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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
His own defence attorney literally said it was because he passionately believed in far right theories. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67372363
They said this to fight charges against kidnapping a federal official (which requires it to be directly because of her official duties as a member of Congress and not outside motivations such as those far right theories). The goal was to present him as a crazy nutjob who took Qanon, 2020 being stolen, and other far right ideas spread online seriously rather than a targeted attack triggered by any official action.
He himself testified to this
What better evidence could there be than him and his defense literally saying it?
If it was disavowed, why did people who stabbed, tasered, threw bombs at, or otherwise attacked cops get pardoned? The idea that only murder is violence (and she herself was shot at by a cop as she refused to listen to a lawful order and continued illegal behavior so I guess you're saying police brutality is more of an issue than violence against police is) seems weak. All of those things are violence!
In fact here's something interesting, I asked chatgpt to run some numbers. "Per participant, was Jan 6th or BLM more violent towards cops?"
Of course it doesn't matter, at the end of the day everyone is an individual and should be judged as an individual. Whether you attended BLM or Jan 6th, if you didn't assault a cop then you don't deserve blame for it. But it is quite interesting to see. Even if we change it to say, 40,000 (a medium estimate of the total Jan 6th protestors and not just those who entered the capitol), it's still about 1 in 400 or so.
Edit: You know there's also an interesting thing to consider in right vs left violence discussions. The gender gap!
Men make up 80% of violent crimes (and some specific ones like mass shootings like 97%). Thus statistically a group composed of men should have more violent people than an equal sized group of women. And violence is typically a thing done most by youth, so the group with younger men should presumably have more than the group with younger women.
Combine this with
And it would make sense if right wing violence was a bit more common, just because it has more men.
Or you could just poll people.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll
Very liberal more likely to say its acceptable to be happy about public figures deaths and more likely to agree that political violence can be justified.
Polling people immediately after just reveals signaling, it doesn't reveal beliefs. And as always, wording matters.
For example if you say
“true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country”,
It's 30% of Republicans and only about 12% of Democrats. https://prri.org/research/threats-to-american-democracy-ahead-of-an-unprecedented-presidential-election/
This also changes over time
Now of course as always, beware the man of one study, beware the man of the polls (especially online polls) too.
Timing, wording, polling sample biases, all of these can lead to drastic differences. Polling is signaling, it's obvious that 35% of Republicans didn't actually support political violence during 2021 (given not even a fraction of a fraction did any violence), they just said it to signal "I'm really upset right now!".
Wording matters, but "true American patriots" is putting such a heavy thumb on the scale that I'm somewhere between disappointed and impressed by PRRI, and that's knowing some of their other hijinks.
Sure, so let's just look at your own Yougov link (which presumably you trust as a fair source since you used it) which says
Yeah this seems to support that it's mostly signaling "I support my side!" or "I'm upset!" rather than consistent views.
?
I've got an icon on my posts for a reason! And on that specific matter, I specifically and try to caveat YouGov almost anytime I do reference them.
EDIT: I'm also extremely skeptical of YouGov's specific poll question here given the combined use of the Likert scale and literally never showing its breakdown.
Woops sorry I didn't notice the usernames but same logic applies anyway.
If we trust Yougov for Poll 1, we should trust it for Poll 2. If we don't trust Poll 2, we shouldn't trust it for Poll 1.
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