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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.
I agree, but I think the word "internal" is doing ~all of the work. What I was trying to gesture at with the "whatever he died of" paraphrase wasn't merely the "statement of the obvious" that you interpreted it as, but the line of argument that kicks the can on whether it was murder or not and says, "who cares if he was choked or died of a self-inflicted overdose, he was such a scumbag that Chauvin would have been doing everyone a favor even if it was murder and we should all look the other way". I see a fair bit of this among online rightists, including on the Motte, and I don't think it's unfair to parse it as tantamount to celebrating the alleged murder, even if its proponents carefully avoid endorsing the claim that it was murder, keeping their approval safely tethered to hypotheticals.
My view, therefore, is that expressing that sentiment publicly is unethical for the same consequentialist reason that loudly cheering on a political assassination is unethical. In either case, the problem is that it creates a climate in which potential future murderers are given reason to believe that they'll be hailed as heroes if they commit extrajudicial killings, just so long as the targets are sufficiently bad guys in the eyes of the public. I think this would very much apply to a hypothetical Jimmy Savile murderer. We might shed no tears for Savile as a person, knowing that he really was a child-raping monster; but we do not want to give trigger-happy would-be-heroes the impression that gunning down celebrities that they're totally sure are secretly pedophiles is something society approves of. For, uh, obvious reasons.
Celebrating Kirk's death could still have this effect even if he had been a privately horrible man whose widow was glad to be rid of him; celebrating Floyd's ostensible murder could have this effect whether or not Floyd was a victim of circumstances vs. an unrepentant bastard, and indeed, whether or not Chauvin actually, as a matter of fact, killed him. The only valid moral question to ask about people dancing on their respective graves is whether that celebration might motivate some other guy to take a shot at another politician; might motivate some other cop to finish off some other lowlife whom he feels is definitely irredeemable scum.
(But, as stated, although it's an important question to bear in mind in terms of how individuals choose to act, I don't think it's one whose impact could ever so great or direct as to make the grave-dancers 'as bad as the killers'/culpable for the deaths themselves in any meaningful sense.)
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