Bad People Dying is a Good Thing, Actually

The liberal instinct to be civil toward horrible people is misguided and dangerous

Michael Guevarra

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A skull over a black background.
Photo by Lina White on Unsplash

If you haven’t heard the news, AM radio pioneer, conservative media icon, and spectacularly destructive racist and bigot Rush Limbaugh has died at the age of 70. He spent his career aggressively promoting cultural division on social issues, at times suggesting that marriage equality would lead to bestiality and once running a segment that mocked gay people dying of the AIDS virus.

A world without such a presence is better off. There are people who spend their lives profiting from efforts to undermine society’s ability to grow into a rational space where human well-being can flourish. The spread of the worst beliefs — racism, sexism, fascism, sexual discrimination, neurological discrimination, and so on — these don’t begin and end with the average people who hold them. These ideas proliferate, in part, because of the influential people who breathe life into them using platforms that have built-in credibility. That platform could be a radio show, a podcast, a YouTube channel, a popular newspaper — hell, it could be the presidency. Does the U.S. capitol riot happen without President Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about a fraudulent election?

And when it comes to electoral politics in a country supposedly intended to be a representative democracy, its effectiveness is partially dependent upon the understanding and worldview of the electorate. Governance and legislation in the United States are vehicles for class warfare. If you’re a wage earner who roots for the health and well-being of people who are corrosive to our liberation, you’re being a class traitor. If you’re a member of a marginalized community doing the same, even if it’s in the name of “being better than them,” you need to realize that you’re contributing to these oppressive structures.

When it comes to this character of conflict, politeness doesn’t make you a good guy. It makes you a dupe.

Celebrating the death of an awful human being like Rush Limbaugh doesn’t make you “as bad as he was,” a phrase I read verbatim from a liberal’s Facebook comment earlier today. The liberal compulsion to…

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Michael Guevarra

Bay Area writer, punk sociologist, and feral poet // editor of The Anticapital