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Can’t quite pinpoint it - maybe a preference cascade or something more. The online left can’t imagine it, but for a non-negligible chunk - maybe even most - of the Professional Managerial Class, Charlie Kirk wasn’t beyond the pale. Justifying his murder as a “Nazi/fascist/white supremacist”? PMCs paused: “Wait, Kirk’s fine. I like him, or someone I know respects him. You’re okay with us getting brutally murdered?” It’s not exactly what Kimmel said, but the smear’s are everywhere. Kimmel spread an obvious lie. PMCs bought into the “motte” of woke, but now they see hundreds of thousands cheering the brutal murder of a normal family man. “The right lied about the election to steal it? These freaks lie to justify killing.” I’ve been preaching here and in real life: This isn’t the fight. Normies run on vibes, and the vibes are against the left on this one.
Are you referring to the following?
After the evidence published on the 16th, claiming that the shooter was MAGA would be at least a fringe view. One might claim that everyone from the FBI and state prosecution is blatantly partisan and obviously trying to blame the murder on the left, but that would leave the question how the FBI fabricated a MtF boyfriend. So personally, I think that the official narrative -- the killer acting to 'fight LGBT hate' is probably correct.
Still, the Kimmel episode was aired on the 15th, when none of these chat quotes were public (afaik).
And then you have the FCC statement:
So Kimmel was either spinning the truth very hard or outright lying. Bad, but mostly SOP -- Trump himself does the same whenever he opens his mouth. If Carr thinks that this is the "sickest conduct possible", he must live a very sheltered life indeed -- free from social media, for one thing. One wonders if he has ever watched Fox News. In short, his statement is as much of a lie as Kimmel's is.
I think that the right is reasonably upset by the social media celebrations of the murders by the far left. Kimmel was not guilty of that at all, he was just someone the FCC could cancel who had interacted with the topic in a way which did not please Trump, and was already on the cancel list, so he got got.
There was never any evidence whatsoever that pointed to Robinson being MAGA. It was quite reasonable to insist that rightwingers wait for data before calling the shooter a leftist - are we just declining to hold leftists to any evidentiary standards whatsoever?
Kimmel is straight up lying there to defame millions of people, including the president himself. That sounds like the sort of thing that might cost a network 10 or 11 digits in settlement money.
Not really evidence, but as the public started to learn who Robinson was (before finding out he was gay with a biological male partner) Reddit claimed he was right wing because his family is right wing.
Now that we know Robinson killed Kirk because Robinson saw Kirk as homophobic, causing this to be a left-wing motivated killing, that theory no longer holds water. Not that Reddit posters care about the truth, but that’s another story for another day.
Indeed, and what's becoming more and more clear is that the types of Reddit users that are the source of the stereotype of Redditors don't even care about appearing to care about the truth.
Given that hyper-progressive/leftist children of hyper-conservative/rightist parents is common enough to be a stereotype and cliche unto itself, and that these types of people are rather well represented on Reddit, as well as how much extrajudicial violence against people with opinions one dislikes is an unironically supported idea among those groups in a way that it isn't among conservative/rightists families, the line of reasoning that leads to concluding that the shooter is likely to be right-wing is so blatantly and obviously faulty that it's less charitable to presume honest incompetence than to presume intentional motivated reasoning. It's a strong message that says, "I don't care about believing the truth, only about believing narratives that flatter my side, and I want you to know that I want you to know it."
I suspect less-well-represented than you might think. After a while hearing the same stories over and over again, you realize they really are just that -- the same stories. Sure, there's leftist children of Red Tribe rightist parents. But there's even more leftist children of Blue Tribe center-left parents, and many will tell the other story because it's higher-status with their in-group.
My experience is that most of the real "left-wing kid from religious conservative home" stories involve a kid who is non-gender-conforming in some way (in my generation, mostly gay guys and tomboyish girls).
IME the girls were mostly talked into a different lifestyle by a boyfriend. Some of the guys were also talked into a different lifestyle by a boyfriend, as you note, but most of them are just party-hearty and sociable guys that wanted to do drugs and hook up. There seems to be more of the latter.
This is hypo-agency for women and hyper-agency for men.
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