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It is Okay to Think That Charlie Kirk was not Literally Jesus.
Charlie Kirk did not deserve to get shot in the jugular for expressing controversial political opinions. I actually agreed with many of Charlie Kirk's controversial political opinions. The thing about controversial political opinions though, is that lots of people don't like them. If you are a person who does not like Charlie Kirk's political opinions, here are some things that would be perfectly understandable for you to think or feel upon hearing the news that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed:
"Charlie Kirk once said gun rights are worth the cost of a few shooting deaths. Kinda funny now huh? I wonder if he's changed his mind."
"Sucks he died like that, but I'm kinda glad I don't have to see his tiny face spouting talking points anymore."
"Charlie Kirk was a massive hack. I think we should care about the kids shot at that school in Colorado more than him."
"Charlie Kirk wanted me kicked out of the country because of my political opinions. It's hard for me to feel bad for him."
To be clear, all of these are tasteless and (in my opinion) poorly thought-out, but they are well within the bounds of civil discourse. None of these are beyond the pale. None of these should get one fired from one's unrelated job. None of these are even close to inciting or advocating for violence.
I was shocked today when I saw a Republican Congressman announce a woke-era pressure campaign againt people who "belittled" the assasination. Apparently I have a much longer memory than many people. I still remember 2020. I still remember George Floyd. It wasn't just the riots, it wasn't just the demonization of physical policing tactics, it was the Orwellian psycholigical tyranny of not being able to express nuanced or contrary feelings about a tragic event. Never again. In a free society, people should be able to express their thoughts and feelings on major events, even if they aren't entirely thought-out or sanitized.
Charlie Kirk believed it was part of God's perfect moral law that people who are my friends, my family, my coworkers should be stoned to death. He described Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson (and other black women) as affirmative action hires who stole their spots from white people and who don't have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. This whole attempt to lionize Kirk after his death has been extremely black pulling, as a leftist. Basically none of the articles that try to do so can actually mention things Kirk said or believed because if they did their audience would not think he was worth lionizing! He didn't deserve to get killed for his views but this attempt to pretend Kirk was just the nicest kindest commentator we should all seek to emulate is insane.
Rather than litigate his actual statements as other are doing, isn't this a good game theoretical move? Reducing the value of assassination as a political tool by amplifying the status of the message meant to be silenced seems like a good feature.
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I don't think any lionization is aimed at blackpilled leftists. Ezra Klein says free speech is good, but he doesn't lionize him. This is about the best response that can be mustered among a sea of "he didn't deserve to die, but..."
I don't know much about Kirk. As far as political influencers go, a commitment to the exercise of speech and "Debate*" is worth a nod even in an asterisked, scare quoted own-the-lib form. Doubly so in an environment where an exercise of (obnoxious) speech, the bedrock of our polite society, will get you targeted. I wish Kirk's politics were more like mine in his life and advocacy, but that goes for everyone.
Would it be helpful if you pretended Joe Rogan was killed instead? That sounds snarky, but I am curious who might be a controversial, but deserving figure you dislike to receive more than mostly derision with a he didn't deserve, but... primer.
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From right wing outlets, yes, I see a lot of lionizing about what a great guy he was. From left wing outlets, barely-restrained grave dancing following throat-clearing about how murder is bad. Mostly what I see from mainstream news is "This is awful and says something about politics/free speech/gun control in America right now" followed by a lot of throat-clearing about how Kirk was "controversial."
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Don't forget Biden said that part.
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Wait… I thought you were against lionizing Kirk?
I didn’t know much about Kirk other than a vague impression he’s some sort of milquetoast young conservative personality, but this makes me like him more.
For indeed, that’s the mechanical outcome of substantially lower average black IQ and massive racial preferences in favor of blacks and against whites and Asians. At a given level of achievement or “achievement,” a black person will, on average, exhibit a significant deficit in brainpower compared to a would-be replacement white or Asian person.
For example, the “Opportunity Costs of…” paper found that in the mid-to-late 90s, being black was worth +230 points on the SAT vs. being white (+280 vs. Asians). 230 is larger than the difference in current day SAT scores between Harvard and Florida State University enrollees (220 and 180 at the 25th and 75th percentiles, respectively—lots of Harvard students likely hitting the math cap). It wouldn’t be outrageous for a person to take seriously the brainpower of an nth percentile Harvard student but not an nth percentile FSU student.
Celebration parallax in action. Using Brown-Jackson as an implied counter-example to black female affirmative-action-hire and lack-of-brainpower is a curious choice, given Biden was quite clear on his selection criteria. That’s the Problematic part about widespread discrimination against whites and Asians in favor of blacks and a group of high-profile black women voicing their support of it: someone doubting the brainpower of said black women.
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Could I get a source for the first claim where Kirk believes that it is God's perfect moral law that (I'm assuming gay people) should be stoned to death?
For the second, here is the best source I could find. The source is listed as The Charlie Kirk Show, 13 July 2023, but it's surprisingly difficult to find the actual unclipped source even with this information. The earliest episodes I can find are for November 11, 2023: https://salemnewschannel.com/host/charlie-kirk/full-episodes?page=37
https://x.com/patriottakes/status/1679829904026730496
Transcript:
Additional context of the clip
On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in higher education. After this decision, many high profile black women came out to speak about how affirmative action impacted their lives. The four women Kirk mentioned wasn't because soley they were black, but because they came in support of affirmative action, or outright stated they benefited from affirmative action.
Joy Reid https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/joy-reid-affirmative-action-harvard-supreme-court-rcna92190
Shiela Jackson Lee - it's in the video
Michelle Obama https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/29/michelle-obama-affirmative-action-00104211
Ketanji Brown Jackson She has the least obvious self claimed benefit about affirmative action that I could find, but she did defend it in her dissent: https://thehill.com/homenews/4073556-read-jackson-dissent-supreme-court-affirmative-action/
She was also appointed after Biden vowed to nominate a black women, which I think is some evidence enough that affirmative action played a role in her getting to where she was https://www.reuters.com/world/us/retiring-us-justice-breyer-appear-with-biden-white-house-2022-01-27/
Yes, Kirk did say are affirmative action hires, that they stole a white person's spot, and that they don't have the brain power to be taken seriously. That does come off as quite rude and mean spirited. But it was in response to the black women admitting they got to their positions due to affirmative action. It's not like he just randomly named the first four black women he could solely for the purpose of insulting them. Did they or did they not benefit from affirmative action? If not for affirmative action, would they be where they are today? Had it not been for affirmative action, would someone else, possibly white, be in their position instead?
9/10 times I see someone quote something bad Charlie Kirk said, it's all made in assumption that you would agree that these things are bad with zero to no effort to actually address the argument he is making. It's all "look at this mean thing Kirk said" with no effort to explain why it's bad or wrong. And each time I have looked in context of the quote, I come away thinking that it wasn't as bad as people that want to "reveal" his true character make it out to be.
Ultimately, that claims boils down to Kirk said mean things about public figures based on a response from said public figures. You could say my summary is too charitable, I will respond that the other summary is too uncharitable, so one should look at the quote in context and make the decision for themselves how bad what Kirk said really is.
Clip for the gay thing (I slightly misquoted) along with some additional context in this comment.
Yea I guess these public figures talking about how affirmative action helped them really forced Kirk into describing them as "not hav[ing] the brain power to be taken seriously." How could he have done anything else!
Since other people have already commented on the gay thing, I don't have much to add, but criticism of Charlie Kirk being a hypocrite is very different from claiming he wants gay people to be stoned to death.
Ok, but I don't think Kirk was a hypocrite. Do you think he understood himself, in that clip, to be saying something like "Ms. Rachel agrees with Leviticus 19 but not Leviticus 18... and so do I!" That he was a hypocrite about the bible in the same way he was criticizing? I rather think he believed it was a criticism that would not apply to himself, which entails taking scripture more seriously, and in this specific case agreeing with the part of scripture he brought up as an example.
That's a maximally uncharitable take. I find the interpretation that Kirk is criticizing the selective usage of bible verses to be more plausible. I don't think Kirk believed gays should be stoned to death.
Why do I think Kirk doesn't believe gays should be stoned to death?
Quoting the bible often comes with interpretation of what said bible verse means, especially Old Testament bible verses. His quote is preceded by him talking about "telling them the truth".
Kirk has previously said "Also gay people should be welcome in the conservative movement. As Christians we are called to love everyone,". https://x.com/StephenKing/status/1966484038648021264
Kirk has platformed gay people.
Kirk doesn't make a call to action to stone gay people.
Kirk hasn't stoned any gay people.
Also, is there a source that shows what he says after where it's cut off? In all the previous quotes I looked at, there was stuff said afterward that clarifies or provides more information. Why is the clip cut off where it is? The best sourcing is to provide the full video and when no such source is given one should be suspicious of any editing and cutting that is done. Something tells me he probably said something along the lines of and no I don't actually believe you should stone people to death.
EDIT: I don't think anyone advocating for the stoning of gay people would say this: https://instagram.com/reel/DOmADH6EqoL/
Kirk recognized the political expediencies necessary to have the reach he does. No one doubted he was a savvy operator.
So on one hand we have all these examples the guy above you posted, and on the other hand we have you, your selective interpretation of one statement, and your totally arbitrary claim that everything he ever said otherwise was actually some kind of ruse.
...okay.
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You are out here repeating the same vile villainizing that got this man shot two days ago, and you are repeating it without shame or hesitation.
Incredibly damning that quoting Kirk's words or showing clips of him speaking is "villainizing" him.
Are you honestly not familiar with how clipping is used to take what people say out of context to villainize them?
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I don't know the guy or any of his beliefs, and there's a lot of this sort of "he was a violent transphobe" etc. rhetoric online. So can you direct me to where he said that (like the quotes about gun deaths and the 2nd amendment rights) or is it just "well he was a Christian, therefore he believed in the Bible, therefore he accepted what the Bible says about X/Y/Z, therefore he wanted me stoned to death" chain of inference?
EDIT: I ask this because I remember the fighting over gay rights where people on all sides were quoting Leviticus, and it was considered a killer put-down to ask those against gay rights "so do you wear poly-cotton mix clothing? do you eat shrimp? because those are banned too, you know!" and to say 'if you don't keep all the laws and taboos, you are being a hypocrite and don't have religious objections'.
However, those on the liberal side (generally liberal Christians) also liked to quote, in the context of illegal immigrants, the parts about "Do not ill-treat foreigners who are living in your land. Treat them as you would a fellow-Israelite, and love them as you love yourselves. Remember that you were once foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God", except you know - that's in the same list as the mixed materials and anti-witchcraft, so are they stoning witches to death? no? then they're hypocrites and not acting out of religious belief!
People cherrypick parts of Scripture all the time; it would be entirely possible for Kirk to be anti-gay marriage but not want gays stoned to death.
Here is the clip where describes the section of Leviticus 18 about stoning men who have sex with men to death as part of "God's perfect law".
Here is the clip where he makes the comments about Ketanji Brown Jackson and others.
Edit for your edit:
The broader context in the clip above is that Kirk is criticizing Ms. Rachel for selectively quoting parts of Leviticus that she likes and ignoring the parts she doesn't. With the implication this makes her faith or invocation less sincere or authentic. That she is a hypocrite. For this to function as a contrast it would have to be the case that Kirk does not do the same thing, otherwise what is the point? Ms. Rachel selectively quotes scripture, just like me! So Kirk must either be consistent about believing the commands in Leviticus, presumably including the one he brings up, or his point in bringing it up is incoherent because it applies just as much to himself.
Okay, thank you for the link.
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Here is the full episode that the clip about stoning is taken from. The clip starts around 1:02:00. He continues:
The New Testament revised how sinners ought to be treated (stoning them to death is definitively "un-Christlike"), but did not generally override the list of behaviors considered to be sinful; and Leviticus attests that gay sex is a sin. If you grew up anywhere in the West and not under a rock, you have understood this argument since you were a child. It's not hard to find videos where Kirk expounds on this very basic principle:
In another comment you called him "savvy", implying that he's dogwhistling to an audience who will understand that what he's really saying is they should go out and stone a gay. Well, it would have to be a very high-pitched whistle indeed to pierce through the background noise of the millions of Christians who have taken the same line for centuries in all sincerity – not to mention all the other times he himself modeled or advocated a firm but gentle stance towards gays and other gender non-conformists.
As for the affirmative action comments – OK, yes, he made a snide remark pointing out the obvious corollary of benefiting from affirmative action. But come on. You do realize this is the best that hordes of disgruntled leftists have been able to dig up, right? He was more civil than most commentators of similar stature, left or right. I was never a fan of his, but watching some of his videos now, it's striking how strong his commitment to politeness was – as far as I've seen, he never raised his voice or cursed at his interlocutor; he was content merely to let the fools he debated make fools of themselves, without piling on ridicule; he would consistently chide the crowd when they were heckling or otherwise being less than fully accommodating to his opponents; and his final appeal was often to love and never to its opposite. I'm no Christian myself, but these are exactly the sorts of qualities I've always admired about Christians, and he was pretty much a sterling example.
(The way he marketed himself – "handing out L's" – doesn't quite align with that, but my rejoinder is again simply: come on. He wasn't literally an angel, but by the standards of argumentative political content targeted at his audience's age and IQ bracket, he merits a place in one of the higher celestial spheres.)
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This really reads as a tongue in cheek gotcha, he can't stop smirking as he makes the argument. I don't think he takes the scripture literally, he immediately explains his personal interpretation of the 'love your neighbor' bit, and I think he is also explaining his interpretation of the myriad 'stone the gays' bits in the bible in the same moment.
I would imagine that his position, which he half states in the clip, is that homosexuality is a sin and as a good and loving Christian he has an obligation to help gay people understand that truth rather then just affirming their identity.
This is just based on the clip. I have seen very little Charlie Kirk content so he might in other places make claims that undermine this reading.
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I would like to see a full clip of the first, not conveniently cut before he finishes speaking. The context of the argument appears to be that he is pushing back against the tiktoker for saying that every word of Leviticus must be taken completely literally. He's clearly using it as a gotcha against her quoting Leviticus - he opened the argument with "I mean, Satan's quoted scripture." For the second, he is saying that appointing unqualified and incompetent candidates because of diversity commitments implies that black women are not capable of doing the job, that this is the argument that progressives are implicitly making when they appoint a KBJ to the Supreme Court because Biden committed to picking a black woman.
Something you will find if you spend time on themotte is that it's a good idea to check the sources people show you for their claims and think critically about them.
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what is wrong with what he said in the clip?
Isn't that the justice that doesn't know what a woman is? if I remember correctly she said she couldn't say because she wasn't a biologist, right?
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Because it doesn't matter what he said, he died speaking. We don't murder people for speaking. If you start nitpicking the words he used while you eulogize him, you center how he brought it on himself with his speech. You accept the premise that we murder people for speech, and are haggling over the price.
If you think it was wrong to kill Kirk for his speech (as I do) then that's fine. If you want to go on to talk about what a great commentator he was and how kind and gentle and worthy of emulation he is, maybe you should quote some of the things he actually said.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much. If you actually thought it was wrong, you wouldn't be all over here justifying it and throwing shit on the dead. You think it was right, or you're relived it happened, and you're upset that other people are upset.
This is similar to what I saw in other from the Trump assassination attempt: an overwhelming disappointment that he missed, then retroactive justification about how that reaction doesn't invalidate everything else you believe about yourself.
Can you point me to where I justify him being shot? I think Kirk was a shitty person who doesn't deserve to be posthumously lionized and I have made no secret of that. That doesn't mean he deserved to be murdered!
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As I see it, I believe it was wrong to kill Kirk for his speech, because I believe that such actions in general are wrong and ought to be prevented (using minimal necessary force, etc.). One method I see as helping is to set the precedent that if you kill someone like Kirk, then all your allies will team up with Kirk's friends and make sure he becomes remembered as a hero (and ideally you won't be remembered at all, or at best as a nobody loser), no matter what the murdered person was like before. This won't stop the truly psychotic and deranged, but it should reduce the incentive for political enemies to murder opposing pundits. I wrote out more in this comment yesterday about my thinking.
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You've never been to a funeral before have you?
I have.
So then you should be aware of the social norm of not speaking ill of the dead, even flattering them, when you eulogize them. So you can't even plead ignorance, you just don't think your political enemies that have been murdered deserve even that common decency.
Most people will learn most of what they know about him immediately after he died. A period of not speaking ill of the dead is unduly biased towards his supporters.
If you're literally at his funeral then it's fair to stop people from dancing on his grave. Not in the world wide web.
I think that's a fair social norm to punish his murderer, tho, and discourage future such actions. "If you kill someone, we as a society will only talk about how great he was, and for a time deliberately look past all the things you thought were bad."
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Well, where by "his supporters," you mean "supporters of free speech and dialogue as a way to solve political differences that's preferable to violence," sure. People who support such things have a huge, legitimate reason to want Kirk to be lionized, in a way that's entirely orthogonal to their support of his non-meta political opinions, because it sets the precedent that political assassination is politically beneficial to the assassinated. Now, it's possible that the increase in incentive to murder someone on your own side via false flag is greater than the decrease in incentive to murder someone on the other side, but I'm skeptical of this notion.
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I think it a dumb norm generally. One that does a lot of harm and we should do away with. This is not specific to my political enemies. Do you think we should avoid speaking ill of, even flattering, Jeffrey Epstein? Joseph Stalin? Mao Zedong? They are all dead!
So we're right back to comparing Charlie Kirk to history's greatest monsters to justify how he's being treated?
Yeah, this isn't getting de-escalated.
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You say it's generally a dumb norm, but to prove it you parade around some of the worst men who have ever lived? Sounds more like special pleading.
What if we replace them with unlikeable, but relatively average people? Should I avoid speaking ill of Destiny, Ethan Klein, or Hassan Piker, if they die? I think so.
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Regarding the stoning thing. There was a kerfuffle where Steven King tweeted that allegation and then very quickly apologized.
His tweet where he stated that Kirk “advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin.’” got at least 25 million views before being deleted.
His later apology: “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages.” has 2.5 million right now.
His followup tweet that "I have apologized. Charlie Kirk never advocated stoning gays to death." Has 1.6 million.
Those are quite impressive numbers for an apology. But they're still an order of magnitude lower than the engagement numbers on the accusation.
Perhaps your second criticism is warranted. I genuinely don't know, I don't care to check. But your first is apparently not, at least according to King. (I'm being a bit hypocritical here in not looking up the original videos or articles myself.) We should all keep in mind that social media rumormongering selects for discord, not truth.
He described the section of Leviticus 18 that calls for stoning men who have sex with men to death as part of "God's perfect law." Is Kirk not a Christian? Does he not believe in God's law? Does Kirk also only quote scripture hypocritically when it serves his ends?
That clip confirms the interpretation in King's apology.
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Do you think that all observant Christians and Jews in the world (the latter, unlike Christians, I remind you, think the entire Law of Moses remains binding) believe in going out and stoning homosexuals right now, and are therefore terrible people?
What do you mean by "observant"? I suspect lots of people who conceive of themselves as observant pick and choose what part of their holy book they endorse. Does that make them not "observant"? In Kirk's case specifically, he is the one who brought up not believing in stoning gay people as an example of hypocrisy.
For the purposes of this argument, let's define observant as being, at minimum, people who believe the Old Testament is the revealed word of God, and that God, being perfect, has not made mistakes. Do you think anyone unwilling to say that God made a mistake in the Book of Leviticus is a bad person, undeserving of sympathy if they are murdered? And as I asked above, do you think such Jews and Christians therefore and necessarily want to go out and stone homosexuals?
Yea. I think if you believe it is a moral imperative to stone gay people to death you are a bad person.
I am sure there are practical reasons (they will go to jail) they don't want to.
So then you believe that, in round terms, 100% of Christians and Jews (and Europeans more generally) who lived before the 1860s, when buggery started being bumped down from being a capital crime, were bad people, and none of the deaths of anyone who fought in any European war, or was murdered in Christendom before then, was sad?
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If they believe something is the unmistaken Word of God yet do not follow it, I think they are not observant.
I can't speak for Jews, but for observant Christians (such as Charlie Kirk), they believe Jesus Christ deliberately gave requirements for carrying out stoning that are impossible (anyone throwing a stone must be without sin) and therefore they are not supposed to stone anyone, homosexual or otherwise - though men having sex with men remains sexually immoral.
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Why? Wouldn't you want someone who believes in God's law in stoning people like you to death to make arguments to peacefully convince others through persuasion that this is correct? The most likely alternative to that seems to be using violence to actually enact God's law (something that we know God's followers have historically not been shy about doing). And that tends to be less pleasant - and often more effective, sadly - than argumentation pretty often.
Like, maybe his opinions were evil or beyond the pale or whatever. But he did seem rather nice and kind in how he tried to persuade people of his evil opinions. I think if both people with evil and good opinions decided to emulate his way of being nice and kind while commentating, I think America would be a better, safer place, especially for the types of people that would unfairly suffer if all the people who thought like Kirk decided to eschew scruples around niceness and kindness.
Old Testament law, now we are under the New Testament grace, not law (since Kirk was a Christian, not a Jew). I think the problem has arisen from American Protestants hammering the Old Testament and ignoring the New except for the epistles of St. Paul.
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Because he was not a very nice person? He was very often a rude asshole. Please, watch this clip and tell me Kirk in it could be described as "kind" and "nice."
No I would prefer they shut up and keep their opinions to themselves.
I don't know. I get the sense that if Kirk personally tried to enact God's law the most likely outcome is he would be dead or in prison from the attempt. That could be better than convincing a large number of people that gay people should be stoned to death for being gay.
I defy you to watch the clip above and tell me that Kirk is "nice" and "kind" in it.
Good luck with your totalitarian utopia.
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That's not an option in a diverse liberal democracy, though. The choice is just between how someone with evil ideas like his pushes them forward.
The problem isn't Kirk, it's the millions of people who think like Kirk who don't see a peaceful democratic way to coordinate to make their voices heard. This is a harm in itself, but also a risk of major second-order harms that are tough to predict and prevent.
Not particularly nice or kind, I agree. But it's about as nice a way as I've seen someone deliver the message that these people are incompetent affirmative action hires who don't deserve the roles they got, which they did due to their race. Yeah, it's mocking and mean, and he could've been nicer, I suppose, but it's hard to be nicer than that when trying to make a point like that, which is an important point that ought to be made and publicized by people who truly believe it. But by the standards of political commentary about people in the opposite side, he looks basically like the nicest and kindest person on Earth.
So maybe it's more accurate to say that the world would be more peaceful and better to live in if people decided to try to emulate being "less un-nice and less un-kind" like Kirk. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and all that.
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Just for calibration, If that's "rude asshole", what do you call people cheering on his death?
They are also often assholes about it.
Just "assholes"? On my scale, if they're "assholes" then that automatically elevates Kirk to "kind" and "nice".
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Did he? I get the general impetus to not speak ill of the dead, but unless he'd taken a turn very recently that I'm not aware of, Kirk was not doing good-faith outreach. He was generating content.
Tell me the difference.
He had his opinions, he went to places, and he tried to convince others. He didnt insult his questioners, he didnt maliciously stick fingers in their eyes. Yes, he had a motive and an agenda; a preferred outcome from his activities. No, you werent ever going to change the opinions of this debate bro in real time. His back and forths were in service to advocacy.
But outside of some very insular and high-minded communities... this is as good as it gets. This is what every political and public advocate does. It has always been the case whether this was a Uni gig or a Monk debate.
The accusation that Charlie didnt operate in 'good faith' - in the same way I might with a good friend when discussing contrary politics - seems true in a very narrow sense. But if it doesnt count, almost nothing does.
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I haven't seen much of his videos, but from the clips I saw, he seemed unusually nice and kind in how he made his arguments shutting down arguments he considered wrong or even absurd.
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Why would I want the enemy to coordinate violence against me rather than perform uncoordinated violence (and, assuming that people aren't yet persuaded of his point of view, get shut down)?
Uncoordinated violence is random, hard to predict, and hard to prevent. After all, there's a reason why there was so much scaremongering about "stochastic terrorism" over the past half-decade or so (and just "terrorism" in the couple decades before). Coordinated violence, of the kind that involves peacefully lobbying voters and politicians in a democratic republic, is more predictable, more legible, which also makes it more preventable. Certainly when it comes to some crazy explicitly religious doctrine in the USA.
I mean, this is sort of what makes liberal democracy better than the alternatives. That it pushes people to openly coordinate violence against each other based on arguments and persuasion rather than enacting violence against each other based on metal and blood. Because, of course, all politics is about coordinating violence against each other.
Yes, I would sooner prefer my enemies be suppressed from coordinating so that only a small, least inhibited fraction lashes out with random violence. I know it because my side is suppressed in such a way in my country and I would prefer the opposite.
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