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I don't think it was normal, even two weeks ago, to actually call for Trump to be assassinated, and yeah, you might have faced consequences for it (or not, depending on how your boss feels). That's why this celebration of victory is premature, nothing has really changed. Many individuals on the left have overreached and gotten burned, but nobody is going to get fired merely for supporting Biden, let alone for being gay or black or trans. The rules, written and unwritten, about what you can or can't say at work, are still written or unwritten and enforced or unenforced by the same fat liberal white women.
This article provides two examples of public figures or bodies implicitly promoting violence against Trump during his first term. It also touches on the rather creepy social media trend that developed after the Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade, in which the justices' home addresses were shared on social media with the obvious purpose of prompting some crazy person with nothing to lose to go there and murder them (which one guy indeed tried to do). So yeah, I think promoting violence against Trump and people allied with him was a totally normal thing in American left-liberal circles throughout his first term.
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Prof. John McWhorter, of all people, did, on a public podcast. He later recanted, but still.
Glen Loury can't abandon the propaganda of McWhorter as a " moderate, centrist calm reasonable person" while criticizing him for his comments of favoring the assassination of Trump.
We really are living in the times of the cult of symbolic centrism, symbolic antiracism, symbolic racism, symbolic nazism, etc, etc. Where groups and individuals are assigned irrational undeserving positive and negative status and associations, based on false expectations.
Hope we see some genuine lowering of status and consequences for people like McWhorter and the end of the illusion that people like Loury want to maintain. Is Loury going to stop constantly talking with McWhorter in the way he isn't talking with many people to the right of his?
I doubt it. I don't think he chooses whether or not to talk to McWhorter based on political purposes. I think they do just honestly go way back as friends first. It's extremely easy to shun people who you're not friends with based on political differences. When you start doing it to your pre-existing friends, it's a short road to loneliness, above and beyond the typical concerns people have (especially influential public figures) with determining whether anyone who appears to be a friend is acting that way because they genuinely like being friends or if it's just a means to an end.
There is likely a friendship there too, but Loury and McWhorter podcast together is also very much so political content. I also get the impression that part of their friendship has to do with their common political ground.
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Alternatively, things really are coming apart to such a degree that even the calm, reasonable people are losing their minds.
A lot of people think that Trump dead would be a net-positive outcome. My problem isn't that this is mean, but rather that it is dangerously wrong. Trump does not generate the culture war, but rather was generated by it. Killing him will not magic it away, but will only throw gasoline on the fire.
I've been of the opinion for a while that Trump having a heart attack would be net-good, although this is not entirely for culture war reasons (part of it is just that he's too old to be POTUS in a term that might include WWIII).
However, on the one occasion I did mention this on theMotte I did also mention that this doesn't apply to murdering him (which, as you say, would end Badly).
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Trump got Babbit killed. Trump is getting people killed.
Trump is not some magical output of a culture war. Trump is a danger to us all.
If you want the violence to stop, the person blaring violent rhetoric nonstop has to be silenced.
How, exactly? Please explain the causal chain between something Trump did and the Babbit shooting.
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I don't see much justification of how things have changed for McWhorter to be calling for the assassination of Trump. He isn't a reasonable guy who lost his mind because there is an event that justified him supporting openly Trump being assassinated, but someone who should lose the quality of being considered reasonable and he proved that such estimation was mistaken. Trump is someone who isn't even particularly right wing. The criticism should be on the mentality of people like McWhorter, who have no adequate justification for this. My belief is we live in an age of too much unnecessary rage against compromising establishment "right" figures who probably deserve criticism for failing to even do their promised duty. So, that outrage is unreasonable, and so is putting people like Trump on the pedestal for being targets of it, even if he should be defended against such unjustified anger.
McWhorter being dangerously wrong is part of the fact that his politics are unreasonable and he is unreasonable.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/donald-trump-violent-rhetoric-catalogue
Trump has lost the quality of being reasonable, and his continued existence in our public life or any advocacy of such should be grounds for having lost the quality of being considered reasonable.
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There was some recent Supreme Court decision about the President not being liable for "official acts", which resulted in progressives tripping over themselves to suggest Biden orders an assassination on Trump. None of them got fired as far as I know. I have no idea where the idea that this was not normal is coming from, it almost feels like there's a need to pretend that nothing ever changes, and therefore the status quo is how it has always been.
There is a difference between petitioning the government to pursue X policy and telling random people to do X by criminal violence. It's co-ordinated vs. un-co-ordinated meanness. The obvious analogy is that asking the government to keep or re-introduce the death penalty for murder is totally legal, but putting out a Craigslist ad for the Bay Harbor Butcher is conspiracy to commit murder.
With that said, there does seem to be some movement; I notice that people saying "it sucks that Crooks missed" or equivalent (which is not direct incitement) seem to be getting hit, which does seem unusual.
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I don't have any particular concerns over the way most people raised this. It was a standard "parade of horribles", where you try to come up with the most extreme 'hypos' (in the legal lingo) to push an interpretation as far as it can go in order to see if that's really an interpretation that you can live with. This one is pretty extreme, because the President's powers in this area are pretty plausibly vast. We saw somewhat similar language pushing on "assassinate a US citizen" around the al-Awlaki business. The President's war powers are among the most dangerous powers given to anyone in the country; they sort of have to be. We want a President Lincoln to be able to order the killing of rebel soldiers and leaders, even on US soil, in cases of genuine rebellion. How to draw lines is hard, and frankly, we probably still haven't managed to lay out any lines with real conceptual clarity; it might just not be possible to do so a priori. I'm pretty fine with people at least considering different scenarios in order to argue that we need to be careful in how we draw the lines as a separate thing from, "Whelp, if we're going to draw the line where you want to draw it, President Biden actually should order Seal Team Six to assassinate Trump." Probably some blowhards on reddit actually said the latter thing, but most relatively serious folks (to the extent there are many left) were doing the more sensible thing.
Believing that the president should order a hit squad on Trump implies that Trump is such a danger that that's required. Claiming that he's that dangerous encourages violence from everyone, not just from a government raiding party.
I wouldn't have this kind of problem with someone asserting that Trump should be arrested and given the death penalty after a fair trial, but not many people will say that, precisely because that doesn't imply that he needs to be killed by any means possible.
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I don't mind blowhards blowing hard, my point is that something has changed over the past two weeks. While a lot of people are still making edgy jokes, some of them are getting got, which didn't happen before. I don't even know if it's a good thing (beyond some unpleasant people getting a taste of their own medicine), I just think it's weird to insist that nothing has changed.
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I say "not normal" in that I think it was wrong of them to suggest it.
It sounded like you said they were likely to face consequences for it. I think I even disagree with it being wrong, depending on how it's done.
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Of course they never directly called for him to be assassinated. That would be vulgar, and possibly illegal. But there was a lot of rhetoric like "Trump is a fascist," "he's a threat to democracy," "Jan 6 was a coup attempt," "if he wins there might not be another election until he dies," etc. The logical conclusion from that, that any redblooded young wanna-be hero would think of, is that he's a monster who must be stopped by Any Means Necessary. Pundits need to back off and say "yes Trump is bad, but even if he wins there will still be another election in 4 years, so keep a sense of perspective."
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