These are the GOOD people. Those that Nate Friedman shows, above, in his tribute to Charlie Kirk, which he did at the Tribute to Charlie, apparently the biggest such ever in the United States, watched by over 100 million and attended, in person, by over 200,000.
The Tik Tokkers dancing on Charlie's grave, horrid horrid views. Those that want to kill, to murder, to assassinate a good man, and now we know, any good person, to stop their thoughts and speech. These are the BAD people.
Very Manichaean of me, I admit. But there we are. There are good people and there are bad people. Maybe it's in you. Or maybe it's your society that made you that way. A measure for me is: Whether or not you celebrate the death of a person whose views you know nothing of (as most of the grave dancers don't). That's one of those dividing lines for me.
As Mao Tse-tung used to say: "One divides into two". Or, as I used to say: "There are two types of people in the world; those that divide the world into two and those that don't".
If you can't tell good from bad. Or if you prevaricate about it -- "Charlie Kirk should not have been killed, BUT... " -- aka Salman Rushdie's "But Brigade" redux, if there's some doubt and wondering, then I can't help you.
You can think as badly as you want of me. I feel comfortable being on the side of Free Speech, on the side of the free interchange of ideas, on the side of NOT killing people you disagree with, of engaging with young minds in the academy.
That's the side I stand on. That's the side most of the Left used to stand on. But no longer does.
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Salman Rushdie's speech (a clip), from January 2015 on Free Speech and the "But Brigade":
“So anyway, the thing that I come to—I used this phrase on TV the other day— the rise of the ‘but-brigade.’ I got so sick of the goddamn but-brigade. And now the moment somebody says ‘Yes I believe in free speech, but,’ I stop listening. ‘I believe in free speech, but people should behave themselves.’ ‘I believe in free speech, but we shouldn’t upset anybody.’ ‘I believe in free speech, but let’s not go too far.’
“The point about it is, the moment you limit free speech, it’s not free speech. The point about it is that it’s free. Both John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela, in important speeches, used the same three-word phrase which to my mind says it all: “Freedom is indivisible.” You can’t slice it up. Otherwise it ceases to be freedom.
