No. Fuck your sides.
They need you to believe neutrality is cowardice so you never notice the real cowardice is outsourcing your identity to a team.
Every side is just a funnel into the same machine. The same laws, the same debts, the same bureaucrats, the same wars, the same surveillance, the same permanent class of rulers playing musical chairs while you cheer for the jersey you picked.
Refusing to pick is the only way to stay whole. To keep your voice from being drafted into a chorus you don’t control.
The woke right wants to exploit this tragedy to recruit brownshirts.
That's why it's critical that we resist the temptation to let rage and hate get the best of us.
The calls for violence & civil war you see online in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, are being pushed by troll & influence networks based in Israel, Russia, Iran and India. They are all trying to get you to go kill your neighbour, and further destabilize the USA.
Everyone needs to read about the Spanish Civil War.
There are people in the replies who call us "leftists" for making this point.
It's "Our side is good and varied, bad actors are not representative. Their side is a monolith of culpable evil."
That is how extremists think.
You can't make us hate millions of our fellow Americans because of one murderer and the radical online leftists defending him.
Extremism is a problem, but more hate and resentment won't stop it.
When an assassination happens there are different ways to go about it, if you are murdered in private, someone was trying to shut you up.
If you are murdered in public, in front of crowds and cameras, like Charlie Kirk, then someone was trying to shut others up by sending a message.
Erica Watkins is running for U.S. Congress out of Oklahoma.
She posted on her public profile, expressing outrage at the people of America for condemning the assassination of Charlie Kirk while making a comparison to Palestine.
Ok. Now I’ve had time to think. Here is what I will actually say.
Several months ago, a Democratic legislator from Minnesota was assassinated, at the time the Left called for vengeance while the Right called for calm “violence is bad/not all conservatives”, the Far-Right meanwhile cheered loudly as the Trump Admin gave a canned PC statement.
Now the reverse occurs, and what we see now is the Right calling for what amounts to a mass round up of anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan. While Obama and the liberals wring their hands calling for peace as Trump orders the flag at half mast nation wide. And once more the extremist nutcases cackle with smug glee, only this time it’s the extremes of both sides who are over the moon. The Nazis/Fascists get their Anti-Left Proto-Race War while the communists get a few cheap laughs before they get to go out and throw Molotovs at buildings while achieving nothing.
What we are seeing here is the modern incarnation of Horst Wessel, or to use a Leftist equivalent example Sergei Kirov. A Martyr for a political cause whose name and likeness will be used and abused by the real monsters in our society, the centralised power structure of the state and the corporate interests behind them. While the poor and disenfranchised of the United States, farmers and small business owners who are overwhelmingly conservative suffer under a flailing economy. LGBTQ/PoC and Leftists face the threat of institutional persecution, and the working class of America all living paycheck to paycheck just trying to make it. All of them will tear each other apart, blame one another for all their ills. Round up minority groups of all types and battle in the streets over some perceived grand struggle.
And all the while the wealthy elite sitting atop their billions, Republican and Democrat alike, will smile with glee as both the U.S Government and its corporate backers tighten their grip, buying out destitute farmers crushed by the tariffs to steal the nations land, infiltrating our technology to remove all privacy and then crush American democracy once and for all, 1st and 2nd Amendments taken without a shot being fired. Fulfilling the warning Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson warned about at the country’s inception.
I am devastated about whats happened. Not gloating or satisfied, even though I opposed Charlie Kirk on almost every single political issue and definitely didn’t like him as a person. He and his family didn’t deserve what happened today, neither did Democrat Representative Melissa Hortman nor any of the other victims of political violence since 2016. They upheld their beliefs and actively stood in the public space to defend them.
Now I should say in the past I have said very direct and even violent things myself. I won’t be a hypocrite and say that I haven’t. However I have always maintained and continue to maintain that one should only consider that option when no other recourse is left (reference my pinned tweet). The paradox of tolerance is hard to navigate and where to draw the line is sometimes impossible to determine.
But the fact of the matter is regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, the reality is the extremists of both right and left along with the corporate overlords who own the US Government are the only “winners” today.
No one else.