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Something that's getting frustrating to me around the discussion of Charlie Kirk's assassination (man it feels weird to say that) is that conservatives are being told to eat the Paul Pelosi attack as a right wing thing.
But the attacker (David Depape), was, if he was even capable of holding any sort of political position at all, not even remotely right wing, at least not in any way that any right winger would identify as a bedfellow.
The guy lived in a bus in Berkley, CA doing drugs in a polyamorous sex cult. He clearly went completely insane, then attacked Paul Pelosi. This is the type of thing that conservatives are trying to stop. This event is neutral at best, and more realistically just left-wing cities eating themselves. The opening paragraph from a sfchronicle article about his daughter is one of the craziest I've ever seen:
I'm also getting sick of hearing that the right wing is supposed to eat January 6th. We've had every single right wing politician "disavowing" this for the last 5 years, despite the fact that the only person killed on this day was a right wing woman.
January 6th was one day of protesting which followed months of protesting by left wingers.
Generally my frustration is this idea that right wing and left wing politics and expressions of those politics are equals, or just different poles of an ideology. They're not. One of my favorite articles: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/ expands on what I mean.
(No the woke won't debate you, here's why - required reading around here imo)
These two ideologies, western liberal democracy, which the conservatives are still, maybe stupidly, trying to work inside of, and some bastard form of revolutionary marxism, are not two sides fighting over territory. There's no compromise where we meet in the middle. It's winner take all - either we remain a western liberal democracy, or we don't.
I think people are waking up to this, which is good. Sam Hyde's video today about this was pretty good: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_czBvLB-DwY (watch the first 5 minutes at least, please. It's good.)
JD's video was also really good (a slightly normie version of the same message): https://youtube.com/watch?v=ngofqx9EfcM
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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