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I remember when Trump was shot, the right was accused of being hypocrites on cancel culture for trying to get people fired for celebrating it.
I don't think this is hypocrisy or "my-sideism" at all. The taboo against political assassinations is a load-bearing one for a liberal society with broad free speech rights. If cancel culture was limited to firing people who celebrated political assassinations, I don't think "cancel culture" would exist as a meme at all! I'm happy if the left only cancels people for celebrating political assassinations as long as the right gets to do so too. That sounds like a perfectly stable equilibrium and a well-tailored exception to free speech for a functional liberal society.
But that's not how "cancel culture" became a meme, and we all know that and I feel like I'm being gaslighted by people who should know better. People lost their job for misgendering, or arguing that male and female abilities were different, or supporting conservative ballot measures, or donating anonymously to a legal defense fund and getting doxxed, or casually hanging an "ok" sign out of a car window, or arguing that riots empirically hurt the political cause they were in support of.
The effect of all of these cancellations is to make social discourse dumber, to fence off a chunk of plausibly true beliefs as things you can't say. The effect of cancelling people for celebrating assassinations is to keep assassination taboo'ed beyond the doors of polite society.
Maybe there should be amnesty for entry level service workers. But even there, it shouldn't be too hard to get another entry level service job, and a slap on the wrist from polite society serves as notice to the social taboo.
I'll bite that bullet gladly. I'm happy if you cancel me for celebrating the intentional murder of a political figure. If the price of that was removing all other threat of cancellation, well I would be giddy with a sense of freedom that I haven't felt in 13 years.
If Ilhan Omar died in a car accident and people were being fired for voicing disrespectful opinions about her, would you feel similarly?
What if she was killed by a confused person for a non-politically articulable reason?
I think the case of celebrating someone’s death of natural or accidental causes is completely different. Assassination is a possibility in a free society with lots of soft targets and we only get to have that society as long as assassination is massively ostracized.
Singing “ding dong the the witch is dead” when Thatcher died of old age, as awful as it was, doesn’t create the same kind of threat to our free society
I appreciate this articulation of a distinction I felt but I was having trouble formalising. I thought the comments about Thatcher were in poor taste but not fundamentally harmful.
With Kirk, I am even sympathetic to those the "reaped what he sowed" variety of comments, because they are at least not unambiguously in favour of political violence (and from the non-US, non-pro-gun point of view there is a sad but also delicious irony in a gun rights advocate who argued that occasional deaths were a price worth paying himself paying that very same awful price himself)—but I am appalled by those who openly celebrate the murder of another human in any circumstances (save perhaps a very narrow exception for those who present a clear and immediate danger of doing the same or worse to others).
Charlie Kirk might have been a reprehensible shill for a harmful and destructive political movement, but no sane person should be pleased to see people being gunned down for their beliefs.
As they say: send not for whom the bell tolls.
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