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With regard to the Kirk quote, this seems splitting hairs. When Kirk or the MAGA base are fantasizing about locking Clinton up or executing Biden, I do not believe that they are thinking of a totally impartial judge and jury coming to the conclusion that their opponent has indeed committed the crime they are accusing them of beyond any reasonable doubt.
The presidential action which came closest to treason in recent memory was J6 (Trump inciting his mob to impede the certification of the election), and his pet SCOTUS decided that he had actually immunity for that. Last time I checked, Biden had not order Seal Team Six to kill Trump, if he had, that would excuse Kirk's statement.
For Trump, the DoJ is a political instrument to wield against his enemies, he is rather open about that. In that context, saying "no, I am not advocating for political violence, I am advocating for harsh penalties imposed by a kangaroo court for political crimes" does not seem very convincing.
And the stochastic terrorism is present in that just the same. Kirk's statement would strongly suggest to his most deranged 10% of listeners that morally speaking, Biden should be killed or imprisoned for his crimes. Add more context, like the justice system being characterized as corrupt and woke, and it sounds like an incitement to do outside the law that which the law would do if it was enforced fairly, in the minds of the deranged.
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Relatedly, there is a reason why MAGA is more leaning towards violence which is state-sanctioned and the left is more leaning towards extrajudicial violence. The MAGA motivation for violence is basically "DC is a swamp which opposes the will of the people, and should be punished for its corruption".
With the left, Trump might be seen as a Tiberius Gracchus figure: a populist breaker of norms who has ambitions of tyranny. So it is less "Trump must be punished for his past misdeeds" and more "Trump must be stopped before he dismantles the republic".
I happen to know better - that even if he could be taken to trial, which already might not be possible, Joe would not be convicted under current jurisprudence and laws of the land. But on the other hand, I do believe that Joe earnestly tried to subvert and destroy the country. An act that under the colloquial definition of treason, as well as the historical definition of treason accepted by many societies, would clearly qualify. Undoubtedly countless fair and just executions have been carried out throughout history for offenses far less than what Joe has done.
I'm assuming the average boomer has no idea how the legal system works, or how treason is defined under United States law, or how current jurisprudence interprets that law. I'm sure the average boomer sees Joe's actions as treasonous and assumes that the law would agree.
Interestingly, trying to overthrow or destroy the United States doesn't actually count as treason under the law.
There are some interesting parallels here to the run-up to the election, when the common talking point was that the Democrats using the legal system to go after Trump, or removing Trump from the ballot for treason were massive norm violations.
If we were talking jail maybe, but personally I don't see how adding "...by the government, after a trial (in which my desired outcome is the just one)" to "I hope my political opponent is executed" makes it not support of violence.
Do you oppose capital punishment in all cases?
If not, where do you draw the line?
Generally yes, more so because in today's day and age we can indefinitely keep someone in jail for the off chance that they are later exonerated (and given the amount of red tape to go for the death penalty I think life in prison is cheaper).
But I said this more because of the motivation of the situation. If the context is along the lines of wishing a politician that is not even on trial gets a trial with the specific outcome of the death penalty, I think you've cast your thinking far enough ahead that you want to see the person dead.
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The same thing we do every night, Kamala: trying to destroy America.
I think it highly implausible that Biden was trying to destroy the USA. If his goal was to turn the US into a failed state, he did a rather terrible job. And why would he want that?
Different people have different visions for their country. Some want a capitalist heaven, or a commie utopia. Some want to support Israel, some want to support Israel a lot. Some want universal healthcare, some want Roe overturned. Some want do get rid of background checks, some want the 2A reinterpreted so it does not apply to any firearm innovations made after it came into force. Some want to turn a blind eye to illegal migration, some want to deport every last illegal (except for the ones which keep the economy running). Some want to bomb country A, others want to bomb country B.
From where I stand, the general course of US politics has been pretty consistent from Clinton to Biden. There were always big donors whose interests got special consideration beyond the interests of the American people, mud-slinging during campaign season, use of office to get a political advantage over the opposition, from photo ops to politically motivated investigations, bombing of random places. Both Trump 1 and Biden were particularly uninspired, but for the most part it was just business as usual.
He did a great job at intentionally letting in tens of millions of people from the worst parts of the world. If left unchecked it would certainly result in the replacement and subversion of the previous people of the country.
Fact: Joe deliberately and successfully caused the largest wave of migration into the United States in history, and possibly even the largest wave of migration in all of human history.
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Wasn't long ago that conservatives were lambasting the notion of stochastic terrorism. Do they buy it now?
Direct advocacy of violence goes well beyond what "stochastic terrorism" was supposed to be. The idea of stochastic terrorism is basically that saying bad things about people -- not advocacy of violence, just that the people were terrible in some way -- might make crazies kill them.
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I have never considered it to be taken any other way? The truth is, the MAGA masses honestly, earnestly believe that these people have committed high crimes and treason, which a fair and unbiased trial would reveal the full details of, resulting in an inevitable and just execution that even the Blue Tribe would agree is just. Are they right? Likely not. But I have never doubted that this is what they earnestly believe.
Some among them, surely. The Qanon true believers who think he is fighting a secret war against the adrenochrome-addicted establishment.
Still, my model of the median Trump voter is that they know that Trump is bullshitting all day long and corrupt AF. But the establishment hating him so much makes it all worth it.
In particular, I would argue that outside your odd lizardman, none of the smarter MAGA people believe the narrative. I think it highly unlikely that Charlie Kirk thought, in his heart of hearts, that Biden was committing treason for which his countrymen would sent him to the gallows if they knew about it. But the narrative played really well with the idiots, so he spread it.
As much as I’d personally like to believe that, but I doubt it. I’m on record several times advocating for people to actually assume that the “other side” probably believes what they say they do, and I think that’s the case here as well- while, as an admitted partisan, I think right-wing influencers are full of shit, I’m sure they genuinely believe that shit; after all, after decades of the conservative media ecosystem being increasingly divorced from reality (at an alarmingly accelerated rate in the last few years), it’s probably never been easier to buy into ‘your side’s’ narrative than it’s ever been before.
The ‘smart’ people on the right don’t necessarily have to be any better-informed than ‘the idiots’ that make up the rank-and-file. Possibly even the opposite; greater reasoning can easily turn into greater capacity for rationalization.
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What's "the narrative"? I certainly think that Biden had been absolutely horrible. I don't have legal education enough to see if he could be plausible charged with treason (probably not successfully), but I think he certainly did not have mine or The People's interests in mind even in those rare moments he was able to keep anything in mind. And certainly whoever was running the autopen in his stead - which must be some kind of serious crime, though I again don't know how to properly call it - did not. Do I want Biden on the gallows? Shit no, what would it give me? I don't even really want him in jail, he probably wouldn't be able to even understand what's going on. But I wouldn't mind seeing in jail some of the people who were running the clown show. But much more important is to do everything possible to undo at least some of the harm that they inflicted on the country and the society. If believing all that makes me an "idiot" in your eyes, so be it, it's not my problem.
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...How closely have you been following the revelations about Russiagate/Crossfire Hurricane/Hillary's email server/Biden's Corruption/Hunter's Laptop over the last year? My working understanding of that mess (and it seems to me there's a fair amount of evidence that it is a coherent, single mess) is that we now have solid evidence that Obama, Hillary and Biden worked together to suborn the national security apparatus and turn it into both a partisan weapon against their political enemies, as well as a shield to their own serious malfeasance. As with, say, Watergate, but amusingly never ever with any Democrat scandal, the initial crimes seem vastly overshadowed by the institutional corruption used to cover them, which at this point appear to have run so deep and for so long that they put the viability of our political system itself into question.
More generally, there's this amusing pattern I see, where people are very willing to discuss things under a frame where Trump and MAGA are fascistic white supremacists who must be stopped by any means necessary, as we did here for years, and are also willing to discuss things under a frame where actually there's no difference between the parties, everyone's corrupt so none of the details really matter, but certainly are not willing to discuss under the frame where, no, actually it's the democrats who are uniquely, intolerably bad. Maybe it's just bias speaking, but it seems to me that this excluded third option is going to get harder and harder to exclude the more evidence accumulates. And while within the context of debate and one's own mind denial might be an invincible shield, it's less effective in the real world if sufficient numbers of the public simply stop being willing to cooperate with your tribe in any way ever again.
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No, it isn't. There's a reason that it's the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and not the Unfair Trial and Biased Jury and Execution of Charlie Kirk. Assassination is something that members of the public are physically capable of doing, and supporting assassination supports things that can and at some point will actually be done by vigilantes. Nobody's going to vigilante put-on-trial and execute Biden, unless you think that's really a demand that Biden be lynched, which 1) I find unlikely to have been intended and 2) isn't possible anyway.
Kirk was going on record that Biden might deserve death for his actions. He made that statement knowing that the general narrative of MAGA is that the justice system is corrupt and protects the DC swamp. To a base to which Trump had already (jokingly?) implied in 2016 that the '2nd amendment people' might want to interfere with the appointment of SC justices through assassination. A base which has plenty of people with the firearms training to pull of assassinations.
Of course, if he had connected the dots, a la "Biden deserves death, but our corrupt justice system will never convict him. Someone should just shoot him", that would have been 10x worse.
I don't think that Kirk was intentionally trying to incite stochastic terrorism, he was simply spinning his MAGA lies (e.g. about Biden being especially treasonous) for political gain, and not giving a damn if that would increase the relative risk of Biden getting gunned down or not.
You are making a six degrees of Kevin Bacon argument. Saying that Biden should be tried and executed is technically violence, but it's not the kind of violence that someone could listen to him and then do. When you connect that to something Trump said, you're connecting it to something he said seven years apart, and not even about Biden. You're also trying to frame a single statement from Trump as a gotcha. It isn't a single statement that does it, it's a lot of statements from a lot of people.
Obviously the statement means "if we get in charge of the government, then we...." He was under no illusion that Biden could be tried and executed under the justice system as it existed in 2023. That still isn't encouraging vigilante justice, unles you think people are going to do a vigilante takeover of the justice system first.
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This argument cuts both ways; if that discussion is tantamount to advocating for political violence, then anyone else who's "advocated for harsh penalties imposed by a kangaroo court for political crimes" is just "splitting hairs" about the gap between that and just outright saying "x gets the bullet". And it's not like we have a shortage of people who said -- and in many cases did, and did often, and did to far less prominent people -- those same scope of things.
And no one treated them the same as someone talking about how he'd shoot a motherfucker.
For what it is worth, I can not recall any prominent Democrat calling for Trump to be executed for his role in J6.
Were the sentences for the J6 crowd harsh, especially compared to the sentences for the BLM riots? Sure, they totally threw the book at them for clear political reasons.
But unlike a Biden treason trial ending in a death verdict which Kirk was fantasizing about, they were still recognizable as a legal system working, somehow. Not well (the US legal system generally does not work well), and not as impartial as one might hope, perhaps, but not a kangaroo court.
Is life in prison due to a kangaroo court much better? As that is something Dem actually attempted to do to Trump. And certainly I don't remember if any Dems were vocally against it.
The bolded is your subjective assessment, and rather the pivotal element which changes the situation from fair to unfair. If the Democrats don't think it was a kangaroo court, would you still expect them to be against it?
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The peaceful transfer of power is one of the greatest selling points of democracy. Trump trying to mess with that was by far the worst thing he did in his first term.
Crucially, he did not get convicted because the court system (the SC in particular) stopped it, despite the wishes of the Biden administration. Trump getting convicted would in my mind not conclusively prove a kangaroo court, but him getting immunity proves reasonably well that the courts (or at least the SC) are independent of the political Zeitgeist.
He did get convicted (I'm talking about the NY trial here.) He just got lightly sentenced after winning the election instead of the possible 100+ years he could have gotten. The main point is that "kangaroo court" is mostly subjective, but only one side did actually bring a ridiculous case in front of an incredibly partisan area and get a favorable judgement against their partisan enemy. So while we can muse on what Kirk might have meant in his heart of hearts (and I wouldn't even say I really disagree with you there), Dems are actually putting it into practice.
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