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Rather than January 6th or Paul Pelosi or even the Minnesota legislators, Patrick Crusius and Payton Gendron are the proper right-wing analogues to Tyler Robinson.
I don't generally like using emotive language but I'm going to in this to try to make some points.
This gets into the almost impossible "measuring contest" of who commits the most violence. The recent shooting directly challenges the narrative. How many Republicans, conservatives, or right-wingers support killing Black or Latino people just for being Black or Latino? Or, to make a fairer comparison, how many would say anything close to, "I'm against killing Blacks in a grocery store, but..."? The left has branded Charlie Kirk a "Nazi white supremacist" for citing crime statistics. As far as I know, he's never hinted at genetic causes; he uses standard boomer-con it's about culture, claiming intact families would reduce crime and that affirmative action places some Black women in roles they're not qualified for. That's why you can't make the right eat Crusius and Gendron. @Stellula. Any right-winger who said, "...but despite making up 13% of the population, Blacks commit 50% of violent crimes," would be shit-canned before they could take their next shit.
What making the left eat this is after a man with a young, beautiful family had his throat blown open, with so much blood gushing out that if it wasn't real people would have thought it was slasher-horror film excess - not just random nuts, but professors and teachers - said, "...but."
One can go on Twitter, search for "TND" and find examples of rando accounts doing just that, particularly after the Iryna Zaretska murder. Who knows how many (presumably some of them are sockpuppets), but there are at least some.
They don't tend to associate their real identities though. Especially if they are teachers or doctors.
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Referring to illegal immigration as an "invasion" is totally mainstream on the right. What do you do to invaders?
The state removes them from the country under threat of violence. Are you a pacifist? I'm sure you know this: Political action is about desires we want enforced with violence. The debate is over the bounds of legitimate violence, in this case what "normies" see as justified. They don’t think in those terms, so they’re wildly inconsistent, driven by vibes. That’s why horror-movie levels of blood hits hard. Few normies think it’s okay to start stacking bodies over calling illegal immigrants “invaders.”
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Repel them. It's literally in the Constitution.
With what? Rifles?
Is there something you're asking here which I'm missing? Trump has been pretty explicit that he wants to deport them back to their home countries.
Invasions are violent, and you generally repel them by killing invaders. If referring to Charlie Kirk as a Nazi is encouragement to kill him, then referring to illegal immigrants as invaders is encouragement to kill them
You do kill invaders if necessary, but you don't have to. Invaders often retreat, or they're captured as prisoners. I grant you that "invasion" is somewhat hyperoblic, since it conjures up images of organized armies massing on the border, but it's well within normal political rhetoric.
The problem is that, for the left, fascists and Nazis are the worst thing they can think of--secular counterparts to demons and devils. There is nothing redeemable about Nazis, and they shall be given no quarter. They are like orcs and goblins, enemies you can kill without moral qualms. They are not to be humanized, sympathized with, or shown in any way to be reasonable. Nazis are the villains of your story when you just need someone for the good guy to punch and shoot. Violence against Nazis is always righteous. This is the only culture I have ever known, and this messaging about Nazis has been drummed into me and everyone else by decades of movies, books, TV shows, videogames, and whatever else.
People may call illegal immigrants invaders, but they know they're not literally an invading army in the same way that the Russian army is invading Ukraine. Most left-wingers who throw around the accusation of "Nazi" know that people like Charlie Kirk are not actual Nazis, but unfortunately they done it so much and for so long that a significant chunk of lefties, especially the young, actually believe it. Moreover, their version of a Nazi is likely worse than the real Nazis were. You don't debate or tolerate Nazis, you shoot them and celebrate their death.
From UNSONG, by Scott Alexander, (interlude ח):
The trouble with otherising the Nazis is that one then fails to notice when one is making the same mistakes that led Germany down that skull-lined path.
Certainly doesn't leave any room for an Oskar Schindler or a John Rabe.
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Surely the closest analogue is Anders Behring Breivik, even down to focusing on killing the youth leaders of the enemy party. Not American, though.
Citing non-Americans seems unfair, though with the Americanization of global politics, maybe less and less so
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That's a big deal in this context.
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While I don't think it would matter to many (arguably hasn't mattered) inversing the ideologies, it probably should be noted that Crusius is full on crazy (schizoaffective disorder). Decarlos Brown Jr probably is similar I have seen it asserted that he was poisoned by anti-white rhetoric but the main thrust is that progressive policies kept him on the street.
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Those should be the examples of right wing violence that the left makes the right eat.
I wonder why these aren’t more commonly talked about?
Do you remember if any prominent right wing figures said that the victims deserved it? There are obviously the people saying that about Kirk, and there have also been semi notable people saying that about Ashley Babbitt, and the victims of the attempted Trump assassination.
The Free Helicopter rides memes were about as close as I can recall.
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It’s been wall to wall condemnation of the Kirk assassination by Democratic Party figures and media spokespeople. And saying “I hate Charlie Kirk, but he shouldn’t have been assassinated” isn’t justification any more than “we need to close the border and deport illegals, but you shouldn’t shoot up a Wal Mart”
We don't need them to condemn the assassination, we need them to condemn the shockingly large portion of their base who are ecstatic about it.
For various reasons the left and mainstream institutions have manufactured a sizable minority that among other things, believes that assassination of American political figures is justified (check out the polling).
These people need to be told by everybody that they are dangerous and their beliefs need to be evicted from education and employment and mainstream thought.
Democrat politicians have been complicit in creating a generation that has norms that are completely incompatible with liberal democracy. This includes democrat strategists and consultants as well as staffers (I know some of them).
It doesn't matter if AOC publicly criticizes assassinations if her supporters love them (and potentially much of her staff).
Now where have I heard this line before? I feel like I heard it a lot about 5 years ago, but I just can't seem to remember who was saying it.
Probably some fine upstanding people pushing a culture we want to see more of in this country.
Speak plainly.
At my job you can wear a pride pin or a BLM badge and at one point it was quite nearly required. If you wore MAGA gear you'd be fired.
I don't see polling showing that the right has a great deal of interest in murdering people who disagree with them.
The left and the right and the demands on either are not the same.
You're not wrong about how things are, but faul_sname isn't wrong about the situation you're advocating for. The villain speech applies; you and they are the same, just with opposite political valence.
As I said in one of my earlier comments, we can all (well mostly) agree that some things are unacceptable to say publicly associated with your identity. A teacher advocating for child sexual abuse publicly is not something you are going to see support from all but the most ardent gadflies.
You have to pick where to draw the line. Critiques and complaints about cancel culture were often about this - the line was drawn in an unacceptable location and critically was politically unipolar.
I think you'd find that most on the right, even the ones who are like "bahahaha taste your own medicine bahaha" would be wiling to say - yes people on both sides should be fired for supporting domestic terrorism. You'd probably even find some people who might say something like "yeah you wanna advocate for terrorism in another country like Gaza? Sure! Just keep it out of the U.S."
Might it eventually get taken too far? Sure.
But for now the gap in equivalency is comically vast.
If you spend years complaining about people getting fired for cat calling on the street and then you start saying that rapists should be fired...that isn't inconsistent, even if one side tries to claim that cat calling is rape.
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My claim: cancel culture was bad when the left did it and is bad when the right does it. Our norms are fragile, and are worth protecting. Allowing people to speak freely means that there will be some people who say horrible things. Some of those horrible things will be false. Some of those people who say those horrible false things will even mean it.
And yet, the societies that try to silence the people who say horrible false things seem to invariably also start trying to silence the people who say inconvenient-to-power true things. As we witnessed just a couple of years ago.
At that time, many on the right seemed to understand the value of free speech, actual free speech and not "you're free to speak and I'm free to blackmail your employer into firing you with threats of a media shitstorm". And last year, there was a shift, and people started to recognize (out loud) the excesses of the "woke" era. Norms turned against people trying to "cancel" each other for insufficient wokeness.
I mean go look at the discourse about "alligator alcatraz", the people saying "I voted for this, self-deport" whenever there's a report of ICE illegally detaining legal US residents in atrocious conditions or trying to sidestep court orders, this very forum with the dark hinting about how the left has made the right angry and you wouldn't like us when we're angry.
To be clear, I support the right of people on the right to say these things. I oppose any attempts to try to be cute and get their employers to go after them.
But I notice that the right seems to be trying to bring back the worst parts of 2021 era cancel culture. And so, in opposition to that, I claim: cancel culture was bad when the left did it and is bad when the right does it
Cancel Culture: I said the word faggot on Facebook in 2006.
Not Cancel Culture: I a person in trusted authority (such as a doctor) publicly celebrated the death of someone who represents half of America.
Yes Cancel Culture
So apparently saying "Charlie Kirk died the same way he lived: bringing out the worst in people" is now "attempting to glorify" the Charlie Kirk assassination. Obviously it's in poor taste. But firing teachers for saying, on their own time and not even to their students, things which are in poor taste is a bad idea. We just went down this road. It's not a good road. The right saw that it was a bad road when it was their people losing their jobs over saying things that were true but unpopular and tactlessly stated, but apparently forgot what they learned the moment they had the ability to do unto others instead of having others do unto them.
In any case, I'm not super interested in getting in a pissing contest over whose cancel culture was worse. The Floyd era cancel culture from the left was clearly worse. But the trend is in a bad direction.
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These aren't the worst parts, it's some of the mildest ones, and it's not bringing them back, they never left. I have sympathy for principled free speech advocates, but the way they act these things are perfectly symmetrical detracts from their point.
I don't think the situations are perfectly symmetrical, I'm just hoping that pointing out the symmetries will at least induce the mental motion of going "huh, that's funny, a lot of people on the right really are advocating for the same actions they found abhorrent in their political adversaries 3 years ago".
I don't expect that a single comment will convince someone who has been seething for years. I do expect that without people willing to speak up for free speech, even bad free speech, this place will turn into just another unremarkable right wing hivemind by evaporative cooling. That would be a shame. I like this place, and I also like what it stands for.
And I do expect that vocally existing as someone who supports free speech will make it easier for others who also care about it to say that rather than just leaving.
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Al Green, a black Texas Dem that surely screams "woke," said kind things about Kirk. Said they have the same creator up above and that Kirk "had a right to be where he was, and a right to life." But he's old school black religious, likes MLK Jr. The newer school of James Baldwin and post-colonial lefties, not a sentiment you see much.
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I saw a smart comment elsewhere that suggested that it’s the rank and file dem voters that are cheering on and celebrating the assassination. And that it’s actually worse than if it were dem leaders. You can change leaders. You can’t change the voters.
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https://x.com/jackunheard/status/1967667070344237517
Are Ilhan Omar or Medhi Hasan prominent members of the democratic party? What about Destiny? Hasan Piker? Are they not prominent left wing thought leaders? Destiny was just on Piers Morgan, for instance.
Neither Omar nor Hasan said Kirk deserved it. They basically said they thought he was an asshole with abhorrent beliefs, and then Hasan called the killing "horrific" and "inexcusable" and Omar said "my heart breaks" for his family. Whether they're really all that broken up about it, probably not, but they're going through the expected motions, and right-wingers would not be all that sad if somebody shot some left-winger of Kirk's stature either.
Piker does not represent the Democratic Party, either its leadership or its base. He's a self-proclaimed socialist who supports the Houthis, which puts him far out of step with both. He's certainly not comparable with people like Tucker Carlson or Kirk himself, who was a personal friend of Trump's and close to the heart of the GOP. He has about a fifth as many twitter followers as Kirk. Destiny has a fraction of that following.
And all that said, neither of them said Kirk deserved it either. Piker told his fans to stop laughing on stream, and called it "horrific." Destiny refused to "disavow" on the grounds it would be an admission of guilt.
What seems to be happening is right-wingers taking examples of people saying "Kirk was an asshole, but he shouldn't have been killed" and pretending like they're saying "Fuck yeah, more of this, give that guy a medal." It's not enough to condemn the Kirk assassination, you have to be sad about it and talk about what a great guy he was too.
Omar effectively said no one really gives a shit about Kirk and everyone is just pretending to be afraid and outraged. Her stance is pretty abhorrent. The rest of what she said was a deflectionary attempt at reframing the conversation around why right-wing politics are bad.
It was a terrible comment she gave.
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Would you extend this grace to anybody murdering people who look Mexican for being Mexican?
"Well yeah of course, of course we condemn murder...but what did these Mexicans expect? They maybe have been here illegally. Even if they weren't they kindof looked like some people who are!"
The things Destiny, Ilhan, etc. are saying are reprehensible.
Didn't some of the testimony for the DC sniper case suggest they were targeting white people for being white people?
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Robinson shot Charlie Kirk for being Charlie Kirk specifically, rather than as a randomly selected conservative (otherwise he might have shot any one of the people in the crowd). Crusius shot his victims for being non-white immigrants generally, since he didn't know who any of them were personally. So the equivalent to leftists badmouthing Kirk as a man after his murder would be right-wingers badmouthing non-white immigrants as a group after several of them are murdered, which they absolutely do
I wonder if there's a deeper interaction with left-wing ideology here. Leftists have to believe that the masses would totally want social democracy/communism if only they were educated and knew what was good for themselves. In this framework the individual propagandists are themselves the ones responsible for reactionary sentiment amongst the population at large. Right-wingers see the core problem as the undesirable demographics directly, so cheering targeted assassinations doesn't really fit.
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