” If you take what people say out of context and turn it into a political weapon, it becomes something less than human. This is what the legacy media, the Democrats, and Hollywood have done with Trump and his supporters for ten years.
I had to escape that feedback loop, watch his rallies for myself, and get the fuller picture of who he is and who his supporters are. I had to wrestle with the idea of humanity being stripped away from people I didn’t know. They do it on the Right, too. People are people, and power is a funny thing. Dehumanization, however, is never the right path. For an entire industry that dominates culture to be in the business of dehumanization makes it dangerous and violent.
Once you sell the idea that Charlie Kirk spread “hate” or said “hateful things,” then you have given a permission structure for violence. That’s not rocket science. But even still, after he was shot, that was the moment to step back and look at the bigger picture of where we are in history, and no one in Hollywood has been able to do that lest they get attacked by the same kinds of people who wanted Charlie Kirk to be silenced, and yes, even if that meant his death. They wish the same thing for Trump.
That is what hate looks like in practice, real hate. Charlie Kirk talked to people. He debated them. He had traditional religious beliefs, nothing shocking unless you were indoctrinated into the fundamentalist cult that the Left has become. He wanted to listen, debate, and hopefully change minds. But hate was not what Charlie was about, and anyone who says that about him is either a liar or ignorant.
Losing your humanity is not good for you, let alone society. I realized this was happening ten years ago and I have been writing about it ever since. It hasn’t done me any good. I’ve felt their wrath and worry at night, every night, when I go to sleep that someone might decide to, you know, take me out too.
One of the reasons I blew up my so-called career was that I didn’t want to play the game people have to play in China under a Communist government, where you have to say what you really think and feel in secret. Why, I wondered, has the Left I grew up with become the side that demands conformity and polices thought and speech? So I just decided I wasn’t going to do that anymore. I would speak the truth and let the chips fall where they may.
What I found was the unleashing of people who are so consumed by hate that they could no longer even see me as a human being, and for many of them, a friend they’d known for years. They find ways of justifying it, of course. If you don’t support the Democrats, then you are hurting them specifically or their families or eliminating their rights, etc. But that’s not really true. It’s emotional blackmail to preserve power. Deep down, they know I’m still the same person, but dehumanizing me makes them feel better about their hatred towards me. And so it goes with Charlie Kirk.
We are all thrown together now in one big humanity soup online. We’re all trying to find our tribes, find consensus and get along. It isn’t going well. But to not feel the impact of not just Charlie’s assassination, but three assassination attempts on Trump’s life means we’ve turned a corner and lost something it might take us a long time to get back, if we ever will.
Hollywood can’t tell this story because they can’t really tell any story about our modern age unless it appeals to those who exist inside their insular world, who believe what they believe and see the country the way they do, in a good/evil binary. Yes, it’s shocking that even a political assassination by someone who uses the same words to describe Charlie Kirk didn’t wake them up to what has happened to this country.
Ari Aster is supposedly making a Charlie Kirk-adjacent film soon. I’ll withhold judgment until I see for myself but in a way, I already know how this ends because it is verboten to humanize people who sit on the other side.
Before you say Charlie was “full of hate” or “hateful,” you should watch some of his videos and decide for yourself if that’s true.
If you want to make the argument that you can’t even handle debate because it is offensive or “hateful,” I’m not sure Hollywood or book publishing or comedy or anything under the control of the Left will ever be free to tell any kind of truth.
Up in Telluride, I am told, when Amanda Seyfried showed up in Nathan Fielder and Noah Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything and said, “I stand by what I said,” the crowd erupted in applause. She thinks we should be worried because she had to hire bodyguards, or that her speech was threatened in any way. I just want to say to them, do you listen to yourself?
Credit: Source link