Kevin Barrett
John Brown’s 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and his subsequent arrest and execution, set the stage for the First American Civil War. Brown, a Christian anti-slavery activist, raided a federal armory, seized weapons, and attempted to incite a slave uprising.
The violence of his raid (seven were killed and ten injured) followed by his execution shocked and radicalized both the pro- and anti-slavery camps. Sixteen months after Brown’s hanging, the North and South were officially at war.
The First American Civil War had an undeniably tragic dimension. It featured arguably great leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, and was fought for arguably noble causes: to end slavery on one side, to preserve states’ rights on the other, and ultimately to forge the political future of North America—a future with seemingly limitless potential, a future whose trajectory appeared poised to soar forever upward.
Karl Marx famously said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. And if the First American Civil War was tragic, the one currently brewing is farcical. The leaders on both sides—Doltish Donald Trump, Sleepy Joe Biden, Goofy Kamala Harris—are genocidal clowns who lack a gram of gravitas. And Charlie Kirk, the Republican broadcaster-activist whose killing loosely parallels Brown’s, may have been destined for what today passes for greatness—he likely would have run for president, perhaps as early as 2028—but would never have been able to disguise his dominant trait: mediocrity.
The single shot that felled Charlie Kirk, whoever fired it from whatever direction, unleashed a cataclysmic emotional outpouring from the pro-Trump political right. Hysterical denunciations of anyone who didn’t join their eulogies were quickly followed by calls to silence those perceived as “enemies of Charlie.” Many dozens of ordinary Americans were fired from their jobs for posting irreverent comments on social media, thanks to the digital witch-hunt launched by right-wing zealots, while mainstream media figures including Matthew Dowd, Karen Attiah, and Jimmy Kimmel were similarly disemployed or deplatformed.
Though Kirk was no John Brown, and Trump is no Abe Lincoln, the Kirk-Brown parallel is worth exploring. Both cases radicalized both reds and blues by creating heroic martyrs and cartoon villains. For the reds, the victims of John Brown’s raid then, and the Charlie Kirk shooting today, are heroic martyrs, while the “crazed n****r-loving radical” John Brown and the “crazed tr*nny-loving radical” Tyler Robinson are cartoon villains.
The blues, it must be admitted, were a lot more fired up by 1859’s John Brown than by 2025’s Tyler Robinson. Brown’s attempt to free slaves was genuinely supported by a substantial minority of the blue (anti-slavery) camp, though the majority deplored it. By contrast, there are vanishingly few blues today who felt or voiced full-throated support of Tyler Robinson’s alleged murder of Charlie Kirk.
Indeed, the main effect of both the John Brown and Charlie Kirk affairs was to radicalize the reds, not the blues. In 1859, pro-slavery leaders in the South were horrified by the bloodshed of Brown’s raid, equally horrified by the handful of radical voices that supported it, and terrified that the blues were going to come after them and destroy their way of life. Feeling pushed to the edge, Southern leaders were driven to secede from the Union.
Today’s reds likewise feel that their way of life is existentially threatened. Like 1859 southern whites fearful of the ever-increasing population of four million enslaved blacks (constituting 33% of the southern population) today’s white racialist conservatives fear that immigration will soon render them a minority in their own country.
Additionally, technological changes, the deliberate destruction of working-class jobs, and the breakdown of religious-based family values (and with it the procreative family) have combined to make today’s USA almost completely unrecognizable to those old enough to remember what America was like before the sexual revolution, outsourcing of manufacturing, mass immigration, and a proliferation of feminist, pro-sexual-deviance, and pro-minority ideologies transformed it into something as unrecognizable as it is unpleasant.
Today’s reds, like those of 1859, feel their backs are up against the wall. The spectacular violence of the Charlie Kirk affair, like that of the John Brown affair before it, may drive them to attempt to sever ties with the old, blue-dominated Union. But rather than state-by-state secession, what we might see is a demolition of America’s federal Constitutional order from within. Since the reds currently hold the White House and Congress, but will almost certainly lose the latter in the 2026 midterms and likely the former in the 2028 presidential elections, their only way to hold onto power, and accelerate their desperate attempt to recreate 1950s-style American “greatness,” would be to somehow nullify, postpone, or permanently cancel those elections. The Charlie Kirk murder could be the first in a series of violent events that will be used to justify such extreme measures.
If indeed the Trumpian reds accelerate their violations of institutional norms, and are offered more incidents like the Kirk shooting that they can use as pretexts to shred what passes for the Constitutional order, their opponents, the blues, will increasingly also feel that their backs are up against the wall, and that nonviolent political activity is no longer an option. The cancelation of elections could be the trigger. Blue uprisings will then be met with red violence, as Trump unleashes the military (as well as private militias, security companies, and mercenaries) against his opponents. State violence will feed on anti-state violence and vice-versa, and the result will likely be some combination of revolution and civil war.
If future historians look back at the Charlie Kirk shooting as a catalyst for civil war, and compare it to the John Brown affair, they will likely highlight a couple of stark differences. First, unlike John Brown, the alleged Charlie Kirk shooter, Tyler Robinson, cannot conceivably be portrayed as a hero. While Brown’s attempt to free slaves by violence circa 1859 may have been ill-advised, there is something noble about slave uprisings, as we would all agree if we were ourselves enslaved. But killing a pundit because you disagree with his opinions, no matter how noxious those opinions may be, is an act that no sane person would ever support.*
An even more crushingly obvious and important difference between the Brown and Kirk affairs is the reliability of their respective mythic official narratives. John Brown, everyone agrees, was a real anti-slavery fighter who really did raid Harpers Ferry and was genuinely hanged for his troubles. Tyler Robinson, on the other hand, is, as Tommy Lee Jones once put it, “a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.” And the official story of the Kirk shooting has more holes than the proverbial Swiss cheese at a mouse convention.
Only an encyclopedic article could fully address the long list of absurdities, among them: The huge high-velocity bullet that merely pricked Kirk’s neck and then vanished, later to be supposedly found in the dead Kirk’s neck after it had been impossibly stopped because Kirk was a “man of steel” (the doctor who reportedly made this claim called the bullet-stoppage “a miracle”); the nonexistence of the alleged rifle in all photos of the suspect; the impossibility of the rifle getting from the roof where it was allegedly used to the spot where it was found gift-wrapped in the woods; the videos of apparent members of Kirk’s security detail making hand-signals immediately before the shooting, then destroying evidence in its aftermath; security videos of Robinson nonchalantly eating a burger shortly after he had supposedly killed Kirk; the most ludicrously fake “text-messaging confession” that could possibly be imagined; and so much more.
But of all the giveaways that the Kirk killing was not what it seemed, the most important may have been the government’s premature announcement that the motive for the shooting was transgenderism. Just a few hours after the shooting, mainstream media reported that government sources had announced that “bullet casings with pro-transgender messages” had been found. But it wasn’t until at least 33 hours after the shooting that Tyler Robinson, who was allegedly in a relationship with a transgender person, was identified as the suspect—and as it turned out, the bullet casings did not reference transgenderism at all! As Ron Unz summarizes: “Thus, even before identifying the suspect, the government had correctly determined the very unusual motive for his crime, doing so on the basis of evidence that actually turned out not to exist.”
If Kirk’s killing was a professional operation, it was a sloppy job. And the leader of the country that assassinates orders of magnitude more journalists than every other nation on Earth combined, a certain Benjamin Netanyahu, was equally sloppy in his bizarre reactions to the Kirk shooting. Just minutes after the shooting, Netanyahu posted his condolence message, apparently without taking the time to vet it in the way such official messages are normally vetted—suggesting advance knowledge of the event. Then he followed up that apparent mistake with a series of videos angrily insisting that he and his nation did not kill Charlie Kirk. In those videos, Netanyahu, like Lady Macbeth in the Shakespeare play, seems to “protest too much.”
Those interested in exploring the question of who really shot Charlie Kirk have an abundance of resources to draw on. Max Blumenthal’s articles for The Grayzone, Ron Unz’s at The Unz Review, and videos by Kirk’s friend Candace Owens, international affairs expert John Mearsheimer, and ex-CIA analysts Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson all point the finger at Israel. Kirk, such observers note, had been rebelling against the zionist billionaires who created him, and may have been seen as more valuable dead than alive.
So the official version of the Charlie Kirk shooting, unlike that of the John Brown affair, is a complete farce. The ostensible motive—revenge against an activist who had disparaged transgender rights—is equally farcical, unlike Brown’s noble if misguided attempt to overthrow slavery. Finally, the red-vs-blue war currently in the offing will be likewise absurd, since both sides are led by evil clowns, and since the prize will be a rotten and imploding empire, not a youthful, rising one.
* Unfortunately, Americans are getting less and less sane: Using force to silence the other side’s political views has been normalized. Countless dissident voices, including this author, have endured death threats, ejections from universities, shadowbannings, deplatformings, and even debankings. The vast majority of such crimes against free speech have been committed by zionists.
