Ben Burgis and Meagan Day, on the former’s debate with Charlie Kirk:
At the same time, he didn’t descend into personal attacks. He stuck to the substance of arguments, largely steering clear of cheap gotchas…discussions like that are absolutely necessary. The shooting yesterday points the way toward a much uglier path…
While I share Burgis and Day’s distaste for murder and unease about what the future holds, this passage is completely outrageous. In just the last month, Kirk compared immigrants to cockroaches; suggested that Rep. Rashida Tlaib isn’t an American; referred to Muslims as rapefugees; called BLM protesters idiots; referred to unwanted immigrants as parasites; ridiculed overweight women; called journalists vile, ghoulish creatures; and referred to a trans cheerleader as garbage.
It’s hard to read this kind of rhetoric and not conclude that Burgis and Day’s passion for free speech liberalism has pushed them into an absurd overcorrection. It would be one thing to concede that Kirk was what he was — a hateful bomb-throwing demagogue — and insist that the left should tolerate his speech despite that. But lifting him up as an exemplar of civil and substantive discourse in the same article that you’re lecturing the left on its “almost competitive lack of empathy” is just bizarre hagiography. Praising him for being polite to Burgis for five minutes is pretty damn close to praising Ted Bundy for all those times he didn’t eat someone.
I’m especially confused that Burgis took this tack given how he wrote about a similar incident just a year ago:
If we’re serious about diminishing the incidence of lone-wolf political violence in the United States, lecturing people to tone down the way they talk about figures like Donald Trump is unlikely to be an effective strategy. A more fruitful area to focus on is America’s gun laws, which are bizarrely permissive by the standards of other advanced democracies.
This seems exactly right to me. When reactionary billionaires spend tens of millions in dark money on platforming a political demagogue who calls empathy “a made up new-age term,” we should not be remotely surprised when some statistically inevitable subset of his critics refuse to extend any empathy to him. And you certainly aren’t going to prevent that by hectoring them about it in Jacobin. But what you can do is argue for a baseline of commonsense gun regulation so that this heated rhetoric that infects our politics is less likely to end in gun violence.
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