The Victimhood Olympics, the Vibe Shift, and the Assassination of Charlie Kirk
A week after the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk, many of us are still struggling to come to grips with where we are. Many parents are laboring to explain to their kids why Charlie Kirk was murdered. More broadly, political commentators are wondering, “What happened to Gen Z?” (“The suspect in the killing of Charlie Kirk is 22 years old. The perpetrator of the Annunciation Church mass shooting was 23 years old. The alleged gunman in last December’s killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was 26 years old. The shooter who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, was 20 years old.”)
While there are many layers to an answer to that question, ranging from social media and smartphones to the disruption caused by COVID lockdowns, to the fragmentation of American society as a whole and the abandonment of God, I’d like to focus on tying together a few elements that have been proposed in recent days.
We can begin with this astute observation by Sohrab Amari:
Two parallel developments:
(1) Wokeness peaked in 2020 and has been on a downward slide ever since (rendering anti-woke tedious to a corresponding degree).
(2) A hard-core remnant of the 2020 BLM/trans tendency has radicalized further since then — even militarized.
Why is this significant? For over a decade, under the delusion of what we now call “wokeness,” we established the infamous intersectional hierarchy, what we might call “the Victimhood Olympics.” Dividing the population up into various classifications of oppressor and oppressed, people competed to be the greatest victim, cashing in their intersectional points for social status. Victimhood conferred invulnerability. Not only that, the greatest victim could demand that society reorganize itself around their chosen narratives and identity. Those were the rules that we collectively adopted, and which we taught in schools and enforced in board rooms and on campuses and in government.
Now, not everyone fully bought into the Woke game. Instead, many just went along with it. Corporations did it to make money (and avoid the ire of Woke activists). Fly the rainbow flag. Put the black square in your profile. Repeat the catechism (“In this house, love is love, no person is illegal, yada yada yada”). Large numbers of people had a “go along to get along” mindset, like the green grocer in Vaclav Havel’s famous essay about “The Power of the Powerless.”
The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.
Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer’s superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan’s real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer’s existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?
Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient;’ he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.
It’s crucial that we recognize the Go-Along stream of Wokeness. The ideological fig leaf of critical theory masked the craven opportunism and cowardice of many sectors of society. This explains a substantial portion of the woke-mind virus that afflicted us beginning in 2014 or so (I have described the dynamics in more detail in chapter 4 of The Sin of Empathy), and which Amari notes began to wane after 2020.
But amidst this Get-Along Wokeness was the deep catechesis of the True Believers, the Woker-Than-Thou. These are the ones who participated in the Victimhood Olympics “for reals.” Coddled by a culture of untethered empathy, they became “wound collectors,” a term coined by Joe Navarro for individuals who “consciously collect and preserve social slights, grievances, and injustices—real or imagined—to justify their beliefs, ideologies, or behaviors, often with harmful consequences.” Wound collectors rode the wave of Wokeness higher and higher, believing that their day had finally come.
But then the Vibe Shift happened. The wave of Wokeness crested, and the backlash began. Trump’s re-emergence after his “loss” in 2020 began to shake things. The revolt of the normies against the outer edges of wokeness—from men competing in women’s sports and showering in girls’ locker rooms to the institutionalization of anti-white racism at all levels of society—shattered the illusion of limitless Woke progress.
And with Trump’s re-election last November, things began to really unravel for the Woke—executive orders recognizing biological reality and dismantling the DEI hierarchy in the government, Bud Light replacing Dylan Mulvaney with Shane Gillis and Peyton Manning, the NCAA banning men in women’s sports, and so on.
American society sought to “put the woke away” (at least in its more extreme forms). The Victimhood Olympics were over (or at least in remission). But where does this leave the true believer? “What do you mean the Victimhood Olympics are over? What do you expect me to do with all the wounds I’ve collected? Where do I cash them in now?”
For the trans-BLM-remnant, the return of Trump and the vibe shift is the spark needed to set off the cesspool of violence they’ve been stewing in. When society was trending their way and all the corporations were cheerleading for Woke, they could be content with Cancel Culture. Now that the normies revolted against the far edges of insanity, and corporations pivoted back and at least are hiding the Woke, the ante must be upped. Cancel Culture gives way to Assassination Culture, to mass-shooting-of-Christian-children Culture, to TikTok-dance-videos-when-Charlie-Kirk-is-murdered Culture.
The Cheerleaders
This last phenomenon deserves its own comment. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is truly shocking. But almost as shocking has been the widespread celebration of his death in certain corners of the Left. Many have been disturbed by the number of women, teachers, and nurses who have mocked, rationalized, and celebrated Kirk’s murder. But remember that wokeness has long been a feminine-coded movement. Young women have shown themselves particularly committed to leftism, even as other demographic groups have swung away. Louise Perry has rightly argued that the “the specific variety of Leftism that is currently riding high is extremely well suited to feminine preferences,” most notably:
1. A cause that appeals to compassion for the vulnerable (the care/harm foundation, to use Jonathan Haidt’s expression), tapping into women’s greater average agreeableness.
2. A cause that emphasizes fearful threats, tapping into women’s greater average neuroticism and risk aversion.
3. A cause that offers collective emotional experiences, given that women are more vulnerable to social contagion, and particularly to outbreaks of mass hysteria. [see the original article for hyperlinks to proof of these traits]
Elsewhere, Perry has connected female empathy and mothering instincts to the coddling of the trans-phenomenon.
Mentally ill misfits inspire compassion in women, particularly childless women looking for an outlet for their maternal instincts. When women view trans people as hyper-vulnerable—and trans activists have worked very hard on promoting that view—there’s no way that women will call a “trans woman” a man, even if it means letting Bruno into the girls’ locker room.
Those protective instincts were manifested in cancel culture, which Perry describes as [mean] “girl culture”: “the use of a feminine style of aggression to enforce political conformity in the workplace and other areas of public life.” These feminine forms of aggression include social ostracization, name-calling, rumour-mongering, and other mean-girl behavior.
The fact that many of these women are in the educational, medical, and journalistic professions is owing to the fact that these were (and still are) the strongholds of Wokeness—indoctrination centers filled with true believers that have deeply imbibed and participated in the Woke Revolution.
But in light of recent events, Perry’s argument needs modification. She claims that “wokeism doesn’t work in a masculine register.” And to some degree, that is true; Wokeism has identified masculinity as one of its chief symbolic opponents. But the gender ideology that is deeply embedded within wokeness complicates the picture, as the pattern of trans violence in recent years demonstrates.
The Tranissaries
This helps to explain why the trans movement has been the tip of the spear of leftwing violence. In many ways, Trans is the apotheosis of wokeness, the culmination of the leftist revolt against reality, against nature and nature’s God. Consider the appeal. In the intersectional hierarchy, men are oppressors. So are white people. To be a white woman or especially a white man is to be at the bottom of the intersectional pyramid, responsible for all of the great evils of the day, with no way to erase the stain of your whiteness or your maleness. Until gender ideology comes along. Now, if you discover and adopt a new sexual identity, you are immediately at the top of the pyramid, the winner of the Victimhood Olympics. Think of the power of the Trans promise. You can reshape reality, reshape biology, reshape society. Under the new rules of the Victimhood Olympics, you can make up your own sexual identity, and the most powerful social media platforms in the world will add it to the list. You can demand that people call you pronouns of the opposite sex. You can even invent your own pronouns—made-up words like xe/xir—and you can demand that people call you by them on pain of losing their livelihood. That is power. And for a few years, everyone goes along. You are in the catbird’s seat.
And so you go all in. You pump your body full of chemicals and hormone blockers, with testosterone or estrogen. You go deeper and seek surgeries to conform your biology to your chosen sexual identity. Top surgery or bottom surgery, castration or phalloplasty—in a fervor of religious zeal, you dive all the way in.
And then the vibe shifts. The normies revolt against the revolution. And now you’ve sterilized yourself, ruined your endocrine system, and irreversibly damaged your body and warped your soul, while collecting grievances against those who would frustrate your desires. All you’re left with is a bundle of malice, rage, shame, and anger at broken promises, and a target on the backs of Christians and conservatives that the Democratic Party and the media have accused of being “fascists, Nazis, racists, homophobes, and transphobes” for the last twenty years. In other words, now you have a permanent Remnant of Wokeness who will not go quietly into the good night, domestic terrorists prepared to carry out violence against those who oppose their insanity. You have the rage of the Malakoi.
Auron Macyntire has astutely identified parallels between the trans terrorists and the janissaries of the Ottoman Empire. Janissaries were stolen from their Christian parents by Muslims, indoctrinated into Islam, and trained to be the elite infantry for the sultans. Likewise, the tranissaries “were stolen from their parents by leftwing ideologues, fed a radical gender ideology, and turned into living weapons for the Democratic party.”
Conclusion
So, where does this leave us as a society? It leaves us with a substantial cohort of ideologically radicalized young people who were successfully indoctrinated into gender confusion through pornography, schools, and the dark portions of the web, who have wrecked their bodies with hormones and surgery, and marred their souls with bitterness, malice, and rage, and given demonic forces a foothold in their lives. In other words, for more than a decade, American culture writ large took the mentally-ill, sexually-deviant, and the demonically-oppressed, validated and affirmed their delusions, pumped them full of experimental hormones, and encouraged them to collect and fondle their grievances against their parents, their neighbors, their churches, and American society. Now the party is over, and the bill is due. We are reaping what we’ve sown.
What should we do in response? The answer is worth an article of its own, but for now I’ll simply point to the only way out: repent of your sins and turn to Christ. Jesus is the Lord and Savior of the world. He came to this earth, struggled and suffered, enduring the darkness of Gethsemane and the horror of Calvary to absorb every last ounce of sin, shame, malice, and lust that this hellish world could muster. And three days later, he trampled death into the dust, and rose triumphant from the grave, ascended into heaven, and invites all men everywhere to turn from their wickedness and receive eternal life. Full forgiveness, freely offered in the gospel. All you have to do is repent and believe. There is no other way. Not for the true believers, and not for the moderate Get-Alongs who validated, encouraged, and enabled this madness. It’s Christ or chaos.
Lord, have mercy.
