Like for over 50 years American right wingers have been fuming about the liberals having managed to turn one of “their” guys into an American icon and the conservatives have mostly had to at least pretend to respect him and his legacy in public and they’ve felt humiliated and emasculated about it the whole time
Now they want to make the liberals bend the knee and force them to slobber over one of their guys or risking getting fired
Don’t think so, I really think that it’s entirely possible that a bunch of apolitical people are genuinely shocked by the reaction to Kirk’s assassination. Obviously the conservatives are going to take advantage of this and recruit, but when
sees preschool teachers saying “I’m glad that guy got shot” on their local Facebook group, it’s going to freak them out and they won’t want to associate with that. The big driver here is not the conservatives, but the reactions of the apolitical/moderates/centrists/“normies”. Without them, all the equivocation by conservatives (including comparisons to MLK) would have zero effect.
I am surprised by how many normies I’ve seen just not care about the guy’s death. I guess that’s what happens when you make people less sensitive to “political violence” because of the violence either perpetrated by the state (like with cops or the wars abroad or the genocide) or ignored by the state (like with school shootings or the social murder of the capitalist health care or housing systems) every damn day.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit, and I think the indifference comes from just how strange it is that the entire mass media of the west is acting like the leader of a country was just assassinated. Some random nobody they’ve never heard of gets shot and the media spends days and days talking about this “horrific tragedy” when hundreds of people get gunned down in the US every day. It just seems so forced that even normies can recognise how fake it all is. And the instant they learn even a single thing about the guy it becomes even stranger to them, why would the media be so upset about the death of an obviously shitty person whose death seemed almost like poetic justice? The only people who seem genuinely upset here are the #thoughtsandprayers liberals that no one likes, even the CHUDs don’t care, they’re just in it for the grift.