Ademonera
9d ago
Returning to the “right-wing violence is more common than left-wing violence” topic, I’ve been paying attention to how it’s covered in mainstream tech-adjacent media. I’ve been reading Ars Technica for years — I loved John Siracusa’s old macOS deep dives — but the tone of their reporting has shifted. A lot of it feels like “heckin science!” coverage: snarky debunkings of RFK Jr., endless FCC drama framed as “look at the dumb Republicans.” Earlier this year, they had weeks of coverage about a Texas measles outbreak, written with the same undertone. I visit Ars because I love technology and will always have a bone to pick with vox-owned The Verge becoming yet another HuffPost 10 years ago (I remember when it was called This is My Next, a blog run by Engadget editors who left after a Verizon takeover).
What surprised me was their decision to wade into the Charlie Kirk assassination. While it’s syndicated from another publication, it is not a technology story. The study they cited was already making the rounds, but the comment section is so obnoxiously hard-left. According to media bias trackers, Ars is still rated “highly credible” and “nonpartisan.”
Yet the style itself has gotten more sneering. I’d really urge you to look at the comment section of this article. Very, very ingroupy, more so than Reddit even. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/right-wing-political-violence-is-more-frequent-deadly-than-left-wing-violence/
With the Kirk shooting, the unwillingness to look inward is striking. No one on the left seems interested in the object-level reading of what happened. There’s some truth to the idea that some were more upset about Jimmy Kimmel being fired than about a historic political assassination.
Also the implication behind saying right wing violence is more frequent than left wing violence is that the right wing needs to get its house in order too. But I’m sure not seeing many on the left besides Gavin Newsom (cynically, probably) try to tell lefties that real fascism isn’t imminent (which, if it were true, would justify resistance, partisan violence). Joe Biden famously ramped up scrutiny of far right extremists based on the Charlottesville march. Would you not expect some authoritarianism if the shoe was on the other foot?
Trump’s been pretty tepid, especially considering he had an attempt on his life and less than a year later, a supporter of his is gunned down. If violence escalates (and based on the violence only over the last year, that is likely to happen), what do they expect him to do? What would a democrat president do? Would it be any less ‘fascistic’? We’re literally dealing with high profile, public murders and assassinations. Pretty scary and there are much more authoritarian ways Trump could have taken this.
We’ve had pretty authoritarian presidents before. Not a huge deal and not historic. Nobody is going to cross the rubicon. We’ve had presidents in living memory round up ethnicities and put them into camps for monitoring. Trump is, in reality, a lib that gets spooked and backs off on anything whenever the market looks bad. He probably does have some tyrant tendencies but he’s still an elected official who won his way into office. Ultimately the left needs to come to terms with their rhetoric blowing things out of proportion.
Do you remember the net neutrality war of the 2010s? Ajit Pai got bomb threats because people were so convinced it was the end of the world to deregulate isps or something stupid like that. Thats why suddenly jumping to free speech arguments and this right wing violence study feels more like an attempt to rile people up than earnest reporting on the context around the violence that just happened.
Psychologically, it feels like the left is struggling with wanting to be the side “on the right side of history,” and at the same time, knowing their rhetoric and zealotry may be feeding into radicalism.
Ademonera
17d ago
When will media stop being Trump-brained? There’s going to be a solid 10 years of media tainted by this need to relate everything to the current moment. I’m sure that people in the arts feel they’re speaking their truth to the masses by making overt and illusion-breaking analogies and references to real life, but it’s a turn off for me. I think the public moving more conservative will solve for this since movies and tv shows do have to be sold, after all. But still.
I’m sure there a good lessons to learn from putting Trump-like figures (or your caricature of him) in your media, but I’ll probably get more compelling things out of watching him. We’re gonna have 50 years of people recalling the Trump era and the history of his time. Why be so hasty? Just make the thing without it
Ademonera
18d ago
There is tons of evidence of premeditation and careful planning put into this. No post hoc justification for Charlie mentioning the issue for which he was apparently killed. Maybe the person heard it and timed it I guess, but this comes some two weeks after a similar belief system mass shooting in recent memory (and a third a few months ago). I agree that transgender rights are centered around the issue - but it’s become clear that there is some loose association between transgender supportive online groups and radical left politics. Doesn’t really matter how he talked about the issue either - the implication is that people against this issue are putting themselves in danger of future violence by speaking their minds.
This forum has a certain leaning to it - moving off reddit naturally attracts more dissident and people here lean relatively rightward (ignoring lineage of SSC first etc).
Reddit is the most mainstream network and can get towards radical politics, but it’s usually attention seeking and inauthentic (North Korea stans etc). X pretty similar.
Discord, 4chan, probably telegram - these are places where small groups of people are communicating radical ideas in a more personal forum. It’s what the classified info poster used as well. I think it’s more inviting to total ideological capture and feeling ‘rewarded’ by those you know for dedicating yourself to the cause.
The ‘terminally online’ behavior others are mentioning here has been a reoccurrence with people that have committed mass violence this year (don’t forget that there have been HISTORIC level of political violence over the last year). I would bet that there is a significant effort going into threat assessments and online surveillance into continued violence from online communities with radical trans acceptance politics, among other groups
Ademonera
21d ago
I’m not so sure. I noticed that once the guy had walked off the train, people were moving a lot faster. One guy runs over and says oh my god. I’m reluctant to judge bystanders but it is sad that nobody jumped to her aid immediately. Clearly it took some time to set in exactly what he had done
Ademonera
21d ago
I saw that line too and I don’t deny it complicates things. It could point to racial animus, or it could just be the ravings of someone severely mentally ill who latched onto the most obvious descriptor in the moment. Either way it’s very distasteful to see people scoff this off like a manufactured right wing story when a refugee was brutally murdered on a train.
The full video is miserable to watch—this young woman grasping at her throat, terrified, and then collapsing into a pool of blood. It’s one of the most viscerally awful things I’ve seen online, and it should have been covered as such: a shocking act of violence against someone who came here seeking safety.
Ademonera
21d ago
That’s not what’s happening here, and framing it that way just muddies the waters. The New York Times isn’t openly cheering murder or calling for race war. What they are doing is applying style guide rules (pronouns, capitalization) without reflection, in ways that overshadow the violence itself.
When they ideological signal while reporting on tragedies, they hand critics easy ammunition. That’s how we end up with Musk’s tweet going viral. It validates the narrative of media bias and feeds this weird anachronism that’s emerged.
If you actually want to stop the slide into complete culture war, the solution isn’t imagining the NYT as genocidal propagandists. You should instead demand they show restraint and focus on the victims (and leave their signaling to op eds and trump bad stories).
Ademonera
21d ago
Last week I wrote about the NYT’s coverage of the Minneapolis school shooting, where the headline and article repeatedly used “Ms.” and “her” for the shooter, Robin Westman. That may follow their style guide, but in the context of a mass killing, it reads less like neutral reporting and more like ideological signaling. The pronouns end up being the story, while two murdered children fade into the background.
Now there’s the coverage of the truly awful video released of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a Charlotte train. There are familiar editorial fingerprints from the ‘style guide’. The NYT capitalizes “Black” but leaves “white” lowercase. Elon Musk pointed this out and it’s getting traction. This is a policy shift the NYT, AP, and others made in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing, with the reasoning that “Black” marks shared cultural identity, while capitalizing “White” risks feeding white-identity politics.
That may be defensible as a policy, but applied in a case where a Black suspect kills a white victim, it lands as bias whether intended or not. The style guide twice now ends up louder than the tragedy itself.
When editorial rules like these are applied without reflection, they pull focus from the human story. It truly makes me upset because these were horrific events. There’s no reason to show off your liberal bona fides at all. Just show compassion for the victims and don’t preemptively build up scaffolding for when it will be used as culture war fuel.
Frankly, I think that articles like this make race relations in America worse. I don’t think that the killing has anything to do with race, at all. It’s about violence in America, which is so insanely out of control. I think cloaking it in platitudes about decreasing crime rate stats also shows how scared of second-order effects news organizations are.
I read a book recently about the history of imprisonment in Texas. It talks about restorative justice and prison labor etc. I don’t know what else you’re supposed to do besides reassure the public that this man (or anyone inflicting evil on others) will never see the light of day again
I 100% agree. Just thinking the connection is there for left wing extremists to cling onto in the same way some right wing lunatic might justify their actions through X belief system.
In popular movies, anticolonialist writing, and Hasan streams, progressives are told violence against an oppressor is de facto justified and moral. And it’s easier to think of someone like Charlie Kirk as an oppressor if you think he’s spreading ‘hate’.
That’s the key part of this I think. Crazy people on the left think they’re on the right side of history and that ends justify the means. I think it is a good basic explanation for why the Charlie Kirk shooting happened, most likely.
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