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In the days following Charlie Kirk's murder, has seen a wave of employers being contacted regarding off-color remarks made by employees on social media about his passing. The debate is, does this constitute cancel culture, but by the right instead of the typical left? Some have argued that it is not the same thing, due to the disparaging comments being immediate, vs old comments dredged up in an attempt to cancel someone. There is a big difference between someone desecrating Charlie Kirk in an overt manner right after his passing, compared to a social media post made 10+ years ago against living targets that could be deemed as racist only under the most uncharitable light.
My take is, contacting an employer with the intent of getting someone fired for something not work-related or fired in the public interest as a 'concerned citizen', by definition, is cancel culture. Sure, one can argue that this is a different degree of cancelation, but it's the same principle. Someone posting a vile comment on his social media celebrating someone's death doesn’t necessarily affect his ability to do his job, like making sandwiches or whatever. Sure, if said individual confessed on social media to spitting in customers' sandwiches or making disparaging remarks about customers, go ahead and get his ass fired to protect the customers if no one else. But this is not like that. Consumers and other employees are not negatively affected by an employee holding a grudge against a dead podcaster.
To turn the tables, imagine if George Soros died and many of those same people wrote "good riddance" on their social media accounts, should this be grounds for cancelation? By the above logic, yes if you want to be morally consistent.
relevant tweet https://x.com/politicalmath/status/1967066826590028174
We can try to imagine a reversal of the scenario. If a pro-immigrant pundit were slain by an illegal immigrant, would conservatives make callous remarks on social media? I think so, yes. I don’t think they would “celebrate” it, but they would definitely make brusque political comments online. I recall reading comments like that after the Mollie Tibbetts story (illegal immigrant killed progressive American girl). We can’t say that it’s different because one side is objectively wrong about things, because polite politics requires that we pretend / believe that this isn’t the case.
But Charlie Kirk’s death is also unusually significant. He was a household name for anyone tuned in to youth politics. He was being groomed for leadership in the conservative movement, so it’s the equivalent of killing a political candidate (you can’t replace someone like Charlie Kirk). His death was unusually public in our uncensored social media environment, and also wildly gruesome. And his show was a symbol of open political discussion, even if only at the surface level. So there’s a sense in which Charlie Kirk’s death is more of an apolitical public tragedy. There’s the political dimension to it, but there’s also the apolitical tragedy dimension. As both parties would be happy to fire anyone who made light of the Boston Marathon Bombing after it happened, it comes down to how Kirk’s assassination ranks up against other objectively sacrosanct public tragedies. I actually don’t like him but I would say it’s something of a sacrosanct public tragedy because of the aforementioned incidental memetic properties of the event.
This is the key factor. Had he died in a car accident ,it would obviously be different. But OTOH, dancing on the graves is something of an American tradition and maybe even intrinsic to humanity, probably going back to the Revolutionary War. Or when Lincoln was shot, many confederates had the same feeling. https://www.vox.com/2015/4/15/8414239/abraham-lincoln-death
Minor nit. “Con” as a shortened form of confidence game or man didn’t appear in the vernacular until the late 1800s. Vox is probably wrong about that reading of the spelling.
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