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Notes -
Yes, Democrats Really Do Want You Dead
Some people have already put the Charlie Kirk assassination into the memory box. For others it still feel terrifyingly relavent. The initial shock at the cheers and jubulant celebration at his gruesome public execution has faded slightly. The public square dominated by Democratic figures and Never Trumpers invoking some fraudulent both sidesism has, like it or not, dulled some of the public backlash. And honestly, the compulsive conspiracy theorist on the right hasn't helped maintain moral clarity in the wake of his murder either.
You may remember, I've talked before about the casual genocidal bloodlust the average Northern VA Democrat has based on the time I lived there. And while Democrats, for now, seem to have enough message discipline to not get on CNN and openly say "Yes, Republicans deserve to be murdered", their line is just shy of that incredibly low bar. Enter Jay Jones.
He's been caught essentially laying out the case that Republicans should be shot and killed, and their children murdered in front of them, so that they change their politics. A DM conversation "leaked" where in he has this conversation with a Republican colleage in the Virginia House I believe. So this wasn't even exactly an "in house" conversation. Just straight up telling the opposition, "Hey, I think you deserve to die" like it would never or could never come back to haunt him.
As of now, no Democrat has pulled their endorsement of him, I saw one single local Democrat say he would stop campaigning with him, several groups have actively reaffirmed his endorsement still saying he's somehow better than your generic Republican. His brazen assertion that you should kill even the children too, because "they are breeding little fascist" is probably a huge hit in Northern VA. Finally someone who openly talks and thinks like they do. I've seen those exact words on the NOVA subreddit every day. He's very likely to have top legal authority over me and my children, whom he believes deserve to die.
I'm gonna be honest, I'm fairly distressed over this. This is how Pogroms work. In the famed Jewish Pogroms of 1881, 40 Jews were killed leading to a mass emigration from Russia. I wonder if we'll hit that number in Virginia the next 4 years. I fully expect my deep red rural county that's been electorally attached through gerrymandering to Fairfax will be aggressively "enriched" as punishment for voting wrong.
Whether we like it or not, the both sidesism deployed by the left is an effective rhetorical tactic that needs to be contended with. It'd be best to accept that popular people on the right have in fact made veiled calls for violence, or at least has given passive endorsements.
Marjorie Taylor Greene liked a facebook post in reference to Nancy Pelosi that said "a bullet to the head would be quicker” in order to remove her.
Charlie Kirk said "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."
The primary difference between left and right calls for violence right now seem to be state sanctioned capital punishment versus revolutionary type assassinations or terrorist acts. At scale, this becomes relevant because the left still largely controls the moral landscape of this country, and it is more likely to give the common man the moral license to kill than the right wing is. It's optically a "grassroots" thing and it appeals to young empathetic people or indoctrinated college grads. They're seen as acts of justified destabilization, and they give the impression that it's just the common man fighting against an immoral oppressor. It's why the left can riot for months at a time (2020 and now), or kill a CEO or conservative commentator and left-leaning mainstream outlets and Democrats can make generalized statements about toning down the violence without ever really having to take any accountability.
I'd like to put together a bigger effort post on this but I have to work.
I don't think saying, "This person is guilty of a capital crime, in my opinion," is the same thing as calling for political violence. It's calling for the rule of law, and if the law says, "Sorry, this person isn't actually guilty of a capital crime," then there you go. Violence stops there.
MTG though, she's something else. I have no qualms with wishing she were out of office and disavowing most of what she says. Marjorie Taylor Greene had an average 24% Approval Rating among Republicans. Most Republicans didn't recognize her name in the poll:
Greene is more important to Democrats to show how crazy Republicans are, than she is to Republicans who largely don't think about her at all and when they do agree she is pretty crazy.
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".
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.
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