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Well, when you thought the week was boring...
Charlie Kirk was just shot at an event, shooter in custody. There's apparently a video going around of the attack, but I haven't a desire to see it. People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead. That makes this the second time that a shooter targeted a conservative political figure at a political event in two years. If Trump hadn't moved his head at the last second, it would've been him, too.
I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.
I fear this is what happens when the culture war is at a fever pitch. Political violence in the US is at heights not seen since the 1970s, from riots in the 2010s and especially 2020 over police-involved shootings, to the capitol riot in 2021, to the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania, to the United Healthcare killing, to finally this murder of a political influencer. I fear for my country when I look at how divided we are, and how immanently we seem to be sliding into violence.
I guess I just find politics tiring nowadays. I vote for a Democrat and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. I vote for a Republican and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. Whether J.D. Vance or Gavin Newsom wins in 28, there will be no future in which Americans look each other eye to eye.
I actually believe things are much better in this country than people think: our economy is surprisingly resilient, we've never suffered under the kind of austerity that's defined post-colonial European governance, our infrastructure, while declining, actually functions in a way that most of the world isn't blessed with, our medical system is mired in governmental and insurance red tape yet the standard of care and state of medical research is world-class, our capacity to innovate technologically is still real and still compelling, and one of our most pressing political issues, illegal immigration, exists solely because people are willing to climb over rocks and drift on rafts simply to try and live here.
We have real problems. And intense escalations on the part of our political tribes are absolutely in the top five. We also have a severe problem with social atomization -- and these two things are related -- which has led to our intimate relationship and loneliness crisis, the rapid decline in social capital, and the technological solitary confinement of the smartphone screen which dehumanizes people like real solitary confinement while confining them to the most intense narrative possible. "If it bleeds, it leads" means that many will be led into bleeding.
I don't know how we rebuild the world, or come to a point where Americans of different views can view each other as well-intentioned. But Kirk is just the latest victim of a crisis that I don't know if there's any way to solve.
The response from leftists alone is just staggering. How can you see blood pouring out of a man's neck and celebrate it, for words alone? For mainstream conservative words? Polite, respectful debate. The country is over. I just want to go to sleep and forget this ever happened. I think the non-celebrating leftists don't even understand the magnitude of what just happened...
I don't think non-moderate lefties get it.
Many righties didn't even like Charlie Kirk that much. He was milquetoast on certain ideas, he supported Israel a little too readily for some people's tastes, he seemed like he was there mainly to keep hard-righty ideas from gaining traction. His twitter game was pretty tame/lame.
But he was in fact a righty, and he represented the compromise position. As long as he was allowed to go around on college campuses and pull his 'gotcha' debate tactics, at least there was lip service paid to the exchange of ideas as the preferred method of resolving differences. The discourse was crappy, but at least it was discourse.
Shooting the guy? Well you've just announced that you do not care for debate of even moderate ideas, and you'll kill someone for disagreeing with you with the most civil manners imaginable. Tapdancing on his grave is advertising that you cannot be reasoned out of your position, and your position entails and accepts killing those you disagree with.
The red tribe sent an emissary to the neighboring tribe, he extended his hand in friendship, and one of the blue tribe (probably) hacked his head off and the rest of the tribe pissed on the corpse? What do you think comes next?
Its not QUITE the equivalent of killing John Wick's dog, but its getting at the same idea. It was one of the few things convincing hard righties that talking was still worthwhile.
This isn't a change in anything. There will always be a certain number of people on either side of the aisle who will celebrate violence against the other side, and the only thing that's different now than 15 years ago is that more of them are on the internet by virtue of fewer of them being too old to go on Reddit. I couldn't tell you the number of crabby old guys in bars who talked openly about the "ten cent solution" during the Obama presidency.
I don't think this is plausible. Since 2010, the stature and influence of an ideology that explicitly rejects argument in favor of shutting up through force has been ascendant. Ideologues of opposing stripes have taken that as permission to do the same thing. The idea that this has had no influence in the proclivity of people who follow the ideology to celebrating the murder of people they disagree with would require a pretty extraordinary ability for populations to be resistant to memes about political violence that I don't think is reflected in any other topic. Especially since political violence against people someone dislikes is one of the most enticing things in the world, and it's uncommon in time that qualms about using it were nearly as common as it is now.
I'll say, I don't think it's a coincidence that I grew up in a blue area in the 90s and 00s and ended up believing that political violence in response to arguments, no matter how evil the arguments, is unacceptable, which also happened to be the dogma in those areas at the time. I think the ideologies that are hegemonic in your environment do tend to have influence on you such that population rates of adoption of ideas can change if the hegemonic ideology changes.
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Nothing. Left-wing influencers are not going to fear for their lives. Antifa is not going to be met with instant lethal violence. NPR stations are not going to be torched. Grievance studies departments are not going to be physically attacked. Meetings of Young Americans for Socialism (not a real org) are not going to broken up by force. For the right, violence is a switch, not a dial, and it rusted in the off position a long time ago.
The big change will probably be the right supporting gun control.
It's not so much the switch that rusted off, more that it is routinely glued stuck to make sure it can not be flipped. This is done by 'conservatives' and the like for various reasons. Be that their own comfortable lives they want to keep safe for themselves, or a complex set of responses to being completely out of control with regards to media and power. So they instinctively know that sticking their neck out in support of anything will lead to it getting chopped off. To that extent the drive people have to glue the switch stuck can be summed up as greed and cowardice.
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Agreed. The only thing that will rouse the comfortable Right to civil unrest is if their wallets get light. The stock market, housing market, consumer prices, etc. have hypnotized the Right into a state of indolent satisfaction. Rich white boomers have much more to lose than poor leftists. So the Right will grunt and groan on X for a while until the next news story chugs along.
It's prudent to drive the economy into the ground on purpose, by any means necessary, to raise consciousness
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I think that depends on whether the big guy in charge cracks enough heads to make it clear that vigilantes won't be necessary.
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