First, with regards to the yougov survey, the survey didn't actually say that was limited to non-violent public figures. I would interpret the question as written as including Osama Bin Ladin and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as public figures. While publicly gloating about their deaths might be a bit much, I can certainly see a valid reason to feel a certain amount of private happiness at news of their deaths.
The asymmetry is nevertheless very stark. It seems implausible to me that the Democrats are so much more likely to celebrate the death of terrorists in the Middle East than Republicans are. (Indeed, the hypothesis reminds me of "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup": https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ , which had a few words to say on this.) It also seems implausible to me that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi would be understood by most people to be a "public figure," although obviously you feel differently.
Even if both those things I find implausible are true, though, I think this is a reasonable inference to draw: if considerably less than half of Political Party #1 always condemns celebrations of an opponent's death (including both violent and non-violent opponents), while considerably *more* than half of Political Party #2 *does* always condemn celebrations of an opponent's death (including both violent and non-violent opponents), it is extremely likely that both these things are true:
(1) a double-digit fraction of Political Party #1 will not always condemn celebrations of a non-violent opponent's death, and
(2) whatever that fraction turns out to be for Political Party #1, it will be much larger than the fraction in Political Party #2.
So this hypothesis could, if its (problematic) premises are accurate, *attenuate* the problem I see in our politics right now, but I don't think it can *eliminate* that problem I see. Moreover, this hypothesis does not seem congruent with my observations years ago about partisan obituaries. (Maybe my observations were wrong, but I obviously am inclined to think they are not!)
Second, in terms of "never speak ill of the dead", I think there needs to be an exception here for honest recognition of deaths which really were directly traceable to the deceased's own choices.
For example, Remi Lucidi, a professional french daredevil who made his name posting self-taken photos on instagram of himself climbing around unsecured on the tops of skyscrapers, usually illegally or otherwise without permission of the buildings owners.
He died in Hong Kong after lying to a security guard to gain entrance, then using an interior access door to secretly reach the rooftop.... and then the door locked behind him and nobody knew he was up there. A maid reported seeing him tapping on a window for help 90 minutes later, so she called the police. It's not like 40th floor windows actually open, so there's not much else she could have done. He's believed to have gotten tired and slipped up somehow shortly afterwards, resulting in him falling to his death. His camera with selfies was left on the roof afterwards.
I think we can all agree, even in the first day after his death, that Remi Lucidi's death was the direct result of a foolish risk he himself took, and that his death was a valuable lesson in the importance of good safety procedures, like having permission, filing your plans ahead of time, using safety lines, climbing with a partner, etc, etc.
Or Felix Baumgartner, world record holder for skydiving from the edge of space and breaking the speed of sound using only gravity and his own body. As near as we can tell, he later suffered a heart attack in mid-air while paragliding above Italy, and was already dead before he ever hit the ground. Saying something like "He died as he lived" or "What a way to go" or "He probably would have wanted it that way" does not seem unreasonable, as long as you don't say it directly to his family when you don't know them very well.
I don't think this counts as speaking ill of the dead, because there is no malice in it. These men were not killed by vicious habits, but, at worst, by poor judgment (in Lucidi's case), and nobody attributes vicious habits to them. There's a criticism of their judgment, perhaps, but not of their virtue or basic decency. The latter is what the taboo is against.
It's hard to see "He probably would have wanted it that way" as speaking ill of the dead at all, if it's sincere, especially when it's probably true. My grandmother died during a short period when nobody was paying close attention to her, just after she was surrounded by her whole family. She probably really did want it that way. I don't see any barb in that.
In Lucidi's case, I agree everyone would have *known* immediately that it was a foolish risk, and I don't think it would be "speaking ill of the dead" to use his death as safety advice. At the same time, though, can't that wait a week? Is there any reason to bring it up, especially on the public Internet where everyone can see? No new safety protocols or legislation is going to have a make-or-break problem if it's delayed for two weeks while his family mourns. So, while I don't think it's the same sort of thing as what we see here (because not an attack on their goodness), I also wonder why we couldn't extend the norm to his case anyway.
That's fair. Still, I could see an argument that, say, Instagram might want to shut down his account and put up a warning page about "don't do this at home kids" shortly after the news broke, or that more professional stuntmen might want to post some sort of polite, measured reaction videos which briefly mention the Lucidi incident, express condolence to the family, and then go into a detailed explanation why the practice of unsecured rooftopping is overly dangerous, and this stuntman is too professional to ever do such a thing, and these are the safety measures he always takes on rooftops.
Likewise, knowingly and deliberately runnings ads for hunting rifles next to news columns about Charlie Kirk's death would be horrible. On the other hand, the next time some celebrity dies from what is clearly a voluntary use of illegal drugs leading to overdose, running ads next to those news columns about not doing drugs and where to find addiction treatments, does not seem completely out of line.
As you said, there's a clear difference between saying "This person is dead and he deserved it because he's a bad person" verus saying "This person is dead, we have a pretty good idea why, and here's the information you need to avoid ending up the same way."
Likewise, Notice to Airmen alerts, describing things pilots have to know to do their jobs safely, and which are generally sent out as quickly as possible after an accident with an identifiable cause... are going to sometimes say things like "The cause of this accident was two-fold: pilot error, PLUS a defect of some type. If you're a pilot, these are the steps you can take to avoid making the same possibly understandable error, and this is how you can check for the mechanical defect on your plane."
From a certain point of view, a lot of pilots consider accusing a dead guy of pilot error to be distasteful, especially if not backed by strong evidence... but on the other hand, if there is an identifiable safety concern, they really do need to know as quickly as possible. Taking the middle ground of saying "we don't know why he made this error, and it might even have been an understandable mistake under the circumstances, but fellow pilots still need to know about it right away..." does not seem unreasonable.
First of all, I'm glad someone besides me prays for dead bad guys like Osama bin Laden and George Tiller (although I have to resist the urge to write them off as bound for hell -- we are forbidden to judge)
I didn't know that much about Charlie Kirk when he was alive. I'm learning a lot about his life after his demise. I don't like Trump supporters on principle, and there is much I don't like about Kirk, but some things I've seen of him I do like, such as his defense of unborn life.
And his wife and small children didn't deserve to lose their husband and father. I'm heartbroken to hear that his 3 year old was there and saw her father get shot. No small child should ever see that happen to anyone, let alone her father.
"This rule is an expression of the Christian charity that lies at the foundation of our civilization, and at the foundations of our souls."
I think a reason that rule has eroded is that America, and the entire western world, is less Christian. The sense of 'there but for the grace of God go I' is faded and the spiritual work of mercy of praying for the dead is no longer obliged. So why would that norm remain when many of the critical reasons for it are no longer believed?
Personally I try to build the habit of always praying for whoever is in danger whenever I hear sirens or hear news that someone died. And I see obituaries roughly a couple times a week since my employer emails them to everyone whenever someone with a connection dies, so I try to always read them and pray for that deceased person. Those habits I try to build, well they're just trying to build up the ability to enact that principle even for someone I loathe. Not that I've ever really thought about it formally like that before.
Given his prominence as a public figure, different people may find different reasons to mourn his death (and I will not here detail such reasons as I see them), but his death should be mourned.
To be clear, I don't think anyone has to *mourn* Charlie Kirk. I did not mourn Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It is sufficient to offer condolences, say one kind thing about the person, offer a prayer for the soul or a "may her memory be a blessing," and then shut up, trying not to succumb to interior hatred.
In fact, in extremis, one can just shut up.
I sense you are in extremis, and are just shutting up. That is honorable, non-vile behavior.
Thanks for these reflections, James. I especially appreciated the contextualizing of Mr. Kirk's statements -- which were widely misquoted even as single-sentence quotes. For example, some people misquoted him as specifically saying the 2nd amendment was worth some "mass shootings." Those were the very tragedies he proceeded to offer practical approaches to.
I would not have used the phrase "worth it" (and maybe if he were sitting down and writing a serious article he wouldn't have either). More neutral, perhaps, to say some gun deaths are "the price we pay" for a policy of defending gun ownership for its legitimate purposes. When someone first quoted (or misquoted) his sentence to me, my reaction was that it was technically true, just as some traffic deaths are the price we pay for, for example, letting Montana have an 80 MPH highway speed limit. (We just drove through there recently.) I recall reading about some past federal calculations on how much regulation of things like potentially polluting substances should be allowed in light of the lives that the regulation might save. Some bean counters actually came up with a dollar figure for the worth of a human life, to be applied to future policies... Clearly there are ways to make those conversations very crass indeed, but as a nation we frequently make some rough trade-offs like this. For me personally, I'm fairly sure I'd be far more likely to accidentally put a bullet in myself or a member of my family than to become the hero who stops a potential mass shooter.
All this is in the context of vociferous agreement with your first and most important statement: It doesn't matter. You don't go around defending the violent murder of someone for having ideas that disagree with yours. That way madness lies.
It's not quite the worth of the human life. Technically it's how much effort you would reasonably spend on avoiding a random human death.
Basically, it goes something likely this: If you, personally, could spend $1 on a bike-mounted flashlight, and if having a bike-mounted-flashlight would change your odds of dying in a bike accident from 2 chances in 1 million to 1 chance in 1 million, would you spend the dollar? If the answer is yes for most people in that situation, that implies that most people will spend $1 million dollars to save themselves from a random death.
If you do enough work on mapping out people's revealed preferences for what they actually do when indirectly asked those sorts of questions every day of their lives, you get a scatterplot of roughly how much people value their own lives. or other people's lives.
A rough rule-of-thumb is that in year 2000 dollars, that americans will spend about 1 million dollars to save their own life from random accidents almost entirely under their own control, and about 10 million dollars to save a stranger's life from random accidents the stranger didn't know were possibilities and couldn't have done anything to protect themselves from. So protecting yourself as a pedestrian on the street is $1million, protecting a stranger from pollution in their water supply is $10 million. Because as a pedestrian, you could always have just chosen to be more careful, follow the rules more consistently, and avoid walking in dangerous circumstances, but a stranger has to drink water and doesn't know if it might be polluted.
And then there are things which fall somewhere in the middle between 'entirely under your own control' vs 'nothing you can do to avoid it', so those have a value somewhere between 1 and 10 million. Also, some industries are more cautious about some types of accidents than other industries, so some industries use different planning numbers.
You're not actually buying and selling human lives, you're just buying and selling risk management.
Very nice post! As someone who never liked Kirk that much, the celebrations of his death are just repulsive to me. People have way too little value for human life. Governor Cox had it right when telling people to touch grass.
In any circumstance, I also particularly dislike people harping on his pro-2A advocacy. The “some gun deaths are worth it” (paraphrasing here) quote was badly phrased in my opinion, but what he was conveying was clear and agreeable. His point was basically “There will always be a cost of living in a free society.”
May he rest in peace. Prayers to his wife and children as well.
I apologize! I plead ignorance. My understanding of Total Depravity was that *everyone* deserves death, through and through, and that God's decision to save the Elect anyway is therefore an even greater sign of His generosity than in, say, Catholic soteriology (where we die because of original sin but really come to deserve it through actual sin).
But what I know of Calvinism is gleaned from a few weeks in the high school comparative religions course and scattershot encounters in the years since, which, clearly, is inadequate.
In a post about reducing hate and misunderstanding, it was certainly not my intent to spread more. I apologize.
Total depravity isn't directly related to what we deserve from God; rather, it states that everything you do is tainted by sin in some way, shape, or form, that your natural inclination is towards sin, and that you won't turn to God without the work of the Trinity.
However, as to what we deserve from God, Calvinists do hold that God would be within His rights to slay us for our rebellion against Him, but that it is wrong for us to enact that judgment without His explicit orders. Think of how in some of the OT prophets God says to some of the nations "I used you to enact judgement on my people, but what you did was wrong, so now I will judge you as well."
I agree with almost all of your post, but I find the discussion of the YouGov poll and this alleged "asymmetric problem" annoying. (I'm trying to moderate my language here, my initial draft had much stronger words that I didn't feel were justifiable on reflection. Progress?) I'll try to put into words the source of that annoyance, for whatever it's worth:
1. Running polls right after major partisan-coded events, and reporting the results with no broader context of similar polls done after opposite-partisan-coded events, is bad and wrong. Case in point, look at a series of polls on whether the economy is getting better or worse: https://today.yougov.com/economy/articles/48353-democrats-republicans-different-views-of-american-economy-poll -- you can tell whatever asymmetry story you like by zooming in on one particular part of that graph. But the actual story is the poll results over time.
2. I wasn't able to find a series of polls that match the one you reference, unfortunately. That would be what I would like to have seen (per #1). But I found a set of polls that I think speak to a related important trend where a countervailing asymmetry exists: how big of a problem is political violence, anyway? https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll
Democrats have a pretty consistent percentage of people who believe it is a problem, 44-58%, regardless of who was most recently and prominently attacked. Republicans seem to have a wildly different view on this depending on who was most recently attacked: 31-67%. My point here isn't that I actually believe this is the whole story (I'd need to see a lot more than just these 6 poll results to take a strong opinion on it), but rather that you can easily paint the opposite picture of the problem when looking at a few polls.
3. But what I think most annoying about this discussion is that I think it is completely missing the forest for the trees. Maybe it's just my algorithm/bias (feel free to correct me with data if you have it), but here's an asymmetric trend I notice that I think is several orders of magnitude more important on this topic than whether or not we speak ill of the dead: when Democratic/left-wing figures get violently attacked, other Democratic figures (politicians and influencers) call for de-escalation and condemn political violence. The worst they typically do is say or imply that this is a one-sided problem with right-wing violence. When Republican/right-wing figures get violently attacked, other Republican figures (politicians and influencers) call for reprisals and openly speculate about civil war. The best that they typically do is say or imply that this is a one-sided problem with the left-wing violence.
I agree that it's probably not a stable equilibrium to say "my opponents deserve to die, but no one should deliver them their just deserts." But it's definitely not a stable equilibrium for one side to always try to de-escalate and the other side to always try to escalate.
It might be that I am suffering from a bias in time rather than a bias in bubble? My views on this were largely formed and locked in long before I wrote "An Asymmetry Observed: Partisan Obituaries" in 2021: https://ropersanchor.jamesjheaney.com/2021/07/06/an-asymmetry-observed-partisan-obituaries/ . This YouGov poll (the first I have ever seen to ask this question) offered good empirical support for an asymmetry I already recognized.
There was another poll in April that showed around 55% of left-wingers thought it was at least "somewhat justified" to kill Donald Trump. I did not much of that poll at the time, because the poll did not cover right-wingers (which was both very suspicious as a polling choice and prevented us from establishing a baseline). But it fits both what I saw and what this poll finds. I would love to see a longer polling series on this "celebrating opponents' death" question -- and, obviously, I would be happy to be wrong, and to discover that this is just another question like the economy where (we have known for a long time) everyone's views change on a dime based on the party in power (arguably Republicans' more than Democrats').
As for your third point... I'm not quite sure what to make of it. When I developed my views about asymmetrical partisan attitudes toward violence, back in the years leading up to 2021, the Right had no problem at all in this department (if memory serves). The Right very enthusiastically denounced violence and tried to de-escalate after Gabby Giffords, Heather Heyer, and the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood attack. Even January 6 was still considered Bad throughout the Right in early 2021! I don't think there was any asymmetry at the time.
I'm very open to the idea that Right-wing norms around this have eroded since then. I have a feeling there's something to it. Indeed, I have a feeling that the Right's growing sense that the Left *actually* wants to kill us has a lot to do with how the Right's response has evolved over the past few years! (It has certainly helped Donald Trump.) For all that, though, I'm not quite sure what you mean by this: "When Republican/right-wing figures get violently attacked, other Republican figures (politicians and influencers) call for reprisals and openly speculate about civil war."
Let's take, for example, Donald Trump, who is emblematic of every bad influence in the Republican Party. He's awful. After Hortman's murder, he posted a perfunctory statement condemning political violence and denouncing the shooting. After Kirk's murder, he posted a lot more stuff; he clearly loves Kirk more and isn't shy about showing it (this is bad). But in, say, his 4-minute video about the killing, Trump condemned political violence, he praised Kirk's spirit of open debate. He very much did the thing you mentioned the Left doing where he pretended this is a one-sided problem with left-wing violence. He promised law enforcement would find and prosecute all those responsible. He complained vigorously about left-wing rhetoric that he saw as leading to the violence, just as Giffords supporters complained vigorously about right-wing rhetoric after he shooting years ago. There were no riots. Minneapolis did not burn as it did five years ago. He did not call for violent reprisals or speculate about civil war.
As for escalation, I don't think there's been any escalation. If anything, the Right's response to this has been relatively tame. For example, the Right has now, in response to all this, fully embraced cancellation, something it had not done five years ago. But the Right's cancellation criterion is "publicly celebrating or excusing the murder of an innocent man," whereas the Left's many cancellation criterion, as far back as ten years ago, already included "making a political donation to a popular, winning political campaign," ( https://ropersanchor.jamesjheaney.com/2014/04/08/re-your-ire-is-misdirected/ ). That's not an escalation, because it's still less firepower than the other side was already using.
So, what (or whom) are some particular asymmetrical examples that you have in mind here?
(Is it me? But I've been speculating about civil war on this blog for the past five years, on social media for the past ten, and in private for the past sixteen or seventeen. I've believed a civil war is slowly coming into view for a really long time.)
Yet, for all that, I still think you're probably onto something. It *does* feel like *something* has changed about how the Right responds to political violence, probably recently, and not for the better. Perhaps if we can nail down better what phenomenon we are looking at, we can examine it better.
I think both (1) there's a difference between how you respond when your side is attacked vs when your side is doing the attacking (which was my original point) and (2) something has changed in the right wing responses to events of this kind in general.
On (1), the older examples you cite are all right-wing attacks, not right-wing victims. In general, I think the right has been more willing to use de-escalatory rhetoric in those cases and denounce violence. But when we look at the response to the assassination of Kirk and the attempted assassinations of Trump, as compared with how the Democrats responded to the Hortman et al type cases, that's where you see the big asymmetry that I was pointing to. As I said, major Democratic figures have (almost?) universally had the normal range of "both sides need to turn the temperature down" to "you Republicans need to turn the temperature down" in response to these events. Meanwhile, here are some responses from major Republican/right wing figures to the Kirk assassination:
Christopher Landau, Deputy Sec of State, threatening (on his official State Dept account!) to deport people for "praising, rationalizing, or making light of" the assassination (https://x.com/DeputySecState/status/1966114506116927972#m).
Representative Clay Higgins on how he plans to use the power of the federal government to seek reprisals against people who "belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk." "I’m going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that big tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content, the user to be banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER. I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked." (https://x.com/RepClayHiggins/status/1966114479042593251) -- FWIW, I think there's a huge difference between using the power of the federal government to cancel people vs using public pressure. Both are bad IMO but I don't think comparable.
Stephen Miller, I don't have a super clear quote for. I'll let you be the judge of where this sits: https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1966693077818765667#m (to me, this reads as an announcement that he thinks this is justification to prosecute roughly every Democratic/left-wing organization in the country)
Matt Walsh says, "It's too late to turn the temperature down. This is not a time to hold hands, this is a time for justice. This is a time for good to fight back against evil. This is time for the righteous to prevail." (https://x.com/realDailyWire/status/1966238479005954530#m) -- feel free to watch the whole video if you think this may be out of context. I have, and I think it's clear he's not talking about finding and punishing the shooter here, he's talking about escalation. He claims later (https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1966473080726749421#m) that he meant "legally, non-violently" fighting, not political violence. Of course, he also said: "I know some of you want to do the kumbaya thing. You want to say that the celebration of Charlie’s death is only happening on the fringes. I’m sorry but that’s just not true. They jeered and heckled him in CONGRESS yesterday. The left wants us dead. That is the mainstream view. It just is. It’s the truth. They couldn’t be any clearer about it. Stop lying to yourself. Face the facts, and act accordingly." (https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1966149973399187884#m) so take that for what it's worth. Donald Trump Jr. agreed with the latter (https://x.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1966518667992010768#m).
Laura Loomer says: "I’m sick of seeing conservatives say we need more debate and more conversations with the Left. No, we don’t. These people are evil at their core. [...] You just have to crush their movement and lock them up." (https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1966815142030491734#m)
I'd quote Tim Pool saying that this means civil war, except I'm not sure if it'd be in reference to Charlie Kirk or if he just has that message scheduled for every Wednesday.
I'm sure I could find more stuff, but I think this says something. I don't think you could create anything remotely like this compilation from figures of similar prominence on the Democratic/left-wing side in response to any of the recent murders or attacks on their side. And I left out of this compilation all the messages that were way beyond what most major Democrats said in response to attacks on them -- I only included what seemed to me to be clear calls for reprisals. But we also have Trump and tons of other major right-wing figures making the least measured condemnations of the left possible -- there is nothing like a Biden-style statement of "I'm not talking about all Democrats, just the radical leftists who call for violence" to be found. They are saying that, actually, it *is* Democrats at large. The left as a whole is responsible.
On (2): Republicans are perhaps even more unhinged when it comes to violence against Democrats. I can understand a swell of emotion (or black ooze, perhaps) in the wake of a tragedy like Kirk's murder, and saying some unhinged stuff. But Republicans are unhinged *when their side is doing the violence.* This is probably just part of the broader Alex Jonesification of the right-wing, but in the wake of I think every recent act of political violence by the right against Democrats, a huge segment of the Republican/right-wing leaders have promoted conspiracy theories, mocked the victims, and generally had a blase attitude about the whole thing. This includes Kirk himself. (To be clear, this doesn't justify the attack on him.) I'm not going to deep dive into providing quotes and such here, but it again goes from the top (Trump) on down to Congressmen and major influencers/media figures. (Not all, of course. There are plenty of Republicans still following the old norms, but they are generally not the rising stars of the party, they are the old guard still clinging on.) If we disagree about this, I can dig stuff up though.
Contrast this with the recent Democratic response to Kirk's murder - essentially no Democrats of significance (that I'm aware of) have speculated that this was a "false flag" or implied it wasn't a big deal or tried to downplay the problem of political violence. People anywhere close to Democratic politics who did anything like that have been fired by their own organizations (e.g., Matthew Dowd at MSNBC). To find people saying the kinds of things that major figures on the right-wing said, you have to search out nobodies -- you aren't seeing Democratic lawmakers or major pundits doing this. (Feel free to provide counterexamples, it's hard to prove a negative so I relied on a lack of reporting of this as my justification.)
And that's what I think the real asymmetry is. Maybe the Democrats/left are more accepting of giving harsh criticism of people soon after die. But the Republicans/right are more accepting of political violence itself and blaming the victims of that violence. And Republicans are much more willing to escalate rather than call for de-escalation. I'll even go so far as to say it's possible that rank-and-file Republicans are better than rank-and-file Democrats on this, but the difference at the top is dramatic and obvious.
Ah, I'm glad you clarified, because, you're right, I was obviously misunderstanding even what category of violent attacks you were looking toward! And this is something I probably need to think through a little more beyond this off-the-cuff, let's-get-words-on-paper-before-the-workweek-starts comment. Yet I'd like to sound you out on two points:
(1) Reprisals.
I never know how much Tumblr memes break containment, because my wife is fully Tumblr-pilled and so ignorant of the rest of the Internet that she's never heard of President Bobcat, but feeds me a lot of whatever's going around Tumblr right now. (Today, it's inexplicably animations from jugglinglab.org?) So I'm going to explain this whole meme, but it's okay because it's funny.
One shining summer day in 2013, someone on Tumblr wrote:
> i need feminism because when jesus does a magic trick it’s a goddamn miracle but when a woman does a magic trick she gets burned at the stake
This post made the rounds and was racking up the likes and reblogs when someone (now famously) replied:
> i mean they did also kill jesus. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you’re coming from here but they very much did kill jesus.
Now, with reprisals:
I mean, after January 6, the Democrats did also try to put Donald Trump in prison for the rest of his life. That was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you're coming from but they did very much reprise against Donald Trump.
Not just Trump, either: the cancellations that followed destroyed the lives of hundreds of people for mere *presence* at the J6 rally, even fully lawfully. Loads of people who had non-violently broken the law (often for mere entry into the Capitol long after it had been forced open) were arrested, prosecuted, and sent to prison for surprisingly lengthy sentences. This was somewhat egregious, because the Biden Administration was *simultaneously* arguing to let the arsonist who had burned a man to death in Minneapolis in the Floyd Riots off with a warning (because racism). The Chapo Trap House guy (whom I take to be roughly on par with Laura Loomer/Tim Pool/Matt Walsh) was saying in *three years later* that the DNC "should have brought out the J6 defendants in shackles and had their families denounce them on stage." ( https://x.com/willmenaker/status/1827016312092275069 ) As with most things Chapo, I suspect this was unserious hyperbole at one level, but also absolutely serious if the Overton window shifted enough to allow it.
All of which is to say: The Democrats went hyper-nuclear with reprisals after J6.
Now, as I made exhaustingly clear on this blog at the time, I think the Democrats had not only the right, but the *duty* to go after Donald Trump. I think it is to the everlasting shame of the Republicans that they failed to convict him at the second impeachment. (Oh, right, he also got impeached.) I thought there were some excesses, but I did not consider them hugely blameworthy, given the gravity of what had happened. (And here is an asymmetry for you: it was, in 2020, unimaginable that any plausible Democratic president would have done anything even close to resembling what Trump did on J6.)
But, at the same time, I'm having a hard time remembering "a Biden-style statement of 'I'm not talking about all [Republicans], just the radical [right-wingers] who call for violence'," since the *actual* Joe Biden premised the 2022 midterm campaign on his thesis that it was a "battle for the soul of the nation" and that "MAGA Republicans" -- to include essentially the entire GOP candidate slate and a majority of its voters -- were a threat to the country and to democracy itself.
Again, I'm having a hard time really *blaming* Democrats for this, because J6 was such a damaging event and Democrats would never have done it. (They had their own ways of trying to cheat the 2020 election, mostly through juking ballot deadlines through sympathetic courts, but all non-violent and under something like the color of law.) But it's also hard for me to credit the idea that Republican reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk is asymmetrically oriented around reprisals.
What do you think about this?
(2) You contend that many right-wing leaders promote conspiracy theories about shooters who attack left-wingers. This is true, and I'm sure it is at least somewhat asymmetrically true because, as you say, the Right is asymmetrically conspiratorial (something I have a hard time blaming them for, but it's a true weakness).
But I just came off a couple of news cycles in which multiple left-wing friends of mine were trying to tell me that it was now established that Tyler Robinson was actually a Groyper radicalized by Nick Fuentes, citing left-wing thought leaders for this claim, including Vanity Fair. (It could still turn out to be true, but it seems very unlikely and certainly hasn't been established at this point.) (Also, it should be said: Vanity Fair didn't say outright that Robinson was a Groyper; it just implied it.) I suppose this is not *literally* calling it a false flag, but it is very much of a piece with right-wing attempts to shift responsibility for Vance Boelter to the opposition by pointing out Boelter had been appointed to a couple no-name boards by Tim Walz.
I also had one of my left-wing friends explain to me today that David French's NYT column today was flawed, because French overlooked the "fact" that both Trump assassins were conservatives, and so was the arsonist who attacked Josh Shapiro. My mother-in-law believed Trump had faked the damage to his ear (and that the assassination attempt was therefore a Trump plan) and told me she learned this from MSNBC. Perhaps she exaggerated? I don't really watch MSNBC (or any cable news). I hope she no longer believes it. All this *seems* to be coming from prominent left-wing thought leaders.
So my memory/experience is that, yes, both sides engage in a considerable amount of conspiracy theorizing whenever the other side gets attacked. While there's almost certainly *some* asymmetry there, it doesn't strike me at first impression that the asymmetry is very large or (therefore) very important.
I'm a little confused by the point about reprisals for J6. Here's a few disanalogies that I think are very relevant (and it kind of seems like you do too? I'm not sure where we actually disagree):
1. J6 was actually organized and promoted at the highest level by the President of the United States and leader of the Republican Party. It was an insurrection aimed at overthrowing our government and keeping someone in power who had just lost an election; an election where there were no credible reasons to dispute the results, and the people who organized the event either knew or very much should have known that there were no credible reasons to dispute the results. So, I mean, Trump also did actually commit extremely serious crimes. That was a pretty significant thing that happened. Like I understand where you're coming from but Trump really did try to coup the government before they tried to put him in jail.
2. Despite that, my memory (and boy oh boy could this be wrong five years later) is that the Democrats were not talking about declaring the entirety of the Republican Party a domestic terrorist organization, were not talking about throwing all rich Republican donors into prison, were not searching social media accounts of federal government employees and members of the military to see if any had made mentions of support for J6ers in order to fire them (I hadn't seen this at the time of my last comment, but apparently this is actively going on right now wrt comments about Kirk), etc. I don't know enough about the details of specific cases you might be referring to in terms of outsized sentences being imposed. But, again, we are talking about people who participated (wittingly or unwittingly, though I think the latter is pretty unlikely) in an insurrection. At some point we have to consider the proportionality of responses to the actions being responded to. Putting that aside, I'll note that I don't believe there was any talk of retaliating in kind or expanding beyond those people and groups who were directly involved in the event.
3. Unfortunately, Laura Loomer, Matt Walsh, and Tim Pool are not to the Republican Party what the Chapo Trap House types are to the Democratic Party. Would that it were so!* Loomer, et al are highly supportive of and involved with Trump and the Republican Party. Loomer especially has extremely tight ties to the President, serving as an unofficial sometimes-advisor (and only because Trump's other advisors talked him out of making her an official one). CTH mostly hates the Democratic Party and its leadership, probably criticizes them more (and more viciously) than they do Republicans. They are not advising Democratic Party leadership. This is maybe just another party asymmetry, but elected Democrats generally don't associate themselves with these kinds of outlets and these left-wing alternative media outlets are generally hostile to Democrats. So I don't really take their comments as representing the same level of connection with actual power and influence. To get people in the alt-media space who have similar connections as Loomer, Walsh, and Pool, I think you'd need to be talking about folks like Crooked Media (Pod Save America, etc), maybe the Majority Report and The Young Turks (but they mostly have connections with relatively minor figures, and many of those connections have weakened as they've become more extreme).
(*The monkey's paw curls, and the radical left takes over the Democratic Party...)
So, my summary is that the following facts matter a lot in my analysis:
1. There was actually an insurrection and attempted coup that was directed from the top of the Republican Party and multiple organizations were actively involved and plotting the same result;
2. Despite this, Democrats focused on people actually, tangibly involved in an insurrection and attempted coup when dealing out "reprisals" (normal legal proceedings);
3. Democratic leaders were not broadly calling for reprisals against everyone who supported or joked about or was insufficiently contrite about what happened;
4. The crazy voices calling for more extreme responses were not among the top elected and appointed Democratic politicians, or even media figures with substantial ties to the party, but rather marginalized radicals who hate the Democrats almost as much (or perhaps sometimes more than) the Republicans;
5. In contrast, the crazy voices calling for extreme responses on the right are top figures both in party, including the President himself in many cases, and media figures who are both extremely supportive of and deeply connected to top members of the party.
I don't think I can restrain myself in responding to the point about the Joe Biden speech, so a quick coda on that in particular: First, Biden was not calling for anyone to be imprisoned or attacked, or even silenced. He explicitly said they have a right to say the things they say. Furthermore, he specifically made calls for *everyone* to reject political violence. Not for Republicans to reject political violence, for everyone to reject it. This is just not happening on the right. As far as who he was talking about in the speech, it is unfortunate that despite his stated intention to only refer to a minority with the label MAGA Republican, the descriptive criterion he gave (deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election) applied to the majority of Republicans. But an important contrast (without getting into the question of whether his level of condemnation was appropriate): he at least tried to make a distinction. I am seeing no one on the right doing this. All Democrats and left-wingers are lumped together, and all are responsible for the most extreme people (who, as I said before, largely hate the Democrats). If you think there is even a remote symmetry between how Biden talked about Republicans and how Trump talks about Democrats, we may just be too far apart on this.
Re: (2) -- I think the big asymmetry I want to point out here is that you are citing your friends talking, and I am citing some of the largest voices on the right, including the President of the United States. Maybe there are prominent people on the Democratic side who have said similar things, but my guess is that it's fairly limited, it's not major elected officials or party thought leaders. That said, I also don't watch mainstream news (or alternative news for the most part) so I can't speak with great authority on what goes on at MSNBC (though again, they just fired a guy for suggesting that Kirk helped produce the environment where things like this happen). I don't think it's a mainstream view among Democrats that the assassination attempt on Trump was faked. I think it is a mainstream view among Republicans that the J6 riot was either orchestrated or largely inflamed by undercover FBI or antifa. I don't think major Democratic figures were mocking Trump after his assassination attempt. The highest level of elected Republicans and media figures were mocking Paul and Nancy Pelosi. I could definitely be wrong about all this, and the asymmetry might not be nearly as large as I perceive it to be. But from what I've seen, there's a huge asymmetry with conspiracy theorizing and downplaying events where the other side gets attacked, while there is also a huge asymmetry in escalating when their own side gets attacked.
In the immediate wake of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, here are reactions from various prominent elected figures on the left of the Democratic Party (or associated thereto):
Now, are all of those initial posts boilerplate? Yes. You could swap the name "Charlie Kirk" for any other hypothetical victim (and I hope there will be no more victims, as vain as I know that hope to be) and all of them could make the exact same statement. But all of them did make those posts. Every single one of them did rightly condemn the act, and political violence in general. (You may consider later comments they made, particularly speaking extemporaneously, to be less helpful; I have found ones from Warren, Pritzker and Mamdani which you may classify as such.)
On the other hand, what I recall of the reaction of Republicans to the killing of Melissa Hortman (and her husband, and an attack on a state Senator and his wife) was largely Mike Lee's initial reaction, in which he appeared to make light of the event (though he later retracted the comments). The Deseret News editorial board (an LDS Church publication) condemned him for it: https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2025/06/17/wasatch-front-shootings-dont-define-who-we-are/ (Doubly so in light of two tragic shootings in and around Salt Lake City at that time which claimed four lives, including an eight-month-old infant.) Unfortunately, at this time, most attempts on my part to search for "<name of elected Republican> hortman shooting" on Google either return responses to Kirk's killing or lefties on Reddit or Instagram complaining about the perceived difference in reaction (or lack thereof) from prominent Republicans to the two events. The only ones I could find after ten minutes of searching (about the same amount of time I spent finding all the above statements about Kirk, but of course there would be a recency bias with that) were these statements from Susan Collins and Minnesota Republicans (Tom Emmer, jointly with Amy Klobuchar, and Lisa Demuth):
So I think that some--though hardly all--of the frustration being seen right now, sometimes in part expressing itself as people egregiously making light of, dismissing, excusing, justifying or even celebrating Kirk's death (or worse, condemning those who condemn his death, a reaction I naively thought it was not even possible for someone to have), stems from this apparent disparity in response to the two killings from high-profile political opponents of the deceased.
My view, and the view I wish everyone shared on this, is that both Kirk's and Hortman's deaths were reprehensible tragedies that should never have occurred and the like of which should never be seen again, and I hope that whoever committed each of those heinous acts, if found in a court of competent jurisdiction to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, goes to jail for a very long time. But, and this may well be a consequence of my own media bubble, this is not what I have seen, in either case.
EDIT: I will give him credit; I found this statement from Donald Trump on Hortman's killing after filtering out the Kirk results:
To be clear at the outset: nothing of what I am about to say in any way excuses any of the behaviour I am about to comment upon. All of it was gross. I hope for all the victims in the incidents upon which I will comment that they receive justice.
First, I will remark upon the October 28, 2022 assault of Paul Pelosi. (I use the criminal term "assault" because the accused was convicted in court of that crime, in addition to kidnapping, burglary and false imprisonment. Between federal and state sentences, he will spend the rest of his life in jail.)
On that day a man entered the home of then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. Not finding her there, he proceeded to ask her eighty-two-year-old husband Paul where she was, and assaulted him. Later, he stated that he had intended to hold the eighty-two-year-old Speaker hostage and attempt to force her to confess that she had lied about "Russiagate", including, he said, a willingness to "break her kneecaps".
I do not recall much if any condemnation coming from the right after these remarks. Trump Jr. campaigned vigorously on behalf of his father in 2024, such as delivering this speech in Arizona just days before the election, a state which his father won in that election: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HebJqqW5zX0 Since then, he has again been chosen to jointly head the trust overseeing the President's assets along with his siblings, as he did in his father's first term: https://www.reuters.com/business/trump-will-separate-himself-family-business-wsj-reports-2025-01-10/
The second incident which I will highlight is the killing of Speaker Emerita of the Minnesota House of Representatives Melissa Hortman.
I will further set the stage by remarking on two shootings in Utah (see the link in the previous post to the Deseret News for some further details).
On June 14, 2025, a "No Kings" rally took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, one of many such protests taking place around the world. Sadly, it was marred by tragedy when a gunman, who may have been there as part of the "peacekeeping" team, shot and killed one protester: https://local.sltrib.com/no-kings-timeline/
The next day, on June 15, 2025, a gunman at WestFest in West Valley City, Utah (a suburb of Salt Lake City), shot and killed, among others, an eight-month-old infant and a forty-one-year-old pregnant woman. According to reports ( https://www.sltrib.com/news/2025/06/20/one-those-killed-westfest-shooting/ ), he claims he did not intend to kill them, but laughed when informed that he had killed the other victim, an eighteen-year-old man. He has been charged with four counts of murder, among other claims. (I believe that as of the Deseret News editorial, it was not known that one of the victims was pregnant.)
Also on June 14, 2025 (drawing from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_legislators ), another gunman disguised himself as a police officer and went to the house of State Senator John Hoffman. Having gained entry, he proceeded to shoot Sen. Hoffman, and then attempted to shoot his daughter Hope only for his wife Yvonne Hoffman to protect her daughter with her own body. For these actions, the gunman has been charged with three counts of attempted first-degree murder and impersonation of a police officer.
The gunman then visited the home of State Representative Kristin Bahner. Fortunately, Rep. Bahner was on vacation with her family at the time; nonetheless, the gunman has been charged with attempted first-degree murder for this as well.
Finally, in the gravest tragedy in Minnesota that day, the gunman visited the home of Speaker Emerita and Representative Melissa Hortman. Once there, he proceeded to kill both Rep. Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman, and grievously injured their pet dog Gilbert, who was later euthanised. For these actions he has been charged with two counts of first-degree premeditated murder and one count of felony cruelty to an animal. He also faces a number of federal charges concerning electronic stalking.
Again, some conservatives condemned this attack, among them Susan Collins and Donald Trump.
But on June 15, 2025, the senior United States Senator from Utah, Mike Lee, made two posts on social media concerning the attack, both quoted in the Deseret News editorial. The first seemed to blame "Marxists" for the event (it is not clear to me whether he was saying that the gunman was himself a Marxist or if he was claiming that this was somehow Minnesota DFL politicians' fault for not implementing Marxist policies, or some other interpretation). The second appeared to attempt to lay blame on Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (misspelled "Waltz"); it emerged that Gov. Walz had appointed the alleged killer to the Workforce Development Board as a "business member" in 2019. However, this was a reappointment to a position to which former Gov. Mark Dayton had appointed the then-future gunman during his time in office, and in any event, I at least do not see how this in any way could implicate either Governor in the attacks. (The gunman claimed in a letter that Walz had instructed him to kill Sen. Amy Klobuchar, but there is to my knowledge no evidence of this beyond said letter: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89ev9j955ko )
Senator Lee did remove the posts a few days later, I believe on June 17, well after all three tragedies detailed above. However, from reporting ( https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sen-mike-lee-faces-criticism-posts-minnesota-shooting/story?id=122930819 ), this was not because of criticism from figures on the right, but rather because Sen. Klobuchar, a personal friend of Hortman's, met with him and requested that he do so. Sen. Lee, to my knowledge, has otherwise faced no substantial consequences for those posts; he remains a sitting Senator, and further remains the chair of the Senate Energy Committee.
I am aware of one condemnation of Sen. Lee's remarks from a Republican, from former RNC chair Michael Steele, who told him to "Grow the hell up": https://x.com/MichaelSteele/status/1934393121489719447 (However, given Mr. Steele's career since losing his bid for reelection as RNC chair in 2011, with joining MSNBC, opposing Donald Trump, joining the Lincoln Project, and endorsing Joe Biden, I personally am skeptical of the extent of his ongoing influence in Republican circles. But then I am not familiar with the inner workings of Republican party politics, so perhaps I am misreading the situation.)
I'm sorry I haven't replied yet. I knew the workweek would be busy, but, the truth is, I'm still thinking about it. (Daniel, your comments were helpful as well.)
Okay, I've had my (extended) think! (Sorry! I had to write articles, feed the readers.) I hope this reply is a two-parter, but it may be a three-parter. Apologies. But, after this long a wait, I could hardly just dash off 200 words and call your point "fairly considered", could I?
PART ONE
I take you to have two related but distinct theses:
Thesis #1: When right-wingers *commit violent attacks*, the Right is much more likely to compose/subscribe to wild conspiracy theories that paint the attacker as a member of the Left (compared to the Left when left-wingers commit violent attacks).
Thesis #2: When right-wingers *are violently attacked*, the Right is much more likely to call for reprisals and revenge against the Left (compared to the Left when left-wingers are violently attacked), and, specifically (per our J6 tangent), the Right's calls for reprisal are much less justified and much more indiscriminate.
Combined, these theses lead you to a super-thesis: the Right is asymmetrically responsible for escalating civil conflict in the wake of political violence. They are turning up the temperature much more than the Democrats. (Thus, my post was annoying, because it pointed out Democrats more eager for political violence while passing over Republicans' role in creating that appetite.)
If I got these wrong, and am *still* misunderstanding your position, I'm probably forked (and you're entitled to be irritated with me). But I hope I got you right this time.
I'll start with Thesis #1.
It is absolutely true that the Right engaged in wild, conspiratorial blame-deflection when Vance Boelter murdered Melissa Hortman, and this spread to the top, including to Sen. Mike Lee, who suggested Hortman had been murdered for opposing Gov. Walz on a vote. (This wasn't even true; see my P.S. to Daniel at the bottom.) Something similar happened with Paul Pelosi, and this spread to the top, with both Trump Jr. and (now that his funeral is over, I'll say it:) Charlie Kirk himself suggesting to audiences, with not a shred of evidence, that the attacker had been some kind of prostitute or something. It's practically official GOP doctrine, at this point, that J6 was perpetrated by plainclothes federal agents and/or antifa. This is very bad. I think you are correct that it is also *typical* of the Right.
But is it *asymmetrical*, in the way that Thesis #1 contends?
I think you are probably right that the "Alex Jonesification" of the Right has made them more prone to this sort of thing in general. (I've had a draft post for years now that argues that, because the Right took the red pill, it is now wildly prone to Type II errors, whereas, because the Left took the blue bill, it is now insanely prone to Type I errors. This fits nicely into your thesis.) Right-wingers include more low-quality slop in their beliefs than left-wingers, in general, and that includes slop that makes them feel less indirectly responsible for mass murders.
On the other hand, the past several weeks have provided powerful evidence that the Left also has a very serious problem with this. The Left engaged in wild, conspiratorial blame-deflection when Tyler Robinson murderered Charlie Kirk, and this spread to the top: Heather Cox Richardson, the doyenne of Leftstack and normie-Dem-whisperer, printed as fact the conspiracy theory that Kirk was a groyper, and has refused to issue a correction, despite continuing to write about Kirk. More notably, Jimmy Kimmel was suspended for spreading this lie, became an instant cause celebre throughout the Left, and returned to the air with an extremely vague apology that admitted no actual fault and failed to correct the factual record. Outlets that unambiguously chalked up murders like Hortman's to a right-wing extremist, like NPR, continue to play coy with Tyler Robinson and talk about nihilistic violent extremism instead of left-wing extremism. I haven't seen a poll since September 14, before most facts were known, but, at that time, Democrats overwhelmingly thought that Robinson was a Republican rather than a Democrat (8% - 41% per YouGov).
So whatever psychological motive leads political ideologues to pretend that political murders weren't committed by "their side," it seems to be alive and well on both sides of the aisle. The asymmetry I see is in how the deflection is propagated: the Right does it with pure viral lies, while the Left launders the lies through credentialed authorities. But I think this is only a reflection of a larger asymmetry over institutional trust (the Red Pill/Blue Pill problem), and the actual lying about the motivations widespread on both sides. Even if they aren't quite identical, I think they're close enough to make Thesis #1 false.
However, I think you are correct about Thesis #2. On the other hand, I have two caveats, which reduce its force.
...However, I think you are correct about Thesis #2. On the other hand, I have two caveats, which reduce its force:
First caveat: I think that Thesis #2 is pretty new. I don't think it was true six months ago, but it is true today. For example, after the assassination attempts against Candidate Trump last year, the Right did *not* react unusually. They demanded investigations. They spread theories, many conspiratorial and self-serving. They ritually blamed left-wing rhetoric and the media (https://www.cnn.com/trump-supporters-blame-media ), which, as you say, is about par for the course. (Left-wingers, of course, respond to right-on-left violence by ritually blaming right-wing rhetoric and the NRA.) But there were few, if any, prominent calls for reprisals against the Left broadly, and I would say the normal amount of civil war speculation (modulo the fact that we are, in fact, clearly sliding toward civil war). Here's Bluesky on Civil War just after the Hortman assassination: https://bsky.app/search?q=civil+war+until%3A2025-06-16+since%3A2025-06-13 , and here's Twitter just after the first Trump assassination attempt: https://x.com/search?q=civil%20war%20until%3A2024-07-15%20since%3A2024-07-12&src=typed_query . These seem about the same to me.
However, I think that this changed drastically after Charlie Kirk's assassination. You are right, I think, that the Right's rhetoric at that moment was unusually escalatory, extremely overbroad, and that this was asymmetrical to how Democrats have dealt with recent political violence against them. I did not really see this in the immediate aftermath, because I was still reeling, but, nevertheless, I think you are right. I agree, for instance, that Stephen Miller did basically call for broad-spectrum investigations across the Left, whether or not there was any evidence of any sort of criminal activity, that this is an unjustified exercise of government power against the political opposition, and that it represents an escalation beyond the usual bipartisan practice of just quietly putting the other side's fringe on the FBI's domestic terrorism watchlist. Many prominent right-wingers joined Miller in either calling for abusive government action or blaming the *entire* Democratic Party and the Left for a murder that the Democratic Party, to its credit, officially abhorred. (The Left did *not* abhor it, which leads to the second caveat.)
Second caveat: I think that Thesis #2 has to be modulated by the fact that quite a few of the reprisals were (like the post-J6 reprisals) entirely justified, and that (like the post-J6 reprisals) even some excesses should be forgiven. This softens (but does not erase) the force of Thesis #2.
(I should here address a minor comment you made: There *were* excesses after J6. There *were* people crawling through social media identifying random completely peaceful members of the crowd, doxxing them, and making sure they lost their jobs. As with nearly all riots, including the Floyd riots, the majority of people present had very little idea there was a riot going on, much less an insurrection. There were people jailed for behavior that could not reasonably be construed as participation in an insurrection. I think the "QAnon Shaman" is a good example of this; charging him was excessive, especially in light of DoJ leniency toward Minneapolis rioters who had caused physical damage, physical injury, and even death.)
An example of justified reprisals: I think it is perfectly appropriate (as Christopher Landau said) to deport non-Americans who "praise, rationalize, or make light" of the assassination of an innocent man; such speech demonstrates a criminal mentality that is fundamentally un-American, and it has always been one of the jobs of immigration authorities to ensure that the people we invite to join the American project are committed to it. (Otherwise, the American experiment will certainly fail.) I have also always favored laws that make National Socialists and Communists inadmissible, even though U.S. citizens have an inviolable right under the First Amendment to espouse Nazism or Stalinism. Deportations for being okay with assassination is not the same as deportations for, say, wanting to keep trans women out of women's locker rooms (or wanting to keep them in), a current subject of political debate, no matter how hotly charged. It's more like deporting someone for saying that he would love to become a drug kingpin, an unambiguous criminal sympathy. I can't find any actual examples of anyone losing a visa over post-Kirk comments, but, in principle, this is an appropriate response to aliens celebrating the murder of U.S. citizens.
Because these reprisals were justified and appropriate, they don't support Thesis #2.
Nevertheless, there is still plenty of stuff (like Stephen Miller's comments) that happened that *do* support Thesis #2.
Here is my brief theory of the case:
What happened last month was extraordinary. The asymmetry I wrote about six years ago -- the Left's hatred for the Right's dead -- was suddenly absolutely everywhere and could no longer be explained away as anything other than deep, broad *hatred* of the Right's living members. It didn't come from some distant "other"; it came from family and friends. I think the shock of this -- a shock the Left has never faced, at least as far as I can think -- fueled an overheated reaction, one that we have not seen the likes of before, which led to the Right blaming *everyone* on the Left and calling for abuses of government power as punishment. This was, as you say, inappropriate and went well beyond anything Democrats do in the face of right-on-left political violence.
I *hope* that, now that we are past the shock, it will not happen again the next time a right-winger is assassinated. However, I fear that, now that all right-wing influencers know that "revenge" gets clicks and eyeballs, it will now become part of the standard right-wing playbook. I hope it does not spread next to the Left, although, if it did, the Right had made it hard to blame them.
With those two caveats, I agree with Thesis #2.
However, I find that I don't ultimately agree with the super-thesis. I don't think this weakened form of Thesis #2, by itself (since I reject Thesis #1), adds up to a conclusion that Republicans are asymmetrically raising the temperature on political violence.
On the other hand, before this conversation, I strongly believed that *Democrats* were asymmetrically raising the temperature, and I'm less confident of that now. (Although, on the other hand, the refusal to abandon Jay Jones and the Nicholas/Sophie Roske sentencing are making it difficult for me to consider this objectively right now.)
I don't know whether you agree with me, in the end, but I am grateful to you for making me think it through.
***
P.S. to Daniel: Sen. Lee's deplorable post about Sen. Hortman was a reference to the fact that she had voted against the DFL on a key procedural motion over the state budget, the upshot of which was something about illegal immigrants lost access to some portions of Medicaid. (I don't recall the details.) The conspiracy theory was that the Left had had her killed for taking health care away from illegal aliens. That was what Lee was saying: Gov. Walz's Marxist thugs will murder you for stepping out of line. Aside from being profoundly disrespectful and making light of a murdered woman, it was a completely insane theory to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the facts. Sen. Hortman did vote against her party... with her party's consent. Everyone in her party hated the idea of stripping Medicaid from illegals, *including Melissa Hortman*, but Republicans made it a key point of the eventual budget deal. Because the MN House is tied, the amendment to the bill could not pass without the active support of at least one DFL'er. As minority leader, Hortman's job was to fall on that sword. She did so with the full support of Gov. Walz and the DFL, which supported the deal. It was a really nasty thing for Mike Lee to post. I *did* see a great deal of condemnation of it from the Right, and I think that Right-wing condemnation was the true reason he apologized (I think his meeting with Sen. Klobuchar was just a face-saving excuse to back down), but I suppose it makes sense that the Right's condemnations of Lee would be less visible on the Left, for the same reason that the mature handling of the Kirk assassination by high-ranking Left-wingers like Bernie Sanders and Ezra Klein was barely visible to the Right.
First, it appears that Kirk's killer confessed to his friends on Discord. This is why I am not saying "alleged"; however, since he has not been convicted of murder, and I do not know enough about criminal procedure to know whether the Discord post would be admissible because of, among other things, protections against self-incrimination, I do not say "murderer". He also said that he was about to turn himself in. (I also, as is my usual practice, will not use the killer's name.)
A search of those posts for the strings "Trump" and "Biden" returned only one result for each. For "Trump", the killer commented on his first impeachment. For "Biden", it was a comment on early returns in the 2020 election, that Trump was leading but also that it was too early to tell who would win.
His views were, as with most people, only partly aligned with any major political faction. Klippenstein cites two examples: he was in favour of LGBTQ+ rights, but also in favour of gun ownership rights.
A message sent by another user after the killer's confession and surrender to police confirms that it was true, and asks other users to pray for the killer's repentance and for Kirk and his family.
In summary, any allegations being thrown around that the killer was a Groyper, or a Marxist, or far-left, or far-right, or whatever else has been claimed are likely all not true. For myself, no matter what else, I hope that he receives the justice he deserves.
As for his acquaintances, whose views seemed to run the ideological gamut: "What I see is a bunch of young people shocked, horrified and searching for answers, like the rest of the country." I can only imagine what it's like to find out that someone you thought you knew well, who was amiable and friendly, posted cat memes and played video games with you, had it in him to assassinate someone in cold blood.
I do have a Discord account, which I log into 1-2 times a week. I never thought of starting my own server, but are there any I should join (where you are present)?
I have used discord for some very specific video game related things ( not lately though) but haven't used it for anything serious, but I always hear about certain communities created by people I listen to or watch ("... Get access to our discord if you contribute to my Patreon along with additional members only content..."). I have never been interested in joining those but one made up of your politics group would cause me to join since it is one of the few things that I miss about FB (though not enough to rejoin)... Basically I am selfishly trying to find a way to get that without FB...
Good read. I followed him from my progressive perch outside of the US, and my main impression over the years was that he really was a white supremacist. Maybe that isn't true, but my understanding of him from casual references gathered over a decade made the general media praise seems very weird to me. Which is why this was good for me to read.
I'm not sure about the reliability of that YouGov poll. If it occurred the day after the shooting won't motivated tribal reasoning radically skew the results?
I did some more research, and it looks like the gap is still there when the tables are turned: shortly after the murder of Democratic politician Melissa Hortman, 19% of Harris voters said that political violence is sometimes justified, but only 11% of Trump voters said the same according to YouGov.
I'm going to stand by my thinking for now, because I still think I'm right and that I have sufficient reason for thinking so -- but, if I have to eat crow later, that would be good news for the country, because it would mean we are not so far apart as I thought.
What's your sense of Charlie Kirk's actual impact before this all happened? Is that a name the average person on the street would have had a reaction to a month ago? I'm barely plugged in at all, and so the fact that I didn't clock that name didn't surprise me any. I wonder how many of these opinions people are expressing now are in line with how they felt a month ago? Or if these are new feelings and emotions they are expressing over <generic talking head of the other party>.
I feel like having a strong negative feeling toward Osama Bin Ladin and then applauding his death is one avenue, and that applauding <someone's> death on the other side of the aisle and then backing in to reasons for why you're happy it happened is another avenue. The first doesn't feel nearly as scary as the second.
This is an interesting question, because, on the one hand, he was a huge deal, a tremendous deal. On the other hand, that huge deal was really only in a pretty niche audience. He was a leading conservative activist, but, culturally speaking, that makes him a big fish in a small pond.
Colbert is the biggest fish in the small pond of Late Night TV, and Holt is the biggest fish in the small pond of TV News Broadcasting. It's impressive that Kirk was able to build enough audience using, basically, YouTube and broadcasting (EDIT: should say "podcasting") to compete with broadcast TV.
Kirk was disproportionately well-known among young people (GenZ/GenA) rather than us Millennials+. He was well-known enough to be a serious contender in the GOP primary for Arizona governor, although not so well-known that it was a sure thing.
If you are really into politics, you had heard of Kirk and had some opinion on him. (I knew of him, had seen maybe 2 minutes of him talking over the years, and was aware that he was a conservative talking head very closely aligned with Mr. Trump. Between that and my total lack of interest in video or talking heads podcasts, I pretty much dismissed Kirk as presumptively a hack. I have learned since his death that this was unfair of me.) If you are only somewhat into politics, especially outside the Right, odds are much lower that you've heard of him. Even if you have heard of him, you may have no opinion of him. Even if you have an opinion of him, it's probably based on very little.
I hesitate to draw any firm or general conclusions from limited data, but I think both: (1) it would be beyond insane to treat this talking head like Osama bin Laden, and (2) it *is* scary to recognize some people backing themselves into hatred.
Oh wow!! Those are MUCH bigger names to compare him against than I was thinking. I had assumed he was at more of a ‘Matt Parker’ (of ‘Standup Maths’) level of fame in an obscure subculture.
**side note: I’m also surprised that you have JD Vance as a larger name than any of these three? Isn’t that the whole thing about veeps is that they’re relegated to the sidelines of notoriety? Kamala didn’t do anything meaningful these last 4 years did she? Or Pence before that? Yet JD has more pull that Colbert?
Well, at least going by Google Trends! What Trends picks up is search traffic, which is an imperfect proxy for cultural reach (but a pretty decent one all the same).
Nevertheless: Yes, Vice Presidents are worthless compared to Presidents. They are meaningless and nobody pays attention to them -- compared to the President. And of course they have no actual powers. But, in terms of *notoriety*, I think Vice Presidents hulk out compared to *most* other offices. You're correct that Harris did nothing in her four years, as Vance is doing nothing now. *But they still made the news* -- and so found their way into the attention spans of many millions of Americans more than any single TV host or lower-level official.
Example: You *probably* remember Vice President Dick Cheney, who has had effectively zero relevance since 2009. But do you remember the Speaker of the House under Cheney (before Pelosi took over in 2007 when the Dems won the midterms)? Much less likely. (It was Dennis Hastert.)
The other effect at work here is the death of broadcast. Even as recently as 2007, although Late Night and Broadcast News were already in decline, they still had *immense* cultural power. In 2006, Jay Leno was winning the time slot with 6 million viewers per night (in a population of 300 million). In 2023, Stephen Colbert was "winning" with just 2 million (in a population of 334 million) and the show was having profitability problems. So Late Night lost two-thirds of its viewers. I'm sure it picked up a lot online (9 million YouTube subs -- triple Kirk's YouTube sub count, and Kirk didn't have a broadcast TV show to fall back on!), but being a Late Night host today just doesn't matter, culturally, like it used to. Ditto broadcast news anchoring. That makes it easier for a too-online guy like Charlie Kirk to punch in their weight class -- perhaps especially on a metric that favors Google searches.
First, with regards to the yougov survey, the survey didn't actually say that was limited to non-violent public figures. I would interpret the question as written as including Osama Bin Ladin and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as public figures. While publicly gloating about their deaths might be a bit much, I can certainly see a valid reason to feel a certain amount of private happiness at news of their deaths.
The poll was conducted the day after Kirk's death, so I find it hard to imagine that the respondents weren't thinking about him at least somewhat.
My interpretation of the YouGov poll is shaped -- perhaps to an unfair extent? -- by beliefs I had already developed years ago: https://ropersanchor.jamesjheaney.com/2021/07/06/an-asymmetry-observed-partisan-obituaries/
The asymmetry is nevertheless very stark. It seems implausible to me that the Democrats are so much more likely to celebrate the death of terrorists in the Middle East than Republicans are. (Indeed, the hypothesis reminds me of "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup": https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ , which had a few words to say on this.) It also seems implausible to me that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi would be understood by most people to be a "public figure," although obviously you feel differently.
Even if both those things I find implausible are true, though, I think this is a reasonable inference to draw: if considerably less than half of Political Party #1 always condemns celebrations of an opponent's death (including both violent and non-violent opponents), while considerably *more* than half of Political Party #2 *does* always condemn celebrations of an opponent's death (including both violent and non-violent opponents), it is extremely likely that both these things are true:
(1) a double-digit fraction of Political Party #1 will not always condemn celebrations of a non-violent opponent's death, and
(2) whatever that fraction turns out to be for Political Party #1, it will be much larger than the fraction in Political Party #2.
So this hypothesis could, if its (problematic) premises are accurate, *attenuate* the problem I see in our politics right now, but I don't think it can *eliminate* that problem I see. Moreover, this hypothesis does not seem congruent with my observations years ago about partisan obituaries. (Maybe my observations were wrong, but I obviously am inclined to think they are not!)
Second, in terms of "never speak ill of the dead", I think there needs to be an exception here for honest recognition of deaths which really were directly traceable to the deceased's own choices.
For example, Remi Lucidi, a professional french daredevil who made his name posting self-taken photos on instagram of himself climbing around unsecured on the tops of skyscrapers, usually illegally or otherwise without permission of the buildings owners.
He died in Hong Kong after lying to a security guard to gain entrance, then using an interior access door to secretly reach the rooftop.... and then the door locked behind him and nobody knew he was up there. A maid reported seeing him tapping on a window for help 90 minutes later, so she called the police. It's not like 40th floor windows actually open, so there's not much else she could have done. He's believed to have gotten tired and slipped up somehow shortly afterwards, resulting in him falling to his death. His camera with selfies was left on the roof afterwards.
I think we can all agree, even in the first day after his death, that Remi Lucidi's death was the direct result of a foolish risk he himself took, and that his death was a valuable lesson in the importance of good safety procedures, like having permission, filing your plans ahead of time, using safety lines, climbing with a partner, etc, etc.
Or Felix Baumgartner, world record holder for skydiving from the edge of space and breaking the speed of sound using only gravity and his own body. As near as we can tell, he later suffered a heart attack in mid-air while paragliding above Italy, and was already dead before he ever hit the ground. Saying something like "He died as he lived" or "What a way to go" or "He probably would have wanted it that way" does not seem unreasonable, as long as you don't say it directly to his family when you don't know them very well.
I don't think this counts as speaking ill of the dead, because there is no malice in it. These men were not killed by vicious habits, but, at worst, by poor judgment (in Lucidi's case), and nobody attributes vicious habits to them. There's a criticism of their judgment, perhaps, but not of their virtue or basic decency. The latter is what the taboo is against.
It's hard to see "He probably would have wanted it that way" as speaking ill of the dead at all, if it's sincere, especially when it's probably true. My grandmother died during a short period when nobody was paying close attention to her, just after she was surrounded by her whole family. She probably really did want it that way. I don't see any barb in that.
In Lucidi's case, I agree everyone would have *known* immediately that it was a foolish risk, and I don't think it would be "speaking ill of the dead" to use his death as safety advice. At the same time, though, can't that wait a week? Is there any reason to bring it up, especially on the public Internet where everyone can see? No new safety protocols or legislation is going to have a make-or-break problem if it's delayed for two weeks while his family mourns. So, while I don't think it's the same sort of thing as what we see here (because not an attack on their goodness), I also wonder why we couldn't extend the norm to his case anyway.
That's fair. Still, I could see an argument that, say, Instagram might want to shut down his account and put up a warning page about "don't do this at home kids" shortly after the news broke, or that more professional stuntmen might want to post some sort of polite, measured reaction videos which briefly mention the Lucidi incident, express condolence to the family, and then go into a detailed explanation why the practice of unsecured rooftopping is overly dangerous, and this stuntman is too professional to ever do such a thing, and these are the safety measures he always takes on rooftops.
Likewise, knowingly and deliberately runnings ads for hunting rifles next to news columns about Charlie Kirk's death would be horrible. On the other hand, the next time some celebrity dies from what is clearly a voluntary use of illegal drugs leading to overdose, running ads next to those news columns about not doing drugs and where to find addiction treatments, does not seem completely out of line.
As you said, there's a clear difference between saying "This person is dead and he deserved it because he's a bad person" verus saying "This person is dead, we have a pretty good idea why, and here's the information you need to avoid ending up the same way."
Likewise, Notice to Airmen alerts, describing things pilots have to know to do their jobs safely, and which are generally sent out as quickly as possible after an accident with an identifiable cause... are going to sometimes say things like "The cause of this accident was two-fold: pilot error, PLUS a defect of some type. If you're a pilot, these are the steps you can take to avoid making the same possibly understandable error, and this is how you can check for the mechanical defect on your plane."
From a certain point of view, a lot of pilots consider accusing a dead guy of pilot error to be distasteful, especially if not backed by strong evidence... but on the other hand, if there is an identifiable safety concern, they really do need to know as quickly as possible. Taking the middle ground of saying "we don't know why he made this error, and it might even have been an understandable mistake under the circumstances, but fellow pilots still need to know about it right away..." does not seem unreasonable.
This all seems very reasonable to me.
First of all, I'm glad someone besides me prays for dead bad guys like Osama bin Laden and George Tiller (although I have to resist the urge to write them off as bound for hell -- we are forbidden to judge)
I didn't know that much about Charlie Kirk when he was alive. I'm learning a lot about his life after his demise. I don't like Trump supporters on principle, and there is much I don't like about Kirk, but some things I've seen of him I do like, such as his defense of unborn life.
And his wife and small children didn't deserve to lose their husband and father. I'm heartbroken to hear that his 3 year old was there and saw her father get shot. No small child should ever see that happen to anyone, let alone her father.
Phil, I pray for them too! And you and I seem to be similar in some ways. Keep fighting the good fight, brother!
"This rule is an expression of the Christian charity that lies at the foundation of our civilization, and at the foundations of our souls."
I think a reason that rule has eroded is that America, and the entire western world, is less Christian. The sense of 'there but for the grace of God go I' is faded and the spiritual work of mercy of praying for the dead is no longer obliged. So why would that norm remain when many of the critical reasons for it are no longer believed?
Personally I try to build the habit of always praying for whoever is in danger whenever I hear sirens or hear news that someone died. And I see obituaries roughly a couple times a week since my employer emails them to everyone whenever someone with a connection dies, so I try to always read them and pray for that deceased person. Those habits I try to build, well they're just trying to build up the ability to enact that principle even for someone I loathe. Not that I've ever really thought about it formally like that before.
Charlie Kirk's death should be mourned.
Given his prominence as a public figure, different people may find different reasons to mourn his death (and I will not here detail such reasons as I see them), but his death should be mourned.
To be clear, I don't think anyone has to *mourn* Charlie Kirk. I did not mourn Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It is sufficient to offer condolences, say one kind thing about the person, offer a prayer for the soul or a "may her memory be a blessing," and then shut up, trying not to succumb to interior hatred.
In fact, in extremis, one can just shut up.
I sense you are in extremis, and are just shutting up. That is honorable, non-vile behavior.
Thanks for these reflections, James. I especially appreciated the contextualizing of Mr. Kirk's statements -- which were widely misquoted even as single-sentence quotes. For example, some people misquoted him as specifically saying the 2nd amendment was worth some "mass shootings." Those were the very tragedies he proceeded to offer practical approaches to.
I would not have used the phrase "worth it" (and maybe if he were sitting down and writing a serious article he wouldn't have either). More neutral, perhaps, to say some gun deaths are "the price we pay" for a policy of defending gun ownership for its legitimate purposes. When someone first quoted (or misquoted) his sentence to me, my reaction was that it was technically true, just as some traffic deaths are the price we pay for, for example, letting Montana have an 80 MPH highway speed limit. (We just drove through there recently.) I recall reading about some past federal calculations on how much regulation of things like potentially polluting substances should be allowed in light of the lives that the regulation might save. Some bean counters actually came up with a dollar figure for the worth of a human life, to be applied to future policies... Clearly there are ways to make those conversations very crass indeed, but as a nation we frequently make some rough trade-offs like this. For me personally, I'm fairly sure I'd be far more likely to accidentally put a bullet in myself or a member of my family than to become the hero who stops a potential mass shooter.
All this is in the context of vociferous agreement with your first and most important statement: It doesn't matter. You don't go around defending the violent murder of someone for having ideas that disagree with yours. That way madness lies.
It's not quite the worth of the human life. Technically it's how much effort you would reasonably spend on avoiding a random human death.
Basically, it goes something likely this: If you, personally, could spend $1 on a bike-mounted flashlight, and if having a bike-mounted-flashlight would change your odds of dying in a bike accident from 2 chances in 1 million to 1 chance in 1 million, would you spend the dollar? If the answer is yes for most people in that situation, that implies that most people will spend $1 million dollars to save themselves from a random death.
If you do enough work on mapping out people's revealed preferences for what they actually do when indirectly asked those sorts of questions every day of their lives, you get a scatterplot of roughly how much people value their own lives. or other people's lives.
A rough rule-of-thumb is that in year 2000 dollars, that americans will spend about 1 million dollars to save their own life from random accidents almost entirely under their own control, and about 10 million dollars to save a stranger's life from random accidents the stranger didn't know were possibilities and couldn't have done anything to protect themselves from. So protecting yourself as a pedestrian on the street is $1million, protecting a stranger from pollution in their water supply is $10 million. Because as a pedestrian, you could always have just chosen to be more careful, follow the rules more consistently, and avoid walking in dangerous circumstances, but a stranger has to drink water and doesn't know if it might be polluted.
And then there are things which fall somewhere in the middle between 'entirely under your own control' vs 'nothing you can do to avoid it', so those have a value somewhere between 1 and 10 million. Also, some industries are more cautious about some types of accidents than other industries, so some industries use different planning numbers.
You're not actually buying and selling human lives, you're just buying and selling risk management.
Very nice post! As someone who never liked Kirk that much, the celebrations of his death are just repulsive to me. People have way too little value for human life. Governor Cox had it right when telling people to touch grass.
In any circumstance, I also particularly dislike people harping on his pro-2A advocacy. The “some gun deaths are worth it” (paraphrasing here) quote was badly phrased in my opinion, but what he was conveying was clear and agreeable. His point was basically “There will always be a cost of living in a free society.”
May he rest in peace. Prayers to his wife and children as well.
Calvinists and psychopaths think there would be some justice in murdering half the U.S. population
Friendly correction from a Calvinist: I know zero fellow Calvinists who would agree with this. It’s at best uninformed, and quite bigoted.
I apologize! I plead ignorance. My understanding of Total Depravity was that *everyone* deserves death, through and through, and that God's decision to save the Elect anyway is therefore an even greater sign of His generosity than in, say, Catholic soteriology (where we die because of original sin but really come to deserve it through actual sin).
But what I know of Calvinism is gleaned from a few weeks in the high school comparative religions course and scattershot encounters in the years since, which, clearly, is inadequate.
In a post about reducing hate and misunderstanding, it was certainly not my intent to spread more. I apologize.
This is a bit jumbled.
Total depravity isn't directly related to what we deserve from God; rather, it states that everything you do is tainted by sin in some way, shape, or form, that your natural inclination is towards sin, and that you won't turn to God without the work of the Trinity.
However, as to what we deserve from God, Calvinists do hold that God would be within His rights to slay us for our rebellion against Him, but that it is wrong for us to enact that judgment without His explicit orders. Think of how in some of the OT prophets God says to some of the nations "I used you to enact judgement on my people, but what you did was wrong, so now I will judge you as well."
I agree with almost all of your post, but I find the discussion of the YouGov poll and this alleged "asymmetric problem" annoying. (I'm trying to moderate my language here, my initial draft had much stronger words that I didn't feel were justifiable on reflection. Progress?) I'll try to put into words the source of that annoyance, for whatever it's worth:
1. Running polls right after major partisan-coded events, and reporting the results with no broader context of similar polls done after opposite-partisan-coded events, is bad and wrong. Case in point, look at a series of polls on whether the economy is getting better or worse: https://today.yougov.com/economy/articles/48353-democrats-republicans-different-views-of-american-economy-poll -- you can tell whatever asymmetry story you like by zooming in on one particular part of that graph. But the actual story is the poll results over time.
2. I wasn't able to find a series of polls that match the one you reference, unfortunately. That would be what I would like to have seen (per #1). But I found a set of polls that I think speak to a related important trend where a countervailing asymmetry exists: how big of a problem is political violence, anyway? https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll
Democrats have a pretty consistent percentage of people who believe it is a problem, 44-58%, regardless of who was most recently and prominently attacked. Republicans seem to have a wildly different view on this depending on who was most recently attacked: 31-67%. My point here isn't that I actually believe this is the whole story (I'd need to see a lot more than just these 6 poll results to take a strong opinion on it), but rather that you can easily paint the opposite picture of the problem when looking at a few polls.
3. But what I think most annoying about this discussion is that I think it is completely missing the forest for the trees. Maybe it's just my algorithm/bias (feel free to correct me with data if you have it), but here's an asymmetric trend I notice that I think is several orders of magnitude more important on this topic than whether or not we speak ill of the dead: when Democratic/left-wing figures get violently attacked, other Democratic figures (politicians and influencers) call for de-escalation and condemn political violence. The worst they typically do is say or imply that this is a one-sided problem with right-wing violence. When Republican/right-wing figures get violently attacked, other Republican figures (politicians and influencers) call for reprisals and openly speculate about civil war. The best that they typically do is say or imply that this is a one-sided problem with the left-wing violence.
I agree that it's probably not a stable equilibrium to say "my opponents deserve to die, but no one should deliver them their just deserts." But it's definitely not a stable equilibrium for one side to always try to de-escalate and the other side to always try to escalate.
It might be that I am suffering from a bias in time rather than a bias in bubble? My views on this were largely formed and locked in long before I wrote "An Asymmetry Observed: Partisan Obituaries" in 2021: https://ropersanchor.jamesjheaney.com/2021/07/06/an-asymmetry-observed-partisan-obituaries/ . This YouGov poll (the first I have ever seen to ask this question) offered good empirical support for an asymmetry I already recognized.
There was another poll in April that showed around 55% of left-wingers thought it was at least "somewhat justified" to kill Donald Trump. I did not much of that poll at the time, because the poll did not cover right-wingers (which was both very suspicious as a polling choice and prevented us from establishing a baseline). But it fits both what I saw and what this poll finds. I would love to see a longer polling series on this "celebrating opponents' death" question -- and, obviously, I would be happy to be wrong, and to discover that this is just another question like the economy where (we have known for a long time) everyone's views change on a dime based on the party in power (arguably Republicans' more than Democrats').
As for your third point... I'm not quite sure what to make of it. When I developed my views about asymmetrical partisan attitudes toward violence, back in the years leading up to 2021, the Right had no problem at all in this department (if memory serves). The Right very enthusiastically denounced violence and tried to de-escalate after Gabby Giffords, Heather Heyer, and the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood attack. Even January 6 was still considered Bad throughout the Right in early 2021! I don't think there was any asymmetry at the time.
I'm very open to the idea that Right-wing norms around this have eroded since then. I have a feeling there's something to it. Indeed, I have a feeling that the Right's growing sense that the Left *actually* wants to kill us has a lot to do with how the Right's response has evolved over the past few years! (It has certainly helped Donald Trump.) For all that, though, I'm not quite sure what you mean by this: "When Republican/right-wing figures get violently attacked, other Republican figures (politicians and influencers) call for reprisals and openly speculate about civil war."
Let's take, for example, Donald Trump, who is emblematic of every bad influence in the Republican Party. He's awful. After Hortman's murder, he posted a perfunctory statement condemning political violence and denouncing the shooting. After Kirk's murder, he posted a lot more stuff; he clearly loves Kirk more and isn't shy about showing it (this is bad). But in, say, his 4-minute video about the killing, Trump condemned political violence, he praised Kirk's spirit of open debate. He very much did the thing you mentioned the Left doing where he pretended this is a one-sided problem with left-wing violence. He promised law enforcement would find and prosecute all those responsible. He complained vigorously about left-wing rhetoric that he saw as leading to the violence, just as Giffords supporters complained vigorously about right-wing rhetoric after he shooting years ago. There were no riots. Minneapolis did not burn as it did five years ago. He did not call for violent reprisals or speculate about civil war.
As for escalation, I don't think there's been any escalation. If anything, the Right's response to this has been relatively tame. For example, the Right has now, in response to all this, fully embraced cancellation, something it had not done five years ago. But the Right's cancellation criterion is "publicly celebrating or excusing the murder of an innocent man," whereas the Left's many cancellation criterion, as far back as ten years ago, already included "making a political donation to a popular, winning political campaign," ( https://ropersanchor.jamesjheaney.com/2014/04/08/re-your-ire-is-misdirected/ ). That's not an escalation, because it's still less firepower than the other side was already using.
So, what (or whom) are some particular asymmetrical examples that you have in mind here?
(Is it me? But I've been speculating about civil war on this blog for the past five years, on social media for the past ten, and in private for the past sixteen or seventeen. I've believed a civil war is slowly coming into view for a really long time.)
Yet, for all that, I still think you're probably onto something. It *does* feel like *something* has changed about how the Right responds to political violence, probably recently, and not for the better. Perhaps if we can nail down better what phenomenon we are looking at, we can examine it better.
I think both (1) there's a difference between how you respond when your side is attacked vs when your side is doing the attacking (which was my original point) and (2) something has changed in the right wing responses to events of this kind in general.
On (1), the older examples you cite are all right-wing attacks, not right-wing victims. In general, I think the right has been more willing to use de-escalatory rhetoric in those cases and denounce violence. But when we look at the response to the assassination of Kirk and the attempted assassinations of Trump, as compared with how the Democrats responded to the Hortman et al type cases, that's where you see the big asymmetry that I was pointing to. As I said, major Democratic figures have (almost?) universally had the normal range of "both sides need to turn the temperature down" to "you Republicans need to turn the temperature down" in response to these events. Meanwhile, here are some responses from major Republican/right wing figures to the Kirk assassination:
Christopher Landau, Deputy Sec of State, threatening (on his official State Dept account!) to deport people for "praising, rationalizing, or making light of" the assassination (https://x.com/DeputySecState/status/1966114506116927972#m).
Representative Clay Higgins on how he plans to use the power of the federal government to seek reprisals against people who "belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk." "I’m going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that big tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content, the user to be banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER. I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked." (https://x.com/RepClayHiggins/status/1966114479042593251) -- FWIW, I think there's a huge difference between using the power of the federal government to cancel people vs using public pressure. Both are bad IMO but I don't think comparable.
Stephen Miller, I don't have a super clear quote for. I'll let you be the judge of where this sits: https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1966693077818765667#m (to me, this reads as an announcement that he thinks this is justification to prosecute roughly every Democratic/left-wing organization in the country)
Matt Walsh says, "It's too late to turn the temperature down. This is not a time to hold hands, this is a time for justice. This is a time for good to fight back against evil. This is time for the righteous to prevail." (https://x.com/realDailyWire/status/1966238479005954530#m) -- feel free to watch the whole video if you think this may be out of context. I have, and I think it's clear he's not talking about finding and punishing the shooter here, he's talking about escalation. He claims later (https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1966473080726749421#m) that he meant "legally, non-violently" fighting, not political violence. Of course, he also said: "I know some of you want to do the kumbaya thing. You want to say that the celebration of Charlie’s death is only happening on the fringes. I’m sorry but that’s just not true. They jeered and heckled him in CONGRESS yesterday. The left wants us dead. That is the mainstream view. It just is. It’s the truth. They couldn’t be any clearer about it. Stop lying to yourself. Face the facts, and act accordingly." (https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1966149973399187884#m) so take that for what it's worth. Donald Trump Jr. agreed with the latter (https://x.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1966518667992010768#m).
Laura Loomer says: "I’m sick of seeing conservatives say we need more debate and more conversations with the Left. No, we don’t. These people are evil at their core. [...] You just have to crush their movement and lock them up." (https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1966815142030491734#m)
I'd quote Tim Pool saying that this means civil war, except I'm not sure if it'd be in reference to Charlie Kirk or if he just has that message scheduled for every Wednesday.
I'm sure I could find more stuff, but I think this says something. I don't think you could create anything remotely like this compilation from figures of similar prominence on the Democratic/left-wing side in response to any of the recent murders or attacks on their side. And I left out of this compilation all the messages that were way beyond what most major Democrats said in response to attacks on them -- I only included what seemed to me to be clear calls for reprisals. But we also have Trump and tons of other major right-wing figures making the least measured condemnations of the left possible -- there is nothing like a Biden-style statement of "I'm not talking about all Democrats, just the radical leftists who call for violence" to be found. They are saying that, actually, it *is* Democrats at large. The left as a whole is responsible.
On (2): Republicans are perhaps even more unhinged when it comes to violence against Democrats. I can understand a swell of emotion (or black ooze, perhaps) in the wake of a tragedy like Kirk's murder, and saying some unhinged stuff. But Republicans are unhinged *when their side is doing the violence.* This is probably just part of the broader Alex Jonesification of the right-wing, but in the wake of I think every recent act of political violence by the right against Democrats, a huge segment of the Republican/right-wing leaders have promoted conspiracy theories, mocked the victims, and generally had a blase attitude about the whole thing. This includes Kirk himself. (To be clear, this doesn't justify the attack on him.) I'm not going to deep dive into providing quotes and such here, but it again goes from the top (Trump) on down to Congressmen and major influencers/media figures. (Not all, of course. There are plenty of Republicans still following the old norms, but they are generally not the rising stars of the party, they are the old guard still clinging on.) If we disagree about this, I can dig stuff up though.
Contrast this with the recent Democratic response to Kirk's murder - essentially no Democrats of significance (that I'm aware of) have speculated that this was a "false flag" or implied it wasn't a big deal or tried to downplay the problem of political violence. People anywhere close to Democratic politics who did anything like that have been fired by their own organizations (e.g., Matthew Dowd at MSNBC). To find people saying the kinds of things that major figures on the right-wing said, you have to search out nobodies -- you aren't seeing Democratic lawmakers or major pundits doing this. (Feel free to provide counterexamples, it's hard to prove a negative so I relied on a lack of reporting of this as my justification.)
And that's what I think the real asymmetry is. Maybe the Democrats/left are more accepting of giving harsh criticism of people soon after die. But the Republicans/right are more accepting of political violence itself and blaming the victims of that violence. And Republicans are much more willing to escalate rather than call for de-escalation. I'll even go so far as to say it's possible that rank-and-file Republicans are better than rank-and-file Democrats on this, but the difference at the top is dramatic and obvious.
Ah, I'm glad you clarified, because, you're right, I was obviously misunderstanding even what category of violent attacks you were looking toward! And this is something I probably need to think through a little more beyond this off-the-cuff, let's-get-words-on-paper-before-the-workweek-starts comment. Yet I'd like to sound you out on two points:
(1) Reprisals.
I never know how much Tumblr memes break containment, because my wife is fully Tumblr-pilled and so ignorant of the rest of the Internet that she's never heard of President Bobcat, but feeds me a lot of whatever's going around Tumblr right now. (Today, it's inexplicably animations from jugglinglab.org?) So I'm going to explain this whole meme, but it's okay because it's funny.
One shining summer day in 2013, someone on Tumblr wrote:
> i need feminism because when jesus does a magic trick it’s a goddamn miracle but when a woman does a magic trick she gets burned at the stake
This post made the rounds and was racking up the likes and reblogs when someone (now famously) replied:
> i mean they did also kill jesus. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you’re coming from here but they very much did kill jesus.
Now, with reprisals:
I mean, after January 6, the Democrats did also try to put Donald Trump in prison for the rest of his life. That was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you're coming from but they did very much reprise against Donald Trump.
Not just Trump, either: the cancellations that followed destroyed the lives of hundreds of people for mere *presence* at the J6 rally, even fully lawfully. Loads of people who had non-violently broken the law (often for mere entry into the Capitol long after it had been forced open) were arrested, prosecuted, and sent to prison for surprisingly lengthy sentences. This was somewhat egregious, because the Biden Administration was *simultaneously* arguing to let the arsonist who had burned a man to death in Minneapolis in the Floyd Riots off with a warning (because racism). The Chapo Trap House guy (whom I take to be roughly on par with Laura Loomer/Tim Pool/Matt Walsh) was saying in *three years later* that the DNC "should have brought out the J6 defendants in shackles and had their families denounce them on stage." ( https://x.com/willmenaker/status/1827016312092275069 ) As with most things Chapo, I suspect this was unserious hyperbole at one level, but also absolutely serious if the Overton window shifted enough to allow it.
All of which is to say: The Democrats went hyper-nuclear with reprisals after J6.
Now, as I made exhaustingly clear on this blog at the time, I think the Democrats had not only the right, but the *duty* to go after Donald Trump. I think it is to the everlasting shame of the Republicans that they failed to convict him at the second impeachment. (Oh, right, he also got impeached.) I thought there were some excesses, but I did not consider them hugely blameworthy, given the gravity of what had happened. (And here is an asymmetry for you: it was, in 2020, unimaginable that any plausible Democratic president would have done anything even close to resembling what Trump did on J6.)
But, at the same time, I'm having a hard time remembering "a Biden-style statement of 'I'm not talking about all [Republicans], just the radical [right-wingers] who call for violence'," since the *actual* Joe Biden premised the 2022 midterm campaign on his thesis that it was a "battle for the soul of the nation" and that "MAGA Republicans" -- to include essentially the entire GOP candidate slate and a majority of its voters -- were a threat to the country and to democracy itself.
Again, I'm having a hard time really *blaming* Democrats for this, because J6 was such a damaging event and Democrats would never have done it. (They had their own ways of trying to cheat the 2020 election, mostly through juking ballot deadlines through sympathetic courts, but all non-violent and under something like the color of law.) But it's also hard for me to credit the idea that Republican reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk is asymmetrically oriented around reprisals.
What do you think about this?
(2) You contend that many right-wing leaders promote conspiracy theories about shooters who attack left-wingers. This is true, and I'm sure it is at least somewhat asymmetrically true because, as you say, the Right is asymmetrically conspiratorial (something I have a hard time blaming them for, but it's a true weakness).
But I just came off a couple of news cycles in which multiple left-wing friends of mine were trying to tell me that it was now established that Tyler Robinson was actually a Groyper radicalized by Nick Fuentes, citing left-wing thought leaders for this claim, including Vanity Fair. (It could still turn out to be true, but it seems very unlikely and certainly hasn't been established at this point.) (Also, it should be said: Vanity Fair didn't say outright that Robinson was a Groyper; it just implied it.) I suppose this is not *literally* calling it a false flag, but it is very much of a piece with right-wing attempts to shift responsibility for Vance Boelter to the opposition by pointing out Boelter had been appointed to a couple no-name boards by Tim Walz.
I also had one of my left-wing friends explain to me today that David French's NYT column today was flawed, because French overlooked the "fact" that both Trump assassins were conservatives, and so was the arsonist who attacked Josh Shapiro. My mother-in-law believed Trump had faked the damage to his ear (and that the assassination attempt was therefore a Trump plan) and told me she learned this from MSNBC. Perhaps she exaggerated? I don't really watch MSNBC (or any cable news). I hope she no longer believes it. All this *seems* to be coming from prominent left-wing thought leaders.
So my memory/experience is that, yes, both sides engage in a considerable amount of conspiracy theorizing whenever the other side gets attacked. While there's almost certainly *some* asymmetry there, it doesn't strike me at first impression that the asymmetry is very large or (therefore) very important.
I'm a little confused by the point about reprisals for J6. Here's a few disanalogies that I think are very relevant (and it kind of seems like you do too? I'm not sure where we actually disagree):
1. J6 was actually organized and promoted at the highest level by the President of the United States and leader of the Republican Party. It was an insurrection aimed at overthrowing our government and keeping someone in power who had just lost an election; an election where there were no credible reasons to dispute the results, and the people who organized the event either knew or very much should have known that there were no credible reasons to dispute the results. So, I mean, Trump also did actually commit extremely serious crimes. That was a pretty significant thing that happened. Like I understand where you're coming from but Trump really did try to coup the government before they tried to put him in jail.
2. Despite that, my memory (and boy oh boy could this be wrong five years later) is that the Democrats were not talking about declaring the entirety of the Republican Party a domestic terrorist organization, were not talking about throwing all rich Republican donors into prison, were not searching social media accounts of federal government employees and members of the military to see if any had made mentions of support for J6ers in order to fire them (I hadn't seen this at the time of my last comment, but apparently this is actively going on right now wrt comments about Kirk), etc. I don't know enough about the details of specific cases you might be referring to in terms of outsized sentences being imposed. But, again, we are talking about people who participated (wittingly or unwittingly, though I think the latter is pretty unlikely) in an insurrection. At some point we have to consider the proportionality of responses to the actions being responded to. Putting that aside, I'll note that I don't believe there was any talk of retaliating in kind or expanding beyond those people and groups who were directly involved in the event.
3. Unfortunately, Laura Loomer, Matt Walsh, and Tim Pool are not to the Republican Party what the Chapo Trap House types are to the Democratic Party. Would that it were so!* Loomer, et al are highly supportive of and involved with Trump and the Republican Party. Loomer especially has extremely tight ties to the President, serving as an unofficial sometimes-advisor (and only because Trump's other advisors talked him out of making her an official one). CTH mostly hates the Democratic Party and its leadership, probably criticizes them more (and more viciously) than they do Republicans. They are not advising Democratic Party leadership. This is maybe just another party asymmetry, but elected Democrats generally don't associate themselves with these kinds of outlets and these left-wing alternative media outlets are generally hostile to Democrats. So I don't really take their comments as representing the same level of connection with actual power and influence. To get people in the alt-media space who have similar connections as Loomer, Walsh, and Pool, I think you'd need to be talking about folks like Crooked Media (Pod Save America, etc), maybe the Majority Report and The Young Turks (but they mostly have connections with relatively minor figures, and many of those connections have weakened as they've become more extreme).
(*The monkey's paw curls, and the radical left takes over the Democratic Party...)
So, my summary is that the following facts matter a lot in my analysis:
1. There was actually an insurrection and attempted coup that was directed from the top of the Republican Party and multiple organizations were actively involved and plotting the same result;
2. Despite this, Democrats focused on people actually, tangibly involved in an insurrection and attempted coup when dealing out "reprisals" (normal legal proceedings);
3. Democratic leaders were not broadly calling for reprisals against everyone who supported or joked about or was insufficiently contrite about what happened;
4. The crazy voices calling for more extreme responses were not among the top elected and appointed Democratic politicians, or even media figures with substantial ties to the party, but rather marginalized radicals who hate the Democrats almost as much (or perhaps sometimes more than) the Republicans;
5. In contrast, the crazy voices calling for extreme responses on the right are top figures both in party, including the President himself in many cases, and media figures who are both extremely supportive of and deeply connected to top members of the party.
I don't think I can restrain myself in responding to the point about the Joe Biden speech, so a quick coda on that in particular: First, Biden was not calling for anyone to be imprisoned or attacked, or even silenced. He explicitly said they have a right to say the things they say. Furthermore, he specifically made calls for *everyone* to reject political violence. Not for Republicans to reject political violence, for everyone to reject it. This is just not happening on the right. As far as who he was talking about in the speech, it is unfortunate that despite his stated intention to only refer to a minority with the label MAGA Republican, the descriptive criterion he gave (deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election) applied to the majority of Republicans. But an important contrast (without getting into the question of whether his level of condemnation was appropriate): he at least tried to make a distinction. I am seeing no one on the right doing this. All Democrats and left-wingers are lumped together, and all are responsible for the most extreme people (who, as I said before, largely hate the Democrats). If you think there is even a remote symmetry between how Biden talked about Republicans and how Trump talks about Democrats, we may just be too far apart on this.
Re: (2) -- I think the big asymmetry I want to point out here is that you are citing your friends talking, and I am citing some of the largest voices on the right, including the President of the United States. Maybe there are prominent people on the Democratic side who have said similar things, but my guess is that it's fairly limited, it's not major elected officials or party thought leaders. That said, I also don't watch mainstream news (or alternative news for the most part) so I can't speak with great authority on what goes on at MSNBC (though again, they just fired a guy for suggesting that Kirk helped produce the environment where things like this happen). I don't think it's a mainstream view among Democrats that the assassination attempt on Trump was faked. I think it is a mainstream view among Republicans that the J6 riot was either orchestrated or largely inflamed by undercover FBI or antifa. I don't think major Democratic figures were mocking Trump after his assassination attempt. The highest level of elected Republicans and media figures were mocking Paul and Nancy Pelosi. I could definitely be wrong about all this, and the asymmetry might not be nearly as large as I perceive it to be. But from what I've seen, there's a huge asymmetry with conspiracy theorizing and downplaying events where the other side gets attacked, while there is also a huge asymmetry in escalating when their own side gets attacked.
I would add this.
In the immediate wake of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, here are reactions from various prominent elected figures on the left of the Democratic Party (or associated thereto):
https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1965867418863235410
https://x.com/GovPritzker/status/1965859695136223287
https://x.com/CoryBooker/status/1965863503635640686
https://x.com/ZohranKMamdani/status/1965861519591354429
https://x.com/SenWarren/status/1965865714017046937
Sanders at least put out a longer statement one day later: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/video-in-wake-of-charlie-kirk-murder-sanders-addresses-rising-political-violence-in-america/ (Among others, he brings up the shooting of Steve Scalise; it is worth remembering that that horrific attack was conducted by one of his own supporters, targeting not just Scalise but also other Republican lawmakers, and he shortly thereafter condemned the attack on the floor of the Senate: https://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/14/sanders-condemns-shooting-by-gunman-who-volunteered-for-his-campaign-239550 )
Now, are all of those initial posts boilerplate? Yes. You could swap the name "Charlie Kirk" for any other hypothetical victim (and I hope there will be no more victims, as vain as I know that hope to be) and all of them could make the exact same statement. But all of them did make those posts. Every single one of them did rightly condemn the act, and political violence in general. (You may consider later comments they made, particularly speaking extemporaneously, to be less helpful; I have found ones from Warren, Pritzker and Mamdani which you may classify as such.)
Here is some international flavour:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/canadian-politicians-condemn-shooting-of-conservative-activist-charlie-kirk/
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-condemns-shooting-charlie-kirk-utah-donald-trump-ally/
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/radionational-breakfast/-absolute-tragedy-marles-on-deadly-shooting-of-charlie-kirk-/105760148
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/images-of-person-of-interest-in-charlie-kirk-shooting-released-as-150-000-reward-offered/hicmjuzm3
On the other hand, what I recall of the reaction of Republicans to the killing of Melissa Hortman (and her husband, and an attack on a state Senator and his wife) was largely Mike Lee's initial reaction, in which he appeared to make light of the event (though he later retracted the comments). The Deseret News editorial board (an LDS Church publication) condemned him for it: https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2025/06/17/wasatch-front-shootings-dont-define-who-we-are/ (Doubly so in light of two tragic shootings in and around Salt Lake City at that time which claimed four lives, including an eight-month-old infant.) Unfortunately, at this time, most attempts on my part to search for "<name of elected Republican> hortman shooting" on Google either return responses to Kirk's killing or lefties on Reddit or Instagram complaining about the perceived difference in reaction (or lack thereof) from prominent Republicans to the two events. The only ones I could find after ten minutes of searching (about the same amount of time I spent finding all the above statements about Kirk, but of course there would be a recency bias with that) were these statements from Susan Collins and Minnesota Republicans (Tom Emmer, jointly with Amy Klobuchar, and Lisa Demuth):
https://www.facebook.com/susancollins/posts/the-attacks-on-public-officials-and-their-families-in-minnesota-are-tragic-and-h/1269320824554870/
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/melissa-hortman-john-hoffman-amy-klobuchar-statements-reactions/
So I think that some--though hardly all--of the frustration being seen right now, sometimes in part expressing itself as people egregiously making light of, dismissing, excusing, justifying or even celebrating Kirk's death (or worse, condemning those who condemn his death, a reaction I naively thought it was not even possible for someone to have), stems from this apparent disparity in response to the two killings from high-profile political opponents of the deceased.
My view, and the view I wish everyone shared on this, is that both Kirk's and Hortman's deaths were reprehensible tragedies that should never have occurred and the like of which should never be seen again, and I hope that whoever committed each of those heinous acts, if found in a court of competent jurisdiction to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, goes to jail for a very long time. But, and this may well be a consequence of my own media bubble, this is not what I have seen, in either case.
EDIT: I will give him credit; I found this statement from Donald Trump on Hortman's killing after filtering out the Kirk results:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/us-politics/article-trump-condemns-minnesota-shootings-but-violence-has-long-played-a-role/
I wish further to add this.
To be clear at the outset: nothing of what I am about to say in any way excuses any of the behaviour I am about to comment upon. All of it was gross. I hope for all the victims in the incidents upon which I will comment that they receive justice.
First, I will remark upon the October 28, 2022 assault of Paul Pelosi. (I use the criminal term "assault" because the accused was convicted in court of that crime, in addition to kidnapping, burglary and false imprisonment. Between federal and state sentences, he will spend the rest of his life in jail.)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/david-depape-life-sentence-1.7367002
On that day a man entered the home of then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. Not finding her there, he proceeded to ask her eighty-two-year-old husband Paul where she was, and assaulted him. Later, he stated that he had intended to hold the eighty-two-year-old Speaker hostage and attempt to force her to confess that she had lied about "Russiagate", including, he said, a willingness to "break her kneecaps".
Coming as it did just days before scheduled elections in the United States, this was a shocking incident. Many condemned it at the time, including then-former President Donald Trump: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3712340-trump-attack-on-paul-pelosi-a-terrible-thing/
This condemnation from the right was, sadly, not universal. Donald Trump, Jr., for instance, posted a meme about having a "Halloween costume ready" (which he claimed was not a reference to the attack on Paul Pelosi). He also attempted to score political points related to policing and law enforcement: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3712538-donald-trump-jr-mocks-paul-pelosi-attack/ (Others, such as Dinesh D'Souza and Elon Musk, who later served for a time in Trump's administration as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, also seemed to downplay the event: https://www.factcheck.org/2022/11/conservative-figures-spread-baseless-claims-about-attack-on-paul-pelosi/ )
I do not recall much if any condemnation coming from the right after these remarks. Trump Jr. campaigned vigorously on behalf of his father in 2024, such as delivering this speech in Arizona just days before the election, a state which his father won in that election: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HebJqqW5zX0 Since then, he has again been chosen to jointly head the trust overseeing the President's assets along with his siblings, as he did in his father's first term: https://www.reuters.com/business/trump-will-separate-himself-family-business-wsj-reports-2025-01-10/
The second incident which I will highlight is the killing of Speaker Emerita of the Minnesota House of Representatives Melissa Hortman.
I will further set the stage by remarking on two shootings in Utah (see the link in the previous post to the Deseret News for some further details).
On June 14, 2025, a "No Kings" rally took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, one of many such protests taking place around the world. Sadly, it was marred by tragedy when a gunman, who may have been there as part of the "peacekeeping" team, shot and killed one protester: https://local.sltrib.com/no-kings-timeline/
The next day, on June 15, 2025, a gunman at WestFest in West Valley City, Utah (a suburb of Salt Lake City), shot and killed, among others, an eight-month-old infant and a forty-one-year-old pregnant woman. According to reports ( https://www.sltrib.com/news/2025/06/20/one-those-killed-westfest-shooting/ ), he claims he did not intend to kill them, but laughed when informed that he had killed the other victim, an eighteen-year-old man. He has been charged with four counts of murder, among other claims. (I believe that as of the Deseret News editorial, it was not known that one of the victims was pregnant.)
Also on June 14, 2025 (drawing from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_legislators ), another gunman disguised himself as a police officer and went to the house of State Senator John Hoffman. Having gained entry, he proceeded to shoot Sen. Hoffman, and then attempted to shoot his daughter Hope only for his wife Yvonne Hoffman to protect her daughter with her own body. For these actions, the gunman has been charged with three counts of attempted first-degree murder and impersonation of a police officer.
The gunman then visited the home of State Representative Kristin Bahner. Fortunately, Rep. Bahner was on vacation with her family at the time; nonetheless, the gunman has been charged with attempted first-degree murder for this as well.
Finally, in the gravest tragedy in Minnesota that day, the gunman visited the home of Speaker Emerita and Representative Melissa Hortman. Once there, he proceeded to kill both Rep. Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman, and grievously injured their pet dog Gilbert, who was later euthanised. For these actions he has been charged with two counts of first-degree premeditated murder and one count of felony cruelty to an animal. He also faces a number of federal charges concerning electronic stalking.
According to reporting from NPR, the gunman had a "hit list" containing the names of dozens more people, and the manhunt which apprehended him was the largest in Minnesota history: https://www.npr.org/2025/06/16/nx-s1-5433748/minnesota-shooting-suspect-vance-boelter-arrested-melissa-hortman-john-hoffman
Again, some conservatives condemned this attack, among them Susan Collins and Donald Trump.
But on June 15, 2025, the senior United States Senator from Utah, Mike Lee, made two posts on social media concerning the attack, both quoted in the Deseret News editorial. The first seemed to blame "Marxists" for the event (it is not clear to me whether he was saying that the gunman was himself a Marxist or if he was claiming that this was somehow Minnesota DFL politicians' fault for not implementing Marxist policies, or some other interpretation). The second appeared to attempt to lay blame on Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (misspelled "Waltz"); it emerged that Gov. Walz had appointed the alleged killer to the Workforce Development Board as a "business member" in 2019. However, this was a reappointment to a position to which former Gov. Mark Dayton had appointed the then-future gunman during his time in office, and in any event, I at least do not see how this in any way could implicate either Governor in the attacks. (The gunman claimed in a letter that Walz had instructed him to kill Sen. Amy Klobuchar, but there is to my knowledge no evidence of this beyond said letter: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89ev9j955ko )
Senator Lee did remove the posts a few days later, I believe on June 17, well after all three tragedies detailed above. However, from reporting ( https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sen-mike-lee-faces-criticism-posts-minnesota-shooting/story?id=122930819 ), this was not because of criticism from figures on the right, but rather because Sen. Klobuchar, a personal friend of Hortman's, met with him and requested that he do so. Sen. Lee, to my knowledge, has otherwise faced no substantial consequences for those posts; he remains a sitting Senator, and further remains the chair of the Senate Energy Committee.
I am aware of one condemnation of Sen. Lee's remarks from a Republican, from former RNC chair Michael Steele, who told him to "Grow the hell up": https://x.com/MichaelSteele/status/1934393121489719447 (However, given Mr. Steele's career since losing his bid for reelection as RNC chair in 2011, with joining MSNBC, opposing Donald Trump, joining the Lincoln Project, and endorsing Joe Biden, I personally am skeptical of the extent of his ongoing influence in Republican circles. But then I am not familiar with the inner workings of Republican party politics, so perhaps I am misreading the situation.)
I'm sorry I haven't replied yet. I knew the workweek would be busy, but, the truth is, I'm still thinking about it. (Daniel, your comments were helpful as well.)
Okay, I've had my (extended) think! (Sorry! I had to write articles, feed the readers.) I hope this reply is a two-parter, but it may be a three-parter. Apologies. But, after this long a wait, I could hardly just dash off 200 words and call your point "fairly considered", could I?
PART ONE
I take you to have two related but distinct theses:
Thesis #1: When right-wingers *commit violent attacks*, the Right is much more likely to compose/subscribe to wild conspiracy theories that paint the attacker as a member of the Left (compared to the Left when left-wingers commit violent attacks).
Thesis #2: When right-wingers *are violently attacked*, the Right is much more likely to call for reprisals and revenge against the Left (compared to the Left when left-wingers are violently attacked), and, specifically (per our J6 tangent), the Right's calls for reprisal are much less justified and much more indiscriminate.
Combined, these theses lead you to a super-thesis: the Right is asymmetrically responsible for escalating civil conflict in the wake of political violence. They are turning up the temperature much more than the Democrats. (Thus, my post was annoying, because it pointed out Democrats more eager for political violence while passing over Republicans' role in creating that appetite.)
If I got these wrong, and am *still* misunderstanding your position, I'm probably forked (and you're entitled to be irritated with me). But I hope I got you right this time.
I'll start with Thesis #1.
It is absolutely true that the Right engaged in wild, conspiratorial blame-deflection when Vance Boelter murdered Melissa Hortman, and this spread to the top, including to Sen. Mike Lee, who suggested Hortman had been murdered for opposing Gov. Walz on a vote. (This wasn't even true; see my P.S. to Daniel at the bottom.) Something similar happened with Paul Pelosi, and this spread to the top, with both Trump Jr. and (now that his funeral is over, I'll say it:) Charlie Kirk himself suggesting to audiences, with not a shred of evidence, that the attacker had been some kind of prostitute or something. It's practically official GOP doctrine, at this point, that J6 was perpetrated by plainclothes federal agents and/or antifa. This is very bad. I think you are correct that it is also *typical* of the Right.
But is it *asymmetrical*, in the way that Thesis #1 contends?
I think you are probably right that the "Alex Jonesification" of the Right has made them more prone to this sort of thing in general. (I've had a draft post for years now that argues that, because the Right took the red pill, it is now wildly prone to Type II errors, whereas, because the Left took the blue bill, it is now insanely prone to Type I errors. This fits nicely into your thesis.) Right-wingers include more low-quality slop in their beliefs than left-wingers, in general, and that includes slop that makes them feel less indirectly responsible for mass murders.
On the other hand, the past several weeks have provided powerful evidence that the Left also has a very serious problem with this. The Left engaged in wild, conspiratorial blame-deflection when Tyler Robinson murderered Charlie Kirk, and this spread to the top: Heather Cox Richardson, the doyenne of Leftstack and normie-Dem-whisperer, printed as fact the conspiracy theory that Kirk was a groyper, and has refused to issue a correction, despite continuing to write about Kirk. More notably, Jimmy Kimmel was suspended for spreading this lie, became an instant cause celebre throughout the Left, and returned to the air with an extremely vague apology that admitted no actual fault and failed to correct the factual record. Outlets that unambiguously chalked up murders like Hortman's to a right-wing extremist, like NPR, continue to play coy with Tyler Robinson and talk about nihilistic violent extremism instead of left-wing extremism. I haven't seen a poll since September 14, before most facts were known, but, at that time, Democrats overwhelmingly thought that Robinson was a Republican rather than a Democrat (8% - 41% per YouGov).
So whatever psychological motive leads political ideologues to pretend that political murders weren't committed by "their side," it seems to be alive and well on both sides of the aisle. The asymmetry I see is in how the deflection is propagated: the Right does it with pure viral lies, while the Left launders the lies through credentialed authorities. But I think this is only a reflection of a larger asymmetry over institutional trust (the Red Pill/Blue Pill problem), and the actual lying about the motivations widespread on both sides. Even if they aren't quite identical, I think they're close enough to make Thesis #1 false.
However, I think you are correct about Thesis #2. On the other hand, I have two caveats, which reduce its force.
CONTINUED
PART TWO
...However, I think you are correct about Thesis #2. On the other hand, I have two caveats, which reduce its force:
First caveat: I think that Thesis #2 is pretty new. I don't think it was true six months ago, but it is true today. For example, after the assassination attempts against Candidate Trump last year, the Right did *not* react unusually. They demanded investigations. They spread theories, many conspiratorial and self-serving. They ritually blamed left-wing rhetoric and the media (https://www.cnn.com/trump-supporters-blame-media ), which, as you say, is about par for the course. (Left-wingers, of course, respond to right-on-left violence by ritually blaming right-wing rhetoric and the NRA.) But there were few, if any, prominent calls for reprisals against the Left broadly, and I would say the normal amount of civil war speculation (modulo the fact that we are, in fact, clearly sliding toward civil war). Here's Bluesky on Civil War just after the Hortman assassination: https://bsky.app/search?q=civil+war+until%3A2025-06-16+since%3A2025-06-13 , and here's Twitter just after the first Trump assassination attempt: https://x.com/search?q=civil%20war%20until%3A2024-07-15%20since%3A2024-07-12&src=typed_query . These seem about the same to me.
However, I think that this changed drastically after Charlie Kirk's assassination. You are right, I think, that the Right's rhetoric at that moment was unusually escalatory, extremely overbroad, and that this was asymmetrical to how Democrats have dealt with recent political violence against them. I did not really see this in the immediate aftermath, because I was still reeling, but, nevertheless, I think you are right. I agree, for instance, that Stephen Miller did basically call for broad-spectrum investigations across the Left, whether or not there was any evidence of any sort of criminal activity, that this is an unjustified exercise of government power against the political opposition, and that it represents an escalation beyond the usual bipartisan practice of just quietly putting the other side's fringe on the FBI's domestic terrorism watchlist. Many prominent right-wingers joined Miller in either calling for abusive government action or blaming the *entire* Democratic Party and the Left for a murder that the Democratic Party, to its credit, officially abhorred. (The Left did *not* abhor it, which leads to the second caveat.)
Second caveat: I think that Thesis #2 has to be modulated by the fact that quite a few of the reprisals were (like the post-J6 reprisals) entirely justified, and that (like the post-J6 reprisals) even some excesses should be forgiven. This softens (but does not erase) the force of Thesis #2.
(I should here address a minor comment you made: There *were* excesses after J6. There *were* people crawling through social media identifying random completely peaceful members of the crowd, doxxing them, and making sure they lost their jobs. As with nearly all riots, including the Floyd riots, the majority of people present had very little idea there was a riot going on, much less an insurrection. There were people jailed for behavior that could not reasonably be construed as participation in an insurrection. I think the "QAnon Shaman" is a good example of this; charging him was excessive, especially in light of DoJ leniency toward Minneapolis rioters who had caused physical damage, physical injury, and even death.)
An example of justified reprisals: I think it is perfectly appropriate (as Christopher Landau said) to deport non-Americans who "praise, rationalize, or make light" of the assassination of an innocent man; such speech demonstrates a criminal mentality that is fundamentally un-American, and it has always been one of the jobs of immigration authorities to ensure that the people we invite to join the American project are committed to it. (Otherwise, the American experiment will certainly fail.) I have also always favored laws that make National Socialists and Communists inadmissible, even though U.S. citizens have an inviolable right under the First Amendment to espouse Nazism or Stalinism. Deportations for being okay with assassination is not the same as deportations for, say, wanting to keep trans women out of women's locker rooms (or wanting to keep them in), a current subject of political debate, no matter how hotly charged. It's more like deporting someone for saying that he would love to become a drug kingpin, an unambiguous criminal sympathy. I can't find any actual examples of anyone losing a visa over post-Kirk comments, but, in principle, this is an appropriate response to aliens celebrating the murder of U.S. citizens.
Likewise, people who publicly celebrated the death of Kirk should not be employed as educators or medical professionals, because they are called upon in those roles to take care of vulnerable right-wingers, and obviously cannot be trusted to do so. For example, the Iowa teacher who posted "1 Nazi down" immediately after the murder (https://who13.com/news/iowa-news/oskaloosa-school-board-votes-to-fire-teacher-after-charlie-kirk-assassination-comments/) was appropriately fired. Likewise the teacher who said "Thoughts and prayers to his children but IMHO America became greater today. There I said it." (https://www.13abc.com/2025/09/11/teacher-no-longer-employed-saying-america-became-greater-after-charlie-kirk-shooting-district-confirms/) Shelly Harmon, a nurse, should no longer be able to work in her field after commenting (on a post about flags at half-staff), "Hell I'm throwing a party and starting a gofundme for the shooter." (https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1965923081194713125)
Because these reprisals were justified and appropriate, they don't support Thesis #2.
Nevertheless, there is still plenty of stuff (like Stephen Miller's comments) that happened that *do* support Thesis #2.
Here is my brief theory of the case:
What happened last month was extraordinary. The asymmetry I wrote about six years ago -- the Left's hatred for the Right's dead -- was suddenly absolutely everywhere and could no longer be explained away as anything other than deep, broad *hatred* of the Right's living members. It didn't come from some distant "other"; it came from family and friends. I think the shock of this -- a shock the Left has never faced, at least as far as I can think -- fueled an overheated reaction, one that we have not seen the likes of before, which led to the Right blaming *everyone* on the Left and calling for abuses of government power as punishment. This was, as you say, inappropriate and went well beyond anything Democrats do in the face of right-on-left political violence.
I *hope* that, now that we are past the shock, it will not happen again the next time a right-winger is assassinated. However, I fear that, now that all right-wing influencers know that "revenge" gets clicks and eyeballs, it will now become part of the standard right-wing playbook. I hope it does not spread next to the Left, although, if it did, the Right had made it hard to blame them.
With those two caveats, I agree with Thesis #2.
However, I find that I don't ultimately agree with the super-thesis. I don't think this weakened form of Thesis #2, by itself (since I reject Thesis #1), adds up to a conclusion that Republicans are asymmetrically raising the temperature on political violence.
On the other hand, before this conversation, I strongly believed that *Democrats* were asymmetrically raising the temperature, and I'm less confident of that now. (Although, on the other hand, the refusal to abandon Jay Jones and the Nicholas/Sophie Roske sentencing are making it difficult for me to consider this objectively right now.)
I don't know whether you agree with me, in the end, but I am grateful to you for making me think it through.
***
P.S. to Daniel: Sen. Lee's deplorable post about Sen. Hortman was a reference to the fact that she had voted against the DFL on a key procedural motion over the state budget, the upshot of which was something about illegal immigrants lost access to some portions of Medicaid. (I don't recall the details.) The conspiracy theory was that the Left had had her killed for taking health care away from illegal aliens. That was what Lee was saying: Gov. Walz's Marxist thugs will murder you for stepping out of line. Aside from being profoundly disrespectful and making light of a murdered woman, it was a completely insane theory to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the facts. Sen. Hortman did vote against her party... with her party's consent. Everyone in her party hated the idea of stripping Medicaid from illegals, *including Melissa Hortman*, but Republicans made it a key point of the eventual budget deal. Because the MN House is tied, the amendment to the bill could not pass without the active support of at least one DFL'er. As minority leader, Hortman's job was to fall on that sword. She did so with the full support of Gov. Walz and the DFL, which supported the deal. It was a really nasty thing for Mike Lee to post. I *did* see a great deal of condemnation of it from the Right, and I think that Right-wing condemnation was the true reason he apologized (I think his meeting with Sen. Klobuchar was just a face-saving excuse to back down), but I suppose it makes sense that the Right's condemnations of Lee would be less visible on the Left, for the same reason that the mature handling of the Kirk assassination by high-ranking Left-wingers like Bernie Sanders and Ezra Klein was barely visible to the Right.
Specifically on the point of the political alignment of Kirk's killer:
Ken Klippenstein (grain of salt) claims to have reviewed Discord messages sent by the killer and his acquaintances that are somewhat revelatory of his political views: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-leaked-messages-from-charlie
First, it appears that Kirk's killer confessed to his friends on Discord. This is why I am not saying "alleged"; however, since he has not been convicted of murder, and I do not know enough about criminal procedure to know whether the Discord post would be admissible because of, among other things, protections against self-incrimination, I do not say "murderer". He also said that he was about to turn himself in. (I also, as is my usual practice, will not use the killer's name.)
A search of those posts for the strings "Trump" and "Biden" returned only one result for each. For "Trump", the killer commented on his first impeachment. For "Biden", it was a comment on early returns in the 2020 election, that Trump was leading but also that it was too early to tell who would win.
His views were, as with most people, only partly aligned with any major political faction. Klippenstein cites two examples: he was in favour of LGBTQ+ rights, but also in favour of gun ownership rights.
A message sent by another user after the killer's confession and surrender to police confirms that it was true, and asks other users to pray for the killer's repentance and for Kirk and his family.
In summary, any allegations being thrown around that the killer was a Groyper, or a Marxist, or far-left, or far-right, or whatever else has been claimed are likely all not true. For myself, no matter what else, I hope that he receives the justice he deserves.
As for his acquaintances, whose views seemed to run the ideological gamut: "What I see is a bunch of young people shocked, horrified and searching for answers, like the rest of the country." I can only imagine what it's like to find out that someone you thought you knew well, who was amiable and friendly, posted cat memes and played video games with you, had it in him to assassinate someone in cold blood.
I haven't been on FB since February but still appreciate seeing you De Civitate posts come through. Keep up the good work.
You were wise to leave, but I have missed your presence on numerous occasions. Really good to hear from you.
Have you ever thought of doing discord server or the like?
I do have a Discord account, which I log into 1-2 times a week. I never thought of starting my own server, but are there any I should join (where you are present)?
Also interested in this.
I have used discord for some very specific video game related things ( not lately though) but haven't used it for anything serious, but I always hear about certain communities created by people I listen to or watch ("... Get access to our discord if you contribute to my Patreon along with additional members only content..."). I have never been interested in joining those but one made up of your politics group would cause me to join since it is one of the few things that I miss about FB (though not enough to rejoin)... Basically I am selfishly trying to find a way to get that without FB...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deq6_p47g54#t=93s
(just that one line at the end)
Good read. I followed him from my progressive perch outside of the US, and my main impression over the years was that he really was a white supremacist. Maybe that isn't true, but my understanding of him from casual references gathered over a decade made the general media praise seems very weird to me. Which is why this was good for me to read.
This is very generous of you. Thank you, sincerely.
I'm not sure about the reliability of that YouGov poll. If it occurred the day after the shooting won't motivated tribal reasoning radically skew the results?
I did some more research, and it looks like the gap is still there when the tables are turned: shortly after the murder of Democratic politician Melissa Hortman, 19% of Harris voters said that political violence is sometimes justified, but only 11% of Trump voters said the same according to YouGov.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll
Question wording is somewhat different, so I'm not sure it's dispositive, but it's a piece of evidence for sure. Good find.
I think you're right that I should be a little more skeptical of the YouGov "celebration of death" poll, due to its timing. However, it lent support to a pattern I had already been detecting (e.g. in this post: https://ropersanchor.jamesjheaney.com/2021/07/06/an-asymmetry-observed-partisan-obituaries/ ), so I kinda jumped on it.
I'm going to stand by my thinking for now, because I still think I'm right and that I have sufficient reason for thinking so -- but, if I have to eat crow later, that would be good news for the country, because it would mean we are not so far apart as I thought.
What's your sense of Charlie Kirk's actual impact before this all happened? Is that a name the average person on the street would have had a reaction to a month ago? I'm barely plugged in at all, and so the fact that I didn't clock that name didn't surprise me any. I wonder how many of these opinions people are expressing now are in line with how they felt a month ago? Or if these are new feelings and emotions they are expressing over <generic talking head of the other party>.
I feel like having a strong negative feeling toward Osama Bin Ladin and then applauding his death is one avenue, and that applauding <someone's> death on the other side of the aisle and then backing in to reasons for why you're happy it happened is another avenue. The first doesn't feel nearly as scary as the second.
This is an interesting question, because, on the one hand, he was a huge deal, a tremendous deal. On the other hand, that huge deal was really only in a pretty niche audience. He was a leading conservative activist, but, culturally speaking, that makes him a big fish in a small pond.
Kirk's cultural reach over the past five years (prior to the eventful events of this summer) was comparable to Stephen Colbert's or Lester Holt's: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2020-01-01%202025-06-01&geo=US&q=Charlie%20Kirk,Stephen%20Colbert,Lester%20Holt&hl=en
Colbert is the biggest fish in the small pond of Late Night TV, and Holt is the biggest fish in the small pond of TV News Broadcasting. It's impressive that Kirk was able to build enough audience using, basically, YouTube and broadcasting (EDIT: should say "podcasting") to compete with broadcast TV.
However, none of these people are especially well-known, when you get down to it. All three of these people are *dwarfed* in cultural reach by Vice President JD Vance: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2020-01-01%202025-06-01&geo=US&q=Charlie%20Kirk,Stephen%20Colbert,Lester%20Holt,JD%20Vance&hl=en
And, even at Vance's peak last July, only 60% of Americans could identify him as the GOP VP candidate: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/40-percent-americans-vp-candidates/story?id=42497013
Kirk was disproportionately well-known among young people (GenZ/GenA) rather than us Millennials+. He was well-known enough to be a serious contender in the GOP primary for Arizona governor, although not so well-known that it was a sure thing.
If you are really into politics, you had heard of Kirk and had some opinion on him. (I knew of him, had seen maybe 2 minutes of him talking over the years, and was aware that he was a conservative talking head very closely aligned with Mr. Trump. Between that and my total lack of interest in video or talking heads podcasts, I pretty much dismissed Kirk as presumptively a hack. I have learned since his death that this was unfair of me.) If you are only somewhat into politics, especially outside the Right, odds are much lower that you've heard of him. Even if you have heard of him, you may have no opinion of him. Even if you have an opinion of him, it's probably based on very little.
I hesitate to draw any firm or general conclusions from limited data, but I think both: (1) it would be beyond insane to treat this talking head like Osama bin Laden, and (2) it *is* scary to recognize some people backing themselves into hatred.
Oh wow!! Those are MUCH bigger names to compare him against than I was thinking. I had assumed he was at more of a ‘Matt Parker’ (of ‘Standup Maths’) level of fame in an obscure subculture.
**side note: I’m also surprised that you have JD Vance as a larger name than any of these three? Isn’t that the whole thing about veeps is that they’re relegated to the sidelines of notoriety? Kamala didn’t do anything meaningful these last 4 years did she? Or Pence before that? Yet JD has more pull that Colbert?
Well, at least going by Google Trends! What Trends picks up is search traffic, which is an imperfect proxy for cultural reach (but a pretty decent one all the same).
Nevertheless: Yes, Vice Presidents are worthless compared to Presidents. They are meaningless and nobody pays attention to them -- compared to the President. And of course they have no actual powers. But, in terms of *notoriety*, I think Vice Presidents hulk out compared to *most* other offices. You're correct that Harris did nothing in her four years, as Vance is doing nothing now. *But they still made the news* -- and so found their way into the attention spans of many millions of Americans more than any single TV host or lower-level official.
Example: You *probably* remember Vice President Dick Cheney, who has had effectively zero relevance since 2009. But do you remember the Speaker of the House under Cheney (before Pelosi took over in 2007 when the Dems won the midterms)? Much less likely. (It was Dennis Hastert.)
The other effect at work here is the death of broadcast. Even as recently as 2007, although Late Night and Broadcast News were already in decline, they still had *immense* cultural power. In 2006, Jay Leno was winning the time slot with 6 million viewers per night (in a population of 300 million). In 2023, Stephen Colbert was "winning" with just 2 million (in a population of 334 million) and the show was having profitability problems. So Late Night lost two-thirds of its viewers. I'm sure it picked up a lot online (9 million YouTube subs -- triple Kirk's YouTube sub count, and Kirk didn't have a broadcast TV show to fall back on!), but being a Late Night host today just doesn't matter, culturally, like it used to. Ditto broadcast news anchoring. That makes it easier for a too-online guy like Charlie Kirk to punch in their weight class -- perhaps especially on a metric that favors Google searches.