Don’t Let the Cold Civil War Turn Hot

America is at war.

For decades, it has been a cold war, as revolutionaries worked quietly to overturn our Constitution and the way of life it upheld. They usurped our government through the administrative state and secured their power through relentless lawfare against any challengers. They consumed our universities via tireless activism and ubiquitous imposition of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

They transformed our media from the exemplar of a free press to the well-rehearsed mouthpiece of the revolutionary regime, and they engineered new digital platforms to breed unthinking compliance. They bullied, harassed, and terrorized anyone who dared to disagree — anyone who suggested that America was worth preserving, that her people and their way of life deserved defense and not destruction.

Then came the fiery riots of 2020, successive assassination attempts against the only president in generations to mount a serious opposition, and, finally, the cold-blooded murder of a man whose only crime was open dialogue.

Charlie Kirk was a patriot. He was a husband, a father, and a Christian — the dreaded “straight white male.” He was a self-made man, who rose to the heights of public influence without so much as a bachelors’ degree — just like so many of the Founders whose legacy he sought to preserve for a new generation.

Charlie Kirk embodied everything our enemy seeks to destroy. And they did — not just with smears, or debanking, or intimidation, or any of the usual weapons of the cold civil war but with a bullet. The whole nation watched as he bled out on a stage where he invited all comers to challenge him in the spirit of republican debate.

More than a century and a half ago, our nation fought a war to defend its founding principles against an enemy that had arisen from within. That war did not begin with the firing on Fort Sumter; those shots followed upon years first of cultural conflict, then of scattered bloodshed. Had American leadership recognized sooner the scope and severity of the crisis, the greatest tragedy of our national history might have been averted.

America is at war. If our leaders do not wake up to that fact, the cold civil war may turn hot, and Charlie Kirk will be far from the last casualty.