The murder of Charlie Kirk was tragic and sad and another example of political violence in America. His assassination in front of his college audience was brutal and shocking.
He was a dynamic young man who was able to create a large and influential conservative following. He was a supporter of President Trump and a powerful voice for the MAGA movement among college students. There is a strong Christian influence in his movement.
There was a lot of good in his movement. Pro freedom and free markets, limited government, and anti-wokeism. It is sad to see his voice silenced whether or not you agreed with him.
At every event like this there is blame leveled by every pundit and politician at whomever or whatever ideology they don’t like. They never wait for the actual facts before they shoot their mouths off. I won’t get into that but if you watched the TV reports you know exactly what I mean.
I would like to give you some perspective on political violence. I’m not talking about murder in America like school shootings. School shootings are carried out by mentally disturbed boys and young men. I’m not talking about gang violence. Political violence is about ideology.
Political violence is not new. Let me tell you about the 1960s. I was a college and law student in those days and saw the assassination of many major political figures. There was racist violence during the Civil Rights movement in the South which is also ideologically motivated violence.
Here’s a timeline:
1962
• James Meredith was the first Black student admitted to Ole Miss in 1962 after facing opposition from the governor and students. It took a federal court order to admit him. Federal troops had to escort him to the school because of constant threats to him. Two days after his admission the governor riled up students during a football game halftime. They rioted. Some 31,000 Army and National Guard troops were called up to quell the violence and protect Meredith. Three people were killed.
1963
• Civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot in Jackson Mississippi.
• Four little Black girls were murdered by the KKK in a church bombing in Birmingham Alabama.
• President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas.
• William Moore a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) member and segregation protester was shot in Alabama.
1964
• Three young CORE civil rights workers: (two white northern students, Schwerner and Goodman and one Black activist, James Cheney) were murdered by the KKK in Mississippi.
1965
• Malcom X, a Black radical Muslim activist was murdered in NYC by Nation of Islam hit men.
1966
• James Meredith, the first Black student admitted to Ole Miss (1962), was shot and wounded during a freedom march from Tennessee to Mississippi but survived.
1967
• George Lincoln Rockwell, a well-known neo-Nazi racist leader, was murdered by a former party member in Virginia. He coined the term “white power.”
1968
• The Orangeburg Massacre occurred when three Black students at South Carolina State College were shot and killed by police during a protest against segregation (February).
• Civil rights leader Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, Tennessee (March).
• Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot after a campaign speech in Los Angeles (June).
1972
• Alabama segregationist Governor George Wallace was shot while campaigning for president in Maryland. He survived but was paralyzed from the waist down.
In 1969 the Zodiac killer dumped his last victim two block away from where my wife and I were living in San Francisco. We also lived a couple blocks away from the Iranian consulate that was bombed in 1971. It rocked the neighborhood. While in law school in 1967 I lived close to the San Francisco Yugoslav consulate which was bombed by Serbian nationalists.
It’s not just the ‘60s. There are many more incidents leading up to today — Presidents Ford and Reagan, Oklahoma City bombing, mail bombs, abortion bombings, shootings, Gabby Gifford, Governor Shapiro, Paul Pelosi, Trump, United Health’s CEO, etc., etc.
Everyone is saying that we are more intolerant these days, that we, not just the pundits and politicians, can’t have fair dialogue with those with whom we disagree. That’s not new either. In the ‘60s and ‘70s there were campus riots, Black Panther shootouts, ghetto riots which burned cities across America, anti-war and draft protests, kids spat on returning soldiers, National Guard shooting deaths at Kent State, political protests. It also was when the murder rate started to rise. It doubled by 1980 and didn’t really decline until 1994.
Fortunately things are less violent today although it may not seem that way. For example, the murder rate now is back to where it was in the ‘50s.
I don’t have any good answers for you. I don’t think violence is going to stop. Some disaffected person whom you thought you knew but really didn’t is going to commit political violence.
Assassination and political violence are a part of America’s cultural fabric.
Jeffrey Harding is a real estate investor and former real estate lawyer in Santa Barbara, who published the Daily Capitalist blog from 2008 to 2013, to discuss economics and finance from a free market perspective.
