Forgive Them, For They Know Not What They Say... Right?

I support Murder McMurderson, but I don't SUPPORT support Murder McMurderson.

One of the most infamous calls to action is from a 23-page manifesto that opens with “A spectre is haunting Europe.” But who has time to read 23 pages in 2021? In the age of Twitter, manifestos don’t require long campfire sessions — you just need a cute dog or Wolf of Wall Street gifs!

And none of this should be surprising. Any rhetoric professor worth their salt should be able to tell you about the importance of shorthand speech and dog whistling when you’re trying to persuade a small audience. But lawyers may be behind on the wave. On Sunday, a politician named Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) shared a video titled “Attack of Immigrants.” It was a play on a popular anime called “Attack on Titan,” a show largely about border patrol keeping dangerous outsiders out of the country with a giant wall and weapons. There’s no question of if this was in bad taste — lawyers and rhetoricians would likely agree to that. But was it incitement?

Ranging from Gosar’s video to the fallout of a recent Travis Scott concert, considerations about what counts as incitement in our current day are mounting. It’s happening in courtrooms too, with Richard Spencer and others on trial to determine if their speech incited the violence that took place at 2017’s Unite The Right rally. And if this is a flashpoint, logs have been added to it for a while now, with Trump proudly yelling about how he could shoot someone in broad daylight and not lose voters (which, who knows, might be related to a longstanding streak of vigilantism in our civilians and our cops). These ideas have to be coming from somewhere. And it’s not always as simple as with Dylann Roof, who left a manifesto before he shot and killed people in their house of worship. Some of them are coming from memes about a frog, or a man cooking burgers, but so much of it is cloaked in plausible deniability, post-modern irony, and pastiche. So much so that even news channels can’t be realistically expected to be taken seriously when they report on contemporary issues.

I know that people joke about killing people all the time, but should they? Maybe lawyers should take a page out of a rhetorician’s book and notice that the context of the things we say mean completely different things in the climate that we say them. Given that people with zipties were looking to take politicians hostage during the failed coup on Jan. 6th and that AOC already voiced fear for being killed during the Capitol riot, would it really be that much of a stretch to say that what Mr. Gosar did was incitement? Or does someone need to die first?

Twitter Refuses To Take Down Gosar Anime That Sees Him Assassinate AOC [Independent]


Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. Before that, he wrote columns for an online magazine named The Muse Collaborative under the pen name Knehmo. He endured the great state of Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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