The guy who killed Kirk was less a hardened leftist and more a young guy with psychological problems who was radicalized by memes wafting in his direction. The guys who tried to kill Trump were nutcases. People with psychological problems are motivated by stupid shit to do something crazy. Toning down the rhetoric may help, but that’s hard when the president is abusing his power and breaking the Constitution left and right. Accurately describing what the president is doing sounds like heated rhetoric when it is not.
The United States military is making extrajudicial illegal killings of potential drug traffickers, apparently killing a boat of Colombians this time. The U.S. is threatening a regime change war with Venezuela.
“Most U.S. drug traffickers are Americans, but the president is ordering extrajudicial maritime killings while ignoring the domestic demand that drives the market.”
When a shooter can be viewed as of the left, or is an illegal immigrant, or Muslim, Trump and Trump supporters talk about the shooter and jump to conclusions about what this means about their political opponents or groups in society they don’t like. When the shooter is a Trump supporter…crickets.
“the idea that people—especially young men—would not be radicalized if it weren’t for social media belies most of human history.
I’ve been listening recently to a podcast called A Twist of History. One episode details Adolf Hitler’s attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic in 1923. Another episode features a riot during a Shakespearean performance in New York City in 1849, fomented by Ned Buntline, a nativist newspaper pundit with ambitions of fame and notoriety. Both instances featured fringe political elements, violence, and deaths.
History is littered with examples like these: men driven to violence by people in close physical proximity, sometimes with the help of inflammatory political rhetoric printed in pamphlets and newspapers.
…
if he encountered bad ideas online, it’s because the internet is now where we encounter ideas. If he cloaked his violence in the language of internet memes, it’s because that’s where culture is these days.
In another era, he may have encountered bad ideas at a town hall and dressed up his horrific act in different slogans. But a man with a capacity for such premeditated and dramatic violence is a man with a capacity for such things in any era. And conversely, countless billions of people encounter the same online ecosystem without committing assassinations.”
“Public employees have robust protections against being fired for such speech, unless it proves exceptionally unpopular.
This feature of First Amendment jurisprudence, and the bad incentives it creates for cancel culture campaigns, is on full display following the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk last week…
In a country where some 22 million civilians are employed by the government, the pool of people who’ve made nasty comments about Kirk naturally includes some public sector workers…
At first blush, this would suggest that even government employees who explicitly praised Kirk’s assassination have First Amendment protections against being fired for that speech, however distasteful.
Whether or not they can, in fact, be fired turns on how much their comments disrupt government operations.
Consequently, the more outrage that can be directed at a particular public worker’s employer, and the more of a headache retaining that worker becomes as a result, the less the First Amendment will protect them from losing their job.
That creates a powerful, toxic incentive to gin up anger at individual government workers as a means of erasing First Amendment protections they have for off-the-job speech…
Kirk was undoubtedly a polarizing figure. The strong feelings, both negative and positive, that he elicited in people are one reason his murder has become such a huge public conversation.
It’s inevitable in that context that some people will say intemperate, mean-spirited things about the man.
It’s foolish to trust online snitch-taggers to be judicious in determining who they’re going to try to get fired, particularly when the more outrage they can generate serves to route around First Amendment protections for government workers’ speech.”