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Notes -
WP:
In particular, Spanberger said:
Someone should probably double check my math, but it seems to me that these are two democrats who seem to have diplomatically suggested that he drops out of the race.
While I agree that his messages are beyond the pale, this also seems like a fuck-up on so many different levels.
Someone who has such ideation should not be elected to any office, but AG seems like a particularly bad fit.
Someone who thinks it is wise to text their Republican colleague these ideations should not have any job where any amount of personal judgement is required. Even a fucking unsolicited dick pick would have been less of a lapse.
Someone who knows that these messages exist and still decides to run for office has proven beyond any doubt that he cares nothing for his party.
In your link, you mostly talk about people wanting to kill Trump, with the exception of "his supporters really don't deserve any sympathy either" and "rant about how great it is that the unvaxed are all going to die".
This is not genocidal by any definition, because Trump is not an ethnicity. Saying that your outgroup does not deserve sympathy is unfortunately normal (MAGA is very much without sympathy wrt illegal immigrants, for example). Celebrating the anticipated death of the unvaccinated seems in poor taste, but is also very different from calls for murdering them.
I will not pretend that I do not think that our world would be better if Trump had died of natural causes halfway through his first term. I also think that getting murdered would be a much greater contribution to his movement than anything he could possibly do with his remaining lifespan, and also do not think that Trump is succeeding in dismantling the constitutional order (which would justify killing him), so I am very much opposed to killing him or his henchmen.
While the lefty celebrations or Kirk's death were disgusting, I think most of the initial reactions were deluded about the political motive. Basically, the left heard "oh, he was shot by a gun nut raised in a Mormon family".
I think that if Greta Thunberg was fatally stabbed by a MS-13 illegal immigrant for whose prison release she had campaigned, parts of right-wing twitter would probably celebrate. "Seems like the woke college student problem is starting to solve itself", "FAFO" or something. If it then later emerges that it was not outgroup-on-outgroup violence, but that the culprit was acting on behalf of the ingroup, this would be at least awkward.
Frankly, it is not. The example from Russia you cite is different because these were random Jews who were killed for being Jewish.
Even if that fuckwit Jones had personally killed that speaker and his kids, that would be political violence, which is a different beast.
From Rome to Weimar, we had a lot of societies where internal political violence was a thing, often employed by different actors. It is bad (also because it makes totalitarianism look like a good option), but it is different from genocide.
I think it’s over-charitable at this point to take “he must take full responsibility” statements as proof of contrition. If you really think this is far beyond the pale, then why beat around the bush with non-statements? “Take responsibility” can mean almost anything. It can mean issuing tge standard non-apology statements often used in politics “if my statements were misunderstood to be meant to cause pain, im sorry,” to stronger apologies to dropping out of the race.
And now that we’re officially getting to the “shooting and terrorism” stage, it’s absolutely not good enough anymore to not say it plainly: calls for and celebration of political violence have no place in the public sphere. If you are doing that, you should resign from public office or be fired from any public media positions you hold. If a political organization cannot forthrightly say: anyone on our side engaging in, promoting, or celebrating violent extremism must apologize and leave. This includes using the accusation of authoritarian regime against the other party. Zero tolerance. That’s what getting serious about political violence and advocacy thereof looks like: no excuses, no weasel worded statements, just actual action.
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Unless you are equivocating over "parts of" meaning "a couple of people with no political influence and who are not representative", this amounts to making up something that the right would do and criticizing them for it, in comparison to something that a Democratic politician actually did.
I was making an analogy to the online left celebrating Kirk's murder (which was not committed by someone I would call a Democratic politician), not Jones statements about shooting some speaker.
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That Brooklyn lefty campaigner guy who was killed on CCTV with his girlfriend nearby, conservatives were very much "welp, hoisted by his own..." as in this is the result of his own views on crime. A smug schadenfreude was palpable, but I didn't see overt celebration myself.
Yeah vibe was far more around the tragic irony of it than 'thank god the oppressor is dead'
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There is a slight of hand here I want to address. I said no Democrat (minus one) has pulled their endorsement. This remains true, even with Democrats saying he really shouldn't have said those things. Despite the condemnation of his words, they still endorse the person for the position he's running for.
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