The War on Terror Came Home

Original article here

As it currently stands in America, the criminal illegal alien is treated by the left as both hero and victim, while the ICE agent enforcing federal law is cast as the de facto villain and oppressor.

After a radical left-wing protester is killed during a confrontation with federal agents—an act authorities deem lawful self-defense—the left demands the dismantling and defunding of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But after an illegal alien rapes and murders an unarmed American woman out for a jog, the same voices continue to champion the very open-border policies that made the crime possible in the first place.

The left demanded unlimited funding and military support for Ukraine, insisting that no cost is too high to repel Russian aggression thousands of miles from our shores. Borders there, we are told, matter absolutely.

Yet the same voices ridicule Donald Trump for arguing that Greenland matters strategically to the United States—to counter Russian influence at our own northern doorstep. Prudence at home is mocked as lunacy, while recklessness abroad is sanctified as virtue.

How did we arrive here? And how do we inoculate the nation against this kind of political lunacy before it is too late—if it is not already?

Those are the questions I confront in my latest book, For Christ and Country: The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk.

Nearly a decade ago, in 2016, Hillary Clinton consigned half of Donald Trump’s supporters to what she called the “basket of deplorables.” Speaking at a private fundraiser, she smeared them as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic.”

Political disagreement was no longer merely disagreement. It was moral disqualification.

Soon after, Donald Trump and those who supported him were no longer dismissed as merely “deplorables” but branded Nazis and fascists—no longer political opponents to be debated but enemies to be confronted and expelled from respectable society.

The speed with which this language was adopted and normalized by progressive activists, media figures, Democratic elites, and your Democrat neighbor was shocking.

On June 22, 2018, Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was refused service and booted from The Red Hen by the restaurant’s co-owner, solely because of her association with the administration.

By August 2020, the practice had escalated. Paid Democratic activists harassed attendees as they departed a White House event.

What began as rhetorical contempt had become public shaming. Disagreement was no longer tolerated; it was punished.

The rhetoric quickly gave way to violence.

Rand Paul was assaulted by his Democratic neighbor, suffering broken ribs.

A devoted supporter of Bernie Sanders opened fire on Republican members of Congress practicing for a charity baseball game, nearly killing Steve Scalise.

After the leak of the draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a man who later declared himself transgender traveled from California to Maryland, intending to murder Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his family.

And at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt.

Did the left pause to reflect or temper its rhetoric? No. They doubled down.

With Charlie gone, the left’s machinery of dehumanization moved on, fixing its sights on ICE agents.

While the left recklessly smears its opponents as Nazis and fascists with impunity, it is long past time to describe the left accurately—as illiberal and coercive, authoritarian in method, punitive in instinct, and openly hostile to constitutional self-government.

In my book, For Christ and Country: The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, I argue that this behavior is best understood not through the tired labels of “left” and “right,” but through method.

Like jihadist movements, the modern left operates on moral absolutism. Dissent is heresy. Opponents are dehumanized. Intimidation is justified as virtue. Violence, when it occurs, is excused as inevitable—or deserved. The goal is not debate or coexistence, but submission.

That comparison is not rhetorical excess. It is an analytical warning. When politics adopts the logic of holy war—where compromise is sin, and enemies must be crushed rather than persuaded—civil society cannot endure for long.

The war on terror once meant confronting radical Islamic terrorists abroad—movements defined by intolerance of dissent and the belief that violence was justified in service of a higher cause. The enemy was external, identifiable, and unapologetic.

Today, that same logic has migrated inward. Different slogans. Different symbols. The same methods. Opponents are heretics. Debate is apostasy. Intimidation is a virtue. Violence is excused as “understandable” when directed at the morally condemned.

We did not defeat that mindset. We imported it—and in our cowardice watched as the Democratic Party absorbed it, normalized it, and turned it inward against fellow Americans.

After 9/11, Muslims in parts of the Middle East danced in the streets. After 9/10—Charlie Kirk’s assassination—leftists across America reenacted his death and openly cheered.

This is where we now stand. Political disagreement has been recast as moral evil. Law enforcement is vilified. Violence is excused. Targets are rotated. Accountability is denied. And each escalation is justified as necessary, inevitable, or deserved.

In For Christ and Country, I argue that Charlie Kirk’s murder was not an aberration but a warning. It revealed what happens when a political movement abandons persuasion for coercion and replaces civic restraint with moral fanaticism. Nations do not collapse all at once. They decay when citizens grow accustomed to intimidation, silence, and fear.

Whether America reverses course will depend on whether enough people are willing to name what is happening—clearly, honestly, and without apology—before the next target is chosen.

That choice remains ours.

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Drew Allen is an author, columnist, and host of ‘The Drew Allen Show.’ His latest book is For Christ and Country: The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk.