September has become a murderous month. This year it marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And as this month began, the trial of Lindsay Clancy was under way in Massachusetts, a trial notable not only for the appalling character of the crime – Clancy strangled each of her three children – but for the appalling degree of sympathy some women have expressed for the defendant.
When Kirk was murdered while speaking on a college campus last year, many left-wing Americans rejoiced – and his killing is still a cause for levity at Hasan Piker rallies today. The leftist podcaster enjoys leading crowds in an off-key, mocking rendition of an AI-written song called “We Are Charlie Kirk.” He and his audience have no empathy for the murdered man – they hate him even in death.
If al-Qaeda attacked America today, the hijackers would get a sympathetic hearing
Piker is a coward and a spoiled child. He praises totalitarians such as Mao Zedong and warns American Jews they will suffer violence for supporting Israel. But he’s careful to couch his threats and thuggish sympathies just coyly enough to be able to deny what his words plainly imply. Somebody will inflict beatings – or bombings – on Jews in this country for having opinions at variance with Piker’s. But hey, he’s just the messenger: don’t blame him when someone else turns the prophecy into a bloody reality. Even if he does sing a giggly song to his followers afterward.
It’s not millionaire socialists such as Piker who pick up rifles to gun down Charlie Kirk or Zionist Jews or anyone else on the far-left’s hit list. Piker’s role is simply to create an environment in which others will act. He’s not alone: the hatred and hysteria whipped up to kill Kirk was fomented by countless small-time radical campaigners. They put a target on Kirk’s back by painting him as a threat to transgender people’s lives. The reality was that his own life was endangered – and was then taken by a gunman.
His slaughter is now a source of ongoing glee for the sort of people who listen to (and sing along with) Piker. There may be other forces at work in the brains of those who pity Lindsay Clancy, a child-killer without a political agenda. Yet it’s hard to avoid comparing her apologists with Luigi Mangione’s left-wing admirers. Mangione became a folk hero to anti-capitalist radicals after he killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. Clancy’s case lacks the overt ideological angle, but emotions run deeper than ideas. Mangione and Clancy have both benefited from a warped sense of sympathy for the underdog and greater identification with the killers’ plight than with that of the victims. It’s been argued that this is a projection of “Main Character Syndrome,” the narcissistic belief of many people, in this age of social media, that the whole world is nothing but a film in which they are the star.
Other people are not really real – they’re just extras, or stock villains (the heartless healthcare executive), or mere props to set up the psychodrama (Clancy’s dead children). Clancy’s five-year-old daughter and two sons, one three years old, the other just eight months, were too young to be main characters. But Clancy, like Mangione, looks like someone who might star in a TV drama where the obviously guilty defendant miraculously turns out to be innocent. That kind of story is so much easier to relate to than one in which a mother really does intend to kill her defenseless children, or one in which a leftist young man isn’t justified in his murderous rage against “the system.” When was the last time you saw anything like that on Netflix?
When al-Qaeda terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, Americans, and millions of people around the world, recognized the atrocity for exactly what it was. Even 25 years ago, there were fringe leftists who believed America deserved the attacks, but they were indeed fringe.
What would Piker say if the attacks took place today? What would the throngs of well-wishers for Clancy or Mangione think? In the last quarter-century, progressives and the entertainment media have both introduced new baseline narratives into the American (and global) psyche. Americans too young to remember 9/11 have been taught throughout their lives to think of right and wrong in terms of racial history, colonialism, mental health and (always politically correct) Hollywood and TV courtroom drama twists. They’ve also become accustomed to hearing political violence mooted as a just possibility by left-wing influencers. This doesn’t mean most young Americans believe such programming, but it’s made inroads into many minds since 2001.
If al-Qaeda attacked America today, the hijackers would get a sympathetic hearing from some of the jurors in the court of public opinion. Al-Qaeda didn’t win its war. But America is losing another kind of struggle with terror, against the moral perversion that makes it possible. Charlie Kirk became a casualty of this other war last year. There will be many more if we do not reverse the mainstreaming of murder.
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