For nearly a month now, pretty much every college campus in the country has made it clear that “decolonization” means “kill whitey.” It’s long been obvious that this is always what the Left meant by “decolonization,” as I outlined a few weeks ago. But after Hamas’ attack on Israel, activist groups have made it explicit. They want similar murders to happen in this country. They don’t view their enemies as human, and they want them exterminated.
For its part, the establishment Left didn’t join in on these calls for violence, at least not directly. But that all changed yesterday, when the online outlet Salon — which passes for mainstream among Leftists — published an op-ed from a journalist named Brian Karem. In no uncertain terms, the point of this op-ed is to justify the murder of the conservatives, and in particular conservative Christians. Karem’s piece is entitled, “MAGA and Christian nationalism: Bigger threat to America than Hamas could ever be.”
This article went viral the other day. Elon Musk tweeted about it a few times. It caused a lot of outrage. What a lot of people are missing is that this op-ed is just the latest iteration of a long line of Brian Karem op-eds in Salon that accuse conservatives of being terrorists. In fact, just a month ago, Karem wrote a piece in Salon entitled, “Hamas and the GOP are both terrorist groups — it’s just a matter of degree.”
In that article, Karem asserted, “There is little or no difference between most of the GOP leadership, including Jim Jordan and Donald Trump, and the leaders of Hamas. Both groups will do anything they can to win. Both groups have engaged in atrocities. Both groups continue to lie. Both groups use human beings as hostages. Both groups are extremely dangerous. Both groups threaten the world’s internal and external peace. The fact is, many Americans viscerally understand this: Donald Trump and his followers are terrorists.”
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As melodramatic and deranged as that op-ed was, no one paid any attention to it whatsoever. So this week, Karem basically rewrote the same article, except he added a little more bite to it this time around. Before I get any further into specifics of the unhinged screeds of Brian Karem, it’s important to emphasize a couple of things. First of all, Karem is not an intern, or a random troll or anything like that. He’s the former senior White House Correspondent for Playboy, and for years he’s been a credentialed member of the White House press pool. This is one of the most coveted positions among mainstream journalists. Back when we had journalistic standards, it used to mean something to be a White House correspondent. But we don’t have journalistic standards anymore, and so Brian Karem is free to publish op-eds saying that his domestic political opponents are worse than Hamas terrorists who kill civilians, while retaining his White House press credentials.
The other important point to emphasize is that, while I’m going to refer to Karem’s writing specifically, he’s far from the only prominent figure on the Left who feels this way. First of all, whatever editors still work at Salon had to approve his pieces and publish them. But more to the point, the leaders of the Democratic Party have been demonizing their political opponents for years, in ways that aren’t that dissimilar to what Karem is doing.
It was just a year ago that Joe Biden all but declared war on “MAGA Republicans,” calling them a threat to democracy for disagreeing with him. Let’s relive that moment together:
There’s Joe Biden, standing in front of the Marines with the blood-red backdrop, shaking his fists and telling the country that democracy means voting for Joe Biden. Everyone who doesn’t vote for Joe Biden, by contrast, is a terrorist.
We saw that kind of rhetoric constantly last year. Around the same time as Joe Biden’s diatribe about MAGA Republicans, various outlets, including The Daily Beast, labeled me a “stochastic terrorist.” They used the same term to describe “Libs of TikTok” and many others. That’s a term that means nothing but sounds vaguely intelligent, so you hear it all the time now. It also have very clear implications. Everyone instinctively agrees that terrorists should be killed. They’re a threat to the country. So when you call someone a terrorist, well it’s not hard to connect the dots.
But this Salon piece stands out for how blatant and flagrant it is. Here’s how the piece begins: “The House of Representatives, now run by [Mike] Johnson, offers a discount version of the apocalyptic orgasm the holy rollers have dreamed of for years. They’ve renewed the Inquisition and seem determined to convert the U.S. into a theocracy run by people who will thump you with the Bible, but haven’t read much of it.”
At this point, you’re probably wondering: Where has that happened? What is he talking about? Where have Republicans done anything that could be remotely compared to the Inquisition? In what way is Mike Johnson ushering in a theocracy? Has he proposed making church attendance compulsory? Has he tried to pass a law forbidding the practice of non-Christian religions? Has he burned any atheists at the stake recently? As far as I know, the answer is “No” on all accounts.
It appears that he has earned the label of theocrat simply because he is a Christian with conservative political views. That might not seem like a big deal to you if you’re a well-adjusted, sane person, but the Left-wing media, of course, is comprised of people who are neither of those things. For a long time now, Brian Karem specifically has viewed Christians who hold conservative political views as demonic. Here he was in the White House Rose Garden just a couple of years ago, during the Trump presidency, explaining that conservatives are “eager for demonic possession”:
VIDEO FLASHBACK: This insane article was written by the same radical leftwing clown that almost got into a physical altercation at a Trump press event.
Brian Karem is not a journalist, he is a hyper-partisan, unhinged activist.
Unedited video. Appearances by @JamesOKeefeIII… https://t.co/0CCeuVdNbV pic.twitter.com/oJ6KMZHpJX
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) November 2, 2023
I’m not exactly sure what “eager for demonic possession” is even supposed to mean, to be honest. At the time, a handful of commentators chastised Brian Karem for acting out. They praised Sebastian Gorka for putting him in his place. But in reality, Karem’s outburst was a revealing moment. He was echoing an increasingly common view on the Left, which is that conservatives — and in particular Christians — need to be eliminated. They need to be exorcised.
This is a view that wasn’t widely advertised a couple of years ago, but you see all over the place now. A couple of days ago, for example, Rolling Stone ran a detailed hit piece on Johnson, focusing on his work at Alliance Defending Freedom for nearly a decade. In that capacity, Johnson advanced legal positions that are completely consistent with his faith. He opposed sodomy. He rejected the Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage. And he wrote an op-ed predicting — correctly — that the so-called LGBTQ movement, left unchallenged, will be the “the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”
You can disagree with Mike Johnson’s views, but there’s no denying that every single one of them is consistent with a Christian worldview. He was also undeniably correct in his prediction, as recent events have shown. In fact, his views are completely consistent with the Democratic Party’s platform circa 2006. The 2008 version of Barack Obama wouldn’t take issue with any of it. And yet — back when most people thought like this, across the political spectrum — we were not living, as the media now predicts, in a theocratic dystopian wasteland.
Karem’s piece doesn’t grapple with any of this. Instead, in something of a manic rage, Karem goes on to ramble about everything from Israel bombing a refugee camp in Gaza, to artificial intelligence, to the dangers of climate change: “That is our world today. It took an asteroid the size of a modern city to wipe out the dinosaurs. People, being smarter than dinosaurs, have figured out how to destroy everything all by ourselves. Climate change is slowly creeping up on us and we are killing each other at an increasing rate. It took a Category 5 hurricane to kill 40-odd people in Acapulco last week. We killed that many in two mass shootings in the U.S. in about the same amount of time — and spared the property. Pogo was right: We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Keep in mind that when the Left talks about “mass shootings,” they love to imply it’s always MAGA Republicans doing the shooting. They get a lot of mileage out of that. But in the overwhelming number of cases — including one of the shootings that Karem appears to be referencing there — these mass shootings are taking place in overwhelmingly black neighborhoods. According to authorities, more than a dozen people were shot by a felon at a Halloween party in Chicago just a couple of days ago. That’s not the result of Christianity, or Christian nationalism, or Trump supporters. Maybe the reason the media buries any mention of these mass shootings in black communities is that, if they covered them, then everyone would realize what an absurd and counterfactual talking point this is.
But even if you accept everything Karem says — even if you suspend reality for a second, and agree that MAGA Republicans are somehow doing all the mass shootings — it still wouldn’t come close to supporting his thesis, which is that conservatives are a terrorist group that’s more dangerous to Americans than Hamas. There are well over 200 million Christians in this country. If you polled those Christians, you would find 0% support for murdering nonbelievers. There would not be any enthusiasm for gunning down elderly women at bus stops.
By contrast, the founding charter of Hamas calls for genocide. Every single militant of Hamas wants to murder non-Muslims and in particular Jews. And, as we’ve learned recently, some of these militants could easily be entering this country through the southern border.
Brian Karem knows that, and so do his editors, and so does the rest of the media. The reason there will be no condemnation from anyone — from the Left-wing media, to the White House press corps, to the Biden administration — is that they understand what he is really getting at here. He’s not really trying to make any meaningful point about Hamas, or artificial intelligence, or climate change. He’s trying to communicate the same message that Joe Biden did one year ago, except he’s putting a finer point on it — that many on the Left want their political opponents to die. They don’t just want them to lose elections. They don’t just want to censor them. They want to dehumanize them. Criminalize them. And worse.