The origins of the assassination culture

October 16, 2025

Opinion by ANDY CALDWELL

I recently wrote about a phenomenon among the youth in America known as the “assassination culture.” In addition to Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old who allegedly killed Charlie Kirk, we have Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate accused of killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, and finally, Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Then, of course, there is the plethora of school shootings by teens and young adults, along with attacks on houses of worship.

According to the Colson Center, “Assassination culture is characterized by a shift in societal attitudes towards political violence, where acts of violence against political figures or symbols are seen as acceptable or even justified by certain segments of the population.

This phenomenon has been linked to broader trends in political discourse, particularly in the wake of significant political events and social movements. It represents a “level-up” from cancel culture, which sought to silence voices through social pressure, to a more violent approach aimed at eradicating adversaries physically”.

How has our culture become so rotten as to produce a generation of young people who participate in or at least support the shift towards an assassination culture? Not only were people elated when Charlie Kirk was murdered while doing nothing but speaking in the public square, some 35,000 people have contributed to Mangione’s defense fund!

Well, you can’t say we weren’t warned!

Here are a couple of excerpts from a piece about Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he visited Harvard in 1978, titled “Solzhenitsyn’s Prophecy,” written by Princeton Law Professor Robert George, who was a Harvard graduate student at the time.

Solzhenitsyn, who spent many a year in the Soviet gulag, came to America to rebuke it. He viewed the west’s weakness…as the fruit of the materialism, consumerism, self-indulgent individualism, emotivism, and narcissism—in a word, the immorality—into which we had allowed ourselves to sink.

Solzhenitsyn, the (by then) legendary human rights activist, warned America and the west that we had become too focused on rights and needed to refocus on obligations. We had come to embrace a false idea of liberty, conceiving of it as doing as one pleases, rather than as the freedom to fulfill one’s human potential and honor one’s conscientious duties (that shalt not kill?) to God and neighbor.

George adds that in another speech some five years later, Solzhenitsyn rightly observed that the moral decline of the west has behind it the same factor that produced the horrors of communism, namely this: “Men have forgotten God. People worship themselves, deify their own desires, fall into an idolatry of the self, because they have forgotten that there is something—indeed someone higher.”  (Someone whom they will someday have to answer to.)

Think about where we are today, some 45 years later. If you were to describe the characteristics of too many young Americans today, could you do it without the following terms?

Nihilism- defined as a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded…a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths.

Materialism- defined as the preoccupation with material things rather than intellectual or spiritual things.

Narcissism- commonly understood as an excessive focus on oneself-an overblown sense of self-importance, entitlement, and a constant need for admiration. The term deals extensively with the attitude of pride, selfishness, and arrogance that underpins narcissistic traits.

Hedonism- seeking one’s own desires above all else-living for pleasure without regard for God’s will or moral boundaries.

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise.

You have certainly heard of the number of young adults who think they prefer communism (they have never been taught about the horrors thereof) over capitalism?

Well, Karl Marx prescribed how to undermine countries like ours by way of the following: “Take away the heritage of a people and they are easily persuaded” and “Keep people from their history and they are easily controlled” and finally, to tie all this up together in a nice little bundle, Marx also wrote “My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.”

Control and destroy by way of attacking and undermining heritage, history, capitalism, and faith in God. Sound familiar? It is the full-time job of academics and progressives to be thus engaged.

Solzhenitsyn’s prescription for what ails us? Live not by lies, as communism is an ideology of lies. And, more importantly, what has been forgotten, can be remembered: namely God!

And as Ronald Reagan rightly warned, “If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”

That is, our nation’s spiritual and moral foundations are critical for our survival and prosperity. That begs the question these many years later after both Solzhenitsyn and Reagan’s warnings, to what degree can the foundations, cornerstones, and pillars of America be rebuilt, restored, and revived?

One thing is for sure, the so-called enlightenment (which is still embraced by progressives today), a movement of the 18th century that stressed the belief that science and logic give people more knowledge and understanding than tradition and religion, has plunged many a culture, society, and empire into darkness.

Is America not in the throes of its own version of the bloody French Revolution which sought to secularize society and establish a new order that is not bound by tradition and the restraining effect of religion? We see the fruits of it, and the fruit is certainly not only rotten, it is deadly to a society that once held the truth that our rights, including the right to life, were divinely inspired.  Consider yourselves warned again!

Andy Caldwell is the executive director of COLAB in Santa Barbara County and host of The Andy Caldwell Radio Show, weekdays from 3-5 p.m. on  FM 98.5, FM 99.5, AM 1240, AM 1290 and FM 96.9.