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« Last post by SVPete on December 15, 2025, 11:53:54 AM »When Death Becomes a Punchline: What We Lose When We Celebrate Our Enemies’ End
https://pjmedia.com/jamie-wilson/2025/12/15/when-death-becomes-a-punchline-what-we-lose-when-we-celebrate-our-enemies-end-n4947087
https://pjmedia.com/jamie-wilson/2025/12/15/when-death-becomes-a-punchline-what-we-lose-when-we-celebrate-our-enemies-end-n4947087
Quote
In September, Charlie Kirk was murdered.
What followed disturbed me almost as much as the crime itself. Not everywhere, not from everyone, but widely enough to be unmistakable, the reaction on the left was celebratory. Celebrities joked. Writers sneered. Ordinary people rushed to explain why he had it coming. He was labeled a hatemonger, a danger, a man whose absence improved the world.
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What struck me most was not simply the cruelty, but its direction. The pain was not accidental. It was aimed. His widow, his children, his friends, and the many fans and admirers who loved him were meant to feel it. The message was clear enough: this is what happens when you love the wrong person. Suffering was not collateral damage. It was part of the point.
Last night, Rob Reiner and his wife were reportedly murdered.
Reiner made some genuinely great films. He also spent years speaking about conservatives with open contempt. He could be dismissive, cruel, and dehumanizing in his rhetoric. None of that is in dispute. But what unsettled me was how familiar the reaction felt. Almost immediately, I am seeing people on the right respond in much the same way I had seen people on the left respond to Kirk’s death: with jokes, with glee, with the thin satisfaction that an enemy had finally been removed.
Different politics. Same behavior.
...
This is not grief, justice, or accountability. It is dehumanization.
The justifications are always ready at hand. He deserved it. She was evil. The world is better off. These phrases are meant to make cruelty feel principled. But dehumanization is not ideological; it is behavioral. It spreads easily, and it looks the same no matter which flag it wraps itself in.
