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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.
It's been roughly a full day since the assassination, not nearly enough time to get a meaningful sense of the long- or even medium-term effects, if any, on national politics and political discourse, but still enough time to get a first blush. I haven't been looking around too much, but certainly I've humored my morbid curiosity about how things are going (that morbid curiosity doesn't extend to morbidity itself; I have negative interest in actually seeing the video of the murder, and I've managed to avoid it so far).
The main thing I've noticed is just how depressingly predictable it is. From the right, I see the expected mix of "they showed their TRUE faces, time for knives out" and "now is the time to pull back and de-escalate, or else our society will not survive" in roughly equal parts. But what I see overwhelmingly more than either is a fervent push of cancel culture, in exactly the same way as the left were doing and being complained about for the past decade+. Lots of minor and even a few right-wing influencers digging through BlueSky and Tumblr accounts, looking for minor nobodies who said egregious and extreme things in celebration of this murder, and fishing for doxxing info to try to get them fired. It's just more of "I believe in free speech when it's useful for me, but not when it's costly to me or my desire to see people I dislike punished" that we saw the left go through in the past 2 decades. And, again, depressingly predictable.
From the left, it's been all the standard interference that any ideological cluster throws out whenever some member of that cluster does something that almost everyone disapproves of, of the sort of "let's wait to find out - it could be just a random loon," "yawn, it's just another gun murder in a nation full of them," or "this [negative adjectives chosen for maximum affect while barely avoiding crossing the line into libel] right-wing influencer was shot." Along with a generous helping of "he had bad opinions, therefore I don't mind" or "I have exactly as much sympathy for him and his family as he did for [people I've deemed to be oppressed]."
Entirely predictable if your basic assumption is that no one is principled, everyone is always looking for plausibly deniable ways to harm people they disagree with and gloat about it. So depressingly predictable. If you had asked me to speculate how people would react to Kirk's murder 2 days ago, those 2 things would probably have been included in some form, certainly the latter one.
And because it's so predictable, it also makes it somewhat confusing. This reminded me of a couple of topics that I'm sure very many on The Motte are familiar with: signalling and common knowledge. Common knowledge has to do with knowledge shared between multiple people, where not only do they have the same knowledge, they also know that each other has that same knowledge, and they also know that each other knows that each other has that same knowledge, etc. With the polarization and recent history of the US, it's common knowledge at this point that, if someone on one side gets physically harmed in what appears to be an attack from the other side, or if someone who seems to be on one side commits some random act of violence, then the blind partisans on the attacker's side will run interference for them, and people against that side will try to pin it on them and use it to excuse their worst, most selfish and cynical behaviors, such as e.g. adopting cancel culture.
As such, if someone wants to signal that they're not just a blind partisan who can be safely ignored, they need to present something that sets them apart from those. Otherwise, what they're doing is either admitting that they're happy to play the role of a blind partisan or that they are the blind partisan that the role was based off of. But then that's a signal for anyone who isn't already bought in or almost bought in to just ignore them or even use them as ammo for arguing why that person's side needs to be crushed even harder.
Which is all well and good if your priority is to make in-group members clap like seals rather than to convince people that this is a nothingburger/perfect justification for crushing the outgroup. But priorities like that aren't all well and good, at least for the health of USA society.
My own bias makes me really really wish that people on the left would actually attempt to live up to our promise of being better than the right and find ways to de-escalate. In this situation, that would have to involve signalling a commitment against political violence in the face of speech of the sort Kirk practiced, and that signal must be costly for it to actually be a signal. And, unfortunately, the kinds of generic statements of condolences and condemnation that mainstream politicians throw out really don't signal anything of the sort; rather, it's a signal that they're happy enough to pay lipservice against political violence when people they dislike get got. It could take many forms, such as committing to push forward some policies that Kirk liked even if they dislike it, because they believe in setting the precedent that if you murder someone for political reasons, your political allies will do everything they can to make sure that the murdered person's political wishes get fulfilled. Or even something relatively minor like that thing Elon said he'd do, funding murals of that Ukrainian woman who got murdered in NC - set the precedent that if you murder someone for political reasons, then your political allies will do their best to make that person a martyr and someone to be celebrated and revered. Or it could be even more minor, just calling out the ideology that refuses a label that explicitly elides between physical violence and words that people dislike in a way that explicitly justifies physical violence against political commentators like Kirk as long as their views are sufficiently disliked and committing to cross aisles to shut that down, or at least shut down the pro-violence-against-speech part.
I'm sure there are some very minor influencers and politicians out there doing just that, but I worry that they're just dominated, by orders of magnitude, by those of us who just want to keep polarizing the issue.
I had a somewhat different reaction. When I saw what was happening, I felt a sigh of relief. I'm not for doxxing, generally. I was against that one woman getting fired from Home Depot for wishing Trump was assassinated. But I was getting worried that the Right would collectively do something bad. And so if this is the thing the Right does that is collectively bad, then it's a lot better than a lot of other things they could have decided to do.
If they can make it unthinkable for someone to publicly celebrate domestic assassinations, then that would be a step away from the precipice we have been creeping towards. If every public official, military member, cultural influencer, professor, and teacher stops comparing their political opponents to Nazi Fascists who need to be killed, then maybe we can heal as a nation. And one way to get that to happen is to do this cancel culture exercise.
It's not what I wanted, but when I see the Right say things like, "They want to kill you too, they just don't know your name yet," I'm relieved the steam is releasing this way. I don't think it's just opportunistic politicking. People are upset that Kirk was assassinated for civilly expressing views 30% - 70% of people in the country share. People are more upset to see others say that Kirk deserved his assassination for civilly expressing views 30% - 70% of people in the country share. Particularly when they share a few of the views that likely got him killed.
I want them to jail George Soros. I want them to jail Reid Hoffman. I want them to uncover the funding mechanisms that knowledge supported things like antifa and if (as I suspect it does) lead back to Soros and Hoffman I want them to jailed. That is playing for keeps but within the lines.
Yeah, RICO'ing Antifa would be a good start, and if goes up to Soros then that would be good. I wouldn't want necessarily to just start harassing Soros until we could figure out a crime to pin him on and get him that way. Identifying a crime and finding the criminal is how the system should work, not identifying a man and then finding the crime. That's what happened to Trump and it wasn't good.
I would argue with Trump it went even beyond finding the man — they invented a crime largely out of whole cloth and then jury rigged the law to get a conviction. It will be overturned on appeal.
Already been sustained by NY's highest court.
I don’t think that’s right. Can you share a link?
I thought I read it HERE, in this thread a few weeks ago.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/n.y.-appeals-court-voids-fine--upholds-judgement-against-trump
However, perhaps this is not the case you were referring to; it's not the election interference case.
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