They're lying about the left's reaction to Charlie Kirk
The right is pushing a "the left did it too" defense of their sadistic response to the ICE killings.
For all the talk one hears about political polarization shoving everyone into opposite camps, our pundit class is still disproportionately infected with the scourge of political centrism. And predictably, in the wake of the Renee Good and Alex Pretti shootings, a new conventional wisdom has crept into the discourse: the right has reacted to their deaths with shocking sadism and inhumanity, just like the left did with Charlie Kirk. Sometimes even the centrists can’t say this with a straight face, so instead we get backhanded criticism: “As bad as the left’s reaction was, the right’s was even worse.”
I’m not interested in laying out a footnoted case here, but for the ever-decaying online record, this is how the response to Kirk’s death actually played out:
The right instantly began to whitewash Kirk as a mere innocuous debate fan, and tried to game the discourse with blind cynical claims that he was shot by a leftist.
Leftists quickly became preoccupied with pushing back on the Kirk whitewashing, mostly by simply drawing attention to things that he actually said, often by quoting him verbatim; with calling out figures on the right who were making blind and inflammatory claims about who the shooter was and what should happen to the left; and with meta-commentary about how the right was deliberately trying to incite political retaliation. There was of course some statistically inevitable celebration and cruel jokes, but this was marginal and entirely confined to normie posters with no real power or influence.
The right started spinning every instance of criticism of Kirk, and even failures to praise Kirk with adequate worship, as celebrations and justifications of his death. A typical example from just yesterday: in a viral post promoted by figures like Elon Musk and organizations like the Mises Caucus, an anonymous user claims that actress “Amanda Seyfried said he deserved it.” The actual post: Seyfried simply said that “He was hateful,” later adding “I can get angry about misogyny and racist rhetoric and ALSO very much agree that Charlie Kirk’s murder was…deplorable in every way imaginable.” This kind of gross characterization of fair criticism was the rule. The right of course also found the marginal instances of actual celebration of Kirk’s death and aggressively hyped them as examples of what the entire left was doing, but this was not in fact a reasonable representation of what was happening.
The usual cast of characters began railroading the left. Powerful Trump administration figures, including JD Vance, loudly scolded the left for its reaction and primed his base with vague claims that “left-wing extremism” was “part of the reason” Kirk was killed. Figures closer to the center like Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein moderated those allegations, but still repeated them; Douthat, for example, suggested that “polls showing a greater left-wing willingness to take joy in an opponent’s death ring true”. And even some leftists got in a few rounds of respectable left-punching. With the table set, Trump darkly warned that there would be “investigations.”
Within a month, however, most Americans had already lost interest. In November, the left’s attention was almost entirely consumed by the Epstein Files. On the right Kirk’s death became surrounded by influencer beefs (mostly pitting Candace Owens against everyone) and with growing irritation with Erika Kirk, who seemed to be enjoying her newfound celebrity a little too much. Oddly enough, the real disrespect for Kirk belatedly came not from his critics on the left, but from largely apolitical posters who decided it’d be funny to start pasting his face into unrelated images.
None of this bears any resemblance to the tidal waves of grotesque sadism from the right that hit after the killings of Good and Pretti. Just consider for example justifications for the murders, something that was almost entirely absent from Kirk’s killing. The tamest response from the right has been to insist, against all evidence and with no consideration for proportionality, that the killings were in self defense. The mainstream response, echoed all the way up to the administration, has been to wed those self-defense arguments with completely baseless innuendo about their Good and Pretti’s supposed ties to terrorism. The extreme response, meanwhile, has been to declare that Good and Pretti’s (alleged) alignment with the liberal-left was itself adequate justification for the murders. Right now, X is completely overrun with this kind of “this is war” rhetoric. But the point here isn’t just that the most extreme justifications for their deaths are more unconscionable than anything we saw on the left; it is that the entire spectrum of responses on the right insist that the killing were justified, something that was considered out of bounds and utterly damning in Kirk’s case, and that was also exceedingly rare.
It gets worse, of course. In Good’s killing, for example, a whole knife-twisting argument emerged that Good was taking a risk assuming that she wouldn’t be killed by ICE agents, and that her willingness to take this risk was proof that she didn’t really love the family she left behind (which is, in turn, proof that leftists in general do not love their families). And while no one of the liberal-left, as far as I can tell, tried to use Kirk’s death to intimidate other right-wing pundits, this has been a mainstream talking point on the right ever since Good’s murder: even ICE agents themselves are on camera saying “didn’t you learn, that’s why we killed that lesbian bitch” to law-abiding observers.
Unfortunately, I’ve committed the discourse-crime here of arguing that the behavior of the left and right has not in fact been perfectly symmetrical, which means that it’s just a matter of time until I start getting emails and social media comments complaining about bias. The actual record, however, is completely unambiguous. And if our politics can’t start seeing the rabid sociopaths of the hard right for who they really are, this kind of violence will only get worse.
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