Why You Should Turn In Your Murderer Son

Western civilization depends on its citizens upholding the law against petty clannishness

Matt Robinson did the right thing. When he found out his son, Tyler, killed Charlie Kirk, the elder Robinson turned him over to police. It’s hard to hand over your own flesh and blood to authorities. Many people in that situation would try to shield their son from arrest. Robinson acted differently, and he should be commended for that.

As with any difficult decision, it’s generated a lot of criticism. Many on the internet disapprove of turning in your own son to the police, even if he did kill in cold blood. Popular podcaster Darryl Cooper (aka Martyr Made) was one of those who voiced this opinion.

“Never,” he responded to a poll asking if you would turn your own son in for murder. “If what he did was so bad that I couldn’t live with it, I’d take him camping and deal with him myself. There’s no justification for turning immediate kin in to distant impersonal authorities.”

Actually, there is a justification for turning in kin to distant impersonal authorities. It’s how we have a functioning society. Westerners are able to recognize common laws as their own and rise above petty concerns. The alternative is the law of the clan, with its endless blood feuds, weak laws, poor governance, and overall dysfunction. We can see its results in our own ghettos. The law of the hood dictates that blacks don’t turn in their fellow brothas and sistahs. These aren’t places you want to live.

Adherence to distant impersonal authorities is a superior alternative.

Cooper assures readers that this value system pushes people to handle their own problems rather than rely on strangers to do it for them. That’s not how it works. The ghetto neither turns in their wrongdoers nor punishes them on their own. The only form of punishment is if a rival gang strikes back at the offender. But it’s unlikely that the offender’s gang, family, or friends will do anything about him. No matter how heinous the crime, they will rally to his side and defend him against all dangers–whether it’s the law or aggrieved gangbangers.

This is how it works in kin-based societies. One can read the Norse sagas or Middle Eastern travelogues to witness how families deal with murderers in their own ranks. Nearly every saga centers around families ensnared in generational blood feuds that can only be resolved by one clan dying off. Impersonal authority was weak and incapable of resolving these disputes. It was left to the families themselves to “solve,” which meant even more violence and unnecessary deaths. The same can be seen in Arab societies and in other parts of the Third World.

If you refuse to follow the laws of your society, you essentially say it’s okay for your family members to commit crime and do as they please–so long as you don’t harm the in-group. Kin-based societies are filled with crimes and depredations against neighboring out-groups, which inevitably leads to bloody conflict and disorder. There’s no impersonal authority who can resolve these disputes.

We see a version of this in the black ghetto. The hood doesn’t punish its own when they rob, attack, and murder outsiders. These aggressors broke no rules of their own community. It’s the impersonal law of the white man that tells them not to do these things, not the code of the ghetto. It’s why majority-black juries are liable to acquit their own in crimes against non-blacks. The hood has its own code, but it doesn’t create peace and stability. It encourages all manner of destructive behavior.

Kin-based societies, just like our own, recognize that one of the gravest crimes a man can commit is to kill his own flesh and blood. The horror at such a crime runs through the Bible, classical literature, and modern western culture. A kin-based society would be just as repulsed, if not more so, by the crime. It would be a much lesser offense to turn in your son than to kill him under such a code.

Turning in your murderous son isn’t a betrayal of your kin. It’s upholding the values you should adhere to as man of the West. Impersonal authority is a crucial ingredient to our civilization and allowed us to rise above the petty squabbles of primitive society. We teach our children to follow the law and to not commit grave offenses out of both deference to authority and due to our own values. To rob, rape, and murder is to bring dishonor on a family. A well-respecting family would accept punishment for the member who did these crimes. Not turning them in rewards their bad behavior.

Of course, there are limits to these demands. If a law violates one’s sense of deep moral principle, such as forsaking one’s religion or some other draconian demand, then it’s understandable to resist turning in your defiant son. But murder is universally recognized as bad, especially in Charlie Kirk’s case. This was no act of self-defense or an accidental outcome of a bar fight. This was cold, calculating murder of a good man. It violated the family’s own values, and they acted on those values by turning in Tyler Robinson.

In the order apparently favored by Cooper, the Robinson family would shield their son from justice. In olden times, this would lead to the Kirk family taking it upon themselves to wreak justice against the unrepentant Robinsons. This would inevitably trigger a never-ending blood feud. A society defined by such acts can not properly maintain order, nor would it know true justice.

Great civilizations from Rome to America recognize the importance of impersonal justice. It prevents blood feuds and establishes rules that all parties adhere to. Punishment is meted out by the state rather than the opposing clan. Citizens see this as the will of the people rather than the petty prerogative of their mortal enemy. It’s not seen as a crime against their own kin to punish one’s relative for murder. It attempts to be as objective as much as humanly possible. The courts don’t get everything right and there are still cases of injustice. But it’s the best system we’ve got.

Allowing for the law to be left to the subjective will of the individual parties is no justice. It just returns us to the law of the jungle.

There is no shame in doing the right thing. It’s what civilization depends on to survive. When people ignore these rules in favor of their own law, anarchy reigns. One can witness its dismal effects in Memphis, Baltimore, and East St. Louis.

The places that people want to live choose a different path, and it’s the one exemplified by Matt Robinson.