This morning, FBI Director Kash Patel and Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah announced the arrest of the young man they believe murdered Charlie Kirk. According to authorities, he was turned in by his father and a family friend. A friend of mine looked into voting records and found that, while the young man was unaffiliated, his parents were registered Republicans, though marked as “disengaged.”
Too many disengaged Republicans allow schools, media, and the wider culture to indoctrinate their children. Whether through ignorance or a blind belief that things aren’t really that bad, children of conservative parents are often turned into Marxist revolutionaries right under their noses. Socialism is a uniquely subversive ideology. Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy, and Ronald Reagan knew it. Yet today we’ve fallen into a willful ignorance about the all-encompassing revolution.
But it has been that bad for a long time. The American Left took over universities in the 1960s and has essentially controlled entertainment media since then, if not longer. Traditional news media skews heavily to the left, while corporate boardrooms and HR departments—once considered conservative domains—now enforce leftist ideas in the private sector.
I graduated high school at 16 in 1999. Not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I did what every adult within earshot told me: go to college. The professor in my first class, an “introduction to college” course meant to teach study habits and an independent work ethic, required us to read a book by Michael Moore denouncing capitalism.
Other professors and administrators used their influence to promote various left-wing causes, as well as to break down traditional morality by encouraging students to experiment with sexuality. This was 1999, at a private Catholic college. Imagine what public universities were doing then—and what they are all teaching now.
It’s not just in higher education that conservative children are led astray. Many older generations have no idea what their children and grandchildren are consuming online. As bad as you think it might be, I can assure you it’s worse.
The alleged shooter had written phrases on his gun’s shell casings, including a transgender/furry meme, a code from a recent video game, and a line from an Italian socialist song. The prevalence of homosexual, transgender, and even furry culture online cannot be underestimated. I began posting on internet message boards in the late 1990s, and it was already there. By the mid-2000s, it was pervasive—though conservatives could still push back. I could tell a fellow forum member who believed he was really a girl inside that God didn’t make him that way without fear of censorship.
That all changed in the mid-2010s. Reddit, one of the biggest message boards on earth, banned a forum dedicated to supporting Donald Trump following the 2016 election, fearing that their lack of censorship had contributed to the rise of a man they believed was literally Hitler. Other platforms followed suit—Twitter banned right-wing influencers, Facebook cracked down on unapproved ideas, and alternatives such as Gab were cut off from payment processors and web servers.
This censorship went into overdrive in 2020, with critics of Covid lockdowns and vaccines silenced. After January 6, 2021, the alternative social media app Parler was annihilated, simultaneously banned from Amazon Web Services as well as the Apple and Android app stores, while Twitter banned the sitting President of the United States.
The internet environment of the past four years has been one in which left-wing ideas, no matter how radical or degenerate, flourished freely, while right-wing ideas, until recently, were censored. A young person logging onto social media for the first time—whether on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok—is bombarded by default with extreme left-wing views, including transgender propaganda.
Try it: make a new account on Instagram, set your age to 14, and see what the algorithm recommends for you.
Beyond social media, platforms like Discord facilitate global conversations, and not always in good ways. In 1999, college students were influenced mainly by professors and classmates. Today, in addition to those influences, they’re plugged into vast networks of radical leftists and LGBTQ+ activists. The alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk reportedly belonged to a Discord channel dedicated to LGBTQ+ issues that openly called for violence against Christians.
Chloe Cole, the detransitioner who spoke to the Idaho Legislature two years ago, was radicalized into believing she was a boy through Tumblr, a blogging platform dominated by LGBTQ+ writers. I recall Tumblr having a reputation for hosting lesbians and trans-identifying people as far back as the late 2000s.
With Twitter returning to its free-speech roots after Elon Musk’s acquisition in 2022, radical leftists migrated to BlueSky. If you have a strong stomach, head over there to see what they really think about us and about the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Until Musk bought Twitter, conservative ideas were often relegated to dark corners of the internet, where some young people were radicalized in the opposite direction. Conservatives who wanted to spread their message had to bypass media gatekeepers, which created a crucible that forged tremendous communicators like Tucker Carlson, Matt Walsh, and of course, the late Charlie Kirk.
One of the most encouraging aspects of Kirk’s movement was the way it made conservative ideas cool again. Since the 1960s, leftists have held the perceived cultural high ground. Left-wing views have long been considered highbrow, while conservative ideas have been mocked as ignorant, uneducated, and low class. In an article for The Lamp Magazine in 2020, future senator and vice president J.D. Vance wrote about how Christian faith was portrayed as low class:
Much of my new atheism came down to a desire for social acceptance among American elites. I spent so much of my time around a different type of people with a different set of priorities that I couldn’t help but absorb some of their preferences. I became interested in secularism just as my attention turned to my separation from the Marines and my impending transition to college. I knew how the educated tended to feel about religion: at best, provincial and stupid; at worst, evil. Echoing Hitchens, I began to think and then eventually to say things like: “The Christian cosmos is more like North Korea than America, and I know where I’d like to live.” I was fitting in to my new caste, in deed and emotion. I am embarrassed to admit this, but the truth often reflects poorly on its subject.
According to author Aaron Renn, we now live in what he calls the “negative world” with regard to Christianity. Our culture is actively hostile to traditional Christian faith, creating enormous pressure to conform.
Young people raised in a conservative Christian culture can find themselves overawed by the wider world. In light of the supposed wisdom of professors, older peers, and new influences, their parents’ culture can seem small, provincial, and lowbrow. The McDonald’s and Applebee’s of their childhood feel gauche compared to the sushi and Ethiopian food they now encounter. They begin to see their parents as uneducated rubes at best—bless their hearts—or evil Nazi Fascists at worst.
Conservative Christian parents, unaware of the pervasiveness and perversity of modern culture, believe they have succeeded in raising conservative Christian children by taking them to church on Sundays and perhaps talking politics at the dinner table. They know public schools lean left but recall their own school days and figure it’s not so bad. They buy their children mobile phones and send them to college—then are shocked when their children come home for summer vacation completely changed.
“We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans,” said Voddie Baucham.
Just as their parents live in a bubble of conservative Christian culture, young prodigals enter a bubble of leftist culture. Before long, everyone they know—professors, peers, friends in the Discord chat—are radical leftists who believe in socialism, atheism, and violent revolution. They forget that millions of Americans see things differently, that conservative ideas are more than just caricatures on South Park. They compete with each other to see who can engage in the most radical rhetoric.
News outlets, entertainment media, and their peers tell them that their job is to fight Nazis and Fascists. Then they are told that you, me, their parents, and influencers like Charlie Kirk are Nazis and Fascists.
This continues unabated until, one day, a young man decided to put that rhetoric into action.
Friends, guard your children’s hearts. I have seen too many conservative Christian parents who thought they raised their kids right, only to watch them go off the deep end as they come of age in a world gone mad. We must raise our children intentionally rather than letting the culture have its way with them.
If you really knew how bad it was in public schools, universities, and mainstream social media, what sacrifices wouldn’t you make to keep your children safe?
History is replete with parents whose children went astray. Parents often don’t understand where they went wrong, or if they did at all.
But it’s not inevitable. Charlie Kirk’s movement disproved the idea that young people will always be more liberal than their parents. Thousands of teenagers came to his rallies and heard him boldly defend not only conservative ideas but also the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In a world telling young people to trans themselves, curse God, deny their parents, and overthrow the system, Charlie told them to get married, build families, build a legacy, and trust in God.
Put in the time and effort to ground your children in Jesus Christ and in the Western tradition that is our heritage. The leftist revolution is not omnipotent, and our God is greater than the god of this world.
This is a land of wolves now.
Sicario
Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
Matthew 10:16
5 stars for this article.
Perfect, timely, well done, Brian.😇