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Comment by toomim | Hacker News Reader

That's using ancient data from... 1948:

> We included individuals whose public exposure occurred between 1948 and 2018.

The last 8 years of politics have been very very abnormal. And in today's data, the "very liberal" approve of political violence at a rate of 24% vs. 3% for the "very conservative":

https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kir...

This ^^^ is the troubling statistic, and there's a 7x difference between the left and the right.

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You’re presenting the data for whether it’s okay to be happy about a political figure’s death, not whether it’s okay to cause one. There’s a section about this you should read starting with “YouGov's polling doesn't suggest that young people or liberals are more pro-violence in general”, and in particular the stark divide about self-defense. None of this is great, but it’s hardly surprising that a minority of younger people are more supportive of violence than people who have more life experience and fully-developed frontal cortexes.

Nice points!

But as for "causing" violence, they also asked whether "political violence is ever justified", and the difference between left vs. right there was even more — 25% vs 3%.

Given the right's overall reaction to things like January 6th, I conclude that this number tells us more about what the left vs right thinks qualifies as political violence, not about their support for it.

The data in the link is clear that the opinions are always partisan based on the very last person shot at... that does track.

Wouldn't you expect the conservatives, then, to be the ones who say that violence is justified?

Yet you're seeing the opposite — after the killing of a conservative, it's the left that says violence is justified.

Furthermore, this trend on the left had been building for a while, which we see in surveys done before his killing:

[1] https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1909391943802703899

[2] https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1836511736213704769

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