From 9/11 to Today: The Counterfeit of “Safety” Exposed

How Charlie Kirk's tragic assassination unmasks the left’s insistence for terror over dialogue

Twenty-four years after that bright September morning turned black, the catechism still drones: they hate us for our freedom. Yet post-9/11 America has taught dogma differently—freedom as permission slip, freedom as a hall pass subject to revocation, freedom as something administered by a clipboard and credentials.

Such freedom is not something to be envious of. But Osama bin Laden and his nineteen henchmen were never concerned about freedom in the first place. Not our kind anyway.

“Fifteen days,” they said at the outset of the coronavirus farce. Then it was fifteen months of rituals, mandates, and the astonishing revelation that The Science™ was settled until it wasn’t. Dissent—once considered violence—suddenly became a public-health necessity on select streets for select causes.

The managerial catechism mutated, but the liturgy remained: obey first, ask questions never.

Which brings us to the rifle shot that cracked a campus courtyard and the soul of a movement. Whether history ultimately records Charlie Kirk’s death on Wednesday afternoon as an assassination, the intent was not ambiguity but elimination—a bullet as argument, a muzzle flash as veto. Today’s revolutionaries prefer to outsource their convictions to explosives and epithets, to arson and algorithms.

When debate fails, deplatform. When deplatforming fails, destroy. This is not an accident of the modern Left—it is its inheritance.

The left–right axis, born in the seating chart of the French Revolution, was not about tax rates but metaphysics. To the left of the president of the National Assembly sat the Jacobins, apostles of abstract virtue and practical terror: equality in theory, the guillotine in practice.

The Revolution ate not only its children but also its parents and fed on the marrow of priests and peasants who kept inconvenient loyalties—to God, to parish, to province, to the little platoons that Edmund Burke warned were being dynamited by the new political chemistry.

Say what one wishes about powdered wigs, they didn’t require powdered remains.

Then came the Bolsheviks, who promised bread but delivered rations. Revolutionaries who preached peace while staffing the secret police. Those who spoke of liberation yet constructed the barbed-wire vocabulary of the twentieth century.

The Bolshevik arithmetic was elegant in its cruelty: subtract a class to add a utopia.

On Spanish streets in the 1930s, the Red Terror targeted the habits of the old civilization—smashing altars, executing nuns, while parish priests disappeared as if tradition itself were a felony. The revolutionary project knew its enemy: not a party but a patrimony.

Fast-forward to our performative present, where being clad in black while maintaining the useless covid-mask has become the uniform of “Antifa.” The canard of “anti-fascism” serves these blood-soaked monsters as the get-out-of-jail-free card for the billions of dollars in damage it has inflicted. Blocks burned, precincts surrendered, businesses boarded up like blank obituaries.

Portland, Oregon—God love its rainfall and roses—was treated as a laboratory for demolition-by-slogan. Leftist politicians filmed their monologues while the networks wrote the fanfiction. When the bill came due, it was itemized in shutters and sirens, the city’s once-vibrant hum replaced with plywood poetry and security grates squealing shut at dusk.

This is how the revolution modernized its branding, but not its methods.

Jack Callahan, barkeep emeritus of common sense, put down his dish towel and cut through the jargon: “You can always tell a counterfeit by what it can’t afford. The counterfeit of freedom can’t afford dissidents.” Then he took another swig off his bottle of Budweiser and added, “Princes love the word freedom. They love it most when they’re spelling it for you.”

Jack is right, as usual. Put not your trust in princes, especially those who govern by waiver in a culture where inherent rights have suddenly become waiverable. Freedom administered is freedom denied. Freedom standardized is freedom sterilized.

Come Thursday morning, twenty-four years on, the mirror still judges.

Recall. The men who hijacked those planes were not conservative in any meaningful sense. They were autocrats with a theology, utopians with detonators.

This was a revolutionary vanguard whose politics were leftward in method if not in manifesto: the individual subordinated to an abstract cause, the old order torched for a promised new dawn, the sacred stripped and redressed as state utility. The tactics—shock, spectacle, submission—have been franchised domestically, but in softer packaging.

We call it “safety.” They call it “progress.”

Jack Callahan calls it “the long con.”

So, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed because words are now considered wounds and wounds have somehow become arguments. Nevertheless, the press corps rehearses its summaries about rhetoric and temperature while quietly indexing which temperatures are proper to raise and which to cool.

The same chorus that, in 2020, tut-tutted high-school quarterbacks for the gall to breathe fresh air, today holds vigils for smashed windows and scolds fathers for wanting their daughters to walk downtown without a chaperone named Glock.

Notice how quickly they discover federalism when rioters need indulgences and how swiftly they rediscover central power when neighborhoods demand tranquility or parents seek sanity.

The counterrevolution will not be televised, because it isn’t a show.

It’s a stewardship. It’s sheriffs who know their counties by the creek beds and not the census tracts, pastors who care more for souls than for seating charts, mothers who burn the script of fear and teach their children to kneel only before God, and fathers who understand that courage is a habit, not a headline.

This is subsidiarity reasserting itself—responsibility traveling downhill, accountability living next door, charity speaking in first names. It’s a republic being rebuilt from the neighborhood outward.

We can mourn—God knows we must—and still refuse the lesson our princes prefer. They say the solution to violence is silence, to danger is docility, to fear is more fear.

No.

The answer to bullets is not whispers but truth, and the answer to arson is not ashes but order. The torch that lit the modern Left has burned too many sanctuaries, too many streets, too many reputations. It is time to douse the sacramental gasoline and rebuild the altars—familial, communal, divine.

Reflect. Hope is not an ideology. It is a Person.

Freedom is not a permission. It is a gift. And a free people does not bow the neck, but it does bow the knee, genuflecting to the rightly ordered, rightly named, and rightly guarded.

This Thursday, remember the heroes who died, reject the lies, and recommit to the only revolution worth having: the restoration of what is true, good, and beautiful—so that when the counterfeit comes knocking, the house is already in order and the lights, at last, are on.

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