It's an American tradition: Peggy Noonan loses her head

Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Feels Like a Hinge Point: What a disaster for the young. It will forever shape their understanding of politics in America, Peggy Noonan, WSJ Opinion, September 11, 2025

... We are in big trouble.

We all know this. We don’t even know what to do with what we know. But the assassination of Charlie Kirk feels different as an event, like a hinge point, like something that is going to reverberate in new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful thing. It carries the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of something bad. Michael Smerconish said on CNN Thursday afternoon that normally after such an event the temperature goes down a little, but not in this case, and he’s right. There are the heartbroken and the indifferent and they are irreconcilable. X, formerly Twitter, was from the moment of the shooting overrun with anguish and rage: It’s on now. Bluesky, where supposedly gentler folk fled Elon Musk, was gleefully violent: Too bad, live by the gun, die by the gun.

But what a disaster all this is for the young. ...

 

No, we are not in big trouble.

We are simply in the same trouble we've always been in, but that doesn't sell newspapers or drive clicks.

But surrendering to hysteria will misguide us, as surely as Tyler Robinson's feelings misguided him when he pulled that trigger, allegedly.

Didn't the country just get over surrendering its mind to its feelings?

Or are we, left, right, and in between, going to do this all over again? 

Fear of death made 270 million Americans trust a completely novel vaccine in 2021, only for over 20 million new infections in early 2022 to rip the mask off the whole thing.

We found out that we were not going to die.

We found out that the experts oversold the threat and the vaccine, ka-ching ka-ching, that after taking it "the virus didn't stop with me". We got sick anyway, and we continued to spread it. The adults knew that the virus was mutating to spread at the cost of its deadliness, but the adults were not in charge. We ended up learning the hard way.

The virus of violence is endemic to the world. Woke is a counterfeit. Summer 2020 was not a summer of love. Christianity is Uberwoke and explains that hate lives in us all.

The spectrum of hate's evidence is wide: By intentional homicide rate, Canada ranks 111th in the world in 2023. Mexico ranks 18th, and the United States ranks 66th.

But in 1975 the intentional homicide rate in the United States was 9.6 per 100,000. 9.6 is 43rd in 2023, Iraq-like. In 2023 the United States is 5.8. The rate is down 40%.

We have become far less violent, not more, in the last fifty years, even as religious faith supposedly has declined.

Maybe we should rethink that. Or maybe for starters we should just think.

Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men. 

-- I Corinthians 14:20 

When Antifa thinks even the media are the fascists, you know we are still at Orwell's "meaningless" fascism from 1944

George Orwell, here:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

George Orwell on the Meaninglessness of the Term 'Fascism'

"It would seem that, as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, youth hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I don't know what else."

The source of this statement attributed to Orwell is given as "Tribune, 1944" here. I haven't found a credible alternative citation proving Orwell wrote it.

In a leftist age, the promiscuous use of the term would be understandable.