Travis Ikeguchi, 27-year old superfan of supremacist right-wing media propaganda, murdered Laura Ann Carleton, 66-year old superfan of human beings in all their wonderful variety.
Ikeguchi argued with her before he shot her, because she had a pride flag on display outside her establishment. A pride flag is a way of telling the world that gay and trans and nonbinary people matter just as much as other people, which is something that a lot of people believe.
I have one up in the front of my house, for example.
If you look at Ikeguchi’s Twitter page, which I do not recommend, you’ll see that his pinned tweet approvingly suggests that the correct thing to do with such a flag, which represents queer people, is to burn it. And as I said, Ikeguchi was a fan of right-wing media, like for instance Matt Walsh.
Matt Walsh, in case you are lucky enough to not know, is the sweaty-minded christian fascist propagandist who recently proclaimed, while explaining how the existence of trans people brings him into “a boiling rage” that he would rather be dead than have his children be trans, so you can imagine how he feels about other people and their trans children.
This means that Laura Ann Carleton’s store is a potentially safer place for Matt Walsh’s children than Matt Walsh’s house, especially if we ponder what christian fascist men who have decided they would rather be dead tend to do to their family members on the way out—especially loved ones who have become the targets of, and excuses they give themselves for, their boiling rage.
It also indicates that if the time comes that Matt Walsh might be in danger of wishing his children and/or himself dead, Matt Walsh’s children will know they have safer places to which to go. That’s one thing the pride flag means for queer people, and that notion of safety for others is what makes people like her so dangerous to Matt Walsh—who like hundreds of other fascist propagandists broadcasts to his audience of thousands or millions his hatred about the people that flag represents.
And yes, Travis Ikeguchi just so happened to be one of those thousands or millions in Walsh’s audience, and he didn’t like the message of safety and inclusion conveyed by Laura Ann Carleton’s pride flag either, so he shot her, because he thought that was his right, which is something that powerful people have spent their careers ensuring would be very easy for him to think and then do.
This is because those powerful people insist that guns are an essential component for freedom, and make sure that there is at all times as little legal friction as possible between guns and boiling rage.
The argument goes thus: if somebody is impinging your freedom or threatening you, then you might need to kill them, and guns are the best way to do that.
And these same powerful people have spent their careers telling anyone who will listen that gay people are an impingement on their freedom, and a threat to society in general, and a lot of people have listened to this over the years, and many of them have connected those rather proximal dots—including, it seems, Travis Ikeguchi, 27.
Laura Ann Carleton was a very nice lady by all accounts, for what it was worth, although even if she hadn’t been very nice, she still should not have been murdered. But now she’s dead, because somebody thought she should not be around in the world any more than they thought gay people should be around in the world.
That somebody thought that she should not be around in the world because she was friends with gay people, and Travis Ikeguchi was one of millions of Americans who believe they should get to decide who does and does not get to exist in the world, and what crimes justify extrajudicial killing.
There are a lot of people who are less murderous, but still think that gay people and their allies should not be around, and will tell you so. What’s interesting is that most of them will probably also tell you they agree that Laura Ann Carleton should not have been murdered, because they think of themselves as good people.
Good people do not think that other people should be murdered, by and large, so they do not usually approve of murder—unless, that is, the propagandists tell them that it was one of the good murders, which is something I believe the Germans call a "rittenhaus."
However, these good people also will not stop thinking that queer people should not be around in the world, nor will they stop delivering messages that make the abuse and harm of queer people rather inevitable, or stop delivering power to people who will help make sure that gay people aren’t around.
And there are a lot of other people who think it’s it’s fine either way if gay people are or are not around, but also when it is time to deliver power, they choose to deliver power to those people who think that gay people should not be around. They just have some other reason to deliver power to those people.
I’m thinking today about political views because there was a tweet going around the same time as Laura Ann Carleton was murdered for being a friend to queer people, that began thusly:
"Leftists can’t understand being friends with people who don’t share their political views, but for most people it's just the norm."
The idea of the tweet being that a normal thing that normal people do is to not let political views harm the comity of existing relationships, or to affect starting new ones—and that a group called “leftists” apparently cannot comprehend this extremely normal posture.
A few days before the tweet, professional mourner of crumbling civility and amateur shoe filler David Brooks published a piece mourning, hold onto your hats, the crumbling of civility.
Civility was apparently robust back in David Brooks’ childhood, back when Jim Crow laws were in place and enforced by a regime of vigilante/police terror known as lynching, and gayness was criminalized and prosecuted, and women couldn’t have their own bank accounts without their husband’s permissions, and so forth.
These days, however, the channels that carry American abuse have apparently been dug closer to David Brooks’ house than they were in those more lovely days, so civility is nearly completely disappeared, at least according to David Brooks, now that the screams of marginalized people have finally grown loud enough for him to hear from his porch.
It’s a very common lament: that there is no civility left these days, as compared to earlier days, and the main reason appears to be that those on the “left” refuse to be friends with those on the “right,” shunning them simply because of their political views.
This implies something rather startling: American conservatives want to be friends with the rest of us.
Had you realized?
You’d never know it to listen to them, but apparently it is so, and the notion that some of us don’t want to be friends with them is one of the most pressing matters to be found in the opinion sections of our nation’s great newspapers and magazines and newsfortainment television programs.
I’m not even linking to the tweet or the article. If you missed them, more will come by soon enough, as regular as waves, as regular as clouds, as regular as hate crimes, as regular as racist gerrymanders, as regular as library closings, as regular as book bans and anti-trans legislation, as regular as gun murders in the United States of America.
So now I’d like to pick apart this strange idea, that the great problem before is incivility and polarization, caused most specifically because those of us on the left won’t be friends with those on the right, over nothing more than their political views.
Let’s look at the key terms, which are “left and right,” and “political views,” and “friends.”
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