When Must We Take Them Seriously?

We must not ignore left-wing calls to kill members of the Trump administration

I’ve never tried to make anyone famous before. Truth be told, I haven’t had the power even if I’d have liked to. But now I’ve got a pretty big audience, so what the hell—here goes. There’s a first time for everything. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to—drum roll!—NICHOLAS DECKER.

You’ve probably never heard of Nicholas Decker and neither had I until last week, when he published a Substack essay entitled, “When Must We Kill Them?” It generated quite a large amount of discussion and comment belied by his rather modest following on the Bird App—a mere 11,800 followers at time of writing.

According to his Twitter bio, Nicholas is a PhD student at George Mason University, reading economics. He’s liberal, an “aspie”—has Asperger’s syndrome—“posts interesting papers,” is a “Michael Kremer stan”—Michael Kremer is a left-wing economist at the University of Chicago—he thinks we should “spend more on drugs,” and he’s also an advocate of “open borders now!”

Nicholas has a Pride flag and a Ukraine flag in his bio, as you’d expect. In his profile picture he’s wearing a pair of furry cat ears, which might mean he’s a Nick Fuentes fan or, more likely, that he’s either gay or transexual—not that those are exclusive options. Quite the opposite.

If you scroll far enough down the media tab on his profile, you’ll eventually come to a photograph of Nick (Decker, not Fuentes) wearing a dress and clutching a plushie toy. His fat swollen nipples suggest gynecomastia and perhaps that he’s taking the female hormone estrogen. In most pictures of himself he posts, though, a series of achingly androgynous selfies, he’s wearing boy clothes.

So rather than assuming young Nick’s gender or sexuality—a cardinal sin in his book, no doubt—let’s just assume he’s a typical, typically confused twenty-something leftist graduate student in the social sciences.

On the basis of this rather slim biographical portrait, I’m sure you can already guess what the main message of “When Must We Kill Them?” is, including the crucial question of who the “them” who must be killed are.

Yes, Nicholas Decker, PhD student at George Mason University, thinks it’s time to start killing members of the Trump administration. Judging by the language he uses, which is vague and metaphorical in places even if the general message is crystal clear, I think he probably believes Trump supporters should be targeted too. He says, “the problem is not one man, but a whole class of people. If one head is cut off, another would take its place.”

A whole class of people.

Cut off all their heads.

Decker’s claim is that the rule of law has come to an end in America—“evil has come to America,” in fact—and all that’s left to do in the face of a Trump administration that revokes the visas of foreign students, imposes tariffs on its competitors, doesn’t let hostile journalists into the Oval Office, deports foreign gang members and disregards the orders of activist judges, is to “decide when we fight.”

“Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one,” Decker cautions.

“If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution. It may be best to stave off, and wait for elections to throw out this scourge; but if it should threaten the ability to remove it, we shall have no choice. We will have to do the right thing. We will have to prepare ourselves to die. I hope that we should conduct ourselves with such courage that it will be our finest hour; I expect that we shall do our duty.”

Decker says it brings him “sorrow”—“the sorrow of the world,” actually, whatever that means—to have to call for the death of a “whole class of people,” and that he “fondly hopes” the current administration will turn back of its own accord “in the face of lighter action.” But it’s clear, really, that the whole thing fills him with subversive glee. On Friday, he added a note to the essay in which he had a good giggle at the “inventiveness and facility of my interlocutors,” before clarifying that “violence is a last resort” and must be “narrowly targeted, and aimed only at extirpating those who have power, and are unjustly resisting giving it up.”

So he doesn’t regret or disavow any of it. Not really. He’s just covering his ass—barely. I could make a joke here, but I won’t.

I think it was the French poet Charles Baudelaire who noted, in his essay mon coeur mis à nu, that the most militant writing often pours forth from the pens of the least warriorlike men. Which is to say, weedy little dorks tend to harbour the most violent fantasies of bloodletting, revenge and a general potency they would otherwise never possess.

This is true, for sure, but there’s plenty of reason not to be complacent about the bloodthirsty calls to arms of the Nicholas Deckers of today. I don’t think this is a laughing matter at all.