When the Preference Cascade Becomes a Flood
Everything is becoming clear.
I’ve written before about preference cascades — where large portions of the public, often a majority, conceal their views for fear of punishment, only to reveal those views when some precipitating event takes place. Classic examples include the fall of Communist regimes, like Ceausescu’s Romania, where even Ceausescu himself thought everyone loved him until shortly before he was stood in front of a wall and shot.
Usually those happen in one direction. But in contemporary America, they’re happening in two.
The murder of Charlie Kirk at the hands of a leftist gunman has revealed that many, many more Americans — and even people elsewhere around the world — supported Charlie and his views than was commonly appreciated. New Zealanders in London danced a Haka in his honor; crowds gathered all over the United States, as well as in Rome, London, Germany, and Israel.
Charlie’s views — uniformly disparaged by the press as “far right” — are in fact mainstream, generally held by the majority of people. His assassination has caused people to step forward, and realize that the normal-American community is a huge majority.
As Jonathan Turley writes:
Charlie was brave, and he was brash. He refused to yield to the threats while encouraging others to speak out on our campuses.
He was particularly hated for holding a mirror to the face of higher education, exposing the hate and hypocrisy on our campuses. For decades, faculty have purged their ranks of conservatives and libertarians. Faced with the intolerance of most schools, polls show that a large percentage of students hide their values to avoid retaliation from faculty or their fellow students.
Charlie chose to change all that. TPUSA challenges people to engage and debate them.
People are getting the courage not to hide their views, which is problematic for the left, whose strategy has consisted of using bullying and propaganda to convince 80% of the population that the views of 20% of the population are in the majority.
Not anymore.
But something else is being revealed, which is just how awful the views of the other 20% are. The approving response to the assassination from so many otherwise apparently respectable people has demonstrated just how many people there are who adhere to a leftist ideology of hate.
These aren’t just a few wackos. These are large numbers of people in professional and managerial jobs — mostly government employees of some sort, it seems — who genuinely believe that holding ideas they don’t like should carry the death penalty.
These people are everywhere. They might be teaching your kids. They might be the face looking down at you as you’re wheeled into the E.R. They might be the guy who approves your building permit, or not. It’s an Army Of Haters.
Trump is the Great Clarifier, and here’s another thing that’s become clear in his second term.
They’re there, they hate you, and they’re not going anywhere. So what to do about it?
I have been watching the news the last few days. I think the tide is turning. It's a lot of little things. But it seems to be adding up. I have seen the reports about the vile reactions to Kirk's death. But some of those are drawing responses. The employee at Office Depot who refused to print a poster for a Kirk vigil got fired. Most businesses are going to realize they cannot afford to make more than half the country mad at them! It may spread. I read about one patient contacting a hospital about a post by one of their staff--asking if they could guarantee her that person would not be assigned to her care. I think more and more organizations will feel pressure about this. Trump has already been after the universities, threatening their research funding for their failures on anti-semitism. That could easily be applied to other issues. (And the leftist judges can't stop him forever.) And in some places, the state governments could clamp down. Do you think Texas will tolerate this stuff from the academics for very long? Or Alabama or Florida? The higher education establishment is weaker than they realize.
This isn't going to be over quickly. I suspect it will be another five years or more to deal with all of it. And I suspect the Dems could be shut out of the White House for a long time--that's happened before (after Lincoln's election in 1860, no Democrat became president until Grover Cleveland in 1884). You had a link on Instapundit to the Battleswarm blog, a piece in which Person pointed out that groups get violent when they begin to realize they are losing. But the violence does not help them--it may hasten their fall.
I said this in response to one of your previous posts.
Scorched. Earth.
This is a wildfire starting to spread out of control. We've had small brush fires that have popped up in the last few decades. Contract with America. The Tea Party. Trump 45. Democrats and their uniparty Republican consorts had enough water to keep most of them under control, but the embers still burned. And most of us stayed silent. We put the lotion on the skin because we didn't want to get the hose again. We saw the dry tinder lying on the ground all around the forest, but we didn't dare start a fire because they would turn the hose on us through social media and the "news" media, and bury us.
Charlie fought that in a way that nobody else did. He was uniquely gifted to be able to walk onto college campuses and spar with the best and worst of the leftists there, all while simultaneously encouraging the conservative students and the ones who didn't really know what they believed yet. In doing this, he was lighting small fires all over the forest, fires that were noticeable but hidden so deeply under the cover of liberal institutions that they couldn't imagine they would actually spread.
Butler, PA was the spark. Someone crazy enough to follow through with what the media and the left had left unsaid all those years. They attempted to assassinate a president, failing by millimeters. Cory Comperatore was unfortunately caught by that bullet. It was a wake-up call for millions of Americans. They went from passive "I'll vote Trump, if I bother to show up to the polls that day" to "I'd walk over broken glass to vote for Trump". It galvanized the electorate, but it also showed Charlie's main constituency that one side was willing to kill the other for their beliefs. The fact that Charlie was as good or better a listener than he was a speaker, and he was a phenomenal speaker, showed them that only one side was interested in talking about ideas.
Trump gets into office, but the hose remains. However, there are more victories being strung together. The deportations and closing of the border show that Trump isn't simply talking about doing something; he is actually accomplishing the things he said he would do. He's taking his second term seriously. The left is still fighting and still has a stranglehold on education and the institutions.
Then, the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
The fire that was slowly spreading is now a conflagration. The tinder that was on the ground in the political forest is caught up. Those leftists who had been protected by the media and felt that they would never be held accountable for their actions are suddenly thrust into the light. That protection burned away in a single moment. No more are they able to say horrible things without being called on it.
And, companies are listening. They see the power of the conservative movement, what it did to Bud Light and Target, and conversely, what it did FOR American Eagle. They know that if they defend the luxury beliefs of their employees, they will lose. Office Depot isn't firing those employees because they support conservative politics. They are doing it because so many people said they were done with Office Depot.
Schools know they are already on thin ice with this administration. They see how it has cost Harvard, and they don't want to push back.
This is a beautiful, terrible moment. It cost Charlie his life. His wife and children are paying for this in tears and heartache. His friends and colleagues and left with a hole in their hearts. It may truly be a Turning Point. However, it is up to all of us who were gifted with this birthright as Americans, and who value what the founding fathers gave to us to continue this work. After seeing Erika's message last night (heartbreaking and awe-inspiring), there is much to do not only to continue Charlie's work, but to restore the American experiment to what it was originally intended.
I pray that this wildfire that Charlie has created is a refiner's fire. It will burn off the inconsequential things, leaving us with what truly matters. There will be conservative voices and causes caught up in this fire as well. It will hopefully provide us with a more perfect Union.