Alex Aufhebung, like all smug leftists with symbols of revolutionary chic in their social-media handles, is sure that his reasoning will always be pristine and flawless. He will always have a good “reason” why the logic of historical necessity, or the needs of the revolution, sadly require that this or that guy be killed. He mistakenly thinks these feeble rationalizations are guardrails that would keep him and his comrades from becoming a Stalin or a Mao or a Pol Pot. That isn’t a guardrail; it’s a permission slip. ‘By whom, under what conditions, to what end’ is just Lenin’s who–whom. Retroactive necessity is the oldest trick in the book. Today, it’s only powerful, high-ranking “fascists” and not “ordinary citizens” who need to die (even as countless of his comrades are insisting right now that Kirk himself was one of those high-ranking fascists). Tomorrow, well, the situation might change, and like any good empiricist, he has to revise his assumptions in light of new evidence, yes? So, sadly, it turns out that the ordinary citizens have become kulaks, or social-fascists, and must be liquidated. But don’t dare suggest that the simple conservative rustic peasants who predicted this all along knew something he didn’t!