White supremacists clash with police in Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12, 2017. One person was killed and 35 people were injured when a car rammed counter protestors. Two state troopers died in an accidental helicopter crash. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.
Fascists love violence and the rhetoric of violence. We liberals are “snowflakes” and “soy boys” who can only shed pitiful and helpless tears when they “own” us. We’re so feckless and confused that we can’t even prove them wrong.
So when a mere soy boy can outshoot most fascists and take out a fascist activist at 150 yards, as Tyler Robinson is accused of doing, fascists react with spit-flying rage (see below). In their minds, it’s supposed to be the other way around.
Fascists can win for while, and a few fascists governments last for a generation or more. But eventually, free people always rise up to teach them a lesson (which they always forget).
The right-wing response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk has been violent rhetoric from top to bottom — from Trump, from Kirk’s wife, to all the sickening right-wing mouths in the media.
The response of the mainstream media has been almost as ugly. I understand why all the mainstream punditry hasten to condemn political violence. It is entirely right that they should do so.
But they did not have to make some kind of saint out of Kirk. “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way,” said the headline on Ezra Klein’s piece in the New York Times. Really, Ezra? There’s a right way to market fascism and hatred? But at least you get to keep your job at the New York Times. There already is a long list of people who lost their jobs for daring to take a different view of what Charlie Kirk was.
We’re supposed to get the message that fascist dominance is inevitable and that resistance is futile. They suppose that we should love them and submit to them. I’m afraid I’m not Christian enough to manage that.
The NYT are suggesting that the assassin was himself right wing and Kirk was too moderate for his tastes. If that is the case it should be seen as another example of right wing violence, albeit inhouse. Speaking of fascists, I happen to be in London today and unbeknownst to me a far right protest was taking place. They left the streets covered with beer cans and other rubbish, and unsurprisingly violence later broke out. There was a huge police presence everywhere. A counter-demonstration passed off peacefully as I understand.
Hi Chenda: I keep seeing suggestions that Robinson actually was right wing, but so far I have not seen anything convincing. I wonder if he is talking, and I also wonder if whoever is listening to him talk will give us honest reports on what he says.