For Cheering Liberals:

You are radicalizing the normies. The right has boiled over.

I wrote about Charlie Kirk just last week. I opened that piece with:

I’ve been warning since oh…time immemorial, that if the left continued to silo itself into ever more echoey echo chambers, their understanding of, and ability to engage with, public policy was going to decline. Their cognitive and discursive muscles would atrophy, and they would find themselves talking past issues rather than engaging directly with them.

I was talking about policy. Wonk stuff. But the same idea applies to displays of empathy. Or what should be displays of empathy.

At work this morning, I was talking to my wife about the recent attack in Charlotte - she doesn’t do a lot of political media, and hadn’t seen anything about it. To her horror, I showed her the following post. It was the first one that popped up on my Twitter feed.

She was saddened and disgusted, then had to go discuss something with a colleague. I scrolled on. Made it two more posts.

Then I called her back over.

Terminal onlinism selects for political junkies and holders of extreme views in ways that sometimes leave the impression that normies have been rendered extinct. They haven’t though.

Most of us - not including myself in this, obviously - actually are just decent people trying to pass the days. Most of us actually do think that violence, of all stripes, is sad and undesirable, and cling to antiquated, folksy views like, just as an example, that America isn’t supposed to be a country where people are murdered for just sitting on trains or expressing their political views, however harsh or unpopular.

So when those types log on and see things like this:

Or this:

Or this:

It hits them in an entirely different way to how it hits us poster-brains.

After what was already an emotionally-charged week for the right (to say the literal least), I was pretty unsurprised by the fury and the sense of boiling-over exhibited by right-leaning commentators.

I was also unsurprised by the gloating, the whatabouting, and the look-over-thereing on display from the left. The intensity was higher, for both, but neither phenomenon was new to me.

The only folks to surprise me today were the normies. We don’t hear from them a lot. We hear from them so little, in fact, that it can be difficult to remember that they too hold political opinions, carry sensibilities, and possess strong feelings about what’s right, what’s decent, and what represents appropriate, American conduct.

Celebrating the death of a political opponent - even one who has espoused highly provocative views - is anathema to people whose brains have not been rotted by social media and the 24-hour news cycle. It is, as we say, not a good look to them.

Charlie Kirk was murdered in front of his wife. In front of his two young children. They were there. In person. At the event. Watching their husband, their daddy, take one in the neck and keel over. I am hard pressed to imagine how a person could look more ghoulish than by regarding that as “just deserts.”

Again, I do not exempt myself in this. I wrote after the murder of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO, that I didn’t think it was reasonable to demand that people perform grief or outrage over the death of somebody they thought was a bad person. I still hold this view, by the way.

If you hated Charlie Kirk, hated what he stood for, and regard the world as being a better place without him in it, you are entitled to those thoughts. You will face no pressure from me to post “RIP,” or share come-together memes, or to go out of your way to lament the manner in which he died.

But I implore you: you must knock it off with the mocking and the cheering and rubbing of noses in the dirt. This ain’t the day for it. Be the bigger one. Please.

I don’t mean this in a general sense. I’m not making some sweepy, I-weep-for-this country point about civility, or not speaking ill of the dead. I’ve spoken ill about plenty of dead people.

I’m saying: you are playing with a very dangerous fire on this one. I suspect you do not realize it, but you need to stop before it burns out of control. We may already have passed that tipping point.

This has nothing to do with you being “right.” It has nothing to do with whether your points about Kirk are on point or not. It’s about context.

Your media consumption habits are likely shielding you from understanding the impact of this news on the American right. And the formerly reliable silence of normies has likely misled you into thinking that more Americans approve of the inhumanity you’re displaying today than actually do.

Two angles here: politics and security.

If you haven’t been following the story of the tragic stabbing in Charlotte, NC (and if you avoid conservative media, you probably haven’t been) you may not fully grasp the extent to which Kirk’s assassination could not possibly have taken place at a worse or more volatile time.

Major news outlets didn’t cover the story until it became a controversy, so you can be forgiven for not really knowing what happened. I’ve seen virtually nothing of it on Facebook. But it was (until today) the #1 trending story on Twitter and on most rightie media.

The very, very short version is that a young, Ukrainian woman was captured on video being stabbed in the neck from behind by a mentally ill black man as she rode a light rail train. It is her picture in that fateful Charlie Kirk post I showed above. One of the last pictures he ever shared. Or ever will share.

The saga has ignited a firestorm, and a tumultuous shout-fest over crime, race, mental illness, and criminal sentencing (the woman’s killer had 14 prior arrests) that has pushed the boundaries of debate to extremes I have never before seen in all my years following politics. Not ever.

The right, along with much of the center, and even much of the left, has been stewing in this all week. Marinating in ugliness, heads full of thoughts that they wish - that I wish - would just go away.

And then Kirk gets killed.

A lot of the lefty reactions to Kirk’s death have taken the form of whataboutism like this.

Hortman’s death was hideous and maddening, but the comparison here is off by several orders of magnitude. Not in any moral sense, just in terms of recognition. The imbalance in fame between a Minnesota State Representative and one of the nation’s most famous and popular conservative commentators is astronomical.

Very real question, and a real show of hands:

How many of you knew who Melissa Hortman was before she was assassinated? How many of you knew who Charlie Kirk was?

To suggest that these two stories were going to be given the same level of media play is to fundamentally misunderstand what the media is, and what it does. And again, this is an especially bad week for pretending to be confused about that, because the excuse for mainstream outlets failing to cover the Charlotte stabbing was that it was such a supposedly small-potatoes story, really, why would they?

To now be pointing at the murder of a formerly obscure, state-level politician and insisting that her death should have been given the same coverage as the on-camera assassination of one of the biggest media stars in the country…after spending the week shrugging at this blazing ball of media fire that was igniting the right, middle, and center left alike…again guys: bad look.

Try to imagine what would have happened if, a week or so after George Floyd’s death, somebody had shot, on camera,

Stephen Colbert.

Joy Reid.

Jon Stewart.

Rachel Maddow.

And imagine what your feelings would have been if you’d tuned into right-leaning media and seen post, after post, after post, after post, after post, after post, after post, after post laughing and high-fiving because “they had it coming.”

Took me all of 3 minutes to mine the screengrabs for this. Just a quick scroll of my Facebook feed coughed up more results than I could share.

You don’t actually need to imagine this scenario, I guess. It’s just happened, only in reverse. You’re seeing it now. And if you’re not, you’re about to be.

The security concern here is civil war. Not rude posting back and forth on Facebook, not rage-sharing MSNBC and Fox clips. Violence.

Beatings. Shootings. Disappearances. Lynchings. Burnings.

It won’t be North v. South. The country isn’t like that anymore. Think less Antietam and more Belfast. Think more people doing what Kirk’s shooter did. More people doing what Hortman’s shooter did.

More Dylann Roofs. More James Hodgskinsons. More Jared Lee Loughners. More Robin Westmans. More. More. MORE. MORE. Until it’s your street. Your doorstep. Your friend. Your sister. Your kid.

And if your plan is to just turn public sentiment in such a profoundly anti-gun direction that we disarm before this can happen, you are an unserious fool, and you need a new hobby.

If this seems hyperbolic, if this seems less important to you than your posting things that land you on the right side of the right issues, remember the normies. Let’s check back in with them.

I have seen political posts today from people I didn’t know knew how to make political posts. People I didn’t know had political opinions. And they are all the same. All expressing a united sentiment: horror at what happened to Charlie Kirk and revulsion at how you are reacting to it.

You want saner gun laws? You want better mental healthcare? You want a more compassionate political climate? A country with less hatred? My friends, you are turning off, in droves, the very people whose support you will need to make this happen.

Any other week, maybe this is a reasonable reaction. Not this week. This week, you’re risking turning the Democratic Party into the Green Party. The Republican Party into The Uniparty.

I promise. I swear before Almighty God. Your angry, snarky shitposting about Charlie Kirk will not move the needle one iota in the direction you want it to this week. It really will move the needle in the other direction.

This is would be a terrific time for more of you to remember that first, most crucial lesson your mother taught you: if you don’t have anything nice to say, shut the actual fuck up.