By Peter Lemiska

Three elements — free speech, hateful rhetoric, and useful idiots — converged early on a September afternoon to destroy two young lives.

One was well-known and well-respected, a beloved husband and father, a crusader for free speech.

The other was an obscure coward who threw away what could have been a promising future. He had succumbed to the hateful lies relentlessly spewed by anti-American zealots, the evil rhetoric that continues to permeate the news and social media.

Like too many others, he paid close attention when those left-wing radicals were saying America is systemically racist, that the men and women who enforce the laws of our nation are fascists, that young children have the ability and the right to alter their God-given genders.

He and those like him are in every sense of the term the useful idiots of our country. They never challenge those lies, no matter how outrageous and abhorrent they may be. They nod in unison as their antagonists compare our American president to the malevolent dictator who killed six million Jews and started World War II. And they readily accept the repugnant lie that the men and women tasked with enforcing our laws are no different than the evil our fathers and grandfathers defeated in that war.

They parrot the hateful words of their agitators, but most can’t even define fascism or Nazism, and they certainly can never explain how those words apply to our government officials or to their fellow Americans who elected them. Wallowing in the poisonous rhetoric, they’ve convinced themselves that they are champions of democracy. It’s a mindset that rational Americans will never understand.

“No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.” Those were the fateful words of James Baldwin, a 20th-century writer who happened to be gay.

Today’s provocateurs plant the seeds of violence and patiently wait. When those seeds bear deadly fruit, they shrug their shoulders. The perpetrators of the violence, the useful idiots, take the heat and pay the price.

Yet those provocateurs in the Democrat Party rail at any suggestion that their inflammatory rhetoric contributes to the violence like we witnessed at Utah Valley University. “No, no, no! There are just too damn many guns,” they argue. Or they protest that the other side uses equally inflammatory language. The Democrat governor of Illinois even blamed the president for “fanning the flames of division.”

But this assassin told us exactly what was fueling his hatred. He inscribed it on his shell casings: “Hey, fascist! Catch!” It’s identical to the idiotic, inflammatory rhetoric his antagonists have been spewing for years. While they expect us to believe it’s just a coincidence, rational Americans know exactly who was feeding his hatred.

He’s not alone.

A recent survey conducted by Rutgers University and the Network Contagion Research Institute concluded that 55% of left-wingers said it was at least somewhat justified to murder President Trump. It seems that years of vicious and relentless lies have turned countless American citizens into revolutionaries.

How can we reconstitute the conscience of a generation? What can be done to restore traditional American values?

We certainly don’t want to tamper with the First Amendment. It’s the bedrock of our constitutional republic.

For Charlie Kirk’s killer, it’s too late. And for those who celebrate his murder, it may also be too late. Conscience is molded at an early age — at home and in schools. It’s much harder to convince young adults that their perspective on life is off-kilter, that they’ve been taken in by hateful words. As Mark Twain noted, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” For those incorrigibles, the useful idiots, we’ll have to rely on effective law enforcement and stiff penalties for lawless behavior.

But we, the people, can do something about the vicious, inflammatory lies spewing from our elected officials. We can use our vote to expel all those politicians who use their power not to solve problems but to incite violence.