Charlie Kirk’s assassination has served as a catalyst for turning a new leaf in our civilizational return to sanity. In a fascinating recent podcast, titled “Western Civilization Has Reached Its Turning Point After Charlie Kirk’s Death,” Victor Davis Hanson remarks:
Something is happening in the United States, … worldwide, too. [T]he death of Charlie Kirk ignited it. It’s not a top-down DEI mandate. It’s a grassroot kind of collective shrug throughout Western civilization [that] could be characterized as “enough is enough.”
We’re witnessing largescale demonstrations in Ireland, Great Britain. The government of France has fallen. …. [T]here is unrest in the Netherlands. We used to think … that Eastern Europe was supposedly backward politically under the Soviet sway, economically stagnant. But … lately, the Eastern Europeans seem the most sensible of all Westerners. They believe in tradition. They believe in borders. They believe in legal only immigration. They believe in fossil fuel development…. And yet, they are also having a reinforcing moment.
Hanson elaborates on this moment, characterized as the West’s “collective shrug”:
What is this moment? We are seeing it in the United States with thousands of people … commemorating the death of Charlie Kirk. There’s no tolerance for the usual left-wing socialist craziness, the abhorrent violent smears of conservatives who’ve died. And you don’t see major bureaucrats or generals or Hollywood figures increasingly … coming out and rejoicing, because they feel that they’re going to get a big push back.
This is not violent. It’s just a collective shrug. And what is the shrug? Basically, it’s saying we’re tolerant of people with alternate lifestyles, but whether we like it or not, the nuclear two-parent family for 2,500 years has ensured the survival of Western civilization….
We have a multi-racial, multicultural population. But whether we like it or not, the foundations of the United States are Judeo-Christian, as they are of Western civilization in general. We have no apologies for that…
We also are tired of what I call boutique anti-Americanism… It doesn’t mean we’re going to outlaw free speech or try to do use the same tactics as the critics of America do. But what we’re saying is we’re a unique place. We’re better than the alternative. We don’t have to be perfect to be good. So, you can say all you want, but we’re going to not just ignore you. We’re going to do our best to make sure your voices have no influence…
Hanson concludes:
[P]eople throughout the West say … we have let in millions … that do not like us and do not share our values. We have opted for economic irrationalism that has … harmed our economies and hurt our lifestyles. We have embraced critical legal theory, critical race theory that suggested the criminal is a victim rather than a victimizer. And we see the effects, and the verdict is in: it doesn’t work.
And we see that our governments, our bureaucracy, our culture at large doesn’t want to hear this message. And we know they’re influential in the media, in the corporate boardroom, in the university, but … they don’t represent 51% of the people ….
Crowds are now marching in Europe in the United States, and the message is: what has worked in the past does not have to be perfect …. It’s better the than the alternative, and we’re going to return to it, and we wish you would join us. But if you don’t want to join us and you want to dismantle Western civilization, or you hate the United States, or you despise your particular European country, then you’re going to be voted out of office and you’re going to have zero political power as it should be.
This grassroots moment reminds me of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Eastern Europe rejected totalitarian socialism. After decades of being brutally coerced into a serf-like subsistence, people awakened with the realization that “enough was enough.” They simply refused to tolerate the tyranny of the absurd any longer.
Similar to the woke usurpation of language in recent years, we were forced to use preposterous fake terms and live by lies in our public existence. As the Berlin Wall collapsed, so did the double-speak and absurd terminology.
In November of 1989, I attended a rally to restore free speech and oppose communism. One of the speakers addressed us as “Ladies and Gentlemen.” After decades of being compelled to ubiquitously employ the absurd address “Comrade,” regardless of whether we were speaking to a superior or a subordinate, we couldn’t believe we were hearing the normal, traditional, and meaningful “Ladies and Gentlemen.” And we said, “Enough is enough.”
Overnight, the ridiculous address “Comrade” disappeared from public speech. I was warned by my family to wait a bit before calling my teachers or other adults “Mr.” and “Mrs.” With the boldness of youth, I disregarded the warning and took special delight in greeting everyone I saw with the respectful and time-honored forms of address. This might seem trivial, but it is symbolic of something much greater — the long-overdue return to tradition and sanity. Let’s not forget that the woke language police in the West also tried to outlaw “Ladies and Gentlemen.” Swiftly, other areas of social life followed suit and returned to normalcy.
We experienced the same “collective shrug,” just as people in the West now are sick and tired of being browbeaten by the woke insanity. As it often happens in history, we needed a few courageous individuals to lead the way. Back in Eastern Europe, we were inspired by figures such as Reagan, Thatcher, and John-Paull II. Today, people in the West are fortunate to have courageous statesmen and influencers who were ahead of the curve.
We have but a brief window of opportunity to seize the moment and rewind the clock back to sanity. Only thus can we rebuild the rock-solid foundations of a tradition that has worked best in human history and provides the only viable hope for the future.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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