We really didn’t.
We just didnt see him as some hero worthy of multiple bronze statues, and we saw that he was being turned into a hero by most people on the left.
We also saw that he died of causes unrelated to his arrest. As in, he was going to die within a few hours of that video no matter what.
Trying to equate the two - both in circumstances, and in the way they died is a very big mis-step.
Neither deserved to die.
Only one of them was trying to make the country a better place.
Only one of them was killed.
“We also have to figure out how it came to be that a kid with a 4.0, with a 34 on the ACT, with a full ride scholarship at my alma mater, who didn’t even last a semester, drops out and ends up doing something like this,” the governor said. "We need to understand that, and we need to figure out how to stop it.”
I suppose this feels a bit personal for me, due to having a step-brother (now a step-sister) who followed the exact same path.
Incredibly intelligent by those metrics, but it turned into a sense of entitlement because life didn’t get handed to them. So rage started to build, and eventually the family lost contact.
It was self-worshiping intelligence, not put to use - he wanted to climb the social hierarchy without learning it.
I found out later that he had been pissed at me when our parents got married, because he had always been the smart one, but I showed up and was smarter than him (in his mind) and athletic, which were polar opposites.
He dropped out of a private christian college after a year, while working a job at UPS which had 100% tuition reimbursement.
I haven’t spoken with them in over a decade, but looking at this shooter has me revisit those memories.
I’m getting the vibe that I’m extremely lucky to have several close people who are ready for debates about any subjects and who are very sensible, even if you disagree with them.
Pps. Not that I think Hoopers video was particularly deep or well argumented, but I agree with the end of the video.
He literally went to college campuses to challenge ideas and allow himself to be challenged. It is basically impossible for a right wing echo chamber to exist. I suppose you might have missed the woke ideas if you watched no sports, no TV, no movies, no pop culture award shows, didn’t have the internet, and never visited an American city or university. Amish elders might exist in an echo chamber that is free of radical leftist thinking, but few others are so fortunate.
I feel so lucky to have survived hundreds of assassination attempts when I was subjected to deadly knee pins over and over by men much larger than Chauvin. Maybe not doing fentanyl and meth before doing things that get you pinned on the ground was the key to my survival.
Locally we have the District Attorney of Maine’s largest population center, multiple public school teachers, a prominent blogger promoted by multiple universities, along with Maine’s largest newspaper running an op-ed characterizing his views as fundamentally malicious two days ago.
Most national level Democratic politicians have the good sense to say that assassination is bad, but still lack the good sense to say that calling half the country Nazis is bad.
Ilhan Omar might be the only member of Congress stupid enough to openly celebrate Kirk’s murder, which probably isn’t even in the top five most ignorant and hateful things she has said.
