Once again, the New York Times is coming to the defense of the ghouls who celebrated the assassination of conservative Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk.
Reporter-at-large Eli Saslow journeyed to Texas Hill Country for the latest epic, a 3,000-word sob story about a fired female firefighter, that got major, three-column play across the prime news real estate of Sunday’s front page: “She Hated Kirk. He Resolved to Make Such People Pay.”
And again left unmentioned: The left cancelling people’s reputations and getting them fired over far less offensive things during the Covid and Black Lives Matter-fueled hysteria of 2020. That phenomenon also overtook the New York Times, driving out opinion staffer Bari Weiss and former opinion editor James Bennet from the Times opinion page during that sinister “social justice” era, whose consequences we are still enduring.
Saslow focused on 55-year-old Mike Arnold, former volunteer mayor of Blanco, Texas, who got back into conservative politics by calling out liberals expressing glee online after the assassination of Christian conservative activist Charlie Kirk on a college campus in Utah.
In the weeks since Kirk’s murder, millions of Americans have engaged in an internet war, flooding one another’s feeds with accusations and attacks that begin onscreen and spill into the real world in places like Blanco, a town of 2,100 in Texas Hill Country. Hundreds of people have been doxxed, fired or threatened for social media posts that were perceived as callous or celebratory in the wake of Kirk’s death. A historic act of political violence has unleashed a wave of new threats, deepening the cycle of division in a nation splitting into two hostile sides.
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But now Arnold scanned through Facebook and saw little of that love in evidence. Some people on the far left were laughing about Kirk’s murder in gleeful videos; others on the right were plotting vengeance. President Trump was saying he “hated” his opponents — that “we just have to beat the hell out of them” — and the longer Arnold scrolled, the more he came to identify with the president’s anger. If a group of Americans was willing to celebrate a coldblooded murder, then there was no line left to step over.
So far so good. But Saslow then piled on still more sympathy to the ghouls who mocked or celebrated Kirk’s murder, after years of the paper ignoring vicious cancellations by liberals, including Danielle Meyers, who “worked as a paramedic and a firefighter in rural Comal County, and she was leading a training for a half-dozen colleagues on ways to detect internal trauma” when she learned the news.
….She returned her attention to the cadaver, but the other paramedics remained in a fog, rewatching the video, cursing, praying for Kirk and consoling one another as Meyers stood by herself.
She was used to being isolated. She was one of only a few women in a fire department of about 100 employees, and even though she tried to fit in by sleeping at the firehouse two nights each week — even though she had won E.M.T. of the Year, passed all the fitness tests, registered as a Republican, collected guns and voted for Trump in 2016 — she was always defined by the ways she stood apart. A vegetarian. A bisexual. A single woman with dyed pink hair and facial piercings among a sea of mostly white, Christian, conservative men.
….She returned her attention to the cadaver, but the other paramedics remained in a fog, rewatching the video, cursing, praying for Kirk and consoling one another as Meyers stood by herself.More excuses were made for Meyers: She felt personally attacked by Kirk’s language
…It seemed to her as if the entire internet had transformed into a shrine. Kirk was a martyr, a hero, a genius, an angel, a saint. She hadn’t posted on her private Facebook page in weeks, but she was tired of censoring herself for the benefit of others.
And this was how Meyers bravely expressed herself online.
“Good riddance,” she wrote on Facebook, a few hours after Kirk’s death. “Thoughts and prayers to the other guy.”
And so it began.
To his credit, Saslow ran down some of Arnold’s beefs, including “newcomers from Austin and San Antonio” bringing their intolerant liberal politics into his rural community and also some of the performative cruelty Arnold found in postings from the tolerant left, including “I’m happy he’s rotting in hell.”
