The bloodthirsty comments of right-wing Trump administration members and supporters regarding Latin American drug traffickers, Latin American leftists, Latin Americans with oil, Latin Americans who travel without government approval, Latin Americans in general, or whoever it is we’re ostensibly champing at the bit to annihilate this week shouldn’t make us forget that political activists across the whole political spectrum are bloodthirsty morons.
As the holidays and the year’s end arrive, let’s not forget one of 2025’s other most disgraceful episodes: celebratory reactions to conservative Charlie Kirk’s murder during one of his on-campus debates. This month, I have a few columns’ worth of thoughts on the unhealthy way people reacted to that tragedy, but the sickness began well before the murder.
The left has often been better than the right about warning that “eliminationist” rhetoric has a tendency to be followed by exterminator tactics. That is, if you think the world will not be safe until an entire tribe, political faction, or way of life is eradicated, there’s a disturbingly high chance it eventually will be—or at least that its enemies will try, if humanity’s violent history is any indication.
In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s murder this year, I noticed the abrupt deletion of a 2017 online thread among professors, at least one of whom considered the mere presence of famous conservative debaters on campus (who were themselves talking about the tendency of the academic left to censor) evidence we live in an “apocalyptic hellscape.” One might’ve thought debate was a good sign, given the apparent alternative.
I’d guess the professor deleting the thread suddenly realized on the day of Kirk’s murder that his earlier cries of apocalypse might be taken now as the sort of eliminationist rhetoric that often leads to censorship and eventually murder (since one’s political foes have the pesky habit of not shutting up while they’re alive).
The same professor astonished me on an earlier occasion by blaming right-wing activist Milo Yiannopoulos for outbreaks of campus violence aimed at... Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo was just shooting his mouth off, whereas his foes have used responses such as riots and Molotov cocktails, but why blame vaunted left-liberal campuses when you can blame and possibly expunge the infection from outside? If you place talkers and bombers on the same moral plane, though, don’t be shocked when more young people skip the talking part.
I shouldn’t have to say that I’m not hereby endorsing Milo’s views in general, and I’d almost reached the point where I’d on principle avoid adding the obligatory “not that I agree with [target of the month]” phrase, but people are so stupid, it’s best I keep adding that clause just for clarity.
Back before his conversion to Christianity and heterosexuality, Milo was a fan of brutal, militarist (and often gay) ancient Sparta, so when he lately claims that Greece- and Rome-idolizing Charlie Kirk was a closeted gay man (and thus the awkward behavior of Kirk’s wife perhaps that of a beard), he may not be so much kicking Kirk while he’s down but trying to needle what he sees as a deceased kindred spirit.
It’s not as overtly hostile, I suppose, as Milo calling conservative columnist and father of four Benny Johnson gay (Johnson’s suing) or Milo posting footage of fascistic, amateurish Trump advisor Laura Loomer drunkenly, clumsily flirting at a party.
It’s not even as hostile, I’d say, as Piers Morgan badgering young, possibly disingenuously right-wing pundit Nick Fuentes to admit he’s never been with a woman. I think the times have grown so dark and dangerous, though, that I’m growing far less interested in pundits getting each other to admit they’re hypocrites or jerks than I am in seeing them out each other as federal agents, as Tucker Carlson and Fuentes have each accused the other of being, or fans of murder, as Megyn Kelly and others revealed themselves to be in the wake of the U.S. slaughter of Venezuelan drug traffickers.
As a scientist friend of mine once put it, perhaps the main thing a rational person wants from morality—really from any moral code—is predictability. If you’re going to plan your day, you need to know that the person talking to you won’t suddenly decide that some incorrect turn of phrase or inadvertently rude gesture on your part is grounds for a violent, even murderous reprisal.
As I put it years ago, most people wouldn’t be horrified if an overtly Christian college asked students to take a vow of silence, nor if a “liberal” college asked applicants to sign a form agreeing not to use a long list of racist phrases. It’s when you can’t reasonably foresee which phrases will suddenly be deemed blasphemous (as when roving Saudi “virtue police” units decide on the fly) or politically incorrect (as when academics keep unearthing new reasons to find even the blandest of colloquial expressions hopelessly rooted in historic oppression) that people get nervous.
And when your controllers see that you’ll put up with living in constant uncertainty and fear, they tend to be tempted to see just how much they can make you squirm and eventually whether they can make you stop squirming once and for all, by force, whether you try to escape them by clinging to the “It’s only comedy” label or the shattered remnants of your boat. Beware the merciless. You may not know what they’re going to do next, but it probably won’t end well.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey