In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I think I can say that we live in a fractured society.
The political right still broadly believes in American greatness, but the left increasingly sees the United States as an evil empire that got rich on the backs of slavery, on land stolen through genocide. The left increasingly believes that as a country we have exploited the global poor while forcing most of our own people into wage-slavery, forcing people to work meaningless jobs in stores, on farms, or in factories, to survive.
The left and the right are not simply competing on opinion, but on moral visions of what America was, what it currently is, and what it ought to be.
The political right believes criminals commit crimes and must be held accountable for their actions. The left believes criminals are victims, acting out against a system of poverty and racism, where the police (urged on by a fascist, ultra-nationalist right) hunt black men down in the streets. The left does not believe in blaming the victim, so it is naturally soft on crime, wanting to take on the underlying white supremacy upon which the structures of America are built.
The political right sees the primary purpose of government as preserving and protecting the liberty of the people. The political left increasingly argues that liberty itself is oppressive, allowing the powerful to exploit the weak, and that the very systems created to safeguard freedom by extension preserve racism, bigotry, and white privilege.
We cannot even agree on our nation’s birthday. Were we born on July 4, 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, which famously proclaimed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”? Or was our birthday August 20, 1619, when the English privateer White Lion arrived at Point Comfort carrying about 20 Africans taken from a Portuguese slave ship?
These dates are more than historical markers. They represent rival founding stories: one grounded in liberty and agency, the other in determinism and victimhood.
The same struggle now plays out across the Western world, where many still hold Western Civilization as the model other societies should follow, while a growing portion of the public sees The West as the single most evil and oppressive force in human history, guilty of both geographic and economic colonization on a global scale, and responsible for past and present atrocities around the world.
I don’t think there is much doubt which side of the fence I stand on, but I pride myself in being able to argue the left’s side better than most who are actually on the left. I believe that until you can argue both sides of an issue convincingly, you do not really understand that issue well enough to hold an opinion.
It is with this in mind that I write this piece, as a systemic analysis of modern leftism, in the hope that it allows us to also better understand the assassination of Charlie Kirk (and of others who will invariably follow).
A Fractured Left Unites
Let me define my terms. By ‘leftism,’ I mean the dominant ideology of the political left. I do not mean ‘Democrats,’ and I do not mean everyone who leans, or who votes Democrat. I am not attacking specific people, but a specific set of beliefs.
I am also not attacking those who believe in leftism. Many of them are good-hearted people who really do want to build a better world. I’ve written before about how such people became indoctrinated in Breaking the Loop: How Virtue Signaling Became a System of Indoctrination, and though I am not going to rehash Closed-Loop Virtue Signaling here, suffice it to say that it is the leadership of the left – the people driving the indoctrination and creating policies around it – that I am exposing.
Leftists, and particularly younger ones, are victims of indoctrination, and they have my sympathy.
For much of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party was dominated by genuine liberty-oriented Democrats. These old-school Democrats believed in free speech, individual opportunity, civic responsibility, and the idea that persuasion was better than coercion. Many of them were defending the same liberties that conservatives value.
Old-school Democrats would have been appalled by what happened to Charlie Kirk, seeing themselves as the heirs of the classical liberal tradition Charlie Kirk stood and died for. They might not have agreed with Charlie Kirk’s views, but they would have totally supported his right to hold his views, and they would have praised his willingness to hold open dialog with those who disagreed.
Those old-school Democrats who remain (many of them have become Republicans) have my support.
Old-school Democrats pushed back against Republican-led obscenity and pornography laws, in support of Free Speech. They often wanted more regulation or a larger welfare state than conservatives, but their aim was to help individuals gain independence, not to create permanent dependence.
The ACLU used to even defend the rights of actual Nazis, and other vile groups, to march and speak. Such was the reverence, on the left not very long ago, toward free speech.
The old guard believed people made choices, and that choices carried consequences. They could argue policy differences with conservatives, often fiercely, but both sides still shared a common language of liberty.
Both sides wanted to go to the same place. They just saw different ways to get there.
Marxists now openly look to class determinism as the engine of history. Malthusians warn that population growth will doom mankind to collapse. Environmentalists, particularly after the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report, describe humanity as a plague upon the planet. And, of course, Saul Alinsky and his followers use tactics to seize power through manipulation.
Until recently, these factions coexisted under a wide tent on the left, overlapping in their suspicion of liberty and personal responsibility but contradicting one another enough to remain a patchwork, keeping the old-school Democrats in charge.
More recently, the DNC’s leadership has gone all-in with the radical wing of the Democratic Party.
That change started under Lyndon B. Johnson.
Ned Touchstone, editor of The Councilor (a newsletter tied to the segregationist White Citizens’ Councils) claimed in a document from the released Kennedy assassination files, that the KKK had “documented proof” Lyndon B. Johnson had “formerly been a member of the Klan in Texas” during the early days of his political career.
That “documented proof” has never been made public, but Johnson really was an unapologetic racist.
Johnson reportedly said in a meeting of the DNC leadership, urging that leadership to change positions on the Civil Rights Act (which the Democrats had always been universally against) and to support the War on Poverty, “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now, we’ve got to do something about this. We’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. I’ll have them n*****s voting Democrat for the next two hundred years.”
We know from visitor logs that this meeting took place.
At the time there were no recordings or transcripts of most Presidential meetings, but Ronald Kessler, author of Inside the White House, claimed that multiple Democrat insiders heard Johnson make that statement.
Economist Milton Friedman later called the War on Poverty a “war on black people,” warning that it would breakdown the African American family, cause rising crime, and create generational poverty.
Friedman noted that the War on Poverty focused on making poverty tolerable, but lacked any mechanism to lift people out of it, guaranteeing a permanent impoverished class who would be dependent upon government handouts, or crime, to survive. His prediction has proven tragically accurate, and it is hard to imagine Johnson not knowing what the actual effect of his War on Poverty would be.
Saul Alinsky was perfecting his methodology for grassroots agitation at the same time. He published Rules for Radicals in 1971, and the War on Poverty gave Alinsky fertile ground within which to push his agenda.
Saul Alinsky did not teach persuasion through reasoned argument. He taught how to harness resentment through manufactured grievance.
In other words, he taught people to lie, and you can thank Saul Alinsky for every manufactured grievance since, from ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,’ to the lies surrounding Covid-19, and now to the lies being spread to minimize or justify the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Hillary Clinton argued that Alinsky’s ideas would be more effective if implemented from within government, creating a playbook for turning the government of the United States against itself, to dismantle society from the inside out.
Hillary Clinton never made it into the Presidency, but Barack Obama used her ideas to great effect.
Environmentalists carried forward the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth in 1972, framing humanity as the problem, warning that population growth would cause global collapse.
Later, the World Economic Forum and its allies pushed similar narratives of “degrowth” and “sustainability” with an even darker twist. Their solution was fewer people.
Each of these movements, the Marxists, the Malthusians, the Alinskyites, and the environmentalists, chipped away at old-school Democrats’ control. They all doubted the moral agency of the individual, and looked instead to systems, structures, or impersonal forces as the drivers of history. For all their influence though, the radicals did not form a coherent whole. They were fragmented strands of thought, united only in what they opposed.
That remained the case until Richard Dawkins came along.
Dawkins’ Denial of Agency
When Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion in 2006, he did more than attack religion. He attacked the concept of human beings as moral agents.
Dawkins argued that science has absolutely no explanation for free thought, and as such, he claimed free thought does not exist – that there is no difference between believing in free thought and believing in God.
Dawkins wrote that our brains are computers, driven by programming (DNA) and data (lived experiences), and acting in entirely predictable ways based upon those two things.
As Dawkins put it, we are ‘mere meat machines,’ that are sufficiently complicated to ‘think that we think,’ but actual free thought and free will are simply not possible, and thus cannot possibly exist outside of a purely religious context that any rational person must reject.
This denial of agency gave the fractured left something it had previously lacked: an intellectual rationale to unify its disparate movements. The Marxist could now say, “The worker has no responsibility. Class position determines behavior.” The Malthusian could say, “Reproduction cannot be restrained, as biology compels it.” The Alinskyite could say, “Truth is irrelevant. People cannot be persuaded, only conditioned.” And the environmentalist could say, “Humanity is inherently destructive, being programmed to consume.”
Before Dawkins, these ideas sat uneasily alongside one another, contradicting as often as they overlapped. With Dawkins, the contradictions dissolved. By declaring that free will is an illusion, he provided a common foundation on which each faction could claim scientific authority for its rejection of human responsibility.
Today Dawkins calls himself a ‘Cultural Christian.’ In spite of this, he legitimized the denial of agency, and gave extreme leftist elements a unifying philosophy. If agency is a myth, then liberty is a myth, as is responsibility and accountability.
As a computer programmer, I test code by controlling inputs to see if the outputs are what I expect. If the inputs do not produce the expected outputs, I correct my code until they do, and once a program is fully debugged, I can completely control the output by controlling the data I input into the system.
If Dawkins is correct that we are meat machines, then it is possible to control humanity by controlling our inputs, including our lived experiences, the media we have access to, and everything else the public can see, hear, eat, or experience.
The purpose of the media, in this environment, is not to inform the public, but to program it, and of course the mainstream media often lies. Truth is irrelevant to that mission.
Only the expected outputs the elite wish to see from the meat machines under their purview matter.
The elite don’t see themselves as meat machines though. Logically they have to view themselves along those lines, but there is a difference between believing something on a logical basis, and emotionally connecting with that belief.
People act out their true beliefs, and the elite truly believe they have agency. It is the rest of us they pretend they can control.
A man like Charlie Kirk, who preached agency and accountability, became intolerable in such a world.
The Long March through Education
Teachers, as a group, have always leaned left. Some of this is natural; teaching is a public service, and many in public service naturally believe government should play a larger role in society.
Before the Department of Education existed, the United States led the world in global test scores. Now we are tied for 40th place in PISA scoring, among the 80 nations that participate. In the meantime, the leftward leanings that had once been personal, have become systematic.
The creation of the Department of Education in 1979 allowed the Federal Government to define what constituted a “quality” education, and to tie funding to compliance.
If people are nothing more than “meat machines,” then the role of education is not to cultivate independent thought, but to program the next generation with the inputs elites believe will produce the outputs those elites want, and as a result, ideas that would once have remained on the fringe, confined to pamphlets, coffee houses, or street protests, are now mainstream. By the time a student graduates, he or she has been thoroughly indoctrinated in the view that America is systemically oppressive, that truth is subjective, and that morality is a personal choice.
Throw in Closed Loop Virtue Signaling, where people are taught that their virtue comes from believing the ‘right things’ independently of whether or not those things are true, and you get to where we are today.
The mainstream media reinforces these inputs later in life, creating a closed loop where the same ‘lessons’ are repeated until they can no longer be questioned. Truth is irrelevant. Programming relies on framing, repetition, and control.
Charlie Kirk was doing great work de-programing young minds, and that is why he was killed. The motivations of the shooter don’t even really matter – it is the purpose behind the narrative that drove him that we should be afraid of.
Radicalism appeals to the young. For the Democratic Party, courting the radicals means courting America’s youth.
The radicals are no longer outsiders. They have classrooms, textbooks, and universities, all united to carry their messaging forward. Dawkins gave them perceived legitimacy.
The Right’s Reflection
For much of the twentieth century the political right was held together by Christian Conservatives, Neo-Conservatives, and free-market thinkers. Christian Conservatives emphasize moral order and traditional values, Neo-Conservatives emphasize foreign policy and an assertive American role abroad, and free-market thinkers emphasize economic liberty and limited domestic government interference.
These groups have very little in common, but also little overlap. They decided to support one another, and in doing so, formed a majority within the party.
There are of course other Republican groups. Libertarians focus on promoting individual freedom, paleoconservatives want a more restrained foreign policy, populists distrust elitism, and moderates try to bridge the gap with Democrats.
These other factions have waxed and waned in influence, sometimes clashing openly with the dominant coalition, and other times agreeing with it, but they tend to fight each other, and none have had the strength to move the party away from the dominant coalition until Donald Trump.
Under Trump, the ruling coalition of Christian Conservatives, Neo-Conservatives, and free market thinkers is gone. It has been replaced by a populist nationalism.
The Tea Party was also populist, but based on perceived taxpayer betrayal by both parties. There was no real unifying philosophy.
MAGA made loyalty to Trump a litmus test: are you with Trump or against him?
Neither the Tea Party nor MAGA offered a unified philosophy. They are reactionary coalitions, bound in simple opposition to the left, and in their zeal to fight back, they have often borrowed the tactics of the left.
Trump 2.0 is different. He’s learned from his missteps and surrounded himself with actual conservatives.
Trump says he is not implementing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, but he is implementing parts of it, and particularly the parts that prevent the Executive Branch from self-governing behind the Chief Executive’s back.
I don’t consider Trump to be a villain or a hero. I view him as an anti-hero, elected to slay an oppressive administrative state and to bring us back toward some semblance of the US Constitution. Once Trump ‘slays the dragon,’ other Republican leaders will need to actually lead.
People try to link Trump to the alt-right, but the alt-right is not part of the actual right. The very phrase, created by a white nationalist named Richard Spencer, means “Alternative to the Right.”
The alt-right rejects the free market, despises traditional religion, and scoffs at constitutional limits. In economic policy, in cultural attitudes, and in its contempt for the founding principles of the United States, the alt-right sounds far more like Marx than Madison.
Where the left demonizes white privilege, the alt-right wants to protect what it believes is earned privilege for white people. Both groups believe in tearing down liberty, erasing responsibility, and rebuilding society around identity. Both deny human agency and substitute collectivist ideology for moral law. Flip the rhetoric about race, and the two worldviews become interchangeable.
The actual right is grounded in liberty, responsibility, and limits to power. We believe that individuals are moral agents, capable of making choices, and accountable for the consequences of their actions. We decry special laws for special groups, because we don’t think along those lines; we believe all groups are the same.
That is why the alt-right must not be confused with the right proper. It is neither conservative nor constitutional. The alt-right represents the left’s logic turned back against the left, and nothing more. Think of the alt-right as the modern version of the Confederacy.
Knowing What “Too Far” Is
There is a key difference between left and right that goes way beyond policy debates. The assassination of Charlie Kirk ties directly into this difference.
I used to know someone on the right who was ‘too far.’ He wore a MAGA hat every day, harbored what were at least borderline racist views, and believed Barack Obama was born in Kenya. He called Democrats our ‘enemies,’ believed all of the extremist conspiracy theories, and represented every stereotype of what many on the left thinks the typical Trump supporter looks like.
He was in his mid seventies, and he passed away a few months ago.
Those people exist, but they are few and far between, and the political right is pretty good at calling them out. I in fact don’t know anyone else who fits the stereotype of what the left sees as ‘MAGA.’
The mainstream right knows what “too far” looks like. We reject white nationalism, violent extremism, and conspiratorial fantasies. We reject racism and political violence in all forms.
When fringe elements try to attach themselves to the right, whether it is neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville or QAnon theorists promoting delusion, we denounce them.
We also reject the true extreme elements of the actual extreme right, such as anarcho-capitalists, who believe in a free market system, but devoid of government.
We can debate the size, scope, and even the purpose of government, but the notion that we can go without a government goes too far, as without a legitimate government to defend freedom, we end up with warlords.
The left, by contrast, refuses to acknowledge that on their side, “too far” even exists.
Every new radical demand is treated as progress. Calls to defund the police were taken seriously even as crime spiked in cities across the country. Teachers’ unions and activists pushed child transition surgeries even after studies on the long term efficacy of ‘gender affirming care’ were conducted.
The National Institutes of Health found that while trans kids who receive no care at all are four times more likely than the public at large to commit suicide, trans kids who get ‘gender affirming care’ are twelve times more likely than trans kids who get no treatment, and forty-eight times more likely to commit suicide than the public at large.
In spite of this, the political left still pushes for ‘gender-affirming care.’ And of course they do. Getting people to believe that men can be women and women can be men is the ultimate form of Closed Loop Virtue Signaling. The left can’t let that go just to save lives.
Radical climate authoritarianism demands shutting down reliable energy sources, even before replacements exist. This drives up costs, and leaves ordinary people unable to heat their homes. This is in spite of the fact that, while climate change is real and the globe has warmed, there is no credible evidence to support climate alarmism.
Denial of agency makes it impossible for the left to blame bad ideas or to take any accountability for their own mistakes. They can’t even admit to being wrong.
What even is ‘wrong’ when truth is irrelevant? When the data does not fit, ‘trust the science’ means ignoring actual scientific studies.
The left also refuses to reject, if not openly condoning, racism and hatred when it comes from what it considers “oppressed” groups. The left claims that only white people can be racist, and that white people are inherently racist, labeling people as racist purely because of the color of their skin.
The left’s definition of ‘racism’ is, in fact, racist.
Black Lives Matter riots that burned neighborhoods and destroyed small businesses were excused as “mostly peaceful protests,” while parents at school board meetings who opposed radical curricula were labeled domestic terrorists. Antisemitic chants are tolerated when they come from left-aligned activists, while the smallest perceived slight from the right is treated as proof of “systemic hate.”
The left even teaches our children to hate one another in our schools. As early as kindergarten, children are told that white people are inherently racist, and that they must atone for their privilege. A child who simply wants to play with a friend on the playground is told to first view that friend through the lens of race and power.
These lessons carry over into adulthood, where distrust and resentment are no longer the exception, but the norm.
I knew the left was headed toward an assassination culture as soon as I heard the phrase “silence is violence.”
There are undoubtedly those on the political right who hate leftists. I’ve known at least one person who did. But again, the right is good about disavowing such sentiments. Many on the right may think that the left is misinformed, and some might even call them ‘stupid,’ but the political right believes fervently in free speech and is against political violence in all forms.
Hatred toward the right is common, and excused on the left, where ANTIFA regularly beats conservatives with bicycle locks, and where in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Twitter (now X) is full of leftists discussing who should go next.
In a healthy country with healthy debate, both sides may see the other as wrong, but when one side decides that the other is evil, and changes the definitions of words to slander the other side (‘racism,’ ‘fascism,’ etc.), the wheels come off the bus. This sort of thing is normalized on the left.
Unless the left admits that there is such a thing as ‘too far’ on their side, and learns to reject those who cross the line, Charlie Kirk will not be the last conservative killed.
Cultural Paradoxes
The denial of agency also explains the bizarre cultural paradoxes of the modern left.
“Queers for Palestine” sees Palestinians as oppressed, which excuses them from all responsibility even when they want to kill gay people.
With agency denied, the oppressed can never be guilty, no matter what they believe or what they do
The word ‘Palestinian’ was never applied to a group of people until 1948, when the Muslim countries surrounding Israel lost a war against it and began to refer to the Muslims living in Israel as ‘Palestinians.’
The actual Muslims living in that region did not self-identify as ‘Palestinian’ until the Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded in 1964. Before that they identified as either Egyptian or Jordanian, so in the case of ‘Queers for Palestine,’ not only is the LGBTQ++ community supporting an ethnic group that by and large wants to kill them, but they are supporting an ethnic group that also does not even exist.
An even better example is in Europe, where Muslim men sometimes encircle women and gang rape them. Anything that disproportionately affects a minority is considered racist, and if Europe prosecuted gang rape across the board, it would predominantly affect Muslim men.
Instead of protecting women, women are told to go out in groups with male escorts when possible, and to dress conservatively, so as to avoid what are now termed ‘misunderstandings.’
On January 6, 2021, roughly 10,000 people entered the Capital Grounds, and somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 entered the Capitol Building. The vast majority of these people merely walked around, perhaps taking selfies, and left.
One person, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed by the police, in spite of the fact that she was unarmed and was not threatening anyone. A police officer died later in the day from a heart attack, but it was unrelated.
The Proud Boys really were trying to foment insurrection, and were rightfully held accountable, as were those who committed acts of violence or vandalism, but of the over 1,500 people arrested and held in solitary confinement, in some cases for four years, the vast majority were not involved in an insurrection, and committed no acts of violence or vandalism. These people were held under suspicion of terrorism, only to then be charged with misdemeanor trespassing and released for time served.
Shall we compare that to the George Floyd riots that occurred around the country, including in our nation’s capital? At one point, the rioting around the White House got so bad that it spilled onto the White House grounds, forcing the President of the United States to be taken to the White House Bunker. Were these rioters attacked by the media? No – Trump was.
The George Floyd rioters killed 19 people, and caused over $2 billion in damage. Rioters set up autonomous zones in major US cities that they claimed were independent of the United States, and though CNN could not find camera angles that did not contain buildings on fire, we were told that these protests were ‘mostly peaceful.’
One CNN reporter called it ‘A Summer of Love.’
Some of the same politicians who denounced January 6 as the most dangerous attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, also created Go Fund Me accounts to help pay the bail of those arrested for looting and rioting over George Floyd.
Why were riots and looting excused as “mostly peaceful protests” when committed by the left? It is because individuals were not seen as choosing violence. “Systems” were blamed instead. The rioters were viewed as acting against those systems, and thus given a pass.
Paradoxes like these only make sense when personal responsibility is erased. Agency is denied when the riots are politically expedient. Expediency rather than justice determines the response.
Beyond Management: Anti-Humanism
Once people are no longer seen as moral agents with inherent worth, they become either resources to be optimized, or problems to be solved, whatever is more expedient.
Groups like the World Economic Forum and the Club of Rome make this explicit.
The Club of Rome and World Economic Forum call for all human activity to be globally managed, warning that population growth will otherwise destroy the Earth. Their “degrowth” rhetoric treats human life as a plague.
By portraying mankind as a cancer on the Earth, these groups deny that human life has intrinsic value and call to have the population reduced, rationed, and restricted.
The logical endpoint is not just managed citizens, but fewer citizens. Once agency is denied, people lose dignity and can be rationed like electricity, reduced like carbon emissions, or eliminated like pests. This is already happening in public policy.
- Canada’s MAiD program (Medical Assistance in Dying): Originally introduced as a narrow “compassionate option” for the terminally ill, it has expanded so far that Canadians with depression, PTSD, or financial hardship have been offered euthanasia. Poverty itself is becoming a reason to “choose” death, with the state treating human lives as disposable when they no longer meet utilitarian standards.
- China’s One-Child Policy: From 1979 to 2015, the Chinese Communist Party enforced one of the most brutal experiments in population control the world has ever seen. Millions of forced abortions and sterilizations were carried out in the name of resource management, leaving a demographic collapse in its wake. Here anti-humanism was the guiding principle of state policy.
- Climate-linked population arguments: Leading figures in environmental movements openly argue that saving the planet requires reducing human numbers. Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb declared that hundreds of millions would starve unless drastic population controls were enacted. Today, versions of that same rhetoric surface in calls to limit family size, discourage children, and even shame people for reproducing, all in the name of carbon reduction.
Anti-humanism has crept deep into American life. Abortion is framed as empowerment, even as it eliminates millions of unborn children every year. Equity initiatives treat people as statistics to be managed though redistribution. Gender ideology teaches confused teenagers that their bodies are mistakes, and that sterilization and mutilation are “affirmation.”
When people are viewed as machines, the question is no longer how to cultivate their potential, but how to program, limit, or decommission them. That is the essence of anti-humanism: a philosophy that strips man of his soul, his individuality, his hope, and his value, and then calls the erasure progress.
And under this world view, Charlie Kirk was simply decommissioned.
Foreign Money, Domestic Division
While our own institutions were drifting left, foreign states poured fuel on the fire. China, Qatar, and other authoritarian regimes have spent billions on American universities to purchase influence, launder narratives, and reward faculty and centers that echo them.
Qatar is the standout. Multiple investigations drawing on the Department of Education’s Section 117 database and follow-on probes show Qatar as the largest foreign donor to U.S. universities, with funding totals in the multi-billion range since the early 2000s. Recipients include Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M, and others, often tied to branch campuses in Doha’s “Education City.” Independent researchers estimate at least $4.7–5.1 billion in Qatari money over two decades, with individual schools receiving eye-watering sums (e.g., Cornell and Georgetown in the high hundreds of millions to over a billion) and patterns of under-reporting uncovered by watchdogs. Critics aren’t guessing at motives: detailed reports argue these funds correlate with erosion of free-speech norms and sharp rises in campus antisemitism, especially where the money comes from Middle Eastern authoritarian sources. Even Congress and state regents are taking notice: Texas A&M voted to shutter its Qatar campus, and House investigators have pressed Harvard, Penn, Columbia, and others on Qatari ties amid the post–Oct. 7 campus meltdowns.
China pursued a parallel track through Confucius Institutes, PRC-linked language and culture centers, spending over $150 million across U.S. campuses (2006–2019) while many schools failed to properly report the funding. Under federal pressure, nearly all of the ~100 institutes have since closed, but GAO notes that universities often replaced them with new PRC-affiliated arrangements, preserving influence under different names. The point isn’t Mandarin classes; it’s leverage over hiring, speakers, and what can and cannot be said about the CCP.
Follow the money and you find curricula, centers, and faculty pipelines that normalize anti-American and anti-Israel worldviews while soft-pedaling the regimes footing the bill. Investigations by ISGAP and NCRI link undocumented foreign gifts, especially from Qatar, to higher levels of campus antisemitism and to campaigns that punish speech rather than debate it. When Jewish students are harassed and Israel is recast as uniquely illegitimate, it’s not an accident; it’s the purchased common sense of institutions paid to prefer certain narratives over truth.
Foreign money didn’t create our crisis of agency, but it supercharged it. If man is a “meat machine,” then a university is just an input device. Control the funding, shape the inputs, and you can predict the outputs: division at home, indulgence toward authoritarian patrons abroad, hostility toward the political right, Israel, and increasingly toward Jews.
Defend Agency, Defend Humanity
Though Dawkins came late to the game, he found soil already tilled by Marx, Malthus, Alinsky, and environmentalism.
Dawkins stripped man of agency, giving a fractured left its unifying creed: responsibility is an illusion, and only systems matter.
The result is a left that denies responsibility, despises success, demands narrative control, excuses violence from their side, and embraces anti-humanism. It is a movement that teaches our children they are programmed rather than free.
The populist right risks mirroring these tactics if it abandons truth for counter-narratives, loyalty tests, and grievance politics. A movement that fights the left’s anti-humanism with its own distortions only reinforces the lie that agency does not exist.
If both sides descend into narrative warfare, the battle ceases to be about liberty versus control, becoming a mere contest between rival groups seeking power.
On the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Democrat leaders jumped out of the woodwork to denounce the shooting, and rightfully so. For a moment, we all seemed to believe in agency again.
It did not last long. Within three days the leftist narrative had coalesced around four points:
- Political violence is never justified, but the driving force is the hateful and vile rhetoric of the political right. Violence from the left in such an environment is unavoidable. We must force the political right to own its violent rhetoric or the left will be forced to act out again.
- Charlie Kirk is not a martyr. He was a disgusting human being who dressed racist, transphobic hatred up in Bible verses.
- Nothing the political left could ever do will outweigh the horror of January 6, 2021, so who are you to throw stones at us?
- And this last one is from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: there is no sense talking about violent rhetoric when guns are still in the hands of civilians. Some of her followers have even said that perhaps Charlie Kirk’s killing can act as a wake-up call that it is finally time for the right to agree to ban guns, before someone on the left is forced to do this again.
The Nation and Rolling Stone just published articles to this effect.
Much of the political left can’t even accept that the assassin, who lived with his boyfriend (a man transitioning to a woman), who was described as being far-left by friends and family, and who wrote ANTIFA messaging on the bullet casings in his rifle (including on the casing of the round that killed Charlie Kirk), was on the political left. They point to his father’s political views, as if a child inherits political views the same way they inherit eye color.
There is a counter-movement on the right, in which it has become customary to show solidarity by saying, “I Am Charlie Kirk.”
There are also some on the right who want to lash out in revenge, although as time passes and people calm down, cooler heads on the right are prevailing.
On the left, on the other hand, Twitter (now X) is awash with people suggesting who should be killed next.
Charlie Kirk was far more effective at deprogramming young minds than I could ever hope to be. That said, if my work can in any way help to put a dent in the hole his death has left in deprogramming young minds, it will be an honor to use my agency in that pursuit.
I am not Charlie Kirk, but the world needs more people like him.
