Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal, chinstrokes over the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

We like to say that something happened gradually and then suddenly. It’s from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”: A character, asked how he went bankrupt, says, “Two ways, gradually and then suddenly.” That’s how political violence in America has been growing in this century. I would say the 2024 assassination attempts on Donald Trump, and now the assassination of Kirk, are the “suddenly” moments. The reality continues while the dark tempo is picking up.

We know this can’t continue and we don’t know how to stop it. That is our predicament.

For those of us who remember the 1960s and the killing of Medgar Evers, both Kennedys and Martin Luther King, it feels like we’re going through another terrible round of political violence. It’s tempting to think, “That was terrible but we got through it.” But the assassinations of the 1960s took place in a healthier country, one that respected itself more and was, for all its troubles, more at ease with itself. It had give. Part of why this moment is scary is that we are brittler, and we love each other less, maybe even love ourselves less. We have less respect for our own history, our story, and so that can’t act as the adhesive it once was. The assassinations of the 1960s felt anomalous, unlike us. Now political violence feels like something we do, which is a painful thought.

Yes, Peggy, and who exactly was it that smeared American History with Marxist agitprop made up of a lengthy, sometimes false always one-sided, catalog of grievances? Who denigrated and condemned “our story” as all about nothing but Slavery, Exploitation, Racism, and Oppression?

Some of us recall quite clearly the way the great Peggy Noonan “gradually, then quite suddenly” changed being an eloquent editorial page cheerleader for Conservatism, when Conservative Republicans had been winning for a long time, into one more establishment media figure knee-twitching and fawning over Obama.