An Al Cross column in the Kentucky Lantern has this headline: We Need Calm Compelling Voices from the Middle. And it contained this pablum:

I got a surprise phone call last week from the other side of the world, where an American expatriate was worried about the future of his country in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. We agreed that the dis-United States of America needs calming voices who can command attention — a tall order in a media landscape that is dominated by sources that are provocative, inflammatory and often false. All of us need to help change that.

American public discourse is now driven by opinion, not by facts, largely because of social-media platforms that favor opinion and use secret algorithms that promote the most provocative views to compete in the new “attention economy.” The decline of the traditional news business reflects the reality that the market for fact has shrunk while the market for opinion has grown. Americans prefer to be entertained, and have their views confirmed, than be informed — especially by facts that might conflict with those views.

So, what can we agree on? I would like to think that virtually all Americans agree that political violence is never justified, and that the vast majority of us would probably say likewise about speech that advocates political violence. There are laws against such things.

What, then, about speech that celebrates political violence, even a crime that results in death? That sort of speech, however repugnant, has been protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. But now people are getting fired for callous things they said about Charlie Kirk’s death, and President Trump and his top lieutenants are using the assassination to more deeply demonize and outright threaten their political opponents. …

The maxim, “All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good men and women to do nothing,” is not as operative as it was in the old media environment, when extreme voices had little access to mass audiences. Now, the extremes are amplified in huge echo chambers, and many Americans in the middle have dropped out of the toxic talk. 

First of all, what the hell is “the middle.” Anyone who has watched our political discourse knows that there’s no such thing. When the country moves more to the right, the middle moves to the right, and that’s been going on for decades, ever since the election of Richard Nixon in the 1960s. There is no such thing as the middle.

And we’re supposed to find “rational voices” from that perspective. Charlie Kirk’s words now are being treated as if they represent the rational voice of the middle. Are we supposed to ignore all of the heinous things he said?

Obviously, that’s Cross’s position. Rattling off obvious no brainer comments like “Murder is bad.” Yes, it is! We know that. We also know that if you say, “We have to restrict access to guns” (you know, the things that people get murdered with), the right screams that we hate the Constitution. In addition, despite the current whitewashing of the victim’s past statements, we don’t have to treat the hateful things he said as gospel. (I know it’s seen as gospel, because I was driving on a highway today and saw a sign outside a church that said, “Pray for Charlie Kirk.”)

Hawk’s Podcast on YouTube has a comprehensive list of all the things MAGAts stand for, and sums up the hypocrisy that’s spewed by the right.

And Joy Reid asks legitimate questions and gives rational answers: