Guess We Shouldn’t Do What The Right Did When Minnesota Democrats Were Murdered, Huh?

Charlie Kirk is dead, and the Right is about to start a civil war with us.

If you haven’t noticed, they’ve been trying to justify this for some time now. Every time there’s a mass shooter or an assassination, they jump on it, claiming the person is a leftist or a transgender person well before their identity is revealed — aggressively decrying the “violent Left.” Nevermind that they’re the ones with the guns or the fact that they’re the ones who did a whole ass insurrection, or that the Right is responsible for practically all of the political violence in this country over the last several years. No, we’re the scary violent ones (while being insufficiently macho).

They did this exact thing in June, when one Vance Luther Boelter assassinated Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband (and their dog) and attempted to kill state Senator John Hoffman, his wife, and his daughter.

Before the shooter was revealed to be Boelter — an anti-vaccine registered Republican and a supporter of Donald Trump who also wanted to shoot up abortion clinics — the Right went on a full-on PR blitz, claiming that they were absolutely, positively shot by a “leftist” who was disappointed that they didn’t side with the rest of the Democrats in two recent votes.

Utah Senator Mike Lee posted on Twitter that “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” along with several other posts implicating the Left in a murder a MAGA activist committed.

Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno tweeted, “The degree to which the extreme left has become radical, violent, and intolerant is both stunning and terrifying.”

Elon Musk claimed that “the far left is murderously violent,” and then argued with his own AI bot because it wouldn’t pretend that there is more left-wing political violence than right-wing political violence.

Elon Musk’s Very Own AI Won’t Even Lie To Him About ‘Left-Wing Violence’

Via Wired:

“Did Walz have her executed?” right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich wrote on X, quoting a post from a well-known conspiracy theory account that highlighted Hortman had voted with Republicans.

YouTuber Benny Johnson, who has almost 5 million followers on the video-sharing site and more than 3 million followers on X, positioned the shooting as part of a growing trend of left-wing violence in a long screed on X that described the alleged shooter as “a left-wing Tim Walz appointee.“

“Everyone talks about Minnesota, but they don’t talk about the guy seems to be a leftist,” Donald Trump Jr. said in an an interview with News Nation. “The guy who committed those atrocities this weekend was a Democrat who worked for Tim Walz.” When pressed by the interviewer, who replied, “he voted for your Dad,” Trump Jr. said, “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

When it was made clear that the shooter was an abortion-hating Trump supporter, conservatives quickly flipped to claiming it was a psy-op and that Vance Luther Boelter was being framed.

The result? There were people on Twitter yesterday still arguing that the shooter was a leftist and really, truly believing it.

Glenn Beck’s The Blaze chose to respond to the shootings by publishing an interview with Boelter in which he explained that he didn’t mean to shoot Democratic Minnesota state Senator John Hoffman, his wife, and his daughter and was innocently there to citizens arrest Hoffman for general COVID vaccine crimes but had to pretend it was a robbery because Hoffman wasn’t alone … and then had to shoot the family because they, rudely, tried to take his gun away when he was waving it in front of their faces.

Then there’s the way they all — including Charlie Kirk — reacted when Paul Pelosi was attacked by a hammer-wielding psychopath who also wished to assassinate Nancy Pelosi.

Kirk, you may know by now, suggested that a “patriot” ought to bail said hammer-wielding psychopath out.

“Why has he not been bailed out?” Kirk said on his podcast at the time. “By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out, I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks.”

Cute, no?

I think my favorite part of that whole scenario is where I witnessed, in real time, conspiracy theorists concocting a “gay lover” theory on the QAnon messageboard that very quickly evolved into the widely accepted story that so many on the Right promoted, without evidence.

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We could, if we wanted, claim without evidence that the shooter is a Republican. Quite frankly, Nick Fuentes’s “Groypers” have been far more confrontational with him than anyone on the Left has. They’ve certainly been following his ass around on his college tours.

We could claim it was a psy-op by a right-wing activist who wanted to start the civil war that they have all been thirsting for.

We could also make up our own bizarre, damning scenario like they did with Paul Pelosi and insist upon sticking to it forever.

We could claim he brought it on himself by “pushing people too far.”

We could do what Charlie Kirk has done and suggest that a “patriot” should pay his assassin’s bail or otherwise assist him.

We could do a lot of things that they might do that we’re just not psychotic or sociopathic enough to come up with on our own — which, apparently, is not working out all that well for us.

But we shouldn’t do any of that, because not only are we not shitty humans, we’re not people who have to lie in order to make our case. We should simply do our best to ensure that America remembers the person that Charlie Kirk was, in his own words. Like the time he said that only people he likes and agrees with should be considered American citizens and everyone else should just leave, the many times he told women to give up their own dreams in order to get barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen for some man, or the time he got weirdly angry about the existence of ASL interpreters in emergency situations, the time he called Martin Luther King Jr. “awful” and “a bad guy,” the time he called trans people a “throbbing middle finger to God” or insisted that neither trans nor gay people exist or said other horrific things about LGBTQ+ people in general, all of the incredibly racist things he said about not believing Black people were competent at their jobs, the times he promoted the racist and anti-semitic Great Replacement Theory beloved by so many mass shooters, and, most especially, when he said that “it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”