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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.
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.
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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