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I come from simple English stock. When I would check in for a flight at Chicago O’Hare using a kiosk, there would typically be forty to fifty fellow travelers sharing both my first and last name in the system. And that was only one airline.
Grok estimates that there are 1,400 to 1,600 people named “Tyler Robinson” in the United States. Their lives got real miserable this morning.
There is also a movement afoot to get people who were, shall we say, less than gracious on social media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, fired from their jobs. It has already claimed a PR assistant for the Carolina Panthers and a beat writer covering the Phoenix Suns.
It has also hit a vet clinic in Nixa, Missouri. The Gentle Care Animal Hospital shares its name with a clinic in Edmond, Oklahoma, whose owner posted nasty comments about Kirk on Facebook. They’ve had to lock their doors and local police are investigating bomb threats. (But as Ann Coulter said on her podcast Friday, the real threats don’t call ahead. They just show up.)
MAGA darling Laura Loomer was quoted by The New York Times saying that she hoped “all of them lose their jobs. Incitement of violence isn’t free speech.” Well, first off, no matter how distasteful and disrespectful you are, you can’t “incite” an incident that already happened. And secondly, the incitement standard is imminent violence. There’s a lot of abhorrent speech that’s still protected speech.
Which returns us to the beginning. A lot of people share names. I even share my name with another person in my business and in my home market. And we both worked for the same station at the same time - on two different occasions. But our worst nightmare was getting our expense checks mixed up. This could have much deeper and more serious consequences.
Social media can be a menace. At least four people were either mistakenly or maliciously “identified” as Kirk’s killer before Friday morning’s arrest. Several people fed the FBI-released photos into AI to “enhance” them and came up with less than desirable results.
In the words of Sgt. Phil Esterhaus on Hill Street Blues: “And hey, let’s be careful out there.”
Discussion (43)
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Many of them were posting suggestions and lists as to who should be next.
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Cancel culture is harsh, but shame is better than prosecution for saying shameful things.
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Which, for better or worse, still doesn’t meet the standard.
You should try entering the words “hung for treason” into X’s search bar. Because if suggestions and lists were the standard MAGA would be down hundreds of thousands.
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In the 80s and 90s, I used to do radio interviews for the Los Angeles film festival. Timothy McVeigh did not do me any good; on the microphone, spelling doesn't count.
IMHO, EJ isn't saying anything like love thy enemy. He's saying that the internet, social media especially, is often an inaccurate blunderbuss that doesn't deserve reflexive trust, especially in hair-trigger moments.
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You miss the point. You said 'incident(s) that had already happened'. I'm pointing out there are many calling for more incidents.
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