Two terrible murders occurred in America recently. One victim was a young Ukrainian woman whose innocent, terrorised face in the moments after she was stabbed on a train by a disgraceful human being will haunt me forever. After avoiding footage of Iryna Zarutska’s death, I watched a video posted on social media, and my heart and soul broke. How can such evil exist? I, along with most men, would have given my life to save that young woman because, contrary to feminist rhetoric, normal men don’t hate women; quite the opposite, in fact. Among many feminist inventions, the idea that men hate women is the most egregiously destructive to social harmony.

The second murder victim was the conservative debater Charlie Kirk, whose videos I have watched many times. I didn’t agree with some of Kirk’s views – I’m an atheist while he was a devout Christian – but I enjoyed watching him leave his vacuous, ill-informed interlocutors looking foolish as he calmly dismantled their arguments. It is possible, for some of us anyway, to disagree with our ideological allies and agree with our opponents. If you’re not capable of changing your mind and learning, or at least being open to evidence, you’re a fundamentalist.

One attitude, though, underpins the murders of both Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk. It’s not hatred per se – which is the obvious explanation for the murderous evil that took their lives – but the ideological foundation that hatred rests on and on which hatred feeds. The attitude is the primary sin of the modern left, and it is pervasive throughout our culture. It’s a repulsive, openly exhibited, look how wonderful I am, never-ending, intrinsic smugness. It’s an attitude of intellectual, moral and social superiority that, ironically, is based on a profound ignorance of every serious subject. Attempt to debate the smug left, and the first thing that strikes you is how little they know of what they’re most certain about. And because they live in an echo chamber of their own invention – a left establishment, in other words, which they’ve created – it’s impossible to dent the armour of their condescension because they always have ignorant people to support their position. Even when Elon Musk democratised X and allowed people with different views a platform on the online democratic square, the left moved to Bluesky to listen to themselves. It’s what Heidegger called ‘fallenness’, where people fall into ‘the they’ of what society says you’re supposed to believe. The extraordinary volte-face of opinion on Israel and on trans ideology are recent examples of this type of irrational groupthink. The terrorists are now heroes, and women have penises.

The smugness rests on a philosophical attitude that refuses – ironically, because it’s one of the left’s favourite words – to acknowledge the reality of difference, which, by definition, means nothing is equal. If something is different, it’s not the same. In this scenario, a Democrat-appointed judge in America, when facing a man with a violent criminal record, will not judge the criminal’s actions with equanimity but through the lens of critical race theory, which exonerates his behaviour because of historical injustice. The criminal will be released and sit on a train that an innocent young woman will board, and he will stab her to death because she is white. In other words, equality before the law becomes a fiction, and the perpetrator of the injustice, the judge (in this case a woman), will feel the warm inner glow of morality – and so will her friends. The dead young woman is seen – if they even deign to publicise her murder, because it goes against the narrative of white supremacy – as collateral damage in a brave attempt to equalise society.

It took, for example, the dominant left-wing media in America two weeks to feature Iryna’s murder on television and in print, and that was only after intense outrage on the internet. Anyone, of course, with the temerity to disagree with the narrative will be called hateful, sexist, racist, transphobic, toxic, misogynistic, and all the other thought-terminating clichés that end debate, and any recalcitrant, immoral fool (from their smug perspective, remember there is only one set of acceptable opinions) will be cast out of polite society. Consequently, the smugness increases exponentially, simply because the scapegoated person’s views have been expunged, and a spiral into the self-referential echo chamber of groupthink becomes even more pronounced.

Eventually, when someone like Charlie Kirk speaks words the left don’t like and is murdered, smugness transmogrifies into hate, and the indefensible becomes normalised. Without even realising how far they’ve fallen, the smug left equate words with violence while actual violence is celebrated. Donald Trump’s intemperate words, astonishingly, on this view, receive a more evil interpretation than the brutal murder of a political foe at a public rally in front of his wife and children.

To get a feel for this revolutionary change in morality and justice, look at how the meaning of commonplace words has changed to further an ideology, which when used in a ‘debate’ gives a veneer of legitimacy to a smug leftist interlocutor. Reason is ‘discrimination’, words are ‘violence’, and everyday beliefs are ‘hatred’. By utilising words this way, any debate about serious issues is already tilted in favour of someone conversing in bad faith. Charlie Kirk’s genius was to circumvent the left establishment’s curated censorship and speak directly, in unambiguous language, to a generation of young people in the most captured of institutions – higher education. Unfortunately, however, the debasement of language has left the tertiary sector and poisoned everyday speech. When you hear that homosexual people not wanting to sleep with heterosexual people (or vice versa) is ‘sexual racism’, you know you’re in an alternate universe, and it’s not one based on reason.

We have seen this intellectual trajectory before, and in an unlikely setting. It’s a little-known feature of Nazi ideology, but the Nazis believed that they were kind, and to use one of their oft-quoted words, decent. Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, committed suicide at Nuremberg because he could not accept that he was a criminal.

It’s a short step from an over-emphasis on kindness and decency to smugness and an unhealthy sense of your own pristine morality, to a belief that the end justifies the means.