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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.
I’m not sure how closely you followed his development when his name first began to crop up, but the reaction I saw from a lot of people were very predictable.
And to be frank, I roll my eyes and really get tired of the straight-laced, “you’re better than that,” “act like an adult,” high minded moralizing of unfortunate events. Expressing glee over very unpleasant opinions you have about others means you’re human. Going out of your way to take a shovel and knock someone’s gravestone off sets you apart from everyone else.
Pretty much. But I continue to be amazed how anyone gets surprised over this. Do people have that much sheltered of a childhood?
This is where I believe you’re wrong. You don’t see this largely in interpersonal interactions because it’s potentially costly and damaging to people’s reputations and “painful truths,” were replaced long ago by politically correct sugarcoating and misdirection.
Your rdrama.net-style "get over it, it's not a big deal. These things happen all the time." viscerally disgusts me, and I hope you know that your words here are exactly why this is going to get worse, not better. I hope you realize that before it's too late, if it's not too late already.
I get where you're coming from, but there is no way to turn down the temperature. The brainwormed extremist 5% on each side have control of the thermostat and are only interested in turning it up. The moderate left and right want the other side's extremists to stop raising the temperature, but they are unwilling to police their own extremists (or if they are, they are denounced as traitors and are sidelined). Neither side is willing to unilaterally disarm for fear of what the other side will do to them (though to be fair, I think the right is more justified in this fear based on the last 10 years). So the temperature will ratchet up until some event releases all the pressure.
The people turning up the temperature for me right now are the "reasonable centrist" types, much moreso than the extremists. I can tell when someone has brainworms, and roll my eyes at them as long as they're not a danger to anyone.
The centists? Ho, boy. From immeditely going o a NEVER AGAIN crusade against cancel culture, even thoughvhe was completelt unbothered by it for 10 years straight, to writing massive essays about how it's okbto shit on a man's corpse before his family had time to bury it, because "something something grifter" and he wasn't an autitic rationalist setting aside his biases at every step, to "actually he wasn't leftist, he was a gamer", to "it's the victim's fault, the shooter would have walked away, if the guy wasn't so mean to trans people", the centrists have been far more radicalizing than the radicals.
The ones walking away from this looking the best, are the ones who at least have the decency to not say anything. Their approach makes it hard to get a headcount, but I noticed a few, and appreciate them.
Yes, exactly. I expect the ghoulishness from the proper Marxists, but seeing the exact same bullshit from "respectable" center lefts that we saw during BLM, covid, and Gaza is mind-ruining. Seeing Wikipedia, Snopes, the LA Times, all jumping through the same hoops as before as if nothing has changed, it's genuinely impossible to comprehend. I saw an NBC article talking about the response to his murder, but right in the subheader, they threw in that he was known for saying extreme things online, justifying it right there with something that isn't even true. This is just who they are. There is no crime that could be committed by their side that will make them set aside the bullshit. They are now the bullshit. They can never not be the bullshit.
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Being mortified at the evil in others is also a part of the human condition. His reaction should also be predictable
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Plenty of evil things are done by humans and are part of the human condition.
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