On February 4th, 2019, for reasons I may never understand, Liam Neeson told a story that he should definitely have kept to himself.
During an interview for his then-new movie, Cold Pursuit, Neeson confessed that years earlier, after learning that a black man raped one of his friends, he prowled the streets of Ballymena, Northern Ireland, with a small metal club, praying for an excuse to beat some other black man to death:
I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be approached by somebody — I’m ashamed to say that — and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some ‘black bastard’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could…kill him.
And while it might seem crazy to blame all black men for the crimes of one specific black man, while you might reasonably suspect he’d have acted differently if the rapist had been white, if you’re feeling frustrated by your inability to avenge your friend or attract the opposite sex or justify the mediocrity of your life, reducing millions of individuals to a faceless collective of “black bastards” makes a lot of sense!
After all, if you can convince yourself that black people are a single, undifferentiated mass, you can kill any of them to get revenge for the violent crimes that 0.008% of them commit every year.
If you can convince yourself that black people could only be more successful than you thanks to affirmative action or DEI, you can declare that all of them are unfit to be mayors or Supreme Court Justices or airline pilots.
As President Lyndon B. Johnson put it, “if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
For most of American history, one of the perks of being a white guy was that you could hear about a different white guy committing a horrific crime without worrying a stranger would beat you to death for it.
But sadly, at least if you’re a white liberal, those days might be coming to an end.
On September 10th, 2025, a 22-year-old named Tyler Robinson murdered right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk during a talk at Utah State University.
And the only thing more jarring than seeing right-wing commentators decide that the immediate aftermath of a school shooting is the right time to politicise it was seeing the enthusiasm with which they embraced using “they/them” pronouns to refer to a single person.
“They killed him with a high-powered rifle,” said Alex Jones.
“They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not,” warned Fox News’s Jesse Watters.
“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die,” claimed Elon Musk.
And while it might seem crazy to declare “war” on the entire political left (even left-wing parties in other countries) over the actions of one specific man in Utah, while it might seem odd that they’re ignoring the fact that Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom and Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (not to mention several left-wing political commentators) immediately and unequivocally condemned Kirk’s murder, while it might even seem suspicious that they’re choosing to focus instead on the worst reactions of trolls and blue-haired TikTokers, if you’re trying to justify attacks on civil liberties or weaponise right-wing outrage or even just boost your follower count on social media, reducing millions of individuals to a faceless collective of violent “leftists” makes a lot of sense.
After all, if you can convince your audience that Robinson murdered Kirk because people on the Left have compared Trump to Hitler and called him a “threat to democracy,” maybe you can gloss over the fact that people say these things because Trump regularly quotes Hitler and famously tried to violently overturn a democratic election.
You might even distract them from the fact that Trump’s current vice president called him “America’s Hitler,” and his anti-vax head of Health and Human Services implied Trump was worse than Hitler. Trump himself spent pretty much the entire election cycle calling his political opponents “radical left marxist communist fascists” and “the enemy from within.”
If you can convince the nation that “most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far-Left,” even though every single source, from both sides of the political spectrum (even the ones hastily removed by Trump’s justice department), attests that the exact opposite is true, you might be able to distract them from your corruption and incompetence and your ongoing refusal to release the Epstein list.
But please, let’s at least stop pretending that this has anything to do with honouring Charlie Kirk’s memory or “lowering the political temperature.” Especially after Trump, who couldn’t even get five words into a statement about the loss of his “friend” before changing the subject to his big, beautiful ballroom, freely admitted that he “couldn’t care less” about bringing the country together.
Because Trump has long understood that if you can convince conservatives that they’re at war with liberals, despite the fact that liberals and conservatives largely share the same concerns about the economy and crime and even immigration and the Second Amendment, they won’t notice that he’s destroying the working and middle class, weaponising the police against American citizens and launching a war on the First Amendment unlike anything since the McCarthy era.
Hell, give them an enemy to hate and they won’t even notice that he’s doing everything they’ve spent the past 249 years insisting they need the Second Amendment to protect themselves from.
The world feels so upside down lately.
Jimmy Kimmel gets “indefinitely suspended” for making fun of Trump’s ballroom-centric reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder, while a Fox News host who suggested that homeless people should receive “involuntary lethal injections or something, just kill ’em,” gets away with a half-assed apology.
Alex Jones, who famously spent years mocking and tormenting the grieving parents of the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, claims the moral high ground over the Left’s “sick” reaction to Kirk’s assassination.
The same right-wing grifters who built their whole political schtick on free speech absolutism and opposition to cancel culture boast about creating a database to help them get hundreds of people fired for speech they find offensive.
This is what happens when the gap between what we claim to stand for and what we actually do becomes unsustainably wide.
This isn’t about politics, it’s not about whether people call themselves liberals or conservatives, it’s about whether they have the integrity to uphold their values consistently, even when it’s inconvenient, it’s about whether they can resist the temptation to hate people because of the worst members of their tribes, it’s about whether they can see human beings before they see skin tones and political affiliations.
These are the kinds of questions that say something about who we are, not just which political group we’ve aligned ourselves with.
And if I’m going to be held responsible for the actions of people I’ve never met, I at least want to know they stand for something.
The world really does seem quite upside down lately, Steve. The mob mentality you have so aptly described harks back to the days when any African American could be lynched because it was “suspected” that the perpetrator of some crime had too much melanin. Trouble is that well reasoned essays like yours aren’t able to quell the mass hysteria too many human beings are susceptible to. But do keep writing. Some of us are reading and paying attention.