[kevinfiol]

> I’ll add that the murder of Charlie Kirk and the widely-publicized reactions form many on the left has seriously shifted the Overton window to the right.

I might be missing something, but from what I saw, almost every major politician on the left condemned the Kirk killing, including major progressives like AOC.

[walkabout]

I think there was more interest in crafting a narrative around that, than engaging with reality. The (at least partially successful) attempt at shifting sentiment didn’t have statements from major democratic figures that were useful, so ignored those and focused on randos posting Kirk quotes of the shrek-some-of-you-may-die.jpg variety regarding school shootings juxtaposed with news of his dying in a school shooting along with sensible-chuckle.gif as the most horrible things ever, and tantamount to endorsing political violence. A bunch of other things didn’t really fit the narrative of calls for political violence and the commission thereof being especially left-wing coded over recent decades, so were also ignored.

It would have been convenient to the effort if left wing leaders had endorsed the murder, or if the language and acts of political violence over recent decades had tended to come from the left, but the lack of those supports didn’t keep them from trying.

Reality and truth-seeking aren’t that important to the outcome of affecting perception, is the thing. That was accomplished, regardless of any “but wait a minute, this doesn’t seem quite right” we can spot. You can watch Fox News and do that all day long with all kinds of things they cover, but it’s simply not important that a lot of their “angles” are really weak—they’d surely prefer they were strong, but it’s also not necessary. In fact a hallmark of the modern version of the thing they engage in is that it doesn’t avoid weaknesses and focus on strengths, but continues unperturbed and with all the trappings of confidence and strength even when all it has at the moment are weak notions.