On Halloween night 2011, a teenager was shot dead in Georgetown. Tyronn Vincent Garner of Southeast D.C. was killed on the 2800 block of M St.
About an hour earlier, I predicted the shooting of Garner. I was in Georgetown in the early-evening after picking up my mail at the university, where I was teaching a journalism class. I’d grown up in Washington and had attended the annual Halloween party in Georgetown, with its costumes and bar-hopping.
However, by 2011 the good vibes evaporated. The street parade was invaded by bad elements, whether gang bangers from the inner city or rednecks from distant towns. I took one walk through Georgetown early on Halloween in 2011 and quickly decided to head home. “Someone’s going to get shot tonight,” I texted my girlfriend. Violence was in the air.
I had a similar feeling last week when I saw the horrible video of conservative activist Charlie Kirk assassinated in Utah. It was shocking, yet I wasn’t surprised. For over five years I’ve warned anyone who would listen that if they’re conservative and didn’t have street smarts and enough security, they might find themselves in trouble. I put it bluntly on a radio show I was on earlier this year: “We are dealing with an American Stasi that doesn’t care if you live or die,” I told the hosts. They went silent.
Kirk’s security failed him. Yet there’s another dynamic to address. There’s a combination of arrogance, naiveté and Elmer Gantry self-righteousness that prevents too many conservatives from allowing lesser mortals who have met the Devil to help them.
Kirk defended me in 2018, when the American left came for my head during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court battle. There’s a video of Kirk defending me to a group of screaming crazies hollering that Kavanaugh was guilty and that I deserved no due process. I also recall getting texts from people notifying me that “Charlie Kirk just posted your GoFundMe.” The dude did me a solid and I’ll never forget it.
Since that time I’ve written many articles and a book on the deadliness of the American Stasi. A reaction I often get is from conservatives who tell me to stop talking about my experience in 2018—to stop “making it all about yourself.” Maybe at some point these critics will understand that I’m not just making it about myself. I’m trying to warn people on the right to “stay alert, stay alive.” We’re dealing with a cunning, tireless and ruthless enemy.
I’m not, nor ever will be, as famous and beloved as Charlie Kirk. My notoriety was a brief flash several years ago. Yet if Utah Valley University had invited me to speak on campus this year, and placed me in the same spot as Charlie Kirk, my first question would’ve been about security. I’d have asked them about the parking lots in the distance. I recently took a trip to Virginia Beach to take a surfing lesson and drink non-alcoholic beer. When I checked into the hotel I repeated my routine since 2018—open the drapes and look at the building across from me to make sure that no one’s looking, photographing, or pointing a gun at me. PTSD? You bet. Stay alert, stay alive.
That sometimes means you don’t get to speak in public. In 2017—a year before Kavanaugh—I wrote a piece, “Ben Shapiro’s Schtick is Played Out.” The carnival routine that Shapiro perfected of getting on stage and humiliating a bunch of college sophomores had run its course. The alternative was to keep doing the college tours, keep ratcheting up the conflict and humiliation until a young underdeveloped mind snapped and somebody got hurt. Yet the drug of dunking on the kids proved too powerful. In the minutes before Kirk was shot he appears complacent. This brilliant young man, riding the wave of all that woke outrage, was lulled into thinking that the enemy’s a joke.
The celebrities of the right have to consult with people who’ve been in a few harrowing scrapes. It hasn’t just been the liberals but the conservatives who’ve gotten things wrong about me, and the conservatives are just as arrogant as the left when it comes to not admitting mistakes. Some are as dangerously coddled and naive as the students they mock.
My point is the safety of my friends on the right. Don’t speak at a college unless security is tight. Don’t enter a kill zone where you’re an easy target. I’d never be so egotistical to think I could’ve saved Charlie Kirk's life. But the volatile mix of arrogance, bad security and adolescent ego that I knew would get someone shot on Halloween 2011 is the same hurricane I’ve sensed at the increasingly crazed campus events where Ben Shapiro and his imitators go for adulation—and a paycheck off of the fury of the woke. It’s time to roll up the circus.
