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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.
The remedy is to take a break from going to social media sites where people who sit online 18 hours a day fling shit at each other, and to take a break from hanging out with ideologues in real life, and to go interact with people in general.
Out in the world, life continues. The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming. The majority of people are not paying attention to this stuff.
You are reacting the way that many people reacted when they heard that JFK was assassinated, or that MLK was assassinated. An emotional shock. But the rational response, I think, is to remember that assassinations are really really rare. There is no actual civil war going on. Well, there's a cold civil war going on, but not a hot one.
Why is that the case?
It's because of law and order. Which, for all of the current system's faults, and I sure would love it to do a better job of taking care of ordinary people like me instead of exposing me to random street violence and so on, is doing a good job of dissuading that subset of the left who would love to kill right-wingers and that subset of the right who would love to kill left-wingers from actually doing it.
Liberalism, for now, is holding. I mean classical liberalism, not the weird American "liberals = the left" definition.
Yes, there are plenty of angry people in this country who would love to assassinate the leaders of their political opponents, or maybe even put their political opponents in mass into extermination camps.
But liberalism, for now, is holding. As a centrist moderate, I sure hope that it continues to hold. There are some good reasons to believe that it will continue to hold. For one, I think that probably the majority of rich people have no use for a civil war full of populists who are ready to murder anyone who is more successful than them and can be painted as being on the other side.
Given how many guns are in private hands in the US and how many politically angry people there are, assassinations are actually surprisingly rare.
People almost never get killed for their political opinions in the US. It happens very rarely. Now, people do get frequently killed because of political policies in general... and that's one area where I sympathize with the right, despite disagreeing with them on most things. What I mean specifically is, pathological empathy-driven progressive policies that end up unleashing street criminals on the public. That's something I disagree with progressives on.
But the murder of someone like Charlie Kirk is an easily foreseeable consequence of what happens when you have hundreds of millions of guns in private hands in a country that is politically polarized.
Note, when I say that I am not calling for gun ownership rights to be reduced. I'm just saying that statistically, it's an obvious consequence. These things are inevitably going to happen from time to time. It's surprising that they happen so infrequently.
Social media is currently awash with people who are using this incident to get cheap dopamine hits and/or to propagandize for their side of the great chimp shit-flinging fight that is the culture war.
They're deranged. And they should not be taken seriously. Most of them are sad people who are using political engagement to make up for the failures of their individual lives.
Someone who is highly politically engaged and spends 18 hours a day writing angry comments on social media will end up creating more online political content than 100 ordinary people. Social media enormously over-represents the opinions of angry no-life losers on both sides of the culture war.
Some view it all as a war between good and evil. And, if I was in some part of Mexico where people fought against murderous cartels, I'd see it that way too. But I live in the US. I am lucky enough, because of the continuing success (for all their faults) of the US' liberal systems and norms, to be able to see our situation in the US as a war between the stupid and the smart. A delineation that cuts across left/right lines.
As in the famous Revenge of the Sith crawl, "there are heroes on both sides"... well, in our reality it's not quite that epic, it's more like "there are smart and stupid people on both sides". And "there are decent people and sociopaths on both sides". I'm lucky to live in a part of the world where that's actually the case. But it is the case.
Look, I don't think you're doing something grisly here, unlike my other examples. You clearly just want to reduce my level of mental pain. That's cool and all, but I still think you're missing the point here. When JFK died, did you see a wave of celebratory people throwing parties in the street? There are multiple people in my small town alone who have gotten fired for celebrating this on Facebook under their real name. They're real. They represent real people who live in the world and do things.
Liberalism is holding? That's great. But the gate has just been hit by a massive battering ram, and the battering ram seems to want to smash into it again, so again, it's a little rich that you think this is a point of comfort. I've been seeing that there's a massive loneliness crisis, that young people can't buy houses, and increasingly sign out of life to pick pineapples. What do you think happens when these societal losers see what they can become with a $400 bolt action rifle that you can buy in any ban state?
You still need a permit to buy it in New Jersey and I think Illinois.
So what? I live in Illinois. You need a FOID card to buy any gun, sure, but it's easy to get besides the wait time. Otherwise, you could just buy it on the private market in another state. And both this murderer and Luigi Mangione are the types to not have a rap sheet, so a FOID card is easy.
It is federally illegal to buy a firearm in another state if you do not meet the legal requirements in your own state.
I live in NJ; I cannot lawfully purchase a similar rifle anywhere in the country, because NJs firearms owners permit is too hard to get. You need to tell them the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health practitioner you have ever seen, since birth, and you need to have two unrelated adult references swear you're moral enough to buy a gun.
For buying a gun from a federal firearms licensed dealer, right? Just drive to the nearest red state and make a friend. Or, hell, 3D print one yourself. We're talking about murder here, so a federal gun crime is small potatoes, and it's easy to do with so many guns in the country. But this is a pretty narrow point, because that's two states out of fifty.
No.
Okay. That's strange to me. How can they enforce the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health practicioner you have ever seen since birth with an additional two unrelated adult references, if it's a private purchase? Who's going to check? Did anyone put any thought into this law?
This does relate to my original post. AOC wants more of these gun laws implemented in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, even though they don't save anyone and are trivially overcome. When they inevitably don't save anyone, they'll want more gun laws. This is not a new observation, but it is part of the reason why the usual rhetoric of "well he accepted deaths from guns, guess it's ironic he died." He was actually more willing to confront the truth than them, by far, because they still believe that they wouldn't need to repeal the 2nd Amendment and ban every gun and zealously swipe up and destroy every gun they can find over the course of decades to get what they want.
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