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Notes -
How a Young Activist’s Murder Has Been Gleefully Distorted Online
To this day right wingers on Twitter still bring up the image of him trying to run and tripping on the bench right before he was stabbed as a sort of Always Sunny meme. A lot of them took a similar line that leftists took with Kirk - "I don't agree with this but he did".
It seemed like the Left as a whole just avoided this like the plague. It seemed to be a specifically black tribal thing.
The big difference is that Carson's killing was not politically motivated at all, was it?
There are two sort of related conversations going on at the same time.
One is that leftist violence is out of control because a leftists killed Charlie Kirk.
The other is that in general the left is blood thirsty, as evidenced by the way leftists responded to the killing of Charlie Kirk.
These two points can stand independent of each other, and several people explicitly said as much when the political motivations of Charlie Kirk's killer were more nebulous. That, even if it was a random crazy or a groyper, the real problem was how so many leftists responded to it.
It is this second conversation, the group response thing, that was the focus here, as such, what matters is how the right as a group responded to Carson's death, not the motivations or political associations of his killer.
These may have been nebulous political motivations but were almost certainly still political. I'm sure that can hardly be said about Carson's killer.
Also with Carson's Killer it's hard for anybody on the Leftwing side of the fence to poke that particular hornet's nest without immediately self-defeating so...
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Neither was the murder committed by Karmelo Anthony.
The difference from Kirk's murder, I mean.
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If Charlie Kirk was killed by a spray and pray tactic taken up by some switch modified AR-15 this might be a valid comparison along the lines of, "this was his stupid prize for playing the stupid game of supporting the 2nd Amendment," but this was nothing like that. None of the laws Kirk opposed would have saved his life even with perfect implementation.
This is a routine problem of people pretending non-like things are like, or like things are non-like. Its silly.
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There also is just a difference between someone being randomly murdered (or dying of natural causes) and politically assassinated - people spitting on Rush Limbaugh's grave did not have the same connotations as people spitting on Kirk's do.
Yes, fair point.
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I appreciate the example. In my experience, symmetry comparisons across the tribal divide are almost always fruitless, but it seems to me that this is the sort of thing that absolutely has to be possible if we're to have any hope of peace at all.
I have no memory of or experience with right-wing reactions to Ryan Carson's death. It sounds like you do. In your view, was the right-wing reaction then comparable to the left-wing reaction we saw with Kirk, in terms of scale or significance or whatever axes seemed relevant to you?
...I think that is a fair rebuttal. Even accounting for the close alliance between Black tribe and Blue Tribe, they really are not synonyms. Mayor Pete's poll results recently were another point of a similar divergence.
It's similar to the segment of left-wingers claiming that they wouldn't kill Kirk but his dead is an outcome of his policies and behavior and/or that a lack of respect are the norms he himself lived by when others were in trouble (e.g. wrt Nancy Pelosi's husband). As I said the line is usually "he agreed with this, not me"
Doesn't work for anyone who outright says he should be killed for opposing the Civil Rights Act but most have more deniability.
In terms of scale of course it isn't similar. But then, it's hard to think of a similarly prominent media figure on the Left being killed or even coming as close as Trump. Kirk is basically as high as it goes for RW influencers. Given the use of Karmelo Anthony (that news is significantly more avoidable than Kirk or Luigi I think) I figured scale wasn't the sina qua non
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I was not there, but here’s some examples of the reaction on the right to Ryan Carson: The Voice of Thy Brother’s Blood - REVEALED: Murdered leftist activist Ryan Carson has history of celebrating death, violence towards conservatives
I will leave it up to the reader whether this is comparable to the reaction on the left to Charlie Kirk’s death, such as this article: The World Is a Better Place Without Charlie Kirk In It
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I've seen rightwingers talk about Carson, as a volunteer for the Leopards Eating Faces Party. No real sympathy for him, and a great deal of contempt for his fellow volunteer girlfriend that veered into exaggerating her own sins (No, she did not call for the release of the murderer and instead cooperated with the police to prosecute him. OTOH, she is a Zohran supporters, so she kind of is with extra steps.)
The rhetoric from the right is vaguely comparable to the people just bashing Kirk for supporting the 2nd, but knowledge of the case is still pretty limited.
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Archive link to above article
Sharing emotionally manipulative and outright deceptive writing is not an ideal way to service your point. The criticism of Carson was because of his activity on X. I could link any one of his posts, I'll link this one. At the NYPD, to which he replied "Your cops are subhuman." He was such a kind man, he only cared about garbage.
As someone who keeps a close eye on those righty circles and who doesn't shy from graphic content, I couldn't tell you the last time I saw his murder shared, but this could be selection bias. What I have seen are plentiful criticisms of his girlfriend for her behavior continuing from that night.
But really, this is accepting framing, and I don't do that. The righties criticize Carson for his belief that socioeconomic conditions precipitate the willingness of an 18 year old to wander a city and murder a stranger by repeatedly stabbing him. His beliefs directly related with and contributed to the circumstances of his murder. That's not why lefties are criticizing Kirk. Had Kirk agitated for and supported violence against his opposition -- actual violence, not the child's "you said mean words" -- he would have lived and died by the sword. He didn't. He hurt their feelings, and they say that's a reason to say he deserved it as they dance on his grave. These are not comparable.
I don't really understand why we need to tear down Carson some more. He's not a saint but neither was Charlie Kirk. Kirk also has a mountain of quotes that the left can mine to justify celebrating his death, and I believe they are wrong to do so too.
Joe Biden is a bumbling dementia filled Alzheimer's corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.
Granted, not extra-judicial violence, so maybe not exactly "living and dying by the sword," but the following is not exactly that either:
That's like arguing Charlie Kirk argued for escalation and turning up the temperature, which produced a political environment that precipitated his assassination. The cause and effect between Carson's beliefs and his murder are just as far removed.
This is like the Monty Python sketch about non-illegal robbery. Granted, they're not actually doing the thing people are complaining about, but....
It's still advocating for violence.
Sure, "my political opposition should be tried for treason and then shot" may have a thin veneer of plausible deniability to chronic overthinkers like you or I, but most people from both sides are just going to hear "my political opposition should be shot".
The difference is that a lone shooter has a chance of shooting Biden, but a lone shooter has no chance of putting Biden on trial for treason. Advocating state action is literally advocating for violence, but it's not advocating for the kind of violence that a vigilante can do, so it doesn't endanger the target in the same way.
I'm not sure where our disagreement lies. If your point is that the two are not the same, it's true. In my first post I didn't say they were the same, in fact I pointed out that they were different.
If your point is that advocating for state violence is as mundane as paying for a watch like in the Monty Python skit, then I disagree. The takeaway for most is still that "my opposition deserves to die for their crimes" and it does endanger the target, just not as much as an unqualified call for violence.
Secondly, jake said:
And you seem to agree that Kirk "literally [advocated] for violence"?
"Does, but not as much" is a massive understatement. Someone who wants Joe Biden put on trial won't lead to anyone hurting Joe Biden. Someone who wants right-wingers to be assassinated increases the chance of people assassinating right-wingers. These things are significantly unalike to the point where putting them in the same category is sophistry.
Assuming that the Biden quote is correct, only in a noncentral way. If state violence counts, everyone on themotte has literally advocated for violence.
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Are there many cases of someone being tried for treason and exonerated? Treason does sound like the "TPTCurrentlyB want you dead" charge.
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I looked into that yesterday and curiously enough most of the RW glee came from a guy being hoisted by his own defund petard, and after having celebrated the death of Rush Limbaugh (among others, iirc)
One thing that's come into STARK relief over the past week, is there's a pretty noticeable difference between making jokes at the expense of the deceased, which can be bad taste ("too soon!") but isn't a hard taboo, and making jokes that celebrate the person's death directly/condones the act of murder.
It's a noticeable difference, yes, but particularly troublingly I think that in cases like this there's a lot of grey area between the two. Very scissory, or as Adams would say "two movies one screen", in that for many offensive comments someone left-wing will say it isn't condoning the act of murder while someone right-wing will say it is, and I don't think either of them are lying per se.
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This is actually a solid counterpoint. I had forgotten about this guy, and I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I was not exactly sad when he died. I can't remember posting anything about him online, and I definitely didn't take to Facebook, but it's quite possible I made some insensitive remark about him in one of my previous accounts.
It's a bad example because the right had nothing to do with his death at all. His death was ironically viewed precisely because the right's preferred policies might actually have saved him.
In terms of people celebrating political opponents' deaths, it does have something to do with it. I am moderately right leaning, and I remember how I felt when Carson was killed. The reaction on the right wasn't nearly as widespread as the Kirk shooting was on the left, but there undoubtedly was some thinly veiled rejoicing occurring on the right. The scale of it though was not the same as Kirk's death from what I remember. If you want to redirect the focus of his death to it being about policy and who killed him then ok, I'd probably agree, but that's not what my comment was talking about.
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