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Let's get into it:
Bill Maher gave a send-up of the surprising number of assassins and would-be assassins who have made their violent way to headlines. Thomas Matthew Crooks, Luigi Mangione, Tyler Robinson, and Cole Allen are all young men who took up arms in order to destroy life in service to an ideology.
Crooks and Allen tried to kill Trump but were unable to do so, with Crooks killing retired fireman Corey Comperatore and Allen lodging a bullet in a Secret Service agent's armored vest. Mangione got his shot off and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood on a Manhattan sidewalk, and Robinson assassinated Charlie Kirk on a livestream from a rooftop at Utah Valley University.
All of these men believed that violence was the answer. They all believed that the problems they saw in American life could only be solved by picking up arms and aiming them at people they did not know, but just the same, did not like. Crooks, Allen, Mangione, and Robinson all believed they were attacking tyranny.
But living in a society where problems are solved with murder is a tyranny, and how I would define tyranny and how these assassins and would-be killers define it is wholly different. Antifa defines tyranny as, well, me and my friends and colleagues. They argue that in taking up Molotov cocktails or brutalizing reporters trying to expose their tactics, they are fighting fascism. We argue that they are fighting against liberty and democracy.
The moral worldviews between the two disparate factions are so far apart as to be indistinguishable. Many of us grew up in a basic, Christian moral framework because those were the waters we American fish were swimming in. But we now have a situation where many people don't think that that is a valid way to look at the world at all, and they seek to destroy it.
They even use the Christian worldview that many of us purport against us, knowing that compassion and empathy, caring for others, are part of it. And so we're asked to destroy our way of life to accommodate others. But that's not actually Christian at all.
It is a sin to give so much of yourself that you leave nothing left to fulfill your obligations and responsibilities. We have a responsibility not to let this brutal, assassination-prone way of living take over. And I worry that perhaps we are too late to stand up for what we value.
Libby