How Far Will They Go

Going into this holiday season, my thoughts are with my friend Whit, and his article, "Not Just Election Year Jitters." He is more studious than I. Always is. My wife is dragging out mums and pumpkins, and I'm polishing my guns. Thoughts intrude, and Whit isn't helping.

Used to be, I would invite my friends over to watch the game, hoping to find common ground. That isn't a safe bet anymore. The couch was the last room where a man could set out a bowl of something and trust the afternoon to stay about the whistle. I am no longer sure the invitation is a kindness. I am no longer sure the afternoon is about the home crowd.

How far will my open society friends go? We don't talk anymore. We are estranged. The table ended before anyone captured a capital, which is a dull way to lose a country and an efficient one.

There is no way back to the country I ate in. The teaching that made a nationality into an offense has been in the schools, the offices, and the screens long enough that one election cannot unwind it. The indoctrination is why the past is closed. I can win a Tuesday and still sit down to Christmas with the same empty chairs.

My open society friends may be further along than I am. I am polishing a rifle beside the pumpkins. I wonder if they are being rehearsed for a harder hand than I have rehearsed in myself. The fear is not that they disagree with me. Disagreement used to fit on that couch. The fear is that they have been primed, and I have only been thinking.

My friend Whit may say the shooting hasn't started yet. I beg to differ.

Seth Rich was shot in Washington before dawn on 10 July 2016, and he died. He was not a journalist. He was not a man of the right. He worked at the Democratic National Committee. The police called it a robbery, and nobody has been charged. The death is on the record. I have never been able to put that file away.

On 14 June 2017 a man with a rifle asked which party was practicing on a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia, and then he fired. Steve Scalise was hit and lived. A staffer, a lobbyist, and a Capitol Police officer were hit with him. That morning is on the record. On 13 July 2024 a gunman fired into a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The bullet took a piece of Donald Trump's ear. Corey Comperatore was killed in the crowd, and two other men there were hit and lived. Two months later another man waited with a rifle beside a golf course in Florida, and was stopped before he fired. On 10 September 2025 Charlie Kirk was shot dead while he was taking questions at Utah Valley University.

Whit will not call it a war until it looks like 1861. I am looking at the list. We are clearly at war when people are shot at, killed, or apprehended on charges drummed up to fit them. A bullet is an argument that has given up on the sentence. A death is the same argument, finished. A charge written for the man, rather than from what he did, is the argument that still wants to look like law. That last one is the clever weapon. It comes with a docket, a clerk, and a newspaper that will call it accountability. I am on a porch with a rag and a rifle, which makes me look like the hothead. I'm just getting ready for hunting season. The hotheads already have the shot, the body, and the paperwork, and they have taught the country to file all three under Tuesday.

They do have another future. I keep hoping the break is a misunderstanding. The harder thought is that the vision is real. No borders. A managed people. A society that will call itself more democratic than the nation it retires.

My Christmas changed when my children became distant followers of the new truth. Not one in our faith, but one in the great society.

My vision for the future is grilled venison for Christmas Day.

I cannot see a peaceful way out, but my eyes are limited. What I can see is a ballot, a porch, and my wife dragging the mums out of the shed. None of those is a plan for undoing a generation.

Any hope I have goes back to the sports figures, the coaches, the athletes, and the owners who are feeding the same Awakening Charlie Kirk was leading. You can't call it a revival if they were never alive. Young people, perhaps worldwide, are leading a new faith awakening, and they are fighting back with their faith in a higher calling than open borders.

Failing that, the last fear. If we lose, the loss is not only a law retired and a border opened. It is a mark. Everyone who would not join the open society and the new future gets a gold star sewn on. All of us. I don't have a peaceful sentence after that.

— Julian B. Horrow