Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
I think the reason this is getting this much attention is because it's on video
I don't think that hurts, but I think the main reason is that Kirk was a prominent right-wing figure and you already had a lot of people champing at the bit for an excuse to crack some heads. Similarly, Floyd's murder tapped into a pre-existing resentment of police brutality that we'd seen flare up in, e.g. Ferguson and NYC (and also you had hundreds of millions of people with cabin fever).
By contrast, there's no political factions around school shootings. There's no opposition to mobilize against, and to the extent that there's a national conversation to be had, we've already had it.
Your mileage may definitely vary. I've grown up listening to right-wingers not-as-coyly-as-they-think cheer for all manner of violence against their enemies. There's a lot of stuff I ignored when I was inside the tent that I reflect back on and realize how casual support for violence was. It certainly wasn't everybody, but it was quite common and encountered very little pushback.
And these were normies conservatives and that was before Trump came in the scene and started actively riling them up.
Certainly you can find people like that on the left. IME the biggest difference is that when there's left-wing political violence, normie liberals will usually say "that's terrible" and when there's right-wing political violence, normie conservatives will split into thirds along the lines of "it's good, actually", blaming the left, and just pretending it didn't happen.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
The guy also had a bunch of "no kings" anti-trump fliers
Which do you think is more likely: that this guy who was specifically targeting Democrats was also carrying fliers for a normie resist-lib protest because after he finished up murdering his way through the MN state legislature he was going to pass out some literature? Or that this guy with a history of right-wing views (pro-life, anti-trans, evangelical, etc...) was trying to throw people off the scent?
Boelter was not just an unhinged guy (he is also an unhinged guy, but that's just table stakes) who intended to pull the trigger and see what happened. Even if he didn't expect to get away with it, he clearly planned to.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
Well, we're already in hell. Now what?
We're not. We're barely above baseline. This is America. We shoot each other a lot. What we are is acting like we're in an apocalyptic struggle.
When a right-winger does it, they get denounced by everyone.
When a right-winger does it, everyone on the right acts all mystified as to how their constant violent fantasies could have led to violent action. They shift the blame to mental health while half of them snigger behind their hands.
This quote really sums up my experience with the asymmetry here:
My feed is filled with statements from elected democrats condemning the shooting which is obviously good but I have a sneaking suspicion it will all be forgotten when someone named like MyLittleCommunistPony got 100k Likes on TikTok for saying “Good” or whatever
Except that when the tables are turned, instead of MyLittleCommunistPony it's senior Republican leadership. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples would be Trump pardoning J6 insurrectionists. But also Mike Lee claiming the Minnesota assassin was a radical left-winger. Or, uh, Charlie Kirk.
(And all this is leaving aside the reality that right-wingers outsource most of their political violence to law enforcement and cheer from the sidelines)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
it's going to backfire on whatever political positions the perpetrator holds
I'm going to reiterate the bit where a right-wing nut murdered two Democratic politicians in July, planned to murder more, and the right just brassed it out and said he was secretly a leftist. Why moderate? What's the point? Who will be swayed by it? Their enemies won't care and won't respect it.
You misunderstand me. RWers never, ever own their violent extremists, no matter how blatant it is (I mean, seriously, the guy was going down a hit list of democratic legislators). The blame is always shifted onto mental health. This despite how much time the far right spend fantasizing about violence (shit, the most common far-right response I've seen to Kirk's murder is "this is our Reichstag fire, time to break out the jackboots")
I found this remark from Ben Dreyfuss illustrative:
My feed is filled with statements from elected democrats condemning the shooting which is obviously good but I have a sneaking suspicion it will all be forgotten when someone named like MyLittleCommunistPony got 100k Likes on TikTok for saying “Good” or whatever
Except when it's a right-wing extremist, instead of MyLittleCommunistPony saying 'good', it's, like, Mike Lee, and right-wing commentators invent cope about how the guy was really mentally ill and we can't really know what was in his heart.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
Oh, wait, I forgot. When a right-winger does it, it was actually a mental health issue.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
And the fact you have offered this alternative take makes it impossible for me to believe you believe your first claim
Willingness to consider alternative explanations makes me untrustworthy?
Nice talking to you.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
To be clear: I'm not positing the shooter was a professional. I am positing that this is not some crank who bought a gun last week. It is probably (again, assuming the above info is true and not more rumors) someone with significant experience/training shooting. That's not that rare in the US, but it's far from common.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
I'm gonna admit, I'm feeling some simmering rage.
I have to admit, I feel simmering rage whenever I see right-wingers completely memoryhole every instance of right-wing violence to build a one-sided persecution narrative meant to justify more right-wing violence. Oh, you're old enough to remember Scalise getting shot? Are you old enough to remember two fucking months ago? Or three years ago? Or or or.
Oh, wait, I forgot. When a right-winger does it, it was actually a mental health issue. At this point, I'm genuinely convinced there's a subset of American right-wingers that is dug so far into their siege mentality that they're incapable of grasping this. They crouch in the corner, fantasizing about violence until one of them does something, at which point they act shocked for ten seconds before flushing the whole thing down a mental toilet. The ability to flip between gleeful viciousness and 'have you no decency' pearl-clutching is incredible. Not a shred of self-awareness, just an impenetrable conviction that they are innocent victims.
Many of those also resulted in violence, or at least intense conflict, before reaching a measure of reconciliation. But no, it's not just about the existence of disagreement but the gap. This is part of why, e.g. there was so much violence during the Civil Rights Movement. Free speech debates don't become nearly as heated because the scope of disagreement is much narrower.
Meanwhile, right now we have a movement that simultaneously controls every branch of the federal government and thinks it is on the verge of extermination.
yet another "lone wolf with mixed political leanings and a history of mental illness" I'm going to have a really hard time suspending my disbelief.
Why? It would seem fairly plausible that schizos with incoherent political beliefs are disproportionately likely to try and shoot a politician.
Actually, let me offer an alternative take: most people have mixed political leanings and a lot of people have mental health issues. It is often desirable to play up mental health issues and downplay coherent ideological motivations. It is generally pro-social to maintain the idea that you'd have to be a deranged nut to resort to assassination, and if an assassin agrees with you it can be embarrassing. (I think my first statement is more correct, but it can be useful to think of alternative explanations).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
Define 'today'. If we walk backwards through notable assassinations and attempted assassinations, the assassins usually turn out to be massive weirdos.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
People who decide to try and shoot a politician tend to be fucking weird. Zangara and Oswald, for example, were bonkers, but they were pretty clearly also politically motivated.
I haven't a desire to see it. People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead.
I happened to see the video before I knew what I was watching and I would amazed if he survived.
Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.
Unlike Fuentes, Kirk did a lot of public appearances, so even if he's not nearly as provocative a figure he was simply more exposed. I personally never thought of Kirk as anything more a suited buffoon - a borderline caricature of a YR. Not a figure of any real note. The only reason I can think of to go after Kirk is pure availability on the part of a shooter who was determined to shoot somebody.
What is of moderate interest to me is that the report as of now is that a single shot was taken from a rooftop 200 yards away. That is not Zangara stepping out of the crowd. Assuming that detail is correct, that is someone who knew what they were doing.
And intense escalations on the part of our political tribes are absolutely in the top five.
I don't anticipate these cooling because we are talking about fundamental disagreements about the shape of society. There will presumably some reconciliation (in a thesis-antithesis sense, not in a everyone-hugs-it-out sense) eventually, but society can sustain quite a high level of civil violence between now and eventually.
But let me offer at the same time: this is (unfortunately) not that unusual in American politics. We had two state legislators assassinated in Minnesota in July. An attempt on Trump in July of last year. The attack on Paul Pelosi (was targeting Nancy Pelosi). The congressional baseball shooting. Giffords being shot in Arizona. And that's not getting into terrorism/politically motivated murders not targeted at prominent individuals or foiled plots that never got within striking distance. An attempt to present a one-sided narrative of violence is, itself, likely meant to rationalize more violence.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
You develop thick skin
To be fair, this is also a negative outcome.
It is, but it is vastly less concerning and mostly a function of the nature of urban poverty. Beggars are ancient phenomenon.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
You cannot expose yourself by putting earbuds in and spacing-out on public transportation directly in front of a disheveled black man wearing a hoodie
I would submit to you that this is not some universally known people of social lore that every native-born American knows. Living in DC I've done this on hundreds of occasions and I've only been stabbed twice. If I see a disheveled black man on the Metro, I am vastly more worried he's about to regale me with an obviously made up sob story and ask for money.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
I'm actually a little surprised by the people pushing back on this one
I'm not. In the US, at least, right-wing political violence is usually carried out under the guise of law enforcement. Violence by law enforcement is presumed justified and classified as not-actually-violence because it is (mostly) regular and (usually) socially sanctioned. To point out that law enforcement is, in fact, violence is to give left-wing critiques an exploitable breach in the intellectual firewall.
(One can still defend having laws and law enforcement with all of the above, but the point is to not have to in the first place)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
This isn't a matter of "belief," it's history and biology. Wherever civilized and sufficiently stable nations have recovered from sudden and large declines in population, golden ages have followed.
I'm going to have to ask for a citation, because this seems like an extraordinary claim and contrary to basically every historical example I'm aware of. What's the mechanism here? It is true that the recovery that follows an apocalyptic event will seem like a golden age compared to the apocalypse. However, the fact that hitting rock bottom leaves nowhere to go but up does not mean hitting rock bottom is welfare enhancing.
(I have a weird feeling you're going to pick the Black Death, but maybe you'll surprise me).
I'm not denying the mechanism, I'm saying its benefit is illusory.
What are you actually trying to say? Like, what is the counterfactual scenario you are proposing? You say the benefit of material abundance is illusory, but also seem to expect that things would be better if instead of having more stuff workers were paid better. Is your position "actually, things would be better if we had less stuff"? If so, you should say that. If not, there's a basic problem where higher worker compensation and lower prices are isomorphic. If worker compensation rises but the amount of goods remain the same (per your stipulation) the result is the inflation that seems to incense you.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
A rare return from the field of economics is the fact known for >200 years that increasing the supply of labor literally only ever benefits the ownership class.
Set aside the immigrant/native question for a minute. Is it your belief that killing half the workers in the US would make the other half materially better off? Because that is the implication of your claim.
(A: it won't, of course, because, broadly, more labor => more production => more Stuff That People Want)
You shouldn't be thankful big ag can bring in >100,000 H-2A workers so your strawberries are only $5 a pound. You should be furious that your compensation hasn't scaled proportionally so you can afford strawberries at $10 or $15 or $20 a pound; you should be furious at the greed of banks and corporations, at the incompetence and corruption in government, that has allowed the rampant inflation from the probably $0.50 a pound strawberries cost in 1970.
It doesn't matter if you make $10 an hour and strawberries cost $5 or you make $100 an hour and strawberries cost $50. The way you bring down the price of strawberries is by producing more strawberries. Repeat x1b across literally everything.
ICE people do not owe personal fealty to Trump.
The vast majority of them just owe him their jobs and are recruited from his most die-hard base (and are well aware they'll be kicked to the curb when Trump is gone).
As for "Right-wing political violence in the US is almost always carried out under the guise of law enforcement", that's certainly a hard one to swallow.
I don't know why, other than selective perception. We have the extremely prominent examples of the Civil Rights Movement, the history of labor protests, recent protests against the police themselves...
As for 'Especially when the obvious though unstated corollary is "any time a right-wing government uses law enforcement, that counts as political violence"', this is flipped around. The use of law enforcement gives cover to political violence.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
Perhaps we could agree on a compromise where we cede some of our natural freedom to a governing institution in exchange for protection and stability? I've written more about this in my pamphlet, Behemoth.
who I think have fixated too much on the wrong comparisons (re: fascism, Nazism, etc.)
At the beginning of Trump's first term, I was on board with the view that Trump wouldn't be That Bad. I anticipated he'd be something akin to an American Berlusconi: vulgar, corrupt, lawless, and an overall national embarrassment, but not in a way that was systemically threatening. My views turned steadily more negative as it became clear that the TDSers were basically right, albeit overly pessimistic about the strength of political guardrails.
I don't think Trump is a fascist (because fascism is something very specific), but I think he is a personalist and reactionary authoritarian who has surrounded himself with advisors who are, while also not properly fascist, share the same fixation on a directionally fashy illiberal nationalist renewal. Trump is too venal and brainrotted to conceive of anything as ambitious as fascism, but that doesn't stop him from cheerfully taking on the mantle of mad king while wrecking the country. (There's also the matter of conservatives more broadly openly flirting with authoritarian ethnonationalism)
And given the... provocative nature of how the second Trump admin is governing, I don't expect there to be any less energy in the next swing of the pendulum.
Did he? I get the general impetus to not speak ill of the dead, but unless he'd taken a turn very recently that I'm not aware of, Kirk was not doing good-faith outreach. He was generating content.
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