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I've been trying to avoid the day by day of this argument, since overanalysing single incidents can't provide useful insights into a larger political context, but if we have to...
This is largely what I think. I think the OP is hypocritical - he's discovered a video that makes Pretti look like a horrible person, so he concludes that Pretti 'deserved it'. This is an instance of the behaviour he condemns, where 'feelings about ICE and Pretti and Good are mandatory'.
My opinion, held with low confidence, is basically: 1) Goode was probably a valid case of self-defense; Pretti was probably not, 2) Goode, Pretti, and others were behaving recklessly and foolishly, and 3) ICE is being deployed clumsily and without effective strategy, more as political theatre than as a plausibly effective method of slowing migration.
If I put on my very cynical hat, my reading of the broader situation is that there's a political battle going on, and the left are winning. The Trump administration has deployed ICE as a kind of show of force, hoping to encourage their supporters and demoralise opponents. This has not been very effective. The left-wing strategy is basically to follow ICE around and publicise ICE doing unsympathetic things, so as to undermine ICE's perceived legitimacy, and thus also the Trump administration's legitimacy. As such the left are putting sympathetic innocent people into situations where there is an elevated risk of chaos, perceived threat, and thus shootings. I do not think people on the left want ICE to shoot citizens, but they are contributing to situations with elevated risks of that, and from a purely cynical political perspective, every time ICE shoot an observer/protester/activist, the left wins.
My advice for the left would be to find a better way to do this, because chaos on the streets and people dying are bad things in themselves, and my advice for the right would be to become more effective. Deploying ICE to Minneapolis is thuggish theatre. There can be a place for theatre in border policy, insofar as it's a message to prospective illegal entries, but what they are currently doing is clearly not a well-considered, effective strategy to decrease migrant intakes and remove existing illegal aliens.
At any rate. You just can't draw conclusions from whether Pretti himself was a good or bad or anything else person - not about whether the shooting was justifiable, and not about larger political strategy either. It is just a red herring.
What's the argument here?
Sure you can. Pretti was a bad man because he was an insurrectionist communist and because he made it his life's work to obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials. Therefore, he has it coming. Efforts from the right to punish his killers are wrongheaded and will make it more difficult to find the loyalists to help us through the ugly days to come.
Who cares what Pretti did in the last moments of his lif. He was bad. He's no longer on the stage. What else matters? You might disapprove of the methods behind his removal, but so what? Did the left disapprove of the methods behind Kirk's removal? (No.) If you're not fully "who, whom"-pilled by now, will you ever be? Pretti was on the wrong side. One of the bad guys. Enemy combatant. If you're too squeamish to deal with enemy combatants, what are you even doing?
I used to buy into this whole moral framework built from game theory, moral imperatives, and veils of ignorance. Now I don't. I've lost no explanatory power. Now I believe the left, including its foot soldiers like Petti, deserve everything they're going to get in the coming struggle. I feel more for cows slaughtered inhumanely than I do for egalitarian idealists organized around punishing the successful to achieve their unachievable dream of materials equality.
Leftists deserve what's coming to them and I can't much care about the details of their karma delivery packages
What are you talking about? Authority figures on the left universally condemned his assassination. Just 20% of Democrats think his death was justified. https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/justifying-murder/
Literally Dems shouted down a house proposal to honor Kirk (was merely symbolic). Ilhan Omar didn’t condemn — she in so may words said he had it coming.
It just isn’t true what you are saying. A lot of Dem politicians said something to the effective of “Kirk shouldn’t have have been shot BUT he was a bad dude.” That isn’t really condemning it (the but matters more) but gives enough for a post like yours allowing you to claim the dems decried it.
I believe this is the first thing Omar posted about it, and the only statement the day he died:
https://x.com/IlhanMN/status/1965866576206508255
I think this example is basically similar to that of every dem politician and prominent figure, I'm open to counter-examples.
I don't really know what you're asking for. That people lie and pretend they think Kirk was a good person or a positive force in the world for some unspecified period after he died, while the right gets to hagiographize him?
Yes that is generally the bare minimum of polite political discourse. The Overton window of Western democracy is quite narrow and acting like your ideological opponents are literally grand evil is not productive in the long-term.
I too wish we had more polite political discourse, I agree it isn't polite to be criticizing Kirk a couple of days after he died. I also think that many on the left genuinely see Trump and his cronies as the grand evil, it isn't an act. That's not really what this thread is about though.
I think that there is an extremely high level of agreement on the left that Kirk's death was both bad in its impact on the world and unjustified based on Kirk's actions. I think it's really irrational to read between the lines that the left don't "disapprove of the methods behind Kirk's removal" when this is directly contrary to all public statements and even on a private survey of random people you can only get 20% to agree that it was justified.
This very much doesn't match my experience. The most visible and highest-level politicians on the left spoke against it, mostly. The rank and file were revolting, and that includes people in real life in red states, and some close enough to me that I'd worked with them on volunteer projects or let them live in my house.
I think there is something really perverse about how social media shapes discussions, namely that people are often reacting to something, but the thing that they are reacting to isn't explicit. So what happens is a bunch of rights post extremely positive things about Kirk after his death. Then lefts see that and are like "what the hell, this is a bunch of bullshit", and post what they think about Kirk, to (in their view) correct the record. Then a bunch of other rights see that and are like "why are you saying this stuff, why can't you just condemn the violence and leave it at that?", not realizing that these statements are in reaction to statements by other rights. And so on. This is mostly not anyone's fault and happens on both sides every day.
That is to say that, while statements that take the form "It's bad that Kirk was shot, and also he was a bad person/contributed to the climate that made this happen" may be unwise, unkind, unproductive etc., I think it is completely reasonable to take them at face value, as in these people genuinely do believe it's bad that Kirk was shot.
That said, I can't speak to your personal experiences, but:
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