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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 amount of handwringing in this thread as if this is the moment that we've passed some sort of threshold as a society makes me really believe that a lot of people here are quite desperate to witness an event that allows them to declare that a threshold has been passed. Accelerationism and extremism. We know nothing of the shooter, or their motivations. Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota? The red tribe does not have the moral high ground, and some sort of grim moral imperative, simply because a red tribe figure was assassinated. Hysteria.
Also, I mentioned it elsewhere in the thread. Don't rely on the algorithms to feed you the opinion of those who you believe are your outgroup. The algorithms have two focuses: (1) create a bubble for the ingroup to feel comfortable, and (2) create ragebait for the outgroup to feel enraged. Reflect on how you've interacted with social media in the past 24 hours with this in mind. Touch grass and talk to a human - because I definitely know you haven't had the chance to talk to more than a few people since this event happened.
Because, as bad as that is, we have not seen a closeup video of those people being shot to death, and that means something. That Senator's death could have been gruesome. Being shot to death in your own home is a gruesome enough picture, and it carries weight, but it simply does not have anywhere near the same impact that the imagery today had.
You are not the arbiter of moral high grounds. Even if you were it will fall on deaf ears.
I don't know who the shooter was, or what their motivations were. There's a chance it's another mentally ill person who has no real political affiliations. Maybe it's a far right winger with accelerationist goals. Maybe they had personal beef with Kirk.
None of that changes the sheer giddiness and overt schadenfreude of the anonymous leftist redditor or tiktok'er, or the careful framing our left leaning mainstream outlets will use to report and cover this story. That, while not as disturbing as the violence, will have a larger impact on broader non-left society and discourse down the road. It's been like this for over a decade. People are tired of it and they were looking for a reason to get pissed because they were already pissed off to begin with.
Yes. Browsing Reddit today has been eye opening, if not entirely surprising. The open glee upvoted across every subreddit is only really comparable to the Mangione murder. At this point it hardly matters to me who actually did the shooting
One thought experiment I had was to read the to reddit Mangione (who in my opinion while crazy probably deserves to be executed for his lack of remorse) comments/apologetics and imagine if they were instead written about the Minnesota killings. It was really quite sickening. I really think Reddit allowing those comments and that response for essentially a vigilante lynching, is opening the overton window for copycat behavior of all stripes.
Hard to imagine a Left-wing figure getting shot with this sort of reaction from the Right. There's just not anybody as strongly divisive enough, and being Left Wing is kind of 'inherently sympathetic' in the sense that you may not agree with them, but also it's hard to hate most Left-wing figures since it's a position originating from an excess of empathy.
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