One thing that's really gnawing at me today is the response from notable liberals to Kirk's murder. It's not that it's bad for public officials and other notable liberals whose voices carry weight to speak out against political violence. But there was an immediate rush for them to get statements out yesterday like we've never seen before. I'm pretty sure Obama never even made a public statement about Melissa Hortman's assassination, but he had a statement out within like 30 minutes yesterday. Hortman was an elected representative and literally someone Obama had met and hosted at the White House. But her assassination and the attempted assassination of another elected representative by a right winger with a hit list with like 70 more liberals on it (including Obama) didn't merit anything. That was just a fucking Tuesday, or whatever. And look at Ezra Klein's opinion today, just straight up lying to his audience that Kirk did politics "the right way." And I'm sure there's plenty of other similar statements/articles from liberal commentators pretending that Charlie Kirk was a great guy with whom they just had normal political disagreements.
There's only two explanations I can think of for this, neither of them good. First, it could just be conscious or even subconscious pre-emptive surrender on their part. Maybe they just think the fight has already been lost and they've resigned themselves to fascism dominion over America and don't want to endanger themselves. But if that's the case, I find it absolutely ridiculous. Yeah things are bad and everyone here knows I've been saying this shit is going to get very bad for a long time. But like I said yesterday, I don't know that this really gives them any ammunition to ratchet their propaganda up further because their reaction to this is virtually identical to their reaction to a million trivial things. There's already a fire raging, and this doesn't help, but I don't know that it really pours any substantial amount of gas on the fire and I still think there is a chance the fire can be contained, if not quickly extinguished. Just look at how incompetent they've been at so much of their attempt to consolidate power. Look at how fucking old and worthless Trump looks. Look at Republicans begging Pritzker to let them invade Chicago a little bit just as a treat. They are not a vigorous, unstoppable movement, and for liberals with real platforms to treat them as if they are is fucking embarrassing.
The alternative, and I don't know if it's worse or better, is that they simply view Kirk as one of "them" in a way that a lowly state representative isn't, and that they just fundamentally think people of their social status matter more than a lowly state representative, much less us normal people. That they just see it all as a game and think the players on the other side are as Good as they are, regardless of what they say or do.