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I think a lot of these posts are missing the horror that I am feeling.
I personally listened to this guy debating all kinds of people in the background of other things I was doing. I was impressed by how there were very few below-the-belt attacks on the interlocutors, and multiple bouts of praise from Charlie Kirk for the debaters being brave enough to step up and be material for content. I wished I was as skilled as he at setting up such angles of argument so quickly.
When I heard he was shot, it was like I was punched. I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe he's dead. It got even more unbelievable with the second video showing blood flowing out of him like a fountain. I wept upon seeing this. This murder is the closest thing to pure evil that I've seen in my life, ala No Country for Old Men. It makes absolutely no sense, he was making arguments that I genuinely agreed with, he was so young, he had kids, he was a good Christian, you've almost certainly heard all this before. He was upholding the values of this country by engaging in such public discourse. Democracy does not die in darkness, it dies in broad daylight in front of thousands of people, in front of its family, viewed by millions online, everyone powerless to do anything as it bleeds out.
None of what happened afterwards was what I expected at all. Immediately, celebrations, dark ironic pitiless humor, and hideous one-liners with no thought put into them started everywhere. It was official, the Hermann Cain Award logic about when it's acceptable to dance on the graves of your enemies extends about as far as certain leftists want it to. If you have certain values, and you express them, there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who would love to see you get decorated with your own blood, watch you exsanguinate, a chunk of mineral tearing through your vital structures, turning you into a pile of meat instead of a man. Your entire life will be characterized by years-old quotes picked out of a mountain of words you've spoken over the course of your short life.
Today, after gathering enough stock of public reactions, I've come to an even more disturbing conclusion: there are even more people out there who will run cover even for this awful behavior. Here's a small collection of everything I've witnessed: They're all bots. There aren't that many of them. They're only online. It's because of Trump's escalation of rhetoric. It's because this was where this would lead for the kind of life he lived. He was a white supremacist. He wanted gays to be stoned to death. He accepted gun deaths and became one, such a natural consequence. The shooter wasn't one of us. He was a groyper. We can talk about cooling the rhetoric once the 2026 elections happen. Until those go well, it's perfectly understandable why people talk this way. Let's talk about something else, let's talk about January 6th again. Let's talk about Epstein. Let's talk about the Minnesota lawmakers. Anything but this topic. Even many of the moderate lefty politicians couldn't muster up much other than "political violence is bad", saving face in an easy way. Almost none of them did the difficult thing that Gavin Newsom or Cenk Uygur did and confronted the real issue at no small cost to their own image. Some of them even used it to forward their own agendas. AOC put something out in favor of gun control. That's right: we shoot you, and then we use your death to try to convince you to lay down your issues and let us win. Ilhan Omar doesn't believe that anyone genuinely liked the man or is being genuine. After seeing all the downplaying, I have no doubts that she will lose barely any support, because it's tacitly approved.
So many of my own friends, too. I've tried to reach across the aisle for years. I've even discounted some of my true beliefs to coax out some admission that I really wanted to see. I've always tried to model fairness in my political arguments. It got me nothing. All that goodwill, swallowed up, like water falling on the dusty ground.
I thought such a clear case of senseless murder would make people snap out of the usual sanewashing, but no, and in fact, there's so much on this website, too, even among people who are much better than the median social media poster at understanding arguments and taking context into account. I am incredibly sad that there's actually nothing that could happen that could get people to agree with each other without clearing their throat before doing it. The entire internet is a /r/watchpeopledie thread. There's video, and then there's the awful comments under the video. There's no good ending to this. It's painful. This discourse is a grueling journey to the ugliest end of the country imaginable. This discourse is the cumulative societal hangover from more than ten years of a cancerous outgrowth of the most toxic kind of politics, and just like a regular hangover, the world doesn't stop for you. You have to go back into work in the morning and do it all over again. It's unbearable. I was not willing to believe a large portion of the other side was evil up until now. I hope someone cooler-headed than me can make some headway on this issue somehow, because I will go insane if I think about this any more.
Honestly just keep in mind that the large majority of this shit is truly not real (as much foreign interference as the average person thinks there is, times it by at least 10 and they're still probably underestimating) and a lot of the few comments that are real is just edgy chest thumping by people who think it makes them look cool but are cowards in anything real or not even supporting violence like I had showed here.
Political violence is extremely rare nowadays, even with the small increase recently we're still far away from the 60s and 70s. In a short period of time you had JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Evers all killed. And those are just the bigger names. Attacks on Nixon, George Wallace, Vernon Dahmer. KKK bombings and murders, firebombed buses, Bloody Sunday, Weather Underground, Kent State and that's just a small portion of it.
And despite that no one thinks back on the 60s and 70s as some dangerous awful time. Part of it is probably nostalgia washing but part of it is because even then political violence was still a tiny tiny tiny portion of the population dominated by nutjobs.
We're pattern seeking animals evolved to detect and hyperfocus on novel and scary situations, and this means we tend to overestimate them. School shootings are rare, mass shootings are rare, political violence is rare, and kids aren't getting kidnapped by strangers if they walk into the next aisle in the grocery store despite this insane fear
The US is a largely peaceful country with largely peaceful citizens and the rare few that aren't are mostly crazies, gang members killing each other, and rare flukes.
I don't know what to tell you except to tell you that I just straight up don't believe you when you say that it isn't real. Everyone told me the Brian Thompson shooting last year was just edgy chest thumping, too, and now look what happened. It's extremely rich that you are saying that political violence is extremely rare right after Charlie Kirk just bought the farm and tens of thousands of people are publicly declaring they want more, at expense to themselves when they actually have jobs. Do you really think that it will continue to be extremely rare, after seeing the huge waves of support that this murderer got?
How many times have I heard that crime is down, when these I Fucking Love Science fans are forced to confront right afterwards that murders are way up, actually? That the crime was revised in 2021 and 2022 to show that crime increased instead of decreased? When, exactly, do I get to express extreme discomfort with this? Or will I forever be told that nothing is happening when it's something I'm concerned about, instead of what I'm supposed to be concerned about?
Am I supposed to feel happy that we got through the 70s just fine? If I just told you that we were going to go through a wave of leftist violence similar to what happened in the 70s, would you go "wow, what a relief"? Do you think that the country is so cohesive that it can survive an unlimited number of highly televised and celebrated senseless murders? I think you would think again if it was something that happened to someone you respected, and you wouldn't be so quick to downplay everything so much.
I can prove that most of it isn't real by asking you to look around at the real world. There was 75 million Harris voters, if even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of them was engaging in political violence, we should be seeing way more than this! And they shouldn't be constantly ending up as incoherent dudes who don't even have clear politics to slot into (this recent guy didn't even vote).
Even just one percent would be 750,000. .001% would be 750! That's still way more than what political violence we've seen.
Most people are extremely peaceful, and of the very small portion that are meaningfully violent, it's almost always over personal grievances and incentives first. Almost all of those rare truly violent people are beating their spouses, shooting someone who cut them off in traffic, getting in fist fights at the bar or beefing with rival gangs. Not political violence. We don't see roving bands of political gangs hunting and hanging their opponents, we see random one off attacks by nutjobs.
It is extremely rare, in the same way that other violence is extremely rare. Saying it's rare doesn't mean it never happens, it just means it's incredibly uncommon and not what most people actually do. This was an argument that Kirk himself, like pretty much every advocate of the 2nd amendment believes.
There is no reason to take away guns because the large majority of Americans are not violent and can be trusted with them to only use in self-defense. If we are to concede this and claim that a large portion of the population is dangerous and can't be trusted with owning weapons then it dismantles that point and calls for significantly more gun control.
Pretty much all the chest thumping is just edgy people who think it makes them look cool, just like 99% of edgy people. It's the same way some conservative pundits and names are calling for "civil war" now, and yet they aren't picking up their weapons and starting one. They're saying it because it makes them feel cool and strong, but they're actually peaceful people. I know this, because just like almost every edgy leftist poster, almost every edgy right poster hasn't hurt anyone.
If they turn the internal organs of Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, JK Rowling, and Matt Walsh's all into mucilage, it would still be a very low rate of political violence on paper. It turns out that you only need a very small handful of people willing to kill for the cause to have a massively outsized influence on the entire landscape of the country. The more celebrating I see, the more likely that is to happen. Tens of thousands wishing for the death of just a small handful of people is a very concentrated amount of violence. You should fear the reaction very, very much.
Sure, when violent leftist groups go around doing a bunch of murder instead a single attack by a brainrotted young man, I'll acknowledge that it's an issue. But right now we have the latter, not the former, so you're arguing a made up scenario and getting scared by your imagination.
No, I'm not. You know this. This is the second of the political murders. Brian Thompson was the first. That makes two. That makes a trend. I will lose even more faith in humanity if this happens again and you say this exact same line.
Are you scared of white supremacist/neonazi violence taking over the US?
We've had the Evergreen shooting
A school shooting in Nashville
Attack on Baltimore power grid
Attempted bombing in Nashville
Shooting at a Texas mall
Shooting in Wisconsin
And that's just some of the white supremacist inspired violence in the past few years.
Are you gonna lose your faith in humanity if despite an >2 amount of neonazi killings and bombings, I say it's still rare?
Convenient how you ignore every single thing that separates this from the current situation. Did you see thousands of right-wingers openly celebrating those attacks? This murderer was not a brainrotted young man. He was a completely normal person as of a week ago. He was not a schizo with a crossed wire. He was simply someone who believed that the fascists are causing harm and we must fight them outside the bounds of a system they exploit, because what did you think revolution meant, a picnic?
"The past few years," really? Are you fucking serious? We're talking about something that happened days ago. Do you think having a big bad white supremacist rap sheet proves that the other side can never have any legitimate grievance on novel developments?
You should also consider this from a strategic perspective, if you have no interest in understanding others. I can understand why you're so desperate to deflect any attention away from something that could associate the good guy squad with a murderer. But every single word you type is only making it worse for yourself. All this comes off as is a desperate attempt to deny, deflect, and disarm, with your real motives nakedly bare. That you come handily equipped with a laundry list of not even remotely similar attacks is honestly really sad, and betrays your purposes.
And I don't know why you expect this to play out well. Oats_son certainly is not swayed by your argument. I'm not. I agree with everything he said below. Your words only make your side appear more obstinately certain that they can do no wrong by virtue of being on the right side of history. You make absolutely no effort to reach across the aisle and try to appreciate where we're coming from in saying this novel situation is worrisome. You only want to make it about the real bad guys. If you were doing this a month from now, this would be fair, but you are doing this in the immediate aftermath of a shocking, terrifying event, making every effort to reframe the conversation about how right wingers are bad. This will go over as well as if somebody tried to shut down any fears over Kennedy's assassination by bringing up all the black people unjustly killed by police, two days after it happened.
I do not know what you can possibly be thinking, but your arguments are only adding fuel to the fire. You are either a troll or being very, very foolish. Either way, I'd encourage you to stop raising the temperature, for the sake of your own side.
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Are you reading these articles? The Baltimore power grid looks like the only clear-cut example. The Texas mall is the next closest, but the Hispanic guy probably does deserve an astrisk when being used as an example of white supremacist violence (neo-nazi is fair, imo).
But in all the links you've dropped, the school shooters in particular seem much more fixated on the concept of "school shootings" rather than a political angle. Some of them did at least have some far-right or neo-nazi symbolism going on, but for others the connection is "used the OK sign", or the black kid who "may" have been linked to a manifesto that liked some right-wing shooters (and also wanted to kill all the white people and Jews).
The Nashville power plant one might be the most egregious. I've spent 20 fucking years arguing that it is not meaningful when the FBI convinces some autistic Muslim kid to hate America, do something about it, then gives him money to buy fake bomb materials from them, to carry out the plan that they gave him. That doesn't change when they do it to a white guy. What were his ties to white nationalist groups that only appear in the article as something he claimed to his FBI handler? His other FBI handler?
And the thing that jumps out at me is that every one of these articles is drenched in full-throated condemnation and insistant linking. Like there are entire well-funded organizations dedicated to drawing all possible connections here, no matter how tenuous.
Compare that to "The shooter wrote cultural phrases on the bullets" type evasive vagueness that we get from mainstream outlets for violence going the other way. "The killer wrote 'Catch this, fascist!' on the bullet. Experts are unclear if anyone has ever used this phrase before, and certainly can't imagine any extremist groups who might condone such language. This was probably right-on-right violence inspired by Nick Fuentes."
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This is what I expected someone like you to say, except I didn't expect you to come out and say it so quickly rather than waiting the amount of time it took for another murder of a public figure to bring it up, hoping that nobody remembered what you said last time.
So, when you said this,
it was actually a complete, bald-faced lie, used entirely in service of excusing your own rhetoric and downplaying future crimes like this, to be used once and then discarded in favor of whatever new convenient argument you come up with. You are exactly who my original post is talking about. I am still in complete amazement that I still have to go through the exact same dishonest rhetorical tactics with even a murder like this. There is no awful crime that would make you not argue like this. You are permanently broken from politics, and there are a LOT of people like you. There are so many people like you that every comment thread on this site is filled with your rhetoric, even here, on this site that is vastly skewed towards right wingers.
To answer your dishonest question, I am not as scared of white supremacists taking over the US, because their rhetoric is still far outside of the Overton window, and their tragic targets are seemingly random and sadly not as important as YouTubers who get millions of subscribers, and they form part of a background radiation of horrific crimes committed by crazy people similar to the killing of Iryna Zarutska, which while heartbreaking, is not a huge deal like this murder, which was a totally unjustifiable murder for nothing that is getting sanewashed by people like you every day before he's been even put in the ground yet.
I hold no hope of ever convincing anyone like you of anything anymore, so I'm not going to reply to you after this.
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The acts themselves are not particularly concerning, but the reaction is. None of the acts you listed engendered widespread open celebration by normal people.
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