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Notes -
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.
I have been trying to put my finger on why this one feels different, and a Facebook post from Nick Freitas has I think cleared it up for me.
Charlie wasn't an elected official. He was a young man who was willing to speak up for his beliefs. His arguments were often not all that sophisticated; he did a better job as an avatar of free, heterodox expression in academic settings, than as an advocate for any particular position.
This was not an untargeted massacre, as sometimes happens. It was also not the assassination of a government figure or candidate for office, quite. When was the last time someone like Kirk was assassinated? Someone who stood for a political view (or, arguably, a tribe) but who was strictly involved at the level of discourse, rather than politics or government operation (e.g. the Israeli staffers)? What would that even look like, with tribal positions reversed? Would it even occur to a violent right-wing nutjob to go after someone like Kirk? Who even is the "Charlie Kirk of the Left?" What other figures in history occupied this peculiar niche? Maybe Martin Luther King, Jr.? Or (less effectively) the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, though that was an Islam thing rather than a red tribe/blue tribe thing.
Whatever the case, this one bothers me a lot more than any of the other recent violence. It feels like a truly, purely ideological hatred--not activism or civil disobedience, not "mostly peaceful protest" or even "unapologetically violent protest," more of an absolutely unhinged, Excessively Online commitment to "fuck the outgroup." Kirk was harmless in a way Donald Trump obviously isn't, even in a way state legislators and law enforcement aren't; he was not in any position to oppress the way even the lowliest of government officers and officials sometimes might. Kirk had no power but that of his voice.
Kirk was just talking.
And he got murdered for it.
Ding ding ding.
There is virtually no way to paint him as a 'valid target'. Oh he said things you disagree with? He came into your ideological havens and confronted you directly? Boo fucking hoo get better ideas I guess.
He didn't invite nor go looking for violence, wasn't responsible for any decisions that might have caused any harm on a political level.
And what the lefties celebrating his death don't seem to get.
A) Charlie was WAY more popular among normies, especially young ones, than most thought.
B) A lot of those normies can tell that Charlie got killed for espousing opinions that they, themselves hold. He wasn't some out-and-out radical and he didn't run in radical circles.
Killing a basically normal guy, in his early 30's, with a lovely wife and two young kids. Christian. Didn't even curse. Debated civilly, but (and this was his true sin) was VERY EFFECTIVE at spreading righty ideas and demonstrating that lefty ideas were not universally accepted, even in colleges.
It breaks, I daresay, every single social norm that undergirds a 'liberal' (in the classic sense) society.
If merely "said things most people believe but that lefties don't like to hear" is enough to mark him for death, well, who precisely ISN'T fair game to the other side?
It’s like Trump said “They’re not after me, they’re after you! I’m just in the way.”
If you’re understandably skeptical of that coming out of Trump’s mouth, it’s ten times more credible when you shift the subject to Charlie the relatively milquetoast debate bro.
All over social media seems to be the common refrain; “If leftists wanted Charlie Kirk dead, they want you dead, too, they just don’t know your name yet.”
If people are asking Charlie Kirk of all people to defend their views, they've got problems much more fundamental than that. Charlie Kirk was good for the establishment right. He wasn't good for philosophical conservatism. He was a polished product marketed to people, in the same way Ben Shapiro was the "cool kid's philosopher."
Allow me to rephrase;
“If someone is glad that Charlie Kirk, a moderate conservative squish, is dead and deserved to be killed for what he believed, they’d be ecstatic if I or people like me died / were killed based on what I believe.”
This thought occurred simultaneously to maybe tens of millions of people all at once yesterday.
Kirk apparently said the following:
This is, in fact, as far as I've understood, a very, very radical view in the American political sphere on a key issue, one which some might call the defining issue of American politics. It's not the one that would have been shared by the Trump admin: when Trump issued his anti-affirmative-action EO, the framing was that CRA was good and that the things he was banning were going against its spirit. And as the quote says, Kirk himself calls it a radical opinion!
Of course, for many or even most of the leftists celebrating Kirk's demise, the point is not any of the race-based stuff but his strong Christian conservative opinions, such as opposing abortion including for rape and underaged kids, but the people doing that stuff do not do it because they believe Kirk to be a moderate.
I've also seen a number of far right types on social media saying that Kirk was a moderate when he started his career but had been evolving rightwards towards being "/ourguy/" before his tragic death.
Which is strange. As a european who never had much contact with blacks outside of hollywood movies, when I first learned what the Civil rights law actually was, I rejected it. Why can’t they have their own diners? It goes against the basic right of freedom of association. If whites are so oppressive and racist, why would you want to sit next to them? I don't try to get into gay bars or irish bars, because I know they'll taunt me. And if they were known to take away my voting rights and lynch me, it'd be even weirder to suggest attending their bars and schools at the solution to my problems.
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For these things I've learned to go straight to the video. Especially after the NYT had to release a revision because they quoted Kirk as saying something he was actually rebutting.
From what i can tell, the article is referencing the event TPUSA's "America Fest 2023". I have watched the video and couldn't find the quote. I have tried to find other videos of this event with Kirk but couldn't. I asked Gemini to help but still can't find the quote on video.
If he said it, based on other things he said that day on the video I could find, the context was probably something like "The Civil Rights Act didn't go far enough to protect all people of all races, whites included." Because on camera that day he's decrying racism against all peoples.
There's a video where he confirms that the quote is true. He says that they talk about why the Civil Rights Act was a mistake once a week. He also confirms that he thinks MLK is a bad guy, which is also a radical view - the latest polling I could find indicates that 81% of Americans think that MLK had a positive impact on the country, with polling division indicating that at least some of the other respondents (for some reason Pew doesn't indicate how many of the others answer in the negative and how many say they don't know) would be black people who think that MLK wasn't radical enough.
If the meaning was as you speculate, why would he call that a very, very radical view?
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That's part of it, though, isn’t it? Most people I see celebrating lump him firmly into the far right. Not saying their perception is correct, but that's where he lines up in their view.
... Don't ask me what they'd consider a moderate conservative to be; they might very well say there is no such thing, or that it's someone with the social views of circa 2018 Obama.
I suspect to the people who label Charlie Kirk as a “far right white nationalist” (apparently that’s what it says or has said in the past on Wikipedia) whatever constitutes a “moderate” conservative is purely functional; it’s just by definition a conservative that plays within their framework and they can control and don’t feel threatened by.
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It's always been in poor taste outside of the ghetto to celebrate over someone's death, but I'd be lying if I said the reports of someone's passing has never made be smirk before.
Sure, there’s gradients to this whole thing.
When I learned Osama Bin Laden died I went out and had a celebratory beer and enjoyed it in quiet, satisfied contemplation. He was unambiguously and directly responsible for the mass murder of thousands of my fellow citizens, and I was glad he was dead. But even then I didn’t gloat or grab a megaphone and shout it from the rooftops.
The behavior I see from leftists en masse from the death of even the mildest right wing figure is so routinely ghoulish that I’ve come to expect from them that I struggle to think of these people as actually human. This isn’t new, either, it’s been this way basically my whole life.
I’m not expecting his political opponents to theatrically shed a tear for him, just not acting like literal demons cackling with glee would suffice to temper my rage towards them. I consider it well earned at this point.
You're thinking of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. but yeah.
I grew up in an environment where you either become desensitized to everything or you learn to develop a very thick skin. Leftists can have their parades and celebrations if they like. It doesn't bother me, nor should bother anyone who bought into the "leftist snowflake" or "lispy pussy" rhetoric. On a personal level there are days I feel like Christopher Hitchens did on the debate stage, "Love and peace? Very very overrated in my view." Call me immoral or immature if you like. Likewise I'll celebrate internally when one of theirs gets knocked off and they shouldn't have the gall to complain about it for the same reason I didn't complain about them. I’ve had a couple of moments in my life where I’ve felt a little too good about the death of some people who were truly assholes.
Civility is one thing. Moral policing is another. When I was growing up people just seemed to have so much more of a thicker skin than they do today. Nowadays you call someone faggot here, they act like a pearl clutching moron who looks at you like you just pulled out a gun and shot their dog. Which is odd because that's what the left-wing of old used to attack and criticize the right-wing for, because the stereotypical image of them was of a bunch of straight-laced white people that behaved like soccer moms. We didn't call that "being offensive," we called that "letting off," and most of the community kept quiet in the knowledge that sometimes people really did deserve it and had it coming to them. And it actually toughened those people up and caused them to shift their behavior for the better. I actually miss those days sometime.
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