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Maybe not intentionally going hot but it seems very culture war just going based off of reddit's reaction. The response is either shrug, "good", "more of this", or "I don't wish violence on anyone but..." and those are just the ones that aren't removed by the mods. But this is nothing new for reddit, there's a fair number of subs dedicated to anti-capitalism sentiment and they post often about killing rich people in the same way that pol would post about the day of the rope or whatever. I've seen many conversations on reddit that all boil down to:
Then it sort of just devolves into people agreeing with the sentiment that wealth inequality's only solution is violence. You can say this isn't culture but class but it seems to me the lines have already been drawn where being rich is always bad unless the person is sufficiently left. The CEO being despised for being in Healthcare seems like a fig leaf that just fits better than most for people from the outside looking in, but if this was an oil exec or a finance exec, the talking points would be different but the people celebrating would be just as fine with it.
I tend to avoid the anti-capitalist subreddits and whatever overflow they might have into the many left-wing subreddits. So, I imagine, there's more than I think. A decade ago there wasn't any specifically large anti-capitalist subreddits, then things like /r/antiwork and /r/workreform started, now there's stuff like /r/fluentinfinance and other hydra heads that are all the same thing, when they're not celebrating or justifying events like this they're just posting the same things that they must know are lies, whether they pretend that profit is revenue or that rich people's net worth represents the amount of currency they can spend at any moment. It seems clear that the celebration isn't coordinated by the left but the overlap between the tail and the head is pretty hard to figure at this point. There were memes in /r/adviceanimals about the killing and at some point it became a specifically left wing subreddit, but /r/pics, which also became a specifically left wing subreddit, doesn't have anything about it which leads me to believe the sentiment is organic, to the extent that its possible to be on Reddit anymore.
Hatred is lifeblood in the culture war and if the rhetoric is constantly "nothing will change unless poor people decide to rise up and kill their oppressors" and something like this happens where it's no big deal to kill a CEO, comments are talking about how they'd get off with jury nullification, "it's literally the same thing as killing a nazi," or venerating Shinzo Abe's assassin because he deserved to die for being conservative in a thread about this killing, then it's definitely going to either give the culture war fuel or become another overt part of it even if it turns out that the culprit was a hired assassin by a rival company.
It reminds of Trump's assassination attempt and how, whether or right or wrong, it was claimed that it wasn't political. Just because something is done absent a culture war motive doesn't mean that there isn't a culture war angle.
90% of the Facebook reactions to the company's post about the death were laugh emojis. It's not just the Reddit kids. This guy is gonna be a folk hero.
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