This article is the height of irony.
The central claim is that Charlie Kirk was not a good person.
The article provides no support for that claim.
It does, however, provide ample support for the much more supportable claim that Jeremiah Johnson is a terrible person.
Why was Charlie Kirk bad? The article begins by saying that he lacked virtue, that he held "vile" beliefs, that he had a "massive negative impact... on American society", and, indeed, that he represented "an avatar for everything wrong with modern politics". Apparently, he was also a "dishonest huckster" and a "cynical bigot".
None of these claims ever receive any support, they're just left to linger.
Kirk's supposed errors that we're greeted to include "boosting" (i.e., supporting) Donald Trump—a sin committed by over half of the country—and a series of claims that Jeremiah seems to have not done any background research about. Or perhaps he just didn't care to! These claims are what give the game away in this article. They show us that Jeremiah is willing to engage in serious distortions of the truth.
The first claim, in Jeremiah's words, reads: "Kirk himself has also told his very large podcast audience that a ‘patriot’ should bail out Paul Pelosi’s attacker."
What are we supposed to take from this? Well, obviously that Charlie Kirk actually believes it would be patriotic and good to bail out the psycho who attacked Paul Pelosi. But that's not really what Charlie was saying at all. Go watch the video: x.com/JasonSCampbell…
The context to note is that Charlie is a human being who uses sarcasm. Notice how he starts smirking and is clearly telling jokes, throwing his words, and making other facetious comments? "Aaaaamaazzing patriot" is not a serious remark. He did not seriously say that someone should go bail David DePape out, nor that such a person would actually be a patriot. He specifically said that he wasn't qualifying what DePape did, and he said "it's not right".
This was in the middle of a diatribe about how criminals in liberal cities get to walk free (he even mentions one of today's buzzwords: cashless bail). He says that walking free after a crime happens all over San Francisco—and it did and to a smaller degree continues to—while the person who attacks Pelosi actually has to sit in jail (he misspeaks here and says "let out immediately", but listen or watch the fuller recording and you'll understand that slip; it's a livestreamed podcast recording, after all).
Jeremiah's first claim isn't what he wanted it to sound like it was. His second claim is just a pure lie: "[Kirk] heavily promoted a book that called for the systemic mass murder of leftists"—what book? Unhumans. Does it call for "systematic mass murder of leftists" anywhere in it? No. Did Charlie Kirk "heavily promote" it? No more than any other book he featured.
This claim is now irrelevant for evaluating Kirk's character, but there's more, just for fun. The other issue with the book, per Jeremiah, is that the authors "used Pinochet and Franco’s fascist regimes as positive examples".
They did do that. But why? Well, because the alternatives were far worse.
In 1973, Chile was on its way towards Allende's goal: the transition to socialism. His radical economic policy was devastating. This chart uses orange lines to show Chilean real wages at the beginning of Allende's presidency and when it came to its end through a military coup led by Pinochet.
What do you notice? Look carefully.
What you'll see here is total human immiseration on the road to socialism—itself a system of guaranteed immiseration and drudgery.
What Pinochet and his forces did was stop Allende from ruining their country further and subjecting it to permanent terror, totalitarianism, and, frankly given what communism is, evil. Under his rule, Pinochet brought the economy back to normalcy and he enjoyed considerable popularity. Then, he progressively reformed the economy and opened it up further with guidance from Chilean economists who had been educated at the University of Chicago.
These economists were stalwart free-marketeers and proponents of human liberty, and with their liberalization of Chile's economy, they gave birth to the Miracle of Chile and the birth of a stable, market economy in South America, with enviably rising living standards, unlike the situation anywhere subject to socialist rule.
Pinochet's rule was not bloodless, and he did kill about 2,000 communists and hundreds of cartel members too, but not without cause. Chile was fragile and could not afford revolution or to deal with organized drug producers. If revolutionaries had succeeded, the fate of the Chilean people would be far worse and the deaths would be far greater than anything seen under Pinochet.
Pinochet was not perfect, but he or someone like him was necessary to thwart socialism. He also nobly, voluntarily subjected his rule to a plebiscite in 1988, was voted out of power by 56% of the population, and stepped down after working to secure Chile's peaceful transition to normal democratic rule, some two years later.
Francisco Franco's rise to power was perhaps even more brutal than Pinochet's, although it was no less necessary for Spain. Franco led the Nationalists against the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War.
I cannot do justice to the horrors undertaken by the Second Spanish Republic's government.
They engaged in systematic and ceaseless anti-religious attacks resulting in the murder and mutilation of over 6,800 Catholic priests and the rape and murder of hundreds of nuns, not to mention untold damage to church property, relics, landmarks, and so on. They took part in reprisal killings of thousands of POWs, the murder of the Spanish nobility and business owners, the execution of conservatives, and as leftists are wont to do, they even turned against any suspected anti-Stalinists and murdered them too.
If you want to see horror, just go look at the pictures of what they did. I won't share them here.
Franco was right to crush these people, and the greatest tragedy is that he was unable to do so sooner. Had he done so, he could have saved many lives.
During his rule, he was cruel, but he did liberalize, and the alternative was, what, exactly? Leaving power prematurely and having Spain fall back into civil war or leftist hands? Succumbing to Soviet-sponsored terror cells aiming to carve out a foothold from which to mount the invasion of Portugal and the rest of Western Europe? Get real.
If you think Franco was bad to support versus the realistic alternatives available to Spain, then you're delusional. If you think the Soviets would've been better, then you might just be "Unhuman".
Jeremiah did zero research on this second claim, and at best, it's just a handwavy way to attack Kirk without any real substance.
His third claim was that "He likes to muse about staging public executions and bringing children to watch them."
OK! At least this is qualified with that he's musing. And he is, in fact, not making a serious suggestion in the clip! He's talking about how we can deter people from committing crime. The idea, in the segment, was not to make a serious policy suggestion, but to suggest showing people something he says should be regarded as being heavy and serious might get them to not commit crimes.
Who doesn't believe this? Does anyone seriously believe that he's wrong? I suppose that's not at issue, so I'll leave that there.
Really, the issue to Jeremiah is more that Kirk would discuss something like this at all. But this is an untenable standard for a free society; if you cannot discuss ideas that might offend—in jest or otherwise—then you simply do not live in one! There's no possible liberal (and I mean this in the real, sense, à la a Crémieux, Mill, Lieber, or Mises, not a modern-day faux-liberal/near-socialist) case that Kirk did anything wrong here. He upset whiners and hurt no one.
Jeremiah's fourth point just conveys yet again that he doesn't do any background research: "[Kirk] personally organized buses to send people to the January 6th insurrection."
Not really! He sent people when he thought it was a protest, discouraged violence, and expressed regret after finding out what happened. He did not send anyone to an insurrection, because he had no idea an insurrection would take place. This context is trivial to find, so why not mention it?
Is the issue participation in protests? Certainly not! Not to reasonable people, nor to unreasonable people like Jeremiah, who has supported other protests. His issue is with a false claim about what Kirk did, which he could've known was false. He could've known it was false had he simply read the sources at his linked page! He could've even read some of the sentences in the linked paragraph and then gotten a bit curious, but evidently not. Had he read "Turning Point Action... did not organize or take part in the march to the Capitol that erupted in violence" maybe he would've realized he was saying something substantially erroneous.
It's established now that Jeremiah has bad priorities and he doesn't care for context, so it's not surprising that he does this another time. He wrote: "Last month he called for the full military occupation of American cities."
Technically true. But so what? If you check the context, Kirk is just calling for what happened in D.C. That means a massive, temporary increase in policing, with the effect being to reduce crime substantially and predictably (x.com/cremieuxrecuei…). Policing surges do work to reduce crime, and their effects can be durable. American citizens' liberties aren't suspended by this in D.C. or elsewhere, except in the sense that criminals are no longer at liberty to get away with crimes.
If you want to denounce police surges, OK! That's a position plenty of people take. But surges are clearly not inherently bad, nor are they even bad in their current implementation.
Later in Jeremiah's essay, he suggests that he cares a lot about gun violence, but if that's really true, then he should at least tepidly support getting America's crime under control through actually effective means, like deploying police in America's crime-ridden cities. Instead, as I'll note, he prefers attacking fundamental American freedoms.
The final issue Jeremiah raises with Kirk is that he "used language like ‘civil war’ and emphasized how violent the left was and how conservatives needed to be ready."
I hate Whataboutism, but since this is a complaint purely about language rather than something substantive, I'm going to make a sinner out of myself (who hasn't?) and engage in it. Jeremiah tells politically-charged lies about violence in this very essay. Plenty of left-leaning and left-wing pundits do this all the time and he puts no energy towards them.
Jeremiah himself doesn't try to lower the temperature through avoiding divisive terms, but instead he muses about a nonexistent "libertarian-to-fascist" pipeline and suggests normal Catholics like @Vermeullarmine are "fascist" (really: x.com/JeremiahDJohns…). He says "Reconstruction didn't go far enough", contributed to the whole "weird" thing Democrats were doing during the election, and wrote an article castigating people for interest in the Imane Khelif drama. That article, by the way, was *wrong from the moment he published it*. In it, he claimed that our knowledge of Khelif's condition was based entirely on the word of one Russian man, when that simply wasn't even true at the time! (I remember reading this when it came out and thinking 'Well, I guess I can't trust this guy to do background research.' Still can't!) That article contains nonsense claims as well, like that "only around 2-8% of rape claims are false claims". My guess is that he doesn't know how to understand the research on this, and that he never actually bothered to look into it. But I have (link below!).
This is getting too off-topic. I'm just going to state some points now.
Jeremiah is a culture warrior. Jeremiah writes articles that sound a lot like someone who really, really wants you to think he's smart and that he does his research. Jeremiah basically never does his research. Jeremiah acts like he's a moderate, but he never is. And we're still at the beginning of his Kirk article!
Jeremiah goes on to show that he doesn't really understand gun violence and his views on the subject are so ill-informed as to be little more than pointless moralizing. Read his words:
"Far too many gun rights activists like to pretend that America experiences outlier levels of gun violence for some other mysterious reason that has nothing to do with our incredibly permissive stance towards gun control. That’s nonsense. The reason America has far more gun violence than any other rich nation is because we have far more guns and a far looser set of regulations governing firearms."
Is it?
Is there any evidence to support this? Is there any reason to believe this?
There's evidence against it, for sure. For instance, Americans also experience more non-gun violence than CANZUK and Europe do. Even for non-gun violence and controlled for race, America has a higher homicide rate than Canada. American gun violence has precedents in other forms of violence, and I think this is unsurprising if you know America's demographic history, even just among its (selected-to-be-individualistic) Whites.
There's also no relationship at the state level between gun ownership rates and gun violence (excluding suicides). It's not mysterious why this is: guns, without vicious people, do not create violence. In a model containing multiple SES measures, race shares, governor political parties, local political leaning, sex ratios, and age, the strongest variables, in predicting homicides (our best, and indeed, an incredibly reliable proxy for gun violence in the U.S.) are the Black share, followed by the Amerindian share, followed by median household income. Here's how they compare:
America's violence certainly doesn't have "nothing to do" with its permissive stance on gun control; it has quite a bit to do with it, and obviously without guns, there would be no gun deaths, and without guns there would be fewer assaults that make it into homicides. But it is intellectually dishonest to actually chalk up gun violence to the guns rather than to the people. People who, I'll add, rightly ought to be imprisoned, executed, or dissuaded—as Trump is doing right now in D.C. and possibly soon in other cities—for committing crimes. That's pretty simple, and if acted on, it makes any potential points about guns null, since they won't be an issue without crazy people to pull the trigger.
Jeremiah claims that it's pretending to claim that "a country with hundreds of millions of guns floating around can somehow end gun violence through other means." But that's just visibly wrong, and his own sources should've led him to that conclusion! Gun violence has been practically eliminated in D.C.—a place known for it—and, if anything, the solution greatly increased the number of guns in the city.
He very clearly just wants to attack gun ownership and gun rights, one of the most fundamental liberties available to man, and especially to those freest of men who live in the greatest country in the world, the United States. He just wants to grandstand, and the case that brought out this post proves it, because no reasonable gun control proposal—only a full ban—would've stopped someone from owning the hunting rifle that took Charlie's life. Not only that, but you'd have to go further than taking away all but the most piddling of guns. Train a healthy adult male for a month and he could have made the shot on Charlie with a bow or crossbow, and anyone can simply make a bow! (Or machine a pipe gun, for that matter. It's very easy.) The issue is not gun control.
The issue is also not totally unpreventable. Political assassinations can be prevented by lowering the national temperature rhetorically—the opposite of what Jeremiah is doing, but exactly what he claims to want. They can be prevented through increased, improved, and more proactive policing efforts, though this starts to get totalitarian (example: cremieux.xyz/p/minority-rep…). They can be prevented through expanding the use of involuntary commitments and antipsychotic-conditioned mental health releases. They can be prevented through simply enforcing the law.
Regardless of what we choose to do, violence can, however, never be eliminated. There's no way around this fact, short of chipping everyone with a Neuralink and merging them into a hivemind or embracing the most totalitarian of eugenics programs. Neither option is consistent with human freedom or flourishing, and both ought to be rejected.
If Jeremiah were serious and hoping to lower the temperature and speak across the aisle, he would look at some of his citations, like for his statement that "In 2025 so far there have been 309 mass shootings in the US, defined as shootings with four or more injuries or deaths" and then, perhaps, suggest a non-liberty violating means of fixing that issue. Since that statistic has a whole lot to do with gang violence, why not go for something tried-and-true, like a gang crackdown? (x.com/cremieuxrecuei…) I doubt he even knows the required context to understand this is on the table and it routinely works; I doubt he even knows that most of the guns used in said shootings are illegally obtained, and frankly, I doubt he really cares about that fact and what it entails for reducing gun violence without taking away people's liberties.
There's more that could be said about this piece, because it really is sloppy, poorly- and inconsistently-reasoned, shot through by terrible research quality, and more, but now I'll just focus on some of Jeremiah's vile concluding remarks. He said a serious conversation about gun control "will require an honest assessment of the people who’ve embraced calls to violence (both on the right, like Kirk, and on the left)."
He's suggesting here that Kirk "embraced called to violence" when this couldn't be further from the truth. He never called for, and in fact frequently condemned violence. Saying that violence will happen and some people will die from guns if they're available is not a call for violence and it is an insane, disparaging lie to treat such a remark in that way. He then says "We, like Charlie Kirk, can’t help but flirt with violence." But Charlie never flirted with violence, and casting a pro-freedom stance towards guns as flirtation with violence is just the worst type of ignorance, and in this case, nothing more than a smear about the wonderful legacy of Charlie Kirk.
This is most of what Jeremiah's writing is like. It's lazy, it's self-righteous, and it's just dressing for pushing views that most of his countrymen really do reject. It just happens to be the case that this time, Jeremiah's writing is also libel about a good, loving, kind, family-oriented, and unfortunately—for all of us—, recently-assassinated man.
Sources:
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
cremieux.xyz/p/how-many-sex…
Click in: x.com/cremieuxrecuei…
slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/06/gun…
gwern.net/note/statistic…
x.com/cremieuxrecuei…
bjs.ojp.gov/document/sufic…
The central claim is that Charlie Kirk was not a good person.
The article provides no support for that claim.
It does, however, provide ample support for the much more supportable claim that Jeremiah Johnson is a terrible person.
Why was Charlie Kirk bad? The article begins by saying that he lacked virtue, that he held "vile" beliefs, that he had a "massive negative impact... on American society", and, indeed, that he represented "an avatar for everything wrong with modern politics". Apparently, he was also a "dishonest huckster" and a "cynical bigot".
None of these claims ever receive any support, they're just left to linger.
Kirk's supposed errors that we're greeted to include "boosting" (i.e., supporting) Donald Trump—a sin committed by over half of the country—and a series of claims that Jeremiah seems to have not done any background research about. Or perhaps he just didn't care to! These claims are what give the game away in this article. They show us that Jeremiah is willing to engage in serious distortions of the truth.
The first claim, in Jeremiah's words, reads: "Kirk himself has also told his very large podcast audience that a ‘patriot’ should bail out Paul Pelosi’s attacker."
What are we supposed to take from this? Well, obviously that Charlie Kirk actually believes it would be patriotic and good to bail out the psycho who attacked Paul Pelosi. But that's not really what Charlie was saying at all. Go watch the video: x.com/JasonSCampbell…
The context to note is that Charlie is a human being who uses sarcasm. Notice how he starts smirking and is clearly telling jokes, throwing his words, and making other facetious comments? "Aaaaamaazzing patriot" is not a serious remark. He did not seriously say that someone should go bail David DePape out, nor that such a person would actually be a patriot. He specifically said that he wasn't qualifying what DePape did, and he said "it's not right".
This was in the middle of a diatribe about how criminals in liberal cities get to walk free (he even mentions one of today's buzzwords: cashless bail). He says that walking free after a crime happens all over San Francisco—and it did and to a smaller degree continues to—while the person who attacks Pelosi actually has to sit in jail (he misspeaks here and says "let out immediately", but listen or watch the fuller recording and you'll understand that slip; it's a livestreamed podcast recording, after all).
Jeremiah's first claim isn't what he wanted it to sound like it was. His second claim is just a pure lie: "[Kirk] heavily promoted a book that called for the systemic mass murder of leftists"—what book? Unhumans. Does it call for "systematic mass murder of leftists" anywhere in it? No. Did Charlie Kirk "heavily promote" it? No more than any other book he featured.
This claim is now irrelevant for evaluating Kirk's character, but there's more, just for fun. The other issue with the book, per Jeremiah, is that the authors "used Pinochet and Franco’s fascist regimes as positive examples".
They did do that. But why? Well, because the alternatives were far worse.
In 1973, Chile was on its way towards Allende's goal: the transition to socialism. His radical economic policy was devastating. This chart uses orange lines to show Chilean real wages at the beginning of Allende's presidency and when it came to its end through a military coup led by Pinochet.
What do you notice? Look carefully.
What you'll see here is total human immiseration on the road to socialism—itself a system of guaranteed immiseration and drudgery.
What Pinochet and his forces did was stop Allende from ruining their country further and subjecting it to permanent terror, totalitarianism, and, frankly given what communism is, evil. Under his rule, Pinochet brought the economy back to normalcy and he enjoyed considerable popularity. Then, he progressively reformed the economy and opened it up further with guidance from Chilean economists who had been educated at the University of Chicago.
These economists were stalwart free-marketeers and proponents of human liberty, and with their liberalization of Chile's economy, they gave birth to the Miracle of Chile and the birth of a stable, market economy in South America, with enviably rising living standards, unlike the situation anywhere subject to socialist rule.
Pinochet's rule was not bloodless, and he did kill about 2,000 communists and hundreds of cartel members too, but not without cause. Chile was fragile and could not afford revolution or to deal with organized drug producers. If revolutionaries had succeeded, the fate of the Chilean people would be far worse and the deaths would be far greater than anything seen under Pinochet.
Pinochet was not perfect, but he or someone like him was necessary to thwart socialism. He also nobly, voluntarily subjected his rule to a plebiscite in 1988, was voted out of power by 56% of the population, and stepped down after working to secure Chile's peaceful transition to normal democratic rule, some two years later.
Francisco Franco's rise to power was perhaps even more brutal than Pinochet's, although it was no less necessary for Spain. Franco led the Nationalists against the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War.
I cannot do justice to the horrors undertaken by the Second Spanish Republic's government.
They engaged in systematic and ceaseless anti-religious attacks resulting in the murder and mutilation of over 6,800 Catholic priests and the rape and murder of hundreds of nuns, not to mention untold damage to church property, relics, landmarks, and so on. They took part in reprisal killings of thousands of POWs, the murder of the Spanish nobility and business owners, the execution of conservatives, and as leftists are wont to do, they even turned against any suspected anti-Stalinists and murdered them too.
If you want to see horror, just go look at the pictures of what they did. I won't share them here.
Franco was right to crush these people, and the greatest tragedy is that he was unable to do so sooner. Had he done so, he could have saved many lives.
During his rule, he was cruel, but he did liberalize, and the alternative was, what, exactly? Leaving power prematurely and having Spain fall back into civil war or leftist hands? Succumbing to Soviet-sponsored terror cells aiming to carve out a foothold from which to mount the invasion of Portugal and the rest of Western Europe? Get real.
If you think Franco was bad to support versus the realistic alternatives available to Spain, then you're delusional. If you think the Soviets would've been better, then you might just be "Unhuman".
Jeremiah did zero research on this second claim, and at best, it's just a handwavy way to attack Kirk without any real substance.
His third claim was that "He likes to muse about staging public executions and bringing children to watch them."
OK! At least this is qualified with that he's musing. And he is, in fact, not making a serious suggestion in the clip! He's talking about how we can deter people from committing crime. The idea, in the segment, was not to make a serious policy suggestion, but to suggest showing people something he says should be regarded as being heavy and serious might get them to not commit crimes.
Who doesn't believe this? Does anyone seriously believe that he's wrong? I suppose that's not at issue, so I'll leave that there.
Really, the issue to Jeremiah is more that Kirk would discuss something like this at all. But this is an untenable standard for a free society; if you cannot discuss ideas that might offend—in jest or otherwise—then you simply do not live in one! There's no possible liberal (and I mean this in the real, sense, à la a Crémieux, Mill, Lieber, or Mises, not a modern-day faux-liberal/near-socialist) case that Kirk did anything wrong here. He upset whiners and hurt no one.
Jeremiah's fourth point just conveys yet again that he doesn't do any background research: "[Kirk] personally organized buses to send people to the January 6th insurrection."
Not really! He sent people when he thought it was a protest, discouraged violence, and expressed regret after finding out what happened. He did not send anyone to an insurrection, because he had no idea an insurrection would take place. This context is trivial to find, so why not mention it?
Is the issue participation in protests? Certainly not! Not to reasonable people, nor to unreasonable people like Jeremiah, who has supported other protests. His issue is with a false claim about what Kirk did, which he could've known was false. He could've known it was false had he simply read the sources at his linked page! He could've even read some of the sentences in the linked paragraph and then gotten a bit curious, but evidently not. Had he read "Turning Point Action... did not organize or take part in the march to the Capitol that erupted in violence" maybe he would've realized he was saying something substantially erroneous.
It's established now that Jeremiah has bad priorities and he doesn't care for context, so it's not surprising that he does this another time. He wrote: "Last month he called for the full military occupation of American cities."
Technically true. But so what? If you check the context, Kirk is just calling for what happened in D.C. That means a massive, temporary increase in policing, with the effect being to reduce crime substantially and predictably (x.com/cremieuxrecuei…). Policing surges do work to reduce crime, and their effects can be durable. American citizens' liberties aren't suspended by this in D.C. or elsewhere, except in the sense that criminals are no longer at liberty to get away with crimes.
If you want to denounce police surges, OK! That's a position plenty of people take. But surges are clearly not inherently bad, nor are they even bad in their current implementation.
Later in Jeremiah's essay, he suggests that he cares a lot about gun violence, but if that's really true, then he should at least tepidly support getting America's crime under control through actually effective means, like deploying police in America's crime-ridden cities. Instead, as I'll note, he prefers attacking fundamental American freedoms.
The final issue Jeremiah raises with Kirk is that he "used language like ‘civil war’ and emphasized how violent the left was and how conservatives needed to be ready."
I hate Whataboutism, but since this is a complaint purely about language rather than something substantive, I'm going to make a sinner out of myself (who hasn't?) and engage in it. Jeremiah tells politically-charged lies about violence in this very essay. Plenty of left-leaning and left-wing pundits do this all the time and he puts no energy towards them.
Jeremiah himself doesn't try to lower the temperature through avoiding divisive terms, but instead he muses about a nonexistent "libertarian-to-fascist" pipeline and suggests normal Catholics like @Vermeullarmine are "fascist" (really: x.com/JeremiahDJohns…). He says "Reconstruction didn't go far enough", contributed to the whole "weird" thing Democrats were doing during the election, and wrote an article castigating people for interest in the Imane Khelif drama. That article, by the way, was *wrong from the moment he published it*. In it, he claimed that our knowledge of Khelif's condition was based entirely on the word of one Russian man, when that simply wasn't even true at the time! (I remember reading this when it came out and thinking 'Well, I guess I can't trust this guy to do background research.' Still can't!) That article contains nonsense claims as well, like that "only around 2-8% of rape claims are false claims". My guess is that he doesn't know how to understand the research on this, and that he never actually bothered to look into it. But I have (link below!).
This is getting too off-topic. I'm just going to state some points now.
Jeremiah is a culture warrior. Jeremiah writes articles that sound a lot like someone who really, really wants you to think he's smart and that he does his research. Jeremiah basically never does his research. Jeremiah acts like he's a moderate, but he never is. And we're still at the beginning of his Kirk article!
Jeremiah goes on to show that he doesn't really understand gun violence and his views on the subject are so ill-informed as to be little more than pointless moralizing. Read his words:
"Far too many gun rights activists like to pretend that America experiences outlier levels of gun violence for some other mysterious reason that has nothing to do with our incredibly permissive stance towards gun control. That’s nonsense. The reason America has far more gun violence than any other rich nation is because we have far more guns and a far looser set of regulations governing firearms."
Is it?
Is there any evidence to support this? Is there any reason to believe this?
There's evidence against it, for sure. For instance, Americans also experience more non-gun violence than CANZUK and Europe do. Even for non-gun violence and controlled for race, America has a higher homicide rate than Canada. American gun violence has precedents in other forms of violence, and I think this is unsurprising if you know America's demographic history, even just among its (selected-to-be-individualistic) Whites.
There's also no relationship at the state level between gun ownership rates and gun violence (excluding suicides). It's not mysterious why this is: guns, without vicious people, do not create violence. In a model containing multiple SES measures, race shares, governor political parties, local political leaning, sex ratios, and age, the strongest variables, in predicting homicides (our best, and indeed, an incredibly reliable proxy for gun violence in the U.S.) are the Black share, followed by the Amerindian share, followed by median household income. Here's how they compare:
America's violence certainly doesn't have "nothing to do" with its permissive stance on gun control; it has quite a bit to do with it, and obviously without guns, there would be no gun deaths, and without guns there would be fewer assaults that make it into homicides. But it is intellectually dishonest to actually chalk up gun violence to the guns rather than to the people. People who, I'll add, rightly ought to be imprisoned, executed, or dissuaded—as Trump is doing right now in D.C. and possibly soon in other cities—for committing crimes. That's pretty simple, and if acted on, it makes any potential points about guns null, since they won't be an issue without crazy people to pull the trigger.
Jeremiah claims that it's pretending to claim that "a country with hundreds of millions of guns floating around can somehow end gun violence through other means." But that's just visibly wrong, and his own sources should've led him to that conclusion! Gun violence has been practically eliminated in D.C.—a place known for it—and, if anything, the solution greatly increased the number of guns in the city.
He very clearly just wants to attack gun ownership and gun rights, one of the most fundamental liberties available to man, and especially to those freest of men who live in the greatest country in the world, the United States. He just wants to grandstand, and the case that brought out this post proves it, because no reasonable gun control proposal—only a full ban—would've stopped someone from owning the hunting rifle that took Charlie's life. Not only that, but you'd have to go further than taking away all but the most piddling of guns. Train a healthy adult male for a month and he could have made the shot on Charlie with a bow or crossbow, and anyone can simply make a bow! (Or machine a pipe gun, for that matter. It's very easy.) The issue is not gun control.
The issue is also not totally unpreventable. Political assassinations can be prevented by lowering the national temperature rhetorically—the opposite of what Jeremiah is doing, but exactly what he claims to want. They can be prevented through increased, improved, and more proactive policing efforts, though this starts to get totalitarian (example: cremieux.xyz/p/minority-rep…). They can be prevented through expanding the use of involuntary commitments and antipsychotic-conditioned mental health releases. They can be prevented through simply enforcing the law.
Regardless of what we choose to do, violence can, however, never be eliminated. There's no way around this fact, short of chipping everyone with a Neuralink and merging them into a hivemind or embracing the most totalitarian of eugenics programs. Neither option is consistent with human freedom or flourishing, and both ought to be rejected.
If Jeremiah were serious and hoping to lower the temperature and speak across the aisle, he would look at some of his citations, like for his statement that "In 2025 so far there have been 309 mass shootings in the US, defined as shootings with four or more injuries or deaths" and then, perhaps, suggest a non-liberty violating means of fixing that issue. Since that statistic has a whole lot to do with gang violence, why not go for something tried-and-true, like a gang crackdown? (x.com/cremieuxrecuei…) I doubt he even knows the required context to understand this is on the table and it routinely works; I doubt he even knows that most of the guns used in said shootings are illegally obtained, and frankly, I doubt he really cares about that fact and what it entails for reducing gun violence without taking away people's liberties.
There's more that could be said about this piece, because it really is sloppy, poorly- and inconsistently-reasoned, shot through by terrible research quality, and more, but now I'll just focus on some of Jeremiah's vile concluding remarks. He said a serious conversation about gun control "will require an honest assessment of the people who’ve embraced calls to violence (both on the right, like Kirk, and on the left)."
He's suggesting here that Kirk "embraced called to violence" when this couldn't be further from the truth. He never called for, and in fact frequently condemned violence. Saying that violence will happen and some people will die from guns if they're available is not a call for violence and it is an insane, disparaging lie to treat such a remark in that way. He then says "We, like Charlie Kirk, can’t help but flirt with violence." But Charlie never flirted with violence, and casting a pro-freedom stance towards guns as flirtation with violence is just the worst type of ignorance, and in this case, nothing more than a smear about the wonderful legacy of Charlie Kirk.
This is most of what Jeremiah's writing is like. It's lazy, it's self-righteous, and it's just dressing for pushing views that most of his countrymen really do reject. It just happens to be the case that this time, Jeremiah's writing is also libel about a good, loving, kind, family-oriented, and unfortunately—for all of us—, recently-assassinated man.
Sources:
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
cremieux.xyz/p/how-many-sex…
Click in: x.com/cremieuxrecuei…
slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/06/gun…
gwern.net/note/statistic…
x.com/cremieuxrecuei…
bjs.ojp.gov/document/sufic…
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