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The way you're feeling is indicative of how I think a lot of conservatives feel. So many are being told that there isn't a problem, or that the statistics say "well right wingers are more badder," or that my side aggrieved them so I have no standing.
None of it is any assurance against this extremely palpable feeling that their neighbors would cheer if they died. I now know for a fact that if I were murdered - and my identity wasn't reported, only my politics, somehow - many people I consider "friends" would cheer. The feeling is not mutual! Even Charlie Kirk himself wouldn't have cheered if it happened to them.
I do not know how to reconcile this, and I understand even less why so many think they help their case when they try to deflect from this conversation. None of the ones I know seem to understand how this comes off to me, and it feels like it should be pretty obvious. Instead, we need to reframe the conversation. What about a mass shooting? What about FBI statistics? What about something a nazi did ten years ago that we both agreed was terrible the day of?
Okay, can we talk about that after we acknowledge that a bunch of people I trust are implicitly saying that they want me dead and even more are trying to minimize this issue by? I'm not alone in this, and it's not just my problem. What good they expect to come of this is beyond me.
Eh, I think it's easy to carry this too far.
If the Lefty version of Kirk was killed in similar fashion, a lot of rightwingers would also be gleefully dancing on the grave. (Especially right now, when the risk of leftwing cancellation is the lowest it has been in a very long time.)
It's very hard to estimate which "side" is "worse" on an issue like this (whereas on some issues, there is a clear asymmetry, like publicly expressed racism against whites and sexism against men).
Though I must say that, right now, as an "antiwoke" atheist classical liberal, many on the Left would certainly celebrate my death as a racist/sexist/fascist/transphobe and probably the Right wouldn't as a godless heathen, though I have only voted for Democrats for president and have harshly criticized the Progressive Left and the MAGA Right while holding social views roughly consistent with a typical 2012 Obama voter.
I doubt this. First of all, there is a reason there is no leftwing version of Kirk, which is because lefty influence is distributed. If someone kills all the presidents of the Ivy League + AOC + the NYT editorial board, that is a lot of killing to get to the kind of impact that one bullet achieved here.
Secondly, we've seem Republican reactions to violence, and they are not positive. At worst you can sometimes see things being joke-worthy and the right making some crude jokes, like the Paul Pelosi homosexual prostitute situation.
If Hasan Piker gets killed tomorrow you think it will be well-behaved reactions in general from the Right?
I just don't understand a model of today's right that isn't crass.
Mostly "Who?"
More seriously, your model is not evidence.
Buddy why are you conflating a hypothetical with evidence? Obviously my model is not “evidence” and I never claimed it was.
My evidence that the American Right would not act with restraint were the tables turned is that it’s the kind of people who liked Rush Limbaugh and elected Donald Trump and mocked Paul Pelosi.
Propriety and restraint is certainly not a standard part of the MAGA package and it’s remarkable to me that such an obvious fact is being contested, as if the Left is full of hateful hooligans and the Right is just peaceful folk who mind their own business.
If you think it so self-evident, it should be trivial to point to the evidence. You mentioned the mockery of Paul Pelosi. In what ways was this comparable to what we've seen with Kirk's murder? Was it similarly widespread? Was it similarly vicious? Are the incidents themselves comparable? Where the people engaging in the mockery comparable?
I definately will argue that the left is full of hateful hooligans, because they have repeatedly engaged in widespread celebration of ideological murders and attempted murders committed by their percieved allies. Luigi's trial is going on right now in New York, and there are large numbers of people celebrating his tactical legal victories in court.
I have not seen the right do that. If you think you have seen the right do that, please point to what you're seeing and explain why you think it is equivalent.
Paul Pelosi was attacked and it was very common to propagate a false narrative about it being a relationship issue and jokes were rampant. Very bad taste. Seems suggestive of the Right’s attitude toward violence against its political opponents.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-11-01/editorial-gop-responds-to-pelosi-attack-with-cruel-baseless-jokes-its-shameful
You’re hilariously trying to establish a required level of evidence that must be equal, instead of being able to extrapolate from incomplete evidence. The counterpart of this would be for me to point out you can’t prove the negative if an exact case on the other side has not yet happened. I suggest you try reasoning from impartial evidence instead of trying to incorrectly try to win a logical argument.
Here’s an interesting fact that turned out to be a bit predictive:
https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2022/03/the-rise-in-political-violence-in-the-united-states-and-damage-to-our-democracy
Also there’s the fun phenomenon of GOP officials fearing right wing violence.
https://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/video/2025/04/retaliation-is-real-why-republicans-in-congress-wont-stand-up-to-trump
https://apnews.com/article/house-speaker-jim-jordan-threats-54eeecef0188edfcb9903e45019f190f#
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/07/politics/threats-us-public-officials-democracy-invs
I don’t believe this is common among Democrats.
So yeah, I think it’s preposterous to pretend that the present American Right doesn’t have a political violence problem, even if it’s not exactly the same or as large as what we are seeing from the Left re: Kirk.
Your links are spin. They are deliberately mixing up fear of "retaliation" (meaning standard politician stuff), Internet death threats of the type every celebrity gets, genuine death threats that are not from right-wingers, and maybe something that actually qualifies but is cherry picked.
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