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The broad and horrifyingly ghoulish reaction, including in rationalist spaces, is doing a lot of work in establishing the "broadly."
Sure, one individual did it. Millions of cretins cheered for it and seemed to see nothing wrong with that, and seem to have no fear that anyone's going to do the same to Piker (who is a substantial worse person) or anyone else.
If someone offed Piker, I certainly wouldn't mourn him as a person, and I'm not convinced I could even summon much care for the principle. But I wouldn't blare a cheer across social media celebrating an increase in political violence and know that everyone that matters would have my back, either.
It is so, so easy to just... not say things. And so many people failed, horribly.
If Kirk had been struck by lightning, the left would have celebrated in much the same way. Would you then accuse "the left, broadly" of having electrocuted him? Are all right-wingers whose take on George Floyd was a sneering "whatever he died of, good riddance" to be blamed for his murder? I sympathize with the idea that celebrating an assassination should be taboo in a way that celebrating other kinds of death isn't - the possible second-order effects are obvious - but I think speaking in terms of collective guilt is a bridge and a half too far.
I think that's the point. They wanted him to die, and they celebrated when he did.
Nobody would've cared if George Floyd died by lightning. They didn't really care when he died by cop. The right only cared when it became outrage source #1 in 2020 and nobody could escape it.
George Floyd was a convicted criminal, drug user. Charlie Kirk was a conservative who said things the left didn't like, but by most all accounts was a decent man, even to his political enemies.
The distinction here is that the left widely celebrated the death of a decent person that they politically disagreed with, and that this sort of reaction is not just limited to Charlie Kirk. There are entire subreddits dedicated to rejoicing at the deaths of people they politically disagree with. Members of the left will celebrate the death of their own parents if their parents are too politically dissident for their liking.
…I think this is normal? Not great, but normal. Human nature has an irreducible element of spite and Schadenfreude; the fact that most people have people in the world whose guts they hate, news of whose sudden death would bring only elation - this is not some new pathology. It is not exclusive to the Left, it isn't exclusive to the United States, it's not even exclusive to the West. The mark of a civilized society is that we painstakingly sever the instinctive connection, in all those unruly ape minds, between "boy, will I be happy when Gurg finally bites it" and "I should make Gurg snuff it by throwing a big rock at him"; not the excision of the former attitude from the human heart, which no society has ever achieved.
Indeed, you mention "their own parents" as if it were some extreme of depravity, but I think children being relieved when unloved parents who disagreed with them about everything finally shuffle off their mortal coil is a much more universal phenomenon still than people being happy to hear that some minor outgroup celebrity has died. It isn't pretty, and I hasten to add that it's the furthest thing from how I think about my own family, whom I love very much. But it's only human, and the mere presence of this mindstate does not make a murderer.
Schadenfreude? Yes. Both sides experience it. The type of open, widespread celebration we saw from the left for a person like Charlie Kirk? I think not.
Rob Reiner had full blown TDS. When he died, people left, right, and center offered condolences. Stephen King is insufferable right now. When he dies, so will a piece of my childhood. I will mourn the loss of Stephen King. I can see the redeemable qualities in all of these people. I can even see the redeemable qualities of someone like Stephen Colbert on a personal level. Charlie Kirk too had redeemable qualities.
To whatever extent this is true, and it is somewhat, that doesn't offset the fact that the left are the ones who are more likely to define ingroup/outgroup boundaries based on ideological alignment and moral consensus. It's ideology over kinship. The Soviets even mythologized the story of a boy who ratted out his own family and died because of it because they wanted enforce the same kind of ideological boundaries.
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No. But this to me symbolises one of the reasons the Left and the Right seem to talk past each other. The idea that people can see any equivalence between Charlie Kirk the family man & debater, and George Floyd is obscene and incomprehensible to me. George Floyd, the home invader. George Floyd, the man who put a
shotgunpistol to apregnantwoman's belly. George Floyd, the man who spent five years in jail for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, the man who died while being arrested for trying to pass off counterfeit currency, out of his skull on fentanyl.I agree completely that people shouldn't die while being arrested / be murdered by the police, and that investigation and punishment of the police officer was appropriate. I agree that it's unseemly to celebrate people's death no matter who they were and what they'd done. But the fact remains that Charlie Kirk was an innocent man and George Floyd was scum. To me, the fact that the Left considers actively celebrating the death of a man for the crime of being right wing in public to be remotely comparable to not caring that a career criminal is dead demonstrates a vast and hideous chasm of moral divergence.
EDIT:
Oh goodie! Thank you, Politifact. I was worried there for a minute that something bad had happened, you know?
EDIT EDIT: what is known is that the six men with Floyd overpowered a single woman and beat her in the "head and side areas" to make her shut up so they could rob her in peace, Floyd's pistol to her abdomen apparently not having brought the message home: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/meme-spreads-wrong-photo-details-in-floyd-criminal-case/
If you grant this principle, surely this clears the bar of "remotely comparable": both situations are comparable in that they involve people celebrating a perceived enemy's death even though this could be regarded as incentivizing wrongful deaths in the future. They may be very different in other respects, but that comparison still stands. And the fact remains that in neither case does it seem fair to jump from "this celebration is unwise" to "anyone insufficiently condemning the celebration retroactively shares blame for the wrongful death", which was my actual point.
There's more I could say with regards to the Floyd/Kirk comparison and the degree to which left and right talk past each other on these issues - and I can get into that if you'd want me to - but fundamentally they seem to be besides the point I was trying to make, which was simply "the-right-broadly is not responsible for Floyd and the-left-broadly is not responsible for Kirk, assigning blame that way would be crazy in either case", so I'm going to leave this reply at that unless prompted, in order to avoid burying said core point.
Understood. For clarity, to me the statement
with response to a career criminal doesn't seem like celebration, just a statement of the obvious. If I found out that Jimmy Savile had died under suspicious circumstances, I wouldn't go around saying 'how wonderful! the child-rapist is down in hell where he belongs!' but an internal 'good riddance, the world is better without him' would seem completely appropriate.
To me, this response isn't appropriate to the death of a genuine innocent, no matter how much I dislike them. My reaction if Jeremy Corbyn or Diane Abbott (both left-wing politicians I dislike intensely) were to die would not be on the same level as my response to the death of a career criminal. I might find myself feeling some vindication or even pleasure, I'm only human, but I wouldn't say it out loud and I would feel bad about it.
I think there are huge swathes of the left that don't feel the same way. A hugely popular left-wing position - not saying it's yours - seems to broadly be that anyone actively working to advance right-wing positions is effectively on the same level as (or far below) something like George Floyd, and I reject that and find it abhorrent.
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Yeah, I originally included a sentence about how a leftist murdered Kirk, and the left was way too fucking enthusiastic about it. I absolutely hate the responses that flooded social media. I will stand by the distinction, but it doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.
My wife is one of the most empathetic people I know. I don’t even think she would shoot someone in self-defense. But she will say, with a worried expression, that she wishes Trump had died at that rally. It’s unbelievable. Ingroup, outgroup, fargroup.
A not-Trump GoP candidate would still have beaten Kamala like a drum and, after instituting a state cultus of Trump, would then proceed to enact a much more effective agenda. Trump himself has largely failed to crown himself with laurels; a not-Trump candidate taking up the torch would probably have not only tried but succeeded in doing so.
With Trump gone it's likely Biden would not have dropped out. The hue and cry over his debate performance would be completely overshadowed by the spectacle of such a high-profile assassination, and the debate would be considered moot. I would guess a second debate would be scheduled very late in the cycle to give the GOP time to figure out what to do, at which point Biden probably does much better since he would have recovered from his cold, and the GOP would likely be running a candidate with no experience (doubtful they get Romney to run again.) With the advantage of incumbency, and lacking the sui generis Trump, I think Biden gets the higher probability.
The GOP would nominate Desantis(probably the donor favorite) or Abbott(probably the party insider favorite) or Rubio(a compromise position) very quickly. All of whom would destroy the senile Biden in a debate. The GOP would also benefit from the disgusted by Trump crowd no longer having to grit their teeth over trump. I think the GOP pulls an incredible map in this scenario- thé democrats were just incredibly unpopular.
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It's the non-Trump GOP that has largely proven ineffective over the past generation; why would they have done better without Trump?
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