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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.
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.
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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