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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.
There's a saying, more of a cliche, about being the change you want to see. Given that Donald Trump basically is the Republican Party at this point, and has been for some time, I don't see any evidence of anyone desiring any change or even indicating that they want a change, provided it isn't just that the other side has to do the changing. Name one instance where someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation. Name one. I'm not interested in which side has more total incidents or who started it or any of that, because it honestly doesn't matter at this point. We can go all the way back to Trump's entry into politics in 2015 and see nothing but excuses, equivocation, or using tragic events as an opportunity to dunk on his political opponents. Let's take a look at some of the biggies that have transpired in that time:
Dylann Roof: Trump wasn't really in a position where he'd be required to say anything at the time of the incident, as it preceded his entry into politics, but he later criticized the media for not blaming Obama for the shooting. The context of that remark was somewhat complicated, but it's nonetheless impossible to believe any context where Obama could have credibly been blamed for the Roof incident.
Cesar Sayok: See above. A pro-Trump militant mails pipe bombs to various Democratic leaders. Trump's immediate concern is that the media is unfairly blaming him for inspiring the incident. Whether or not that was fair, there didn't seem to be much concern from Trump or any other Republican that somebody was mailing pipe bombs for political reasons.
The Whitmer Kidnapping Plot: Immediately following the arrests, Trump's response was to suggest that she should be in jail anyway due to her COVID policies. In the course of the prosecution it would later come to light that the perpetrators had an entrapment defense that wasn't entirely ridiculous, though it was ultimately unsuccessful, and various people on the right latched on to this to make them look like political prisoners. This ignores the fact that Trump made his comments long before anyone knew all the details.
Paul Pelosi Attack: Trump wasn't in office then, but his response was to make jokes about it on the campaign trail. Then a completely baseless theory developed among conservatives who were sure that the guy was a male prostitute in a relationship with Pelosi. Charlie Kirk said that a true patriot needed to come along and bail the guy out. Even the Republicans who offered support to the Pelosis did nothing to attempt to diffuse the rumors.
Charlottesville: The most famous of Trump's equivocations, endlessly defended among his supporters. The point wasn't whether he was technically correct when he implied that all sides engage in political violence. It was that unequivocally condemning a white supremacist who committed murder should be the easiest thing a president does. Had he simply disavowed white supremacy and violence that would have been the end of it, but he had to use the tragedy as an opportunity to take a dig at his political opponents.
Minnesota Lawmaker Shootings: This is probably the most he ever did in that his office issued a written statement condemning the attacks. But when he actually got in front of a microphone he couldn't resist the opportunity to dunk on Tim Walz.
Shapiro Arson: Probably his best response so far, in that he was completely silent about it, except for a private call with Shapiro several days after the incident.
January 6: The Biggie. This topic has been litigated to death on here and I'm not about to relitigate it. Hundreds of people break into the Capitol building, threatening the vice president and various other politicians, in order to overturn the results of a presidential election. Even while they're still in the building, Trump can't address the nation without telling them he loves them. Initial Republican condemnation turns to justification and excuse making: Most of them just trespassed, they weren't carrying guns, the Democrats didn't do a good job of stopping the 2020 protests (never mind Trump was president), Clinton pardoned Puerto Rican nationalists 30-years later, the election really was stolen and they were all patriots, etc.
If that's where things ended then I could just lump this in with the above, but it went further. As the years past the plight of the poor insurrectionists became a cause celebre on the right, culminating in the pardons of everyone involve. Doesn't matter if they actually caused property damage. Doesn't matter if they assaulted cops. Doesn't matter if they planned things in advance. It was all a big liberal hoax to take political prisoners. It was at this point that the GOP completely abandoned any pretext of being a law and order party insofar as the law applies equally to everyone. Instead they used the perceived bad behavior of their political opponents as a license to condone violence that supports their own political ends.
All of the above is why I find it hard to take the crocodile tears and phony-baloney moralizing following the Kirk shooting seriously. Even when Fox News tried to give Trump an opportunity to turn down the temperature, he rebuked them, insinuating that the ends justified the means; right-wing extremists were okay because they at least wanted the same things he did, while it's the left that's the real problem. When asked about mending the political divide he said he wasn't interested. He said at Kirk's funeral that he disagreed with Kirk in that he hated his opponents and wanted them destroyed.
So when someone says that Jay Jones's private text messages from three years ago should be politically disqualifying I can agree in an abstract sense that they probably should be. But how many things has Trump said that would have traditionally disqualified a presidential candidate? I'm not even going to list them, because on the one hand it would take forever, but more importantly, I'm sure I'd get a bunch of people arguing how it really isn't that bad. Hell, two thirds of Trump's appeal is that he "tells it like it is" without any regard for political correctness. Let's be honest, if text messages had come out wherein Trump said something similar about a Democratic politician in the weeks preceding the election, approximately five people nationwide would change their votes to Harris on that basis. I don't believe for a second that this is some kind of red line that you simply won't allow any politician to cross.
I mean, I'm not a Charlottesville expert, but isn't this a completely fabricated narrative that the courts made stick to signal that they hate white supremacists? My recollection is that the fatality there was only slightly less justifiable than the incident with Rittenhouse; a bunch of counterprotesters surrounded a white supremacist's car and threatened him to signal the strength of their political convictions, and eventually he panicked, tried to drive away, and struck and killed one of them. This seems less like a case of going out to murder one's political opponents and more like a demonstration of why blocking cars is not a nonviolent form of protest.
I've begun to actively loathe twitter, because so many good source of information are now trapped in twisted, labyrinthian multi-threaded posts that are a bitch and a half to store offline.
Anyways, here's a good thread that breaks down the entire charlottesville debacle. Take away from that what you want, but I personally feel this was yet another case of a political lynching.
Oh, and one of the protesters blatantly admitted to brandishing rifle at the guy earlier.
I started a wiki, Memory Whole (https://memorywhole.tv/), inspired by the idea that a lot of the analysis and events on twitter is useful to know, but too fleeting and drowned in noise.
I currently have signups enabled, but I have to manually add people to the editors group. I'm planning to do a big announcement soon
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