Usually we see pretty close to eye to eye but I don't think calling Charlie Kirk a degenerate is accurate nor productive.
Well, depends on how you define accuracy and productivity, and
especially on how you define degeneracy. See; to me this word does not imply any sort of mental illness - merely a complete lack of morals. I propose that the long paragraph you wrote regarding this fellow's life and career is the
definition of a degenerate - or, more specifically, of an intelligent, witty, charismatic degenerate. The worst kind. He's what you get when you just have a second little devil on your right shoulder rather than the angel that's supposed to be sitting there.
There's a bit of personal trauma involved too - see, I had a good chunk of my family murdered because of people like Charlie Kirk. The Nazis rounded up my grandfather along with his parents, his uncle, and his sister (who was 12 at that time). All of them - with the sole exception of my grandfather - were sent straight to the gas chamber after stepping off the train in Auschwitz. So yeah, please excuse me for refusing to normalize what is essentially a modern reincarnation of
Horst Wessel.
I also detest hypocrisy in all its forms, and reactions to this murder are a veritable parade of hypocrisy - with activists publicly crying crocodile tears even as they secretly contemplate how this advances their political agenda. Don't believe me? Compare the contents of this thread to what
people were saying following the murder of Melissa Hortman. It all brings me to the following conclusions (again - strictly a personal opinion):
- the majority of Americans don't actually care about political shootings as such; they only don't like it when "their" politicians get shot,
- for the majority of Americans the fact that a political figure got shot matters less than the political affiliation of the shooter.
And that's how we segue to your concern regarding where this takes the political landscape. I fully agree this is a much more pertinent issue than the murder itself; however, I believe we're blowing the matter out of proportion. Terrorism is, and has always been, the weapon of the weak - and if there's anything the history of political assassinations teaches us, it's that they seldom accomplish the stated goals, and quite often backfire.
For the reasons stated above I don't expect this event to produce any significant change in terms of the American political landscale and its dynamics.