Blog #177 ASSASSINATION & THE FURY UNLEASHED

When the preference cascade becomes a flood

By Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Sept 13, 2025

I’ve written before about preference cascades — where large portions of the public, often a majority, conceal their views for fear of punishment, only to reveal those views when some precipitating event takes place. Classic examples include the fall of Communist regimes, like Ceausescu’s Romania, where even Ceausescu himself thought everyone loved him until shortly before he was stood in front of a wall and shot.

Usually those happen in one direction. But in contemporary America, they’re happening in two.

The murder of Charlie Kirk at the hands of a leftist gunman has revealed that many, many more Americans — and even people elsewhere around the world — supported Charlie and his views than was commonly appreciated. New Zealanders in London danced a Haka in his honor; crowds gathered all over the United States, as well as in Rome, London, Germany, and Israel.

Charlie’s views — uniformly disparaged by the press as “far right” — are in fact mainstream, generally held by the majority of people. His assassination has caused people to step forward, and realize that the normal-American community is a huge majority.

As Jonathan Turley writes:

Charlie was brave, and he was brash. He refused to yield to the threats while encouraging others to speak out on our campuses.

He was particularly hated for holding a mirror to the face of higher education, exposing the hate and hypocrisy on our campuses. For decades, faculty have purged their ranks of conservatives and libertarians. Faced with the intolerance of most schools, polls show that a large percentage of students hide their values to avoid retaliation from faculty or their fellow students.

Charlie chose to change all that. TPUSA challenges people to engage and debate them.

People are getting the courage not to hide their views, which is problematic for the left, whose strategy has consisted of using bullying and propaganda to convince 80% of the population that the views of 20% of the population are in the majority.

Not anymore.

But something else is being revealed, which is just how awful the views of the other 20% are. The approving response to the assassination from so many otherwise apparently respectable people has demonstrated just how many people there are who adhere to a leftist ideology of hate.

These aren’t just a few wackos. These are large numbers of people in professional and managerial jobs — mostly government employees of some sort, it seems — who genuinely believe that holding ideas they don’t like should carry the death penalty.

These people are everywhere. They might be teaching your kids. They might be the face looking down at you as you’re wheeled into the E.R. They might be the guy who approves your building permit, or not. It’s an Army Of Haters.

Trump is the Great Clarifier, and here’s another thing that’s become clear in his second term.

They’re there, they hate you, and they’re not going anywhere.

So what to do about it?