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There was minimal uproar over that assassination because the assassin was a former colleague of the victims who appears to have gone very unambiguously and very publicly crazy in the runup to the shootings. We had considerable discussion of the assassinations at the time, including a number of people, myself included initially, claiming it appeared to be ideological and was a very big deal. Only, by the next day he was in custody and we could read excerpts of his ramblings, and had testimony from his friends and neighbors showing that he had very clearly gone crazy.
People are ringing their hands in this thread because one of the most prominent political activists in Red Tribe just got very publicly murdered, and leftists were visibly celebrating his murder within literal seconds of the shot being fired. I understand that people pointing out this reality might distress you for a number of different reasons, but this is, in fact, very direct and undeniable culture war.
Further, it seems to me that Red Tribe does in fact pretty clearly have the moral high ground here. As I mentioned above and can substantiate at some length, there does not appear to be any substantive evidence that the Minnesota killings were ideological, and there was no widespread public celebration of the sort we are seeing even before that became clear. This is not me attempting to gerrymander definitions, this is the plain facts as I see them.
The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade. They have repeatedly and communally celebrated political murders over that time, have grown increasingly shameless at doing so, and they are again doing so at this moment, all over the internet. This does not appear to me to be a "both sides" problem. It is not going to be resolved by "touching grass".
As much as I denounce Kirk's murder, especially if it was politically motivated, and denounce any celebration my tribe is engaging in, I have a hard time with the pearl clutching going on in conservative circles about this, and especially statement like "The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade."
For the right, it seems that the acceptance of political violence as a potential solution is just baked in. Many on the right love their guns, and they love to make ""implications"" or even more outright statements that they are willing to use their guns against "tyrants". But if you spend 5 minutes around these types you will see that their definition of "tyranny" is not far from "a liberal policy I don't like". This has been a key pillar of conservative politics going back far more than a decade.
I can rest easier knowing that these things generally stay at the level of fantasy. But it IS a consistent conservative fantasy. If we are comparing like to like, liberals "celebrating" by making bluesky posts and conservatives making gun memes about "the tree of liberty", "ten cent solutions", "kill em all and let God sort em out", or shooting targets with Hillary's face on them, do not strike me as having significantly different moral valence.
I'd say much longer than that, since the Days of Rage were famously mostly committed by leftists. Then they went on hiatus for a while. Restarting in the 10s we had assaults on conservatives speaking on college campuses (ahem), probation for multiple counts of assault with a deadly weapon, followed by a year of excusing or celebrating arson, looting, and riots.
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It’s true the right definitely does have its revolutionary fantasies but the form is very different (and less realistic) than what you see on the left. The right wing fantasy of political violence seems to be informed by experiences in American history where we fought the British, or the Indians, or each other in the civil war. Cases where there were clear out groups, often uniformed. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of appetite on the right for random killings of people in their own country for peacefully disagreeing with them. Or for working a job they think is negative utility (Luigi.) Whereas the far left seems to understand that this is what a modern civil war/years of lead/troubles type event looks like.
A good left wing equivalent to Charlie Kirk would be Cenk Uygur. If he was murdered I could definitely imagine some groypers or anime avatar types being smug about it. But I don’t think your normie conservatives would be posting mockery under their real names on Facebook as I’ve seen dozens of leftists do. If a right wing equivalent to Luigi happened (perhaps something like a high level and very woke partner at a law firm getting killed) I don’t think the reaction would be nearly as positive as it was for Luigi. I also think it’s pretty clear these things are less likely to happen in the first place than the reverse
If an assassin killed, say, George Soros, or a higher-up in the DEI/ESG program at Blackrock, I could absolutely see the very-online right gloating and joking about it.
I can too. I don’t know if I would see literally dozens of people I knew in real life gloating and joking about it under their real names on Facebook though…
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Soros, I'll grant you. I can add a few other cartoon-villainesque people like Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harrari, Ursula von der Leyen or Christine Lagarde. But a noname DEI Blackrok patsy? I doubt it.
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The right understands the gravity of using violence for political reasons, and so they don't do it.
The left just murdered a 31 year old father of two little girls who's crime was trying to engage them rhetorically, and a substantial number of the left are cheering it on.
I'm sick of hearing this both sidesism. The left is violent, the right simply isn't. It's not both sides. They're different ideologies.
Would you describe a statement claiming that your side is good and peaceful and the opponent's side is bad and violent, with no evidence to back it up, as waging the culture war?
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Right wingers tend to have more nuanced understandings of violence. Left circles it's either nothing or 10000000% full blast 5 minutes of hate upon approved targets such as Racists, whatever'phobes' are under the lens, MAGA or whatever. One's a childish black-white moral scope and the other's a bit more informed.
Your view contrasts interestingly with the usual view (which I favor) that leftists see violence as a dial that can be turned up or down at will, while right wingers see it as a switch: either fully on or fully off.
I think these are 2 different phenomena. One is preference on where and how to apply violence, i.e. 100% at people I dislike, -100% at people I like. The other has to do with the life that violence takes on when you start it. That when you escalate to the next level of violence, it has a tendency to spiral to the next level and then to the next level and so on, since people rarely like to take violence sitting down, and it's not that common that you have such overwhelming force that not even your victim's friends couldn't come after you in the long run. There seems to be an overestimated belief in the ability of combatants to titrate and control violence, and it's a common leftist misconception IME that it's plausible for a cop to shoot-to-injure a suspect in a firefight. Heck, I've even encountered a real human adult who actually complained about some armed suspect being shot to death by cops instead of having his gun shot out of his hand. And it's not uncommon that I see leftists complaining about some suspect being riddled with dozens of bullets when one or two should've sufficed.
It might be mostly an artifact of differences in experience with guns or physical combat.
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I never bought into that one. There's clearly a difference between a skirmish in the ol' fistycuffs after some heated words have been exchanged in a bar, "oi mate, you better give me your wallet", and what you'd do to some fool that just broke into your house. Political violence might be more of an on/off switch, as for a right-winger, you're not really supposed to do it, unless you're in war, but once you're there...
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