It’s the first time in NBC News polling across five different violent incidents that there has been bipartisan agreement blaming extreme rhetoric from political and media figures.

More than 6 in 10 registered voters said they think “extreme political rhetoric” was an important contributor to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk earlier this year — including majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents, according to the latest NBC News poll.

The findings represent a grim milestone in America’s reckoning with growing political violence and its root causes. The survey marks the first time, across questions about five different violent incidents over 15 years of NBC News polling, that there has been cross-partisan agreement that rhetoric played an important role in an attack, as opposed to the incident having been more about the actions of a single disturbed person.

Overall, 61% of respondents said they feel that “extreme political rhetoric used by some in the media and by political leaders was an important contributor” to Kirk’s killing.

  • TheFogan@programming.dev
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    8 hours ago

    I mean yeah, there’s no question that extremist rhetoric got him killed. and yeah I’d have to say it’s far more of his own style of it. The part that baffles me is how it’s only 60%, unless they somehow posed it as rhetoric against him. To me that question is as basic as saying “did gun violence have anything to do with his death?”, uhh yeah.

    I have feeling the question is vaguely worded so that they can then try and tear it to say “is it people saying he supports facism the reason for the violence”. So that they can push to criminalize describing reality and pointing out real problems, because some people might try to solve problems with violence.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      You do realize that if you click the headline it takes you to an actual article with more details?

      Like, you could have read the article and gotten answers to your questions instead of typing out all those assumptions and hoping someone answers.

      And I would copy/paste most of the time, but really people need to just learn to read the fucking articles.