The untimely demise of Turning Point USA’s CEO has created a wealth of fertile ground. Charlie’s passing has energized the world to step up and speak out in favor of free speech. While not a big deal in the United States, no other nation in the world has our First Amendment.
So-called western Democracies are increasingly policing online speech, public speech, which includes arresting people based on what someone else thinks other people might think or feel about what they said.
Hello, Orwell!
America’s approach can seem a bit wild west to the rest of the world, but it has its advantages. In a post titled “Do We Need To Fire People Who Are Happy Charlie’s Dead?” I touch on the question from the headline in the context of that wild-west speech. It follows a decades-long line of thinking as it pertains to Democrat commenters who find themselves compelled to comment on my content. The rule is, let them speak, because they often help make my point by proving me right.
As for all the firings,
I’m not convinced Charlie, or his Family, or Turning Point would approve of or support the termination of divorced, reckless cat ladies with Ed degrees who moonlight as wine moms venting a misinformed partisan spleen over Mr. Kirk’s untimely demise.
It is, of course, a matter of poor taste and entirely up to private employers what to do with people who work for or represent them. “From a company culture standpoint, [you have a right] to police the sorts of people who would openly celebrate public executions because [your business] fears retribution from the public.” And that was all well and good until Scott Adams reminded me of something.
Well, let me tell you the thing that is most shocking about that. The most shocking thing is that the people who spoke out that way believed they wouldn’t get fired. I think they were all surprised, which means they’ve been living entirely within a bubble in which they thought other people would agree with that. Are you kidding me?
The big blue bubble. It comes up a lot in my writing. And since last week, I’d been dancing around that in numerous Grok Media adventures without actually asking that question. I’ve talked about how algorithms isolate you into online tribes filled with confirmation bias, but I never walked it out into the sunlight in this context.
What sort of person do you have to be to think that celebrating someone having their neck blown open by a 30.06 rifle round while chatting amicably about the issues of the day on a college campus is something you can and should do publicly without personal or professional consequences?
Did you not know that the First Amendment only protects your speech from the government? Blame your public school education for that, unless you went to private school, which may have actually been less expensive, but markedly more academically rigorous. Or perhaps not. Plenty of smart people do and say stupid things all the time. Look at Jasmine Crockett. She is highly educated at some costly institutions, and she says some of the dumbest s*!t a person can utter. For her efforts, Crockett got her congressional seat redistricted out of existence. She’ll need to run in one where she can’t win as easily, which is a rare example (in Congress) that what you say in public can and does (should) have public consequences.
As one author noted over at Reason Magazine, “Anybody celebrating Kirk’s assassination should be roundly mocked and criticized, and can suffer whatever professional consequences are appropriate.”
But how did they not know this wouldn’t play well outside their confirmation bias cave? It’s not as if they don’t have to do things in the real world with people who disagree and at places where it is not appropriate.
Has the internet made them this way?
I’m sure there is some perfectly suitable clinical diagnosis more complex than asshole, but how does one explain how a teacher, who is supposed to have been educated not just in their subject but in critical thinking, debate, and so on.
So I actually have some weird empathy for these teachers getting fired for saying horrendous things about Charlie Kirk, because they actually think they’re in a different reality than they are. How do you think you’re in a different reality? Is it because you individually had some mental problem? Probably not. It’s probably really a predictable outcome of the rhetoric that we’re seeing from the left. It’s the most predictable outcome: that people would believe all the Hitler stuff as literal—“Oh, it’s literally as bad as Hitler; we better do something about it.”
I don’t feel sorry for them because I’ve stewed in much the same environment for going on close to twenty years, and I am not at all like that. America is exceptional, I am blessed, all life matters, and regardless of my feelings about someone’s politics, they are a human being who likely meant something to someone else, capable of redemption at any point in the arc of life.
When fat, drunk, womanizing Senator Ed Kennedy died, as an example, I felt bad for his friends and family. I didn’t have much company. Edward Kennedy committed himself to a more than fair share of evil. Still, I’ve also known numerous blue to the bone dems who have not just announced their conversion, sought redemption, and not just shown contrition, but who have dedicated themselves to real liberty in our lifetimes.
They make better Republicans than a lot of Republicans I’ve met or known.
All they had to do was ignore the rhetoric and see for themselves.
The world is full of individuals who don’t know what they don’t know and dare to pretend otherwise. Brave and stupid, but we all have blind spots. The political response to COVID knocked the scales from millions of eyes, as did Charlie Kirk, on campuses all across America, until he was assassinated. An individual act that appears to have opened millions more eyes to an underlying evil, not just percolating on the political left, and not just encouraged by those claiming positions of leadership, but lived by others as a result of policy.
Iryna Zarutska is a victim, dying just days before Charlie, killed by a progressive justice system that refuses to prosecute a long list of crimes, letting criminals walk free without bail to do more damage. Inner cities across America are war zones where kids who don’t get shot to death are as likely to overdose on street drugs – all byproducts of the war on marriage, schools that exist to enrich union activists instead of teaching children, and a subsistence culture that frowns on the hard work and the learning necessary to escape that hell.
Children are being drugged, tortured, and surgically castrated on the altar of the Transgender agenda, which was already having problems in middle America before the Kirk murder. Don’t expect matters there to improve, but keep your eyes open for the Proglodytes who continue to celebrate not just an assassination but the people’s response to it. The overwhelming love, and grace, and sympathy. The promise to take up Charlie’s banner.
They hate all of that. And hey, it’s America, they are entitled to share how they feel, and suffer whatever social, professional, or political consequences come with it, but the bigger threat is how these people could be functioning in modern society and not even know the risk. They are beyond just angry and bitter; they are at least a little bit broken and, frankly, as likely as anyone to start climbing up on a rooftop with a rifle.
