Richard Landes (“Heaven On Earth”) has traced the trajectory of apocalyptic millennial movements. Apocalyptic millennialism promotes the narrative that is fundamental to the ideologies of Marxists/leftists. Landes noted that when an apocalyptic millennial movement begins to fail then disillusioned followers of the movement become desperate and double down, much like Tim Walz stated a while back at a rally, “We Democrats have to double down on Woke”. Some even make the shift to the “exterminate or be exterminated” phase. They move to desperate measures. Anything now goes to save the crusade, to keep it going. We are also seeing this “doubling down” in desperation with the climate alarmism crusade.
Note the article below reporting on surveys showing political violence may be a “bothsideism” issue, with perhaps a shift to the left recently.
This latest from Michael Shellenberger:
“Left’s Dehumanization Of MAGA Behind Rising Support For Violence: Decrying Charlie Kirk’s assassination isn’t enough”, Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, Sep 11, 2025
https://www.public.news/p/lefts-dehumanization-of-maga-behind
Shellenberger and Gutentag, along with others, argue that the dehumanization/demonization of conservatives over past decades as “far-right, Nazis, fascists” has produced the current climate that legitimizes and validates violence against such people.
“The environment that led to Kirk’s death was created by the Left in its decades-long demonization and dehumanization of conservatives. For 80 years, schools, universities, and the media have used Hitler, Nazism, and fascism as symbols of ultimate evil. To call someone a “Nazi,” “fascist,” or “far-Right,” is therefore to imply that they are part of this evil, and like the historical Nazis, must be eliminated. Over the last 10 years, not just the radical Left but the mainstream news media, including the New York Times, and mainstream Democrats like Newsom, repeatedly characterized Trump and his supporters as Hitler-adjacent fascists. The New Republic openly depicted Trump as Hitler.”
They add that this was part of a deliberate dehumanization campaign and progressives who believe that opponents like Kirk are a dangerous threat to democracy now feel justified in killing such evil threats. The authors say that the Left hates Kirk for challenging their beliefs on gender, race, and feminism.
“The Left cannot tolerate these challenges to its worldview, so it resorts to censorship and silencing.” And those who cannot be censored must now be eliminated by assassination.
Shellenberger and Gutentag conclude: “It’s simply not good enough for Democratic politicians like Newsom and news media outlets like the New York Times, who spent the last decade dehumanizing millions of their fellow citizens, including Trump and Kirk, to simply say that they shouldn’t be killed. If they truly oppose political violence, they should apologize for their relentless false accusations of racism and bigotry, and they should try to make amends by humanizing conservatives. The media, Democrats, and the wider Left must stop portraying MAGA supporters, who have Christian, nationalist, and conservative views, as equivalent to Nazis and fascists through the use of loaded terms like ‘far-Right’.”
Along with ceasing the dehumanization of opponents as ultimate evil, leftists need to stop the demonization Western civilization as corrupt and evil.
(End of Shellenberger/Gutentag article)
And this comment from “Efferous”:
“The single biggest facilitator in all of it is the leftist media. They’ve profited for decades on controlling and steering the narrative with little or no consequence to themselves.”
Insert: I appreciate the effort made by Jimmy Kimmel, among many others, to decry violence following the senseless murder of Charlie Kirk.
He said, “Instead of the angry finger-pointing, can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human?… On behalf of my family, we send love to the Kirks and to all the children, parents and innocents who fall victim to senseless gun violence.”
Yes, not “finger-pointing”, but we should constantly be trying to understand the main contributing factors to violence across history, why it constantly erupts among us, what feeds it, what things incite and validate our worst impulses to resort to violence toward one another.
This site is committed to understanding and explaining such things as the narrative themes that have been uncovered as the main contributing influences to some of the worst outbreaks of violence across past millennia, notably in the last century in the mass-death crusades of Marxism, Nazism, and now environmental alarmism.
Bad ideas/beliefs have been exposed for inciting and validating the unleashing of tribal hatred against differing others, for inciting/validating the impulse to crush, vanquish, and dominate the differing other, and for inciting and validating the impulse to vengefully destroy the differing other that we demonize and dehumanize as an evil threat to our world and therefore to “save the world” we must exterminate that threat.
We know better today the psychopathologies behind violence. It is our responsibility to respond, to make the changes required, and show that we will take the actions necessary to lessen and remove the curse of violence from our societies.
This on the spread of support for assassination culture:
“The left embraces the ‘assassination culture’ that Charlie Kirk warned about: Progressives are celebrating his murder all over social media”, Michael Murphy, Sep 11, 2025
Murphy says that Charlie Kirk grasped that point that “If people cannot debate differences of opinion in a civil and robust manner, violence has, throughout history and with alarming speed, shown itself to be the logical next step.” And he was murdered for the crime of “encouraging open debate”.
Murphy notes that there are many on the left who have “for years hysterically demonized mainstream conservatives as ‘literal Nazis’.” And most people have been taught from childhood that the only appropriate response to Nazis is uncompromising force to crush and eliminate.
He continues, showing reports that state a growing number of Americans now think that political murder is justified, “More than half of left-leaning respondents agreed it would be at least ‘somewhat justified’ to kill Donald Trump, while 48 per cent said the same for Elon Musk.”
Kirk had said just months ago, “Assassination culture is spreading on the left… This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end. The cowardice of local prosecutors and school officials have turned the left into a ticking time bomb.”
Murphy adds, “Progressive lawmakers and unruly activists have, wittingly or otherwise, created a culture of permissiveness around political violence,” and he notes how left-wing activists swooned over Luigi Mangione after he murdered a health insurance CEO.
He then states that the growing acceptance of political assassination by leftists is “the last gasp of an ‘ancien régime’ trying to claw back legitimacy through violence.”
Murphy concludes: “Those who promiscuously accuse others of Nazism while excusing murder are neither kind nor compassionate. They are engineering a culture of political violence. Beneath the nose piercings and the “trauma” and the university degrees, they are modern-day brownshirts.”
“Michael Murphy is a journalist based in London. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and presented the documentary ‘Ireland is full! Anti-immigration backlash in Ireland’. You can follow him on X: @michaelmurph_y.”
The battle for freedom never ceases, Wendell Krossa
The assault on liberal democracy freedom comes from varied places today. There is the Islamic immigration where a significant percentage of migrating people hate liberal democracies, and as stated by one spokesperson in Britain, “We are coming, not to take part, but to take over” with hopes of turning Western liberal democracies into Islamic theocracies. See the report below on the Muslim Brotherhood statement of this project to overturn liberal democracy. This illustrates the failures of “multi-culturalism” policies that do not insist that immigrants embrace the principles of liberal democracy.
And there is the “red” element in the loose “red/green” cooperation, again noted in articles below. Statements by Chinese leadership of their “long game” approach to bringing down Western liberal democracy by such projects as “the long march through the institutions”, infiltrating universities to indoctrinate new generations of Western youth. And they have succeeded with, for example, some 50%-plus of US youth now preferring socialism as the way to organize society. Add the success of majority support for Marxist candidate Mamdani in the New York mayor race.
The response of all who value freedom? Make clear Thomas Sowell’s “test of facts”. The outcomes of the differing approaches to organizing human societies. Teach your children well. Tell them of the past century and the 24 failed socialist experiments that led to the murder of over 100 million people and destroyed every society that it touched. Look carefully at one of the latest experiments of Marxism/socialism in Venezuela, a resource-rich country that was once one of the wealthiest on the planet.
Hugo Chavez promised that his experiment in socialism would be different, as socialists repeatedly promise after every failed experiment. The next one will be different. We just need another chance to prove that our approach is the best. See Kristian Niemietz’s history of these 24 repeated failures over the past century in “Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies”.
And tell your children of the successes of liberal democracy based on Classic Liberal principles, systems of common law, and representative institutions. How it led to billions lifted out of poverty and provided the environment for free people to create all that we value in life today- i.e. lessening violence, improved human well-being, and the ability to care for nature (with ever-increasing wealth) as never before in history.
Encourage your children to read these good sources:
Arthur Herman’s “The Idea of Decline in Western History” and “The Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization”, Joshua Muravchik’s “Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism”, Richard Landes’ “Heaven On Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience”, Arthur Mendel’s “Vision and Violence”, Daniel Hannan’s “Inventing Freedom”, Julian Simon’s “Ultimate Resource”, and so much more comparative research on which approach to organizing human society accomplishes “the most good for the most people”.
Added note: Responsibility for what we promote in public. There are good ideas and there are bad ideas.
The narrative themes that we promote have a powerful influence on people in real life. Bad narrative themes incite and validate our worst impulses, notably the evil triad of tribalism, domination, and vengeful destruction of differing and competing others. We know exactly which ideas/themes these are.
Or narrative themes can counter these animal impulses (i.e. non-retaliation, non-violence, love your enemy) with ideas/themes that inspire and affirm our better angels.
This is fact and has been outlined carefully by historians like Riichard Landes, Arthur Mendel, David Redles, Arthur Herman, and others. They detail with historical evidence how bad ideas/beliefs have incited too much bad behavior among people. And get this- the bad ideas they uncover are “religious ideas”. These ideas (notably, “apocalyptic millennialism”) incited and validated the Marxist and Nazi mass-death crusades across the last century and now shape the environmental alarmism crusade.
This has all been documented with careful historical detail. See the sources listed just above.
We are all responsible for the themes that we embrace and promote in public. Our narrative themes impact/influence real people, especially those susceptible to literalism and extremism, pushing them toward actual violence.
Some have noted this with the transgender activist movement whose members have been told that they are victims suffering genocidal assault and so must act with desperate measures to save their world.
This article reports on surveys that show both right and left are likely to turn to violence to “save our country”.
“Charlie Kirk was a private citizen. His assassination puts us all in peril: May we all live long enough to see a world in which politics matter far less”, J. D. Tuccille, Sept. 12, 2025
Quotes from article:
“Charlie Kirk’s whole role was to debate and persuade young people through his Turning Point USA organization. He was shot at Utah Valley University while speaking at a Prove Me Wrong event that allowed his opponents to challenge him and discuss differences of opinion. The only harm he could have done was by voicing his beliefs and, perhaps, changing some minds. That is, Kirk was almost certainly assassinated for no other reason than that his murderer disagreed with his ideas…
“Over the years, political violence has targeted people and property associated with both the political left and the political right. More recently, researchers worked from the assumption that the right is more likely to turn to force than the left. Polling in April 2024 by PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist found that one in five “U.S. adults believe Americans may have to resort to violence to get their own country back on track.” That sentiment was held by 28 per cent of Republicans, 18 per cent of independents, and 12 per cent of Democrats, supporting the received wisdom. But a lot can change in a few months.
“Since that poll, we’ve seen numerous violent incidents, an election that overturned control of the White House, and growing political frustration. Something seemed to shift in the American psyche…
“Surveying attendees at progressive demonstrations in Washington, D.C., American University’s Professor Dana R. Fisher found a surprising number — 33 per cent of those at the People’s March in January and 35 per cent at the Stand Up for Science rally in March – thought “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” She commented, “Left-leaning Americans participating in peaceful, legally permitted demonstrations are starting to believe that political violence will be necessary to save America.”…
“After the assassination of Brian Thompson, The Network Contagion Research Institute and the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab reported “widespread justification for lethal violence — including assassination — among younger, highly online, and ideologically left-aligned users.” The report warned, “online normalization of political violence may increasingly translate into offline action.”
“Nobody has found evidence that the right has become less violent, but the assassination of Kirk is further evidence that the left is at least as prone to use force if not more so.”