I really feel badly about this, and I find it terrifying, frankly. I know Curmie. I like him; I think of him as a friend, even though he metaphorically kicked me in the teeth by abandoning his column here and fleeing the blog without so much as an explanatory email or a “by your leave” after years of my promoting him and his blog on Ethics Alarms.
But cowabunga! Curmie posted that junk above on his Facebook page three days ago, and it is beyond stupid and beneath contempt. This very intelligent, analytical, learned, sensitive and rational man has embraced one of the most desperate alternate reality spin narratives of the Axis as it tries to somehow avoid the wave of recognition across the nation and the world of what American progressives have become.
First, he is appealing to the authority of the Democratic Socialist Party. Second, the post he is pointing to is deceitful: yes, Granny did say that, but it is a non-sequitur. It is like arguing that FDR was really a Republican because Teddy was. The fact that the “alleged assassin” has a MAGA family proves nothing about his motives or political orientation at all. And Curmie knows this, because Curmie is smart, or was.
The ability of Trump Hate and living in biased, denial-infected bubbles (Curmie’s world is academia and theater) to destroy brain cells is remarkable: they will be writing books and treatises about it for decades. This is like watching “Flowers For Algernon” in reverse (the story that was filmed as “Charlie,” the Oscar winning movie about a mentally-disabled man who is turned into a genius by an experimental treatment.
I have many friends who are suffering from this terrible malady, but none have upset me as much as Curmie. Good Lord, if Curnie can be rendered an idiot by Trump Derangement, none of us is safe.
Larry Tribe, a renowned and respected professor at Harvard Law School from 1968 until his retirement in 2020, and currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus at the school shared a lengthy post from Occupy Democrats which also spread the nonsense that Kirk was killed by a crazy conservative. “Kirk’s apparent assassin seems to have been ultra-MAGA, exploding the GOP/MAGA attempt to pin the blame for this tragedy on liberals,” wrote Tribe. But as Ethics Alarms has documented, Tribe, 83, is sliding into dementia and nobody has had the sense to keep him away from keyboards. Non-Trump-Deranged, non-senile, current law professor Jonathan Turley, seeing the latest evidence of Tribe’s decline, wrote,
Indeed. But not Curmie! Please, not our Curmie!
At the end of “Charley” and “Flowers for Algernon,” the mircale treatment proves to on;y be temporary, and Charley end up a happy moron again. Maybe in “Curmie,” our hero have his intellect and objectivity returned. If that happens, he’ll always have a column waiting here.
We’re rooting for you, Curmie.
….
Addendum: Here is what Curmie thought worthy of endorsing two days ago:
Ethics Alarms 
Hitler’s grandmother had she been alive would have refused to see reality.
Again, for the sake of argument, let’s say Robinson was a Republican…and he’s not…but let’s say he was.
At that point, I simply respond with, “Congratulations, Dems, you found the one Republican that acts exactly the way many of you publicly said you want to!! Please, pat yourselves on the back for that.”
There is no “gotcha” for Democrats on this, no matter they spin it.
I spent a great part of the weekend going down the groyper rabbit hole. According to self-labeled “chronically online” Gen Z-ers, when word came out of what was inscribed on the bullet casings, they immediately recognized this kid as a groyper; a follower of the alt right content creator/podcaster Nick Fuentes. The inscriptions were directly related to meme wars on 4chan from a decade ago. This led me to incels, femboys, trans maxxers, alt right pipelines, meme lords, edge lords, accelerationists, and kaomoji (which is where OwO comes from.)
All that is to say, I highly doubt this is going to break down along clean lines of left and right. If this kid is who his peers suspect he is (and I have no reason to doubt them), this is deep dark internet fringe sub-culture shit. It’s radical. It’s scary. And it’s also incredibly sad. We have lost a generation of young men.
Yet it’s all irrelevant. Only one side of the political divide has been advocating violence against MAGA, Trump and their supporters. Whether an alt-right nut responds to the fearmongering or a Bernie Bro, the accountability is clear.
Except that if this kid is a “groyper” he was not responding to rhetoric from the left. He likely wasn’t even paying attention to the left. It’s not only one side advocating for violence against MAGA. The alt right hates MAGA. They hated Charlie Kirk. They saw him as weak and a betrayal to their cause. Kirk and Fuentes had a long standing beef. In Discord chat rooms the groypers are most definitely calling for violence against MAGA. They’re nihilists and this assassination is the equivalent of gang on gang violence. Think Tupac and Biggie.
Pointing the finger between the left and the right is a distraction in my opinion.
Thank you, Alicia. I was wondering if anyone was going to point out the Nick Fuentes connection, which I think is relevant no matter what Jack says.
Yes, and it’s the Nick Feuntes types that are grooming these young men using rage bait and far right accelerationism while at the same time convincing “incels” that everything is pointless. If only it were as simple as whose rhetoric is worse; republicans or democrats.
Again: One side advocates violence as acceptable in opposition to Trump and MAGA. That side can’t deny or spin that. If may soothe their conscience, but their conscience, such as it is, doesn’t deserve to be soothed. It is not a distraction because in this case it’s clear who the “bad guys” are. Remember the polls showing over a third of Democrats would see a justification for killing him? Culture is always created by multiple eddys and events.
I would add that if the assassination does become a tipping point that swamps the totalitarian Left despite less than clear ideological alignment, it is condign justice. The Leftists used a non-racial shooting to launch nationwide protests demonizing police and whites. This is their playbook. I will enjoy watching them eat it.
I’ll pop the popcorn and sit down next to you.
Yeah, the Left can chant “it wasn’t one of ours” all it wants, but it doesn’t change one iota the fact that many of them were advocating violence against Kirk – and against the right side of the ideological spectrum – before he was shot, and many celebrated (with public statements) his death, and wrote lists of who the killer should tag next, long before anyone had any inkling of who was involved.
That means a goodly number on the Left couldn’t have cared less who pulled the trigger, so long as someone did.
By. Any. Means. Necessary.
The Left shouldn’t feel as though they came first in the race here. Many of them, based on their words, line up far more closely with the shooter than they might like to admit.
I’m not sure this matters. First, I don’t know how accurate the characterization of him as a Groyper is. One argument has been that some people recognizing the symbols as Groyper symbols, but others have been recognizing them from some far left groups. We have grandma saying that the whole family was Republican. Depending on her relationship with her grandson and her level of age related diseases, this could mean all sorts of things. My grandma thought my dad agreed with her political beliefs all their lives, when my dad just decided that he’d rather not upset my grandmother and never voted for the same candidate she did. Conversely, I am also not a Democrat like my grandparents were, though they would have said we had similar political beliefs. We do know that this kid’s parents thought he was on the left. One of his friends from high school has been speaking about how he was radicalized to the left and became belligerent about it. His trans-roomate/lover (depending on the news report) says he was on the left. What is more likely? Random Gen Z-ers and grandma, or Mom, Dad, the friends, and the roomie?
Second, I don’t know that it really matters who killed him. People have been assuming that it was a leftist who killed him because of the old adage, “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.” However, the real issue is that before he was declared dead, a bunch of people on the left started celebrating his shooting. By the time it was news that he had died, there were a plethora of people from the left all over social media proclaiming how it was right that he was murdered, hoping it was one of their own who was gutsy enough to stand up to “The Nazis (TM)”, and running polls on who should be next with names like Trump, Musk, Rogan, and Rowling making top spots. Rather than worrying about who killed him, the non-stop attacks on his character (usually quoted out of context from what I have seen), the proclaiming him a far right extremist (everything I have read/watched shows him as a moderate, though I had barely heard of him before this and may have missed some of his more eggregious statements that are NOT taken entirely out of context), and the declaring that anyone who shares his views (I support most of what I have seen/read from him) should die have pushed many on the right who do share many of his views to feel that the left has gone WAY too far.
Sure, some of the leaders on the left have muttered the correct platitudes, after years of declaring people like him should be arrested and killed. However, one act of sympathy, after years of harsh speech, does not suddenly change anyone’s opinion. This is little different than someone who declares that they found God in between being caught and sentencing for a crime. Maybe they have, but what they did still pollutes the air and is necessary to be acted up. But really, even this matters little. The leaders of the party may be acting politely for a guy who just got killed, but the masses online who are screaming for people to kill more right-wingers is making the right-wingers upset. The leaders of the Democratic party are not generally telling their own to calm it down, but telling those of us who are calling out bad behavior to calm down. I know when I am bringing up a legitimate grievance against someone, I do not respond well to “calm down.” I believe that is what is going on now, that many are bringing up what they believe to be a legitimate grievance and told to ratchet it down, a well know way to ratchet tensions up, as we see in jokes online all the time.
I believe that no matter who killed him, the left has been verbally abusing the right in a ridiculous and, frankly, unpatriotic manner. Charlie Kirk is now a martyr, not necessarily because he was killed, but because of all the people who have rejoiced over his death. Calling out the unethical behavior of all those who acted AFTER his body hit the ground is not tied to his killer. The real problem here, the one that is likely to cause a further rift in our nation, is not that Charlie Kirk was murdered, but that some of my neighbors are calling for others who share his views to be next on the/a shooter’s list.
Alicia, I believe you are a sweet old lady who wants to see the best in all people, but I think you are too gullible and you are being played like a fiddle by the Axis media.
The evidence points clearly to left wing Antifa sympathies of Tyler Robinson. This includes the inscriptions on the shell casings, an interview by the Guardian with Tyler’s friend in high school, plus the transgender boyfriend with which he acted romantically.
The most responsible things is to apply Occam’s razor and for the moment assume the most likely scenario, and then wait for the FBI and the criminal trial for a final perspective. Even then a hundred percent certainty may not be achieved as the suspect may choose to lie about his motivations.
One thing is sure: the left, including the MSM and the Democrats are trying to do their utmost best to deny any connection with leftwing violence, and are trying to spin it as potential rightwing violence, as they are hellbent on retaining the narrative that political violence is predominantly a rightwing phenomenon (according to Rep Moulton, CT).
The misinformation, gaslighting, and DARVO on the assassination is through the roof. Everything the Democrats and the MSM are saying looks designed to keep the Republicans angry. In addition you have all those awful social media posts cheering on Charlie Kirk’s death (they have found posts from 40,000 people at social media not counting BlueSky and X, with BlueSky and X the estimates are about 500,000 people making such posts). And if that is not enough you have disturbances at vigils and memorials of Charlie Kirk. What they are hoping for is to provoke some people to retaliatory violence, so they can confirm the narrative of rightwing violence.
I’ll let your condescension slide for now Cees, and inform you that I have not watched mainstream media in well over decade. In fact, I have spent much of my time, both professionally (for a completely virtual company whose expertise is in navigating the ever changing landscape/algorithms of the internet for our clients) and personally (moderating boards and chat rooms in the wild west days of the internet) since the late 90s. You have made some pretty ignorant assumptions about where I’m getting my information. I might be old but I’m far from sweet. Do better.
Alicia,
I am not going to apologize for my snark; I normally like your posts, but I simply hate it if you start believing and propagating conspiracy theories that are completely ridiculous and already debunked, and that originate from a political agenda. These “groyper” theories are spread with malicious and evil intent to keep the Axis off the hook and pin the assassination on the right. As Charlie Kirk’s body is still above the ground I am not in a mood to be nice, friendly and patient on this topic to anyone. I understand that you are angry but so am I (amd not necessarily at you).
Tyler Robinson’s social media history is becoming known, and this shows his slow radicalization into a radical left person. There are also indications that plans for an attack on Charlie Kirk were known in the trans community before the assassination. Steve Turley gives a nice presentation in the video linked below. Again we need to be careful as nothing is definitive here; the best recommendation is too look at the path that the FBI is following, and accept that they are tight lipped out of necessity.
And please stay away from Reddit and BlueSky as these are rabbit holes that are spreading this groyper nonsense.
“And please stay away from Reddit and BlueSky as these are rabbit holes that are spreading this groyper nonsense.”
You really can’t help yourself, can you? I’ve never set foot on BlueSky. Reddit? I’ve occasionally read threads relevant to Delta first class/sky club flyers. Mea culpa.
Alicia, I had some night to think about it and I am slowly cooling down now. Here is my concern: the “groyper” theory is the most outrageous theory out there to interpret the motives of Tyler Robinson. When proven untrue, this theory will rank with the 9/11 truther theories in malice and stupidity. That implies that nobody should jump to this theory until and after the FBI investigations and the criminal trial conclusively verify the correctness of this theory.
Having one’s name attached to an unserious theory like this may be harmful to a reputation for being serious. (I am still surprised that Donald Trump became President in 2016 after spouting his nonsense in 2012 about Obama’s birth certificate).
Alicia, I normally like your posts. But this propagation of what I believe is a hard left PSYOP operation I could not let pass as I respect you too much to see your name attached to it.
“I respect you too much to see your name attached to it.”
Bless your heart.
(I’ve met Alicia. There’s nothing old about her.)
I don’t think I had ever heard the term “groypers” before this incident (autocorrect wants me to change it to “groupers”). Briefly checking, the gay relationship and trans boyfriend element (if confirmed) doesn’t seem to mesh with groyper ideology.
The cartridge markings are enigmatic…maybe that’s all they were intended to be, or maybe they’re a mixture of insults and satirically “friendly” messages. It’s a tradition used by bomber crews, etc. and that goes back thousands of years to (or before) Roman slingers marking their lead sling “bullets” with messages such as “Greetings, Octavian, cocksucker“.
One inconvenient fact does not square with Tyler Robinson being a groyper: the goyper movement is highly homophobic and transphobic. There are three different video interviews by news agencies with two different neighbors of Tyler Robinson who talked about it being a romantic relationship between Tyler and Lance Twiggs. Lance was born a man and was transitioning to female. They saw hugging, hand holding, and one time kissing. No way would someone opening in a gay (at least while still having male parts) and trans relationship be welcome nor would they identify with the gruyper movement.
The one thing that the trans community can hold out in this is the fact that the trans person in the relationship went to the police to turn in Tyler instead of helping when Tyler tried to involve her in the plot to help cover up by removing the murder weapon.
Disappointment in “friends” runs rampant these days. Two long-term friends just unfriended me because I suggested that if they were going to post “quotes” by Charlie Kirk, they should at least post real ones in their entirety. Sigh.
Again, as I pointed out recently, coming from a family of Republicans does not follow that one is also a Republican. My TDS-suffering sister would certainly never tolerate someone ascribing that moniker to her, the one who rolls her eyes when Dad reads the Christmas Story every year and who gets in arguments with Mom for believing “conspiracy theories” on NextDoor.
And is there a more obnoxious misrepresentation of Charlie Kirk’s beliefs than that second post?
I don’t know what it would be….
The New York Times reports: Alex P. Keaton was a 60’s Liberal
–Dwayne
More cultural illiteracy.
Nah, Alex P. Keaton was a Republican (and a caricature at that) that the show tried to teach a lesson to every so often by having him recognize the wisdom of his parents.
I remember the episode when he was challenged by his professor to argue against Oliver Wendell Holmes regarding incitement (re: the Debs case) and Alex proclaimed that “Ideas are supposed to incite people!”. That was a view liberals believed at the time. How much has changed.
I think there may have been some misunderstanding here. I know full well that Alex was a conservative Republican on Family Ties. I was riffing on the current narrative that Charlie Kirk’s murderer came from a conservative family and therefore couldn’t possibly be any sort of leftist of any stripe and must be MAGA himself.
. . . and by that logic, Alex couldn’t possibly be a conservative Republican because he came from a family of 60’s liberals.
. . . which is, of course, bullshit.
–Dwayne
Sorry, I didn’t recognize your comment as parody, possibly because I can see the NYT engaging in such ridiculous pop cultural revisionism.
Please be careful with humor here, because commenters such as me are testy and on edge, and in comments we are less able to modulate that when we see each other face to face.
Far left and right have a lot more in common than differences. It’s like to point of an infinity ring that twists onto itself and is all distorted. I believe we need to treat them all as a single political extremist population with violent tendencies.
I don’t think it matters where they come from as much as that both sides are spawning perpetually dangerous and unhinged fanatics.
Thank you, Demeter. This is what many of us have been trying to get across for a long time. And both sides call each other fascists. Maybe we need someone to invoke the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.
With all due respect and affection, that’s pure BS, “Whataboutism” dishonesty. The Democrats ran their entire 2024 campaign on declaring Trump Hitler and his supporters fascists. The republican campaign was based on the assertion that Democratic Party policies under Biden, including open borders, trans indoctrination and speech censorship among others, suck. Which they did, and obviously so. There is no “both sides” argument on this.
I beg to disagree, as I have even heard YOU declare that democrats are fascists.
Everyone is using a “side” argument and when you have a far left crazy assassinate someone at the same time a far right crazy child shoots up a school I believe it’s time to shift the perspective a bit. Just because they are louder doesn’t mean the other side isn’t there and aren’t dangerous.
The problem is that there are no “moderate Democrats” now. Chuck Schumer threatened the conservative members of the Supreme Court, remember? Who is the moderate? I can think of one: Fetterman. In the broad sense, yes, all extremists have a lot in common. But extremism is mainstream now on the Left, so you can’t really call them extremists.
“Moderate” republicans are as rare as hen’s teeth.
Only if one considers enforcing laws, fairness in sports, no discrimination in employment and obeying the Constitution as radical, which current progressives do. When one is so far left, everything looks far right…
Don’t talk to me about laws and The Constitution. Just because something is marginally and/or politically legal doesn’t mean that it’s right. And The Constitution? You mean the paper that many republicans seem to value as much as bathroom tissue? Due process? Habeas corpus? Conflict of interest? Separation of church and state? I could go on and on.
And I fear as inaccurately as the first part. There’s nothing in the Constitution about conflicts of interest. What a nation’s laws declare are by definition that society’s conclusion of what right and wrong are. Similarly, there are no Republican principles opposing separation of church and state, just religious sectors of the GOP tent, which is something very different. If you just throw a bunch of generalities into the air, you make intelligible debate impossible. If your issue is habeas, make the case with an example! I might even agree with you.
Because the evidence suggest that they are. The Fascist accusations by the Democrats are pure projection. The speech Joe Biden gave calling MAGA fascists was the most fascist Presidential speech in history, by miles and miles. No Republicans are chanting”From the river to the sea.”
Even if the guy WAS a republican, which I doubt, it was still the libs who celebrated. At this point, Charlie being killed is only half the problem.
JM writes: The ability of Trump Hate and living in biased, denial-infected bubbles (Curmie’s world is academia and theater) to destroy brain cells is remarkable: they will be writing books and treatises about it for decades. This is like watching “Flowers For Algernon” in reverse (the story that was filmed as “Charlie,” the Oscar winning movie about a mentally-disabled man who is turned into a genius by an experimental treatment.
From a psychological point of view, I would say this is NOT about “destroying brain cells” — i.e. a change in the physiological structure of the brain. Instead I would point to the well-known impact of emotional arousal on the selective ACTIVATION of different parts of the brain.
As Utah Governor Spencer Cox stated: “I can’t emphasize enough the damage that social media and the internet is doing to all of us, those dopamine hits,” the Utah Republican stressed. “The most powerful companies in the history of the world have figured out how to hack our brains, get us addicted to outrage … get us addicted to outrage, and get us to hate each other,” he continued.
Outrage, like other strong emotions, triggers prepotent (well practiced, easy-to-access) responses, basically an automatic response to a trigger. To counter such “knee-jerk” (to mix metaphors a bit) responses requires inhibitory control, the domain of the prefrontal cortex. We need PFC for learning, reflection, and most certainly for deliberately choosing a more thoughtful response that does not align with what the herd is doing and saying.
In that sense, I applaud Spencer Cox for trying to turn down the temperature and promote reflection about structural contributors to habitual outrage cycles, which may (possibly) be a component of the shooter’s motivation, and (very likely) has been a major contributor to “mindless” (= PFC not engaged!) and offensively stupid assertions that have all the hallmarks of extreme confirmation bias (those committed to a particular POV searching for evidence that aligns with their preferences).
Any statements than encourage us to either suspend judgment (the suspect is not currently cooperating) our at least keep an open mind are helpful for encouraging thoughtfulness, surely the most reasonable approach when there are contradictory cues (His background is conservative! He was close to a trans person! He used memes associated with Groyper! He went to a Halloween party dressed as Trump/has been heard disparaging Trump) and we actually DON’T know what was in the shooter’s mind when he was deciding he wanted to murder Kirk.
Are you a bot? Is this from some obscure addendum to a talking point memo? Are you simply a pedant?
Special TL:DR version just for you Old Bill!
2. Spencer Cox good.
3. Thoughtfulness good.
4. Mindless outrage not good.
Better?
[Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 2.6 Level for original comment: 8.5]
I think that Spencer Cox is well intended. However this leaves me with the question which side needs to lower the temperature. The Democrats have raised the temperature for decades by accusing the GOP of racism. The Democrats have accused Trump and MAGA Republicans of fascism, Nazism, and Joe Biden in an address to the nation called Trump an existential threat to democracy. And last week an impressionable young man took all this rhetoric too much to heart and killed Charlie Kirk. Heck, Donald Trump already survice two assassination attempts. Tyler Robinson may have been the tip of the spear that killed Charlie Kirk, but the shaft of the spear definitively includes the Democrat party and the Axis media.
After the assassination the Democrats flinched. The message change to “Don’t look at use, we are not at fault. Please Republicans tune down your rhetoric; it may be one of your own who killed Charlie Kirk”.
This change in approach is perfectly highlighted in the video I linked below, with snippets from Chris Murphy, AOC, and Jasmine Crockett. (Please don not skip over the Piers Morgan segment in the video, as the rhetoric of hard left influencers such as Destiny is off the charts unhinged).
Everybody in this country ought to be outraged after this political assassination. Truth requires this. You cannot blame Republicans for their righteous anger. The Democrats have no standing in their calls to tune down the rhetoric. The Democrats need to repent, and walk back all the rhetoric about racism, fascism, Nazism they have deployed against Republicans over the last decades.
I would recommend that everybody watches the speech by Jack Vance at the Charlie Kirk podcast. I am not going to link that as I expect that Jack will post on this speech today. In my opinion, the tone of Jack Vance is exactly right and what is need at this moment.
CvB wrote: “However this leaves me with the question which side needs to lower the temperature.”
You are correct that Cox focused on failed to put an explicitly partisan spin on his statement. I don’t see that as a problem.
My take is that Cox sees the outrage machinery (which includes both people and algorithms–what “side” are the algorithms on? the make-a-buck side I guess…) as a fundamental contributor to the sorry state the country is in.
CvB wrote: “Everybody in this country ought to be outraged after this political assassination.”
I see this phrase “everybody ought to be outraged” attached to all manner of events, sometimes followed up with assertions that if you are not outraged you “aren’t paying attention” or “you are a sociopath” or other inferences. In short: I had this response and all other humans should have the same response as me.
I am NOT outraged, I am sad.
About Kirk’s death (I admired his mission of promoting dialogue and conversation, and his courage–but I would be sad regardless–he was only 31, father of young children), about Iryna’s death (I knew zero about her, true of most of us, and yet, I can feel sad), and about all the preventable deaths that might not have happened were it not for our culture of violence and our failure to address mental health issues that contribute to violent events. Also sad about all the Ukrainians dying AND all the Russians dying. I seem to have a robust capacity for sadness.
What I don’t seem to have is a functioning outrage button, which is perhaps why I gave up on MSM a while ago — without an outrage button it all just seems like crude attempts at weaponizing/monetizing people’s emotional machinery for political and/or commercial ends.
Breaks my heart.
Me too.
Would that I had the guts to send this to all my Trump deranged former (that I thought were) friends:
Robert Sterling on X: “(Warning: long rant) My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue. I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll https://t.co/NeCxHqrFXi” / X
This is brilliant! I’m saving it for future reference.
Yes! A friend of mine (who leans left) posted this on her FB page. So she gets credit for that.
The responses, however, (most who commented seemed to be part of the “liberal friends” category) were not encouraging, I’m afraid. Instead, lots of the usual BS. Denial deflection whataboutism yadda yadda.
I think if the back and forth here proves anything, it’s that people are often more complicated than tribal politics allows the discussion around them to be. I’ve seen people sure that he was Antifa, or a Groyper, or MAGA, or trans, or that his boyfriend was trans… And at this point, I’m still not sure what is true. People have reported that there were things carved on his casings that weren’t there (OwO), or were there but wasn’t related (TRN was the manufacturer’s mark, not “Trans”), or were there but aren’t easily categorized (one had “if you’re reading this, you’re gay” on it). His digital presence is being scraped, and people are commenting about who he followed… But we aren’t sure whether those creators radicalized him, or if radicals are drawn towards those creators.
I have to admit a little culpability. I thought Kirk was targeted because he was an effective voice for the right, and nothing bothers the left quite like competent opponents. All of that was true: The mask-off moment the left has been having has been ugly. But at this point, I have no idea what actually motivated the shooter.
I think we need to get past this. It really doesn’t matter who the person was that pulled the trigger, they are almost certainly mentally unwell, and we can’t control everything down to the lowest common denominator. It really doesn’t matter what the motivations or group identifies were for anything other than argument fodder: Aside from which side gets to crow, no one is going to do anything different from what they were already inclined to do.
It’s particularly sad that Curmie chose maybe the weakest of arguments to highlight in the Kirk shooter case. Early on, one old woman, who may have had limited contact with him, also said she had not talked politics with her grandson and made a general statement about her surprise and the family’s politics. I can’t think of much that would be less convincing; imagine that being offered up as testimony in a trial.