In America, Violence Arises When Cultural Power Shifts

I grew up in an age of assassinations. The President, John F. Kennedy, was gunned down in 1963, when I was nine years old. His brother, Robert Kennedy, was killed five years later, little more than a month after I saw him at a campaign event in my home town. That was the same month Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. Malcolm X had been killed three years before.

Americans often speak proudly of our peaceful transitions of power, but that is because we are only thinking in terms of political power. Yes, compared to the violence that often accompanied the change of rulers in imperial Rome or medieval England, our transfers of leadership are relatively tranquil. Our system of free elections circumvents the need for violent revolution.

But in a democratic republic, political power is bestowed by the people, and the ideas of the people are shaped by the culture. When cultural power changes hands in the U.S., that’s when the shooting starts. The Civil War did not begin because Abraham Lincoln threatened to free the slaves. He didn’t. The war began because his election telegraphed to the slave states that the tide of the culture was shifting against them.

The 1960s marked the dawn of another such shift. A leftward swing was in the making, a rebellion against the post-war consensus. New voices were rising in the academies and in the arts, voices that challenged the efficacy of capitalism, the treatment of minorities, the roles of women, and traditional norms of language, behavior, and dress. It was as that shift was forming, that leaders who spoke even moderately of change began to seem threatening, that rhetoric became inflated and incendiary, and that dealing death began to seem a reasonable political action in the worst of minds. It didn’t work. If anything, it destroyed reasonable leaders like the Kennedys and MLK, and allowed them to be replaced by radicals and grifters.

Today is also such a time.

For at least the last thirty years, American culture has been all but monopolized by the Left. The news media are almost exclusively located in left-wing coastal enclaves. Journalists’ political donations go to Democrats by a huge margin. The news coverage of Donald Trump’s largely moderate policies is relentlessly negative, not to mention hysterical, childish, and absurd. In Hollywood, outspoken conservatives are vanishingly rare. Those less entrenched than, say, Clint Eastwood and Jon Voight keep their mouths shut and, when they don’t, it hobbles their careers. In the academies, conservative speakers are routinely greeted by demonstrations and violence. Liberal arts courses are no longer liberal: they are indoctrination centers where leftist critical theory drowns out the voices of classic writers and thinkers of the past.

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Only such a cultural monopoly could have spread the radical ideas of the left and bullied businesses and citizens into pretending to believe their ridiculous untruths. People can’t change sex. Dysfunction in black communities is caused by black culture, not racism. Women have grown steadily unhappier under feminism. Homosexuality is not a source of pride. Facts are not hate speech, and what some may call hate speech is protected under the First Amendment. These are not bigoted, mean, radical opinions. To those who break through the fog of leftist narrative, there are obvious conclusions drawn from the evidence of our own eyes. The years in which the Left was able to declare these self-evident truths unspeakable were years of cultural tyranny.

But now, the leftist cultural monopoly is crumbling. New media — like the Daily Wire, Elon Musk’s X, and the Megyn Kelly and Joe Rogan podcasts — have risen to prominence in spite of widespread attempts by the government and social media outlets to censor us, demonize us, and starve us out. We have not yet developed the cultural power of radical left-wing institutions like the New York Times, Yale University, and Disney, but we are able to debunk the distortions of those institutions almost as fast as they can produce them.

On the night Donald Trump was re-elected, it was immediately evident that the tide had turned. The ceaseless news stories calling Trump an authoritarian, the banana republic lawfare with which the powerful tried to imprison him, the media-wide (and mordantly hilarious) attempts to depict first Joe Biden then Kamala Harris as viable presidential candidates — all these strategies and more were not enough to create a narrative the majority of voters would believe. Like the American Revolutionaries who inspired us, our ragtag band of culture warriors had beaten back an Empire of Lies.

Charlie Kirk was the next generation of that effort. He believed in God, in family, and in American liberty, things that most Americans have believed for nearly 250 years. He utilized techniques of open debate pioneered by forerunners like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder to invade the academic enclaves of the left and create free conversations that freed minds. Inscriptions on the bullets in the gun that killed him suggest the killer believed Charlie to be a fascist. The killer is responsible for his own actions, but that utterly false belief was impressed upon him through the power of a culture too long dominated by radicals.

That culture is over. That power is changing hands.

I sometimes joke to my wife that I am the Ernie Pyle of the Culture War. Not a speaker-slash-debater like Ben. Not an activist master of samizdat like Matt Walsh. Not a future politician like Michael Knowles. Just a writer in the trenches who tries to get an up-close view of the fight and report what’s happening.

This is what’s happening: We’re winning.

Watch your six.

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Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. Klavan is the bestselling author of numerous books, including the Cameron Winter Mystery series. The fifth installment, After That, The Dark, is now available for Pre-Order. Follow him on X: @andrewklavan