Will They Listen?
Reality checks and a plea for sanity
“Social media is a cancer, and I would urge people to log off, turn off, and touch grass.” — Utah Governor Spencer Cox
Amen, say we all, especially after the week we just staggered through.
In case you’ve already forgotten: This was the week that Russia attacked Poland with drones; Israel attacked Qatar; and Brazil succeeded in doing what America failed to do, when it held its seditious former president accountable. A murder in Charlotte inflamed the culture wars; inflation was up, hiring down; the nation’s report card said the kids are definitely not all right; and Trump blinked on invading Chicago, choosing instead to send troops to Memphis.
But the news cycle was overwhelmed by the assassination of MAGA mega-influencer Charlie Kirk — and the flood of demagoguery, vitriol, and disinformation that followed with sickening predictability.
As I wrote the other day, political assassinations have become a twisted moral/ideological Rorschach test. The murder of Charlie Kirk revealed America in all of its compassionate decency — but also its coruscating tribal ghoulishness.
On Friday, Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox tried to break through to our battered better angels. Political murder, he reminded us, is “much bigger than an attack on an individual.”
It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals.
This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been, and who we could be in better times. Political violence is different than any other type of violence for lots of different reasons….
We will never be able to solve all the other problems, including the violence problems that people are worried about, if we can't have a clash of ideas safely and securely, even especially those ideas with which you disagree...
The assassin will be held accountable, he said, but “all of us have an opportunity right now to do something different”.
We can return violence with fire and violence. We can return hate with hate. And that's the problem with political violence is it metastasizes because we can always point the finger at the other side, and at some point, we have to find an off-ramp — or it's going to get much, much worse.
See, these are choices that we can make. History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country, but every single one of us gets to choose right now. If this is a turning point for us, we get to make decisions. We have our agency.
Contrast that with the message being spread by the Divider-in-Chief. On the same day that Governor Cox spoke, Donald Trump went on Fox & Friends to explain why right-wing violence was justifiable.
“The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They’re saying: ‘We don’t want these people coming in; we don’t want you burning our shopping centers; we don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street’.”
On the other hand, it was open season on left-wing radicals. “They’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”
Trump was amplifying his message from Wednesday night, when he said:
For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today.”
Nick Cohen reminds us of the scorching hypocrisy of Trump’s approach to violence:
In June far right thugs gunned down two liberal politicians from Minnesota. In April they tried to firebomb the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and in August they murdered a police officer outside the Centers for Disease Control.
You can guess what is coming by the failure of Trump to say a single word in public about the murdered officer, even though the victim, David Rose, like Charlie Kirk, was also a young father.
He is not always silent. After a hammer-wielding maniac tried to murder Nancy Pelosi and beat her husband half to death, he made jokes about it.
His vertiginous double standards will soon be state policy.
A reality check?
New information also seems to challenge the Trump/MAGA narrative that Kirk’s killer was a left-wing zealot. It is far too early to know for sure, but there is a very real possibility that the assassin was a so-called “groyper,’ a far-right denizen who followed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
If you want to dive deeper into that possibility, you may find this useful: “Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme.” And this as well: “Groypers, Helldivers 2, Furries: What Do the Messages Left by Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Killer Actually Mean?” | Vanity Fair
But, for the moment, Kara Swisher makes the most sense:
There’s a lot of speculation going around about the political ideology of Tyler Robinson that led him to this horrific act. Was he a “groyper,” who follows the heinous Nick Fuentes, or a white supremacist or just nihilist?
It is all still unclear, but what is obvious is that he was terminally online, isolated and deep into dank gaming and memes and will have a world view that will be incomprehensible to most people, a toxic mishmash of hateful jokes, cruel dunks and, always, a hopeless overlay.
She concludes: “Let’s try a new idea: Saying we don’t know yet why this person committed this horrible act.”
**
But will they listen?
Will MAGA zealots heed fellow Republican Spencer Cox’s plea for decency? Will the right-wing narrative shift if the killer turns out to be a right-wing extremist? Will the reality check penetrate the alt-reality of the right?
Will we back off from the brink?
Doubtful, because there are simply too many incentives for incitement, too much momentum, too much ideological investment, and the Inflamer-in-Chief sits in the Oval Office, with the biggest megaphone of them all.1
A week of commentary
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday dogs
Weekend Eli.
Many of those now calling for dignity and respect in discussing Charlie Kirk’s killing exhibited callousness and juvenile cruelty in reacting to the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi. See NYTimes, (11/5/2022), How Republicans Fed a Misinformation Loop About the Pelosi Attack.
The New York Times article lists 21 prominent Republicans [including Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and Devin Nunes] who mocked the attack or promoted false rumors about the circumstances, including that the attack was perpetrated by a gay prostitute hired by Paul Pelosi. That false narrative was disproven within hours of the attack, but Republicans delighted in repeating the rumor or implying that authorities were covering up the facts surrounding the attack.
I'm going to cuss here for a second so don't look if you're sensitive to that sort of thing: The only thing that's becoming clearer to me is that one fucked up young man killed another fucked up young man and the president is fucking the whole thing up worse.
Will they listen? In a word, "No". Why? It's far easier to run with a ball that supports one's insanity. I mean, "Jewish Space Lasers"?
When you're that far gone, rationality is not going to happen. It's everywhere. I don't think the founding fathers expected mass psychosis.