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Interesting.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to put this on you, specifically, but this is exactly how many of those people have felt for years or decades - Like conservatives want them (or their friends/family) to not exist, and would shrug and make excuses (if not cheer) if they were murdered. Looking at the rapidity with which many conservatives started calling for blood (and in particularly renewing already intense animosity against trans people), it's, uh, hard to blame them for thinking that.
Do you have a second example? I keep seeing just that one.
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See, that's the difference. The left feels, with no supporting evidence (not that any were ever necessary), that the right wants to kill them. The right knows, on many past examples and repeated, incessant public confessions of the leftists themselves, that the left wants to kill them. And not only wants but does.
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The people whose fear you appeal to are generally not reasonable. Charlie Kirk did not want them dead. The fact that so many of them find satisfaction in his death is only proof of their absolute ignorance.
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I had a close friend radicalize hard left and come out as trans. Had a bookkeeping job at a transportation company, mostly worked from home. Would tell us about the hateful, eliminationist comments made all the time by the crude, uneducated, racist, sexist, transphobic blue collar rightwing chud warehouse workers.
The thing is, those comments were 100% made up. My friend never talked to them. Was never around them in the first place. No one in the warehouse gives a shit about the weird guy in the office who works from home 90% of the time, who they never interact with. And even if they did see my friend in the, uh, unfortunate appearances stage, the response would have been laughter, not intense hatred.
Part of the reason I am so confident about this (aside from my own experience as one of the warehouse guys) is that I've literally watched that friend gaslight themselves into a persecution complex. Take an anodyne statement, get outraged, restate it five times, each one going progressively more hostile and angry, until they were crashing out over a made-up thing that no one said.
And I observe that this is pretty damn common among certain people. JK Rowling is a good progressive on 99% of issues, but she doesn't want blokes in battered women's shelters, so now they pretend she's a Holocaust denier who wants them all to die. Jesse Sinegal (the guy you just linked to) is a good progressive on 99.9% of issues, he just thinks the science on childhood gender transition is a bit weak, and the response is cartoons depicting him breaking into a trans kid's bedroom with a knife to murder them (along with BlueSky-approved fan fiction depicting his rape and murder by a trans activist).
I frequently hear about "trans genocide" when the murder rate against them is lower than wealthy white women. I went looking at one point, I think 2019, just searching for news articles about a list of the names of murdered trans people. Every one I could find news about was a black transwoman sexworker murdered by a black john. Is that the conservative bloodlust?
Yes, there are people baying for blood in the wake of Kirk's murder, and that guy you linked deserves to be roundly criticized. But the baseline level of discourse I see among conservatives, the attitude to trans people is a hundred times closer to "But I don't think of you at all" than "They should not exist and we should make it happen". The latter is something I don't think I've ever seen aside from that asshole you just linked to. Frankly, the baseline hostility backwards I see in, say, fandom discords that trend queer is much higher than in explicitly right-wing spaces towards trans people.
Everything else aside, do you return that feeling to the other side? I was rolling my eyes at the "they literally want to kill you" guys on the right just a few days ago. I've reconsidered recently.
A similar phenomenon is what killed the #StopAsianHate movement, when video after video inconveniently emerged to show who was actually committing the acts of Asian hatred. It was not conservative white men, but rather the usual disproportionate source of violent crime.
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Those people were wrong, and it matters that they were wrong. In both the UK and the US we had huge enquiries for the killing of black people, resulting in vast systematic changes to the way that policing was done in the UK. When I was growing up being gay meant being on the absolute tippy-top of the progressive ladder of privilege. Constant handwringing and historical guilt trips were the norm. Nobody with any kind of public presence whatsoever would think about cheering on their brutal murder.
These groups achieved everything they needed by appealing to historical injustices, and they could have left it there. But because they couldn’t reign in their persecution complexes, they pushed far too far, far too hard, and attempted to exterminate even the mildest of cultural conservatism permanently. And now here we are.
People afraid of anti-immigrant or white supremacist or anti-LGBT violence are far more reasonable in their fear than people afraid of anti-conservative violence. Not only have we had numerous incidents of domestic terrorism to that effect during the Trump era, but under the Trump administration many of these sentiments have obtain implicit or explicit state backing. If you want to dismiss them as irrational, you can, but you can't do it while simultaneously arguing that people like OP are rational in their fears.
(hilariously, in the time since I started composing this, we had an unironic 'kill the poor' statement from a Fox host proposed as a remedy to the problem of mentally ill homeless, so put another tally mark in the 'right-winger oblivious to their own rhetoric' column)
This is pure revisionism. There was no moment where 'cultural conservatives' agreed to some compromise position on social issues. They have fought every inch of the way. There was no 'there' to leave it.
No, they're [objectively] not. There was that year where anti-conservatives (or at least, those marching under the banner of anti-conservatism) set fire to basically every major city, caused billions in property damage, and murdered a bunch of people for shits and giggles.
If [violence the left likes] and [violence the left doesn't like] is a ledger that should balance then [the left] have vastly overspent, and have no right to complain when the standard they set turns 'round on them.
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At least in the UK, we have seen considerable immigrant-on-native violence already, with the government desperately covering up any immigrant involvement. See for example the Stockport killings, those incidents in Ireland, the murder of David Ames a few years back. The Stockport killings attracted particular notice because the government crackdown to white rioting in response to the Stockport killings (zero tolerance, beatings, incredibly long jail times for Twitterers) was so obviously different to when an ethnic riot had taken place the week before (the government apologised for trying to separate an ethnic child from its ethnic-yet-abusive parents, police gave hostage-style videos apologising to a room of bearded muslims).
Have you forgotten the way politicians all across the world took the knee? The riots that were egged on by politicians and completely ignored by all the forces that were supposed to do something about them? The armed ambush of ICE agents? The attempts to blind police with lasers? Jane's Revenge, who were never caught? The two trans shootings at churches?
In the UK and the US, conservative/white violence has not received any government support and almost certainly never will. The opposite really doesn't seem to be true. Can you point to any example of the Trump administration protecting white domestic terrorism? I really think you can't.
The closest I can get are the killing of George Floyd, and the Wikipedia 'Violence Against LGBT' page. But 'very violent man dies violent death' and 'homeless transgender prostitute murdered by client' just don't seem even close to 'university debater / US President candidate sniped from rooftop'. I will grant that if you are gay in very poor, very rural parts of America you have some legitimate reasons for concern, though nobody bothers collating these incidents for other kinds of groups and I think that tells you all you need to know about state sanction.
Then how did these compromises happen? Did these groups slaughter their opposition, beat them to death, and take over the tools of the state? No. Some portion of the people who had been conservative on those positions decided to switch their support. Groups like gays, blacks and immigrants appealed for public sympathy and mostly got it. The Spectator, the oldest right-wing magazine in the world, became known as 'The Buggers' Bugle' because of its staunch support for gay rights. I was a conservative and a gay rights supporter growing up, and I saw no contradiction between those two things. Yes, groups that had been oppressed needed to do some PR work and some activism. That's how any social cause works. But once the compromises had been made those groups immediately tried to use the laws that had been made to benefit them, like the Equality Act, to enforce their absolute right to impose their will and preferred worldview and bulldoze any disagreement permanently.
I really don't know how I can persuade you of this. Conservatives in the 2000s had broadly come to terms with social change. They wanted to keep their rights to live their own way to some degree, and they didn't want things to go further than they had already gone, but nobody was secretly dreaming of exterminating the gays and the immigrants in 20010. Such ideas were so far out of the Overton Window you couldn't see it with a telescope. Whereas people like Ozy were writing:
Which is indeed what the Left tried to do. And all parties increasingly recognise that the old compromises were not compromises for the left, but merely temporary setbacks on the march of progress.
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