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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.
I'm gonna admit, I'm feeling some simmering rage.
Years, YEARS of being told that right-wing violence vastly outstripped the amount of left-wing violence. Which was even technically correct if you consider prison gang murders to be ideologically motivated. Which is to say, a perfect motte and bailey. "Right wingers are more violent [in prison], therefore we should crack down on right wingers [outside of prison] because they're more of a threat."
But in real life, especially the past few years, the majority of the stories I actually find is lefties shooting politicians, threatening politicians, engaging in riots, or some rando popping a CEO (I admit that MAY not have been ideologically motivated). Oh, yeah, that recent attack on ICE Agents that many have already probably forgotten. Sometimes the lefties self-immolate instead, which is something you almost never catch righties doing.
J6 was indeed an example of right-wing 'violence' but of course only one person died in that event. Who was in fact a rightie.
I'm old enough to remember:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shooting
So Trump gets shot... and has multiple other attempts on his life. Lefties more or less OPENLY suggest that it'd be morally good to kill him and his associates. Punch Nazis. Where "Nazi" is anybody who believes what the median voter did circa 2007.
And then Charlie Kirk, whose WHOLE FUCKING SHTICK is that he tries to win debates and spread ideas rather than push for fighting, gets popped by what will probably end up being another lefty type. I'm prepared to be wrong on that, but I'll take bets with any comers at this point.
And all of that might not piss me off, if it weren't for lefty media running constant cover, tacitly agreeing that the violence was justifiable and refusing to actually lower the temperature surrounding these events.
I'm tired. But not in the "won't it all stop" sense. More in the "when do we actually fight back and do something about it" sense.
For the time being, stay strapped.
EDIT: oh, I forgot, someone took a run at Nicholas Fuentes, too. I don't even like that dude but its exactly more of my point. Lefty commentators are not in the crosshairs.
I have to admit, I feel simmering rage whenever I see right-wingers completely memoryhole every instance of right-wing violence to build a one-sided persecution narrative meant to justify more right-wing violence. Oh, you're old enough to remember Scalise getting shot? Are you old enough to remember two fucking months ago? Or three years ago? Or or or.
Oh, wait, I forgot. When a right-winger does it, it was actually a mental health issue. At this point, I'm genuinely convinced there's a subset of American right-wingers that is dug so far into their siege mentality that they're incapable of grasping this. They crouch in the corner, fantasizing about violence until one of them does something, at which point they act shocked for ten seconds before flushing the whole thing down a mental toilet. The ability to flip between gleeful viciousness and 'have you no decency' pearl-clutching is incredible. Not a shred of self-awareness, just an impenetrable conviction that they are innocent victims.
One difference is that it seems to be acceptable among much broader swathes of the left to celebrate violence against the outgroup it is on the right. Look at how many people expressed admiration for Luigi Mangione, for example. It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that the left has far more of a problem with tacitly supporting violence than the right.
Your mileage may definitely vary. I've grown up listening to right-wingers not-as-coyly-as-they-think cheer for all manner of violence against their enemies. There's a lot of stuff I ignored when I was inside the tent that I reflect back on and realize how casual support for violence was. It certainly wasn't everybody, but it was quite common and encountered very little pushback.
And these were normies conservatives and that was before Trump came in the scene and started actively riling them up.
Certainly you can find people like that on the left. IME the biggest difference is that when there's left-wing political violence, normie liberals will usually say "that's terrible" and when there's right-wing political violence, normie conservatives will split into thirds along the lines of "it's good, actually", blaming the left, and just pretending it didn't happen.
I don't know what the situation was like for you growing up, but my sense is that there's currently a clear asymmetry. I believe you if you say that individual right-wingers said those sorts of things around you, but the difference as far as I see is that you have close to entire mainstream platforms like reddit and branches of academia that openly celebrate things like this in a way there's no real right-wing equivalent for.
It's meaningless for 80% of liberals to say "that's terrible" when they refuse to disassociate from the 20% who say "that's awesome" and when that latter group has outsize influence in left-wing politics.
Do you have evidence of this? I don't live in the US so my exposure to American media is limited, but I can't think of any non-fringe right-wing group that celebrates political violence on the right. You'd have to go to really marginal groups with tiny numbers like white supremacist or incel forums. There are multiple often-violent groups often have the tacit if not explicit support of much of the American left: Antifa, the Punch A Terf crowd, the pro-Hamas people, the Defund the police contingent, BLM etc.
Jan 6 will continue to be the premier example. The conservative reaction basically split three ways between "it was a false flag", J6ers are heroes, and it was actually no big deal. Eventually this consolidated on a hybrid of the latter two positions (e.g. the lionization of Ashli Babbitt). You don't have to go dumpster diving for groypers to find this. It will come up relatively frequently on gun/hunting forums or other conservative-dominated space where they feel they are 'in private'. I mean, shit, it comes up here from time to time.
However, to your opening paragraph: half my point in this thread has been that American right-wingers don't process their support for political violence as support for political violence. When Tom Cotton calls for people to beat up pro-Palestinian protestors, or they laugh about a guy nearly beating Paul Pelosi to death, or they cheer for police brutality, they don't think of that as supporting political violence. When someone plows a truck into a crowd of protestors, they shrug and say "shouldn't have been standing there" (while laughing behind their hands). When it becomes unignorable (as in the Minnesota case), they shift the blame to mental health or somehow try to make it the fault of left-wingers.
You mention not disassociating from the 20%, but for American* right-wingers the 20% includes much of their senior leadership.
(I also want to note that this is not a new phenomenon; conservatives have been joking about murdering Democrats for decades)
*I have to specify American right-wingers because I don't think this is some timeless quality of conservatism; Americans in general seem a lot more comfortable with violence than their European counterparts
Jan 6th is fair to bring up, although I'm not sure it was any more violent in nature than many of the BLM riots or things like setting up CHAZ.
Such forums have far smaller cultural reach than places like Reddit or even Bluesky. They also have essentially no representation among university departments and college campuses, which play a critical role in shaping the attitudes of young, politically-involved people. The point is that if you're a mentally-unstable, violently inclined individual, you know you're going to get far more widespread adulation and praise for killing a right-wing figure than a left-wing one.
I googled "Tom Cotton Palestine protests" and what I found was him saying this:
That seems pretty distant for saying they should be beaten up for the positions they hold.
Do you have examples of prominent right-wingers doing either of this (for cases of unambiguous police brutality)?
Evidence? I'm not trying to be obtuse btw. I don't live in America and I don't particularly follow American news (90% of what I know about it I pick up from this website).
I have the opposite impression. That 20% on the left includes celebrities, writers, academics, politicians and platforms like reddit. I don't see an equivalent on the right.
Jan 6 will continue to be a major point of contention not for the level of violence in itself, but what that violence (along with other aspects) represents: an attempt forcibly subvert election outcomes. This is sui generis in the history of American political violence.
Firstly, physically manhandling someone against their will is assault. But, to rewind, the reason he is 'clarifying' is that he previously said this:
"I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way. It's time to put an end to this nonsense."
If you consistently characterize peaceful protestors as criminals, suggest the police should be deployed against them, suggest people should take matters into their own hands, etc... then I'm not inclined to be charitable to coy walkbacks.
Off the top of my head: Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. both openly mocked the Pelosi attack. Mike Lee mocked the murder Melissa Hortman and suggested the far-left was to blame. I don't know what 'unambiguous' police brutality means, given how lenient the US is to police violence, efforts of state governments to curtail protest rights, and the tendency of right-wingers to equate any form of protest stronger than standing quietly for an hour or two with rioting, but one of the more notorious incidents to come out of the summer 2020 protests was the dispersal of protests in Lafayette Square in DC at the direction of Donald Trump and with the approval of prominent Republicans. We have Ben Shapiro has advocated that Derek Chauvin be pardoned, as another, later example.
On a policy level, you have things like the Trump administration pulling back on civil rights investigations related to police brutality and refusing to enforce oversight, which I would argue constitutes tacit approval for police brutality (as long as the victims are not the wrong sort of people).
For more grass roots expression, I guess you're just going to have to take my word for it that a lot of conservative voters subscribe to the Tango & Cash theory of criminal justice (and can get pretty damn racist about it to boot). Or not.
Alternatively, if you'll forgive the shitty image macro, I think this succinctly captures why left-wingers are unimpressed by right-wing scolding.
No offense, but the TheMotte is literally a forum for right-wing culture warriors and a handful of contrarian gadflies who like arguing with them. Even for the people who aren't far right, they're almost always people with progressive-critical views. It is in no way representative of American political culture, or even of normie conservative American political culture. It gives you a very one-sided view of the state of affairs, e.g. persistently highlighting RW grievances with academia while ignoring or downplaying influential right-wing media figures and general bad behavior. (If one were to base their impression of US politics purely on Motteposting, one might conclude that the right has virtually no media presence, rather than the reality that there's a massive right-wing media ecosystem).
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