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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   42285 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I think a lot of these posts are missing the horror that I am feeling.

I personally listened to this guy debating all kinds of people in the background of other things I was doing. I was impressed by how there were very few below-the-belt attacks on the interlocutors, and multiple bouts of praise from Charlie Kirk for the debaters being brave enough to step up and be material for content. I wished I was as skilled as he at setting up such angles of argument so quickly.

When I heard he was shot, it was like I was punched. I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe he's dead. It got even more unbelievable with the second video showing blood flowing out of him like a fountain. I wept upon seeing this. This murder is the closest thing to pure evil that I've seen in my life, ala No Country for Old Men. It makes absolutely no sense, he was making arguments that I genuinely agreed with, he was so young, he had kids, he was a good Christian, you've almost certainly heard all this before. He was upholding the values of this country by engaging in such public discourse. Democracy does not die in darkness, it dies in broad daylight in front of thousands of people, in front of its family, viewed by millions online, everyone powerless to do anything as it bleeds out.

None of what happened afterwards was what I expected at all. Immediately, celebrations, dark ironic pitiless humor, and hideous one-liners with no thought put into them started everywhere. It was official, the Hermann Cain Award logic about when it's acceptable to dance on the graves of your enemies extends about as far as certain leftists want it to. If you have certain values, and you express them, there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who would love to see you get decorated with your own blood, watch you exsanguinate, a chunk of mineral tearing through your vital structures, turning you into a pile of meat instead of a man. Your entire life will be characterized by years-old quotes picked out of a mountain of words you've spoken over the course of your short life.

Today, after gathering enough stock of public reactions, I've come to an even more disturbing conclusion: there are even more people out there who will run cover even for this awful behavior. Here's a small collection of everything I've witnessed: They're all bots. There aren't that many of them. They're only online. It's because of Trump's escalation of rhetoric. It's because this was where this would lead for the kind of life he lived. He was a white supremacist. He wanted gays to be stoned to death. He accepted gun deaths and became one, such a natural consequence. The shooter wasn't one of us. He was a groyper. We can talk about cooling the rhetoric once the 2026 elections happen. Until those go well, it's perfectly understandable why people talk this way. Let's talk about something else, let's talk about January 6th again. Let's talk about Epstein. Let's talk about the Minnesota lawmakers. Anything but this topic. Even many of the moderate lefty politicians couldn't muster up much other than "political violence is bad", saving face in an easy way. Almost none of them did the difficult thing that Gavin Newsom or Cenk Uygur did and confronted the real issue at no small cost to their own image. Some of them even used it to forward their own agendas. AOC put something out in favor of gun control. That's right: we shoot you, and then we use your death to try to convince you to lay down your issues and let us win. Ilhan Omar doesn't believe that anyone genuinely liked the man or is being genuine. After seeing all the downplaying, I have no doubts that she will lose barely any support, because it's tacitly approved.

So many of my own friends, too. I've tried to reach across the aisle for years. I've even discounted some of my true beliefs to coax out some admission that I really wanted to see. I've always tried to model fairness in my political arguments. It got me nothing. All that goodwill, swallowed up, like water falling on the dusty ground.

I thought such a clear case of senseless murder would make people snap out of the usual sanewashing, but no, and in fact, there's so much on this website, too, even among people who are much better than the median social media poster at understanding arguments and taking context into account. I am incredibly sad that there's actually nothing that could happen that could get people to agree with each other without clearing their throat before doing it. The entire internet is a /r/watchpeopledie thread. There's video, and then there's the awful comments under the video. There's no good ending to this. It's painful. This discourse is a grueling journey to the ugliest end of the country imaginable. This discourse is the cumulative societal hangover from more than ten years of a cancerous outgrowth of the most toxic kind of politics, and just like a regular hangover, the world doesn't stop for you. You have to go back into work in the morning and do it all over again. It's unbearable. I was not willing to believe a large portion of the other side was evil up until now. I hope someone cooler-headed than me can make some headway on this issue somehow, because I will go insane if I think about this any more.

I'll add my own experiences with Kirk to the posting.

So as a terminally online right-wing Zillenial I had of course heard of Charlie Kirk. That's just the algorithm picking up on my demographics/beliefs, you're going to see Charlie Kirk. Up until 2024 though I hadn't ever really engaged with his content. I'd seen a few clips, and honestly I more-or-less threw him into the box of "generic right-wing commentator pwns teh libs lolxd." Might be dating myself a bit with that one but oh well. I'd developed a strong distaste for that kind of video as early as high school, so I never really revisited Kirk until recently. Enter election night 2024. Me and a group of friends are hanging out in discord, gorging ourselves on information. We're looking through half a dozen electoral streams, we have the NYTimes election meters up on everyone's screens, twitter screencaps are flying, the comments are coming thick and fast. The main question we have though, is who do we watch? CNN and MSNBC are out, Fox news is boring, TYT commentators are annoying, BBC has one token conservative getting ganged up on by six liberals and that's kinda fun to watch for a bit because he seems to be holding his own, but nothing really captures us. Then we try Louder with Crowder, and it's awful. Screaming, shouting, buzzer noises, just disgusting. Finally I turn on Charlie Kirk, fully expecting more of the same. And it is hands-down, without a doubt, the single best election coverage I have ever seen. It was masterful. Calm deliberate discussion, a clear right-wing bias of course but that doesn't bother us. It was... amazing. He was talking over the issues with people who seemed genuinely intelligent, he had a wonderful manner of speaking, it was just genuinely a joy to watch. We never switched away, not even after the election was called for Trump. That's how gripping it was. I think it was 4am Eastern before we finally switched him off and all went to bed.

The first I heard of Kirk's assassination was when I was in the gym on the treadmill. I have my phone turned off at work, and don't really check it until after I get home and am in the gym. So it was about 5:30pm. The first notification I had was one of my friends from that night saying "we're never going to get to watch Charlie's election stream again." I didn't understand at first, not until I started looking.

I'm usually one of the people decrying parasocial relationships with media figures. They don't know you, they don't care about you in the same way you care about them, and they never will. But despite myself I had grown attached to Charlie Kirk, if only for the fact that when every other podcast, streamer, and what-have-you was desperately trying to grab viewers by being as loud and aggressive as possible, Charlie Kirk was doing actual reporting. I am truly saddened by his loss, not just for the obvious reasons, but because he was acting the way I'd want commentators to act in an ideal world. We are lesser for his passing.

Yes, this is much of the same experience I had. I expected him to be the same type of irreverent, obnoxious right-winger like Crowder, or the Hodge Twins, or those videos from PragerU, or whatever other person with spicy-sounding one-liners gets posted to Facebook, judging from what I had heard of him from all those TPUSA memes. Unlike the others, I don't feel like he put out useless platitudes with no thought behind them. He actually had a masterful understanding of when an argument would or wouldn't apply, based on the reasoning put forward by the debaters. That's part of what made it shocking even reading right-wingers posting here on The Motte, with people downplaying him as being some milquetoast guy who didn't believe in anything. Even the right-wingers here had not watched him and had no idea who he was.

I notice a similar dynamic with Joe Rogan. People who listen to Joe Rogan know that he's not particularly political. He's an MMA weed smoker who is genuinely curious about all kinds of things, making him an excellent interviewer. But some former acquaintances from college said they would never listen to him because of how extreme he is. I fear that this is one of the most damaging ways that the "lefties don't understand righties but righties understand lefties" study can take effect. Just learn about who people are from osmosis, what could go wrong?

I had also always put him in the same bucket as Crowder and Shapiro, one of these generic “own the libs/facts don’t care about your feelings” debate bro types. Strangely after his death I discovered my wife had frequently watched him on TikTok and thought very highly of his intelligence and eloquence.

If you have certain values, and you express them, there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who would love to see you get decorated with your own blood, watch you exsanguinate, a chunk of mineral tearing through your vital structures, turning you into a pile of meat instead of a man.

Interesting.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to put this on you, specifically, but this is exactly how many of those people have felt for years or decades - Like conservatives want them (or their friends/family) to not exist, and would shrug and make excuses (if not cheer) if they were murdered. Looking at the rapidity with which many conservatives started calling for blood (and in particularly renewing already intense animosity against trans people), it's, uh, hard to blame them for thinking that.

  • -10

Do you have a second example? I keep seeing just that one.

See, that's the difference. The left feels, with no supporting evidence (not that any were ever necessary), that the right wants to kill them. The right knows, on many past examples and repeated, incessant public confessions of the leftists themselves, that the left wants to kill them. And not only wants but does.

The people whose fear you appeal to are generally not reasonable. Charlie Kirk did not want them dead. The fact that so many of them find satisfaction in his death is only proof of their absolute ignorance.

but this is exactly how many of those people have felt for years or decades - Like conservatives want them (or their friends/family) to not exist

I had a close friend radicalize hard left and come out as trans. Had a bookkeeping job at a transportation company, mostly worked from home. Would tell us about the hateful, eliminationist comments made all the time by the crude, uneducated, racist, sexist, transphobic blue collar rightwing chud warehouse workers.

The thing is, those comments were 100% made up. My friend never talked to them. Was never around them in the first place. No one in the warehouse gives a shit about the weird guy in the office who works from home 90% of the time, who they never interact with. And even if they did see my friend in the, uh, unfortunate appearances stage, the response would have been laughter, not intense hatred.

Part of the reason I am so confident about this (aside from my own experience as one of the warehouse guys) is that I've literally watched that friend gaslight themselves into a persecution complex. Take an anodyne statement, get outraged, restate it five times, each one going progressively more hostile and angry, until they were crashing out over a made-up thing that no one said.

And I observe that this is pretty damn common among certain people. JK Rowling is a good progressive on 99% of issues, but she doesn't want blokes in battered women's shelters, so now they pretend she's a Holocaust denier who wants them all to die. Jesse Sinegal (the guy you just linked to) is a good progressive on 99.9% of issues, he just thinks the science on childhood gender transition is a bit weak, and the response is cartoons depicting him breaking into a trans kid's bedroom with a knife to murder them (along with BlueSky-approved fan fiction depicting his rape and murder by a trans activist).

I frequently hear about "trans genocide" when the murder rate against them is lower than wealthy white women. I went looking at one point, I think 2019, just searching for news articles about a list of the names of murdered trans people. Every one I could find news about was a black transwoman sexworker murdered by a black john. Is that the conservative bloodlust?

Yes, there are people baying for blood in the wake of Kirk's murder, and that guy you linked deserves to be roundly criticized. But the baseline level of discourse I see among conservatives, the attitude to trans people is a hundred times closer to "But I don't think of you at all" than "They should not exist and we should make it happen". The latter is something I don't think I've ever seen aside from that asshole you just linked to. Frankly, the baseline hostility backwards I see in, say, fandom discords that trend queer is much higher than in explicitly right-wing spaces towards trans people.

it's, uh, hard to blame them for thinking that.

Everything else aside, do you return that feeling to the other side? I was rolling my eyes at the "they literally want to kill you" guys on the right just a few days ago. I've reconsidered recently.

I went looking at one point, I think 2019, just searching for news articles about a list of the names of murdered trans people. Every one I could find news about was a black transwoman sexworker murdered by a black john. Is that the conservative bloodlust?

A similar phenomenon is what killed the #StopAsianHate movement, when video after video inconveniently emerged to show who was actually committing the acts of Asian hatred. It was not conservative white men, but rather the usual disproportionate source of violent crime.

Those people were wrong, and it matters that they were wrong. In both the UK and the US we had huge enquiries for the killing of black people, resulting in vast systematic changes to the way that policing was done in the UK. When I was growing up being gay meant being on the absolute tippy-top of the progressive ladder of privilege. Constant handwringing and historical guilt trips were the norm. Nobody with any kind of public presence whatsoever would think about cheering on their brutal murder.

These groups achieved everything they needed by appealing to historical injustices, and they could have left it there. But because they couldn’t reign in their persecution complexes, they pushed far too far, far too hard, and attempted to exterminate even the mildest of cultural conservatism permanently. And now here we are.

People afraid of anti-immigrant or white supremacist or anti-LGBT violence are far more reasonable in their fear than people afraid of anti-conservative violence. Not only have we had numerous incidents of domestic terrorism to that effect during the Trump era, but under the Trump administration many of these sentiments have obtain implicit or explicit state backing. If you want to dismiss them as irrational, you can, but you can't do it while simultaneously arguing that people like OP are rational in their fears.

(hilariously, in the time since I started composing this, we had an unironic 'kill the poor' statement from a Fox host proposed as a remedy to the problem of mentally ill homeless, so put another tally mark in the 'right-winger oblivious to their own rhetoric' column)

These groups achieved everything they needed by appealing to historical injustices, and they could have left it there.

This is pure revisionism. There was no moment where 'cultural conservatives' agreed to some compromise position on social issues. They have fought every inch of the way. There was no 'there' to leave it.

  • -10

People afraid of anti-immigrant or white supremacist or anti-LGBT violence are far more reasonable in their fear than people afraid of anti-conservative violence

No, they're [objectively] not. There was that year where anti-conservatives (or at least, those marching under the banner of anti-conservatism) set fire to basically every major city, caused billions in property damage, and murdered a bunch of people for shits and giggles.

If [violence the left likes] and [violence the left doesn't like] is a ledger that should balance then [the left] have vastly overspent, and have no right to complain when the standard they set turns 'round on them.

At least in the UK, we have seen considerable immigrant-on-native violence already, with the government desperately covering up any immigrant involvement. See for example the Stockport killings, those incidents in Ireland, the murder of David Ames a few years back. The Stockport killings attracted particular notice because the government crackdown to white rioting in response to the Stockport killings (zero tolerance, beatings, incredibly long jail times for Twitterers) was so obviously different to when an ethnic riot had taken place the week before (the government apologised for trying to separate an ethnic child from its ethnic-yet-abusive parents, police gave hostage-style videos apologising to a room of bearded muslims).

Have you forgotten the way politicians all across the world took the knee? The riots that were egged on by politicians and completely ignored by all the forces that were supposed to do something about them? The armed ambush of ICE agents? The attempts to blind police with lasers? Jane's Revenge, who were never caught? The two trans shootings at churches?

In the UK and the US, conservative/white violence has not received any government support and almost certainly never will. The opposite really doesn't seem to be true. Can you point to any example of the Trump administration protecting white domestic terrorism? I really think you can't.

The closest I can get are the killing of George Floyd, and the Wikipedia 'Violence Against LGBT' page. But 'very violent man dies violent death' and 'homeless transgender prostitute murdered by client' just don't seem even close to 'university debater / US President candidate sniped from rooftop'. I will grant that if you are gay in very poor, very rural parts of America you have some legitimate reasons for concern, though nobody bothers collating these incidents for other kinds of groups and I think that tells you all you need to know about state sanction.

These groups achieved everything they needed by appealing to historical injustices, and they could have left it there.

This is pure revisionism. There was no moment where 'cultural conservatives' agreed to some compromise position on social issues. They have fought every inch of the way. There was no 'there' to leave it.

Then how did these compromises happen? Did these groups slaughter their opposition, beat them to death, and take over the tools of the state? No. Some portion of the people who had been conservative on those positions decided to switch their support. Groups like gays, blacks and immigrants appealed for public sympathy and mostly got it. The Spectator, the oldest right-wing magazine in the world, became known as 'The Buggers' Bugle' because of its staunch support for gay rights. I was a conservative and a gay rights supporter growing up, and I saw no contradiction between those two things. Yes, groups that had been oppressed needed to do some PR work and some activism. That's how any social cause works. But once the compromises had been made those groups immediately tried to use the laws that had been made to benefit them, like the Equality Act, to enforce their absolute right to impose their will and preferred worldview and bulldoze any disagreement permanently.

I really don't know how I can persuade you of this. Conservatives in the 2000s had broadly come to terms with social change. They wanted to keep their rights to live their own way to some degree, and they didn't want things to go further than they had already gone, but nobody was secretly dreaming of exterminating the gays and the immigrants in 20010. Such ideas were so far out of the Overton Window you couldn't see it with a telescope. Whereas people like Ozy were writing:

But my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.

Which is indeed what the Left tried to do. And all parties increasingly recognise that the old compromises were not compromises for the left, but merely temporary setbacks on the march of progress.

I understand how difficult it is to see the gloating and then still see the person. I do for many, not all, but for many, what helps is the numbers. @Magusoflight mentions the "Charlie's Murderers" website has having totaled 20,000 entries; that's a rounding error, that's several orders of magnitude below lizardman constant. It could be a hundredth of the total who hold the sentiment and that total is still below the lizardman constant among Americans. It's noise.

The same is true for posts on X. I've seen lamentations of the number of likes on some very cruel posts and I've been surprised at how few people in the comments understand the likes are botted are else mostly originate in non-Americans. I do not live in a country where such a degree of callousness is present in enough leftists to total 500,000 likes on a snipe at his daughter. This country would look completely different if the leftist fringe were that numerous.

This doesn't make it not a problem that certain people are gloating. There are instances, specific to categories of profession, where they should face immediate termination. A doctor, as happened on reddit whereupon he was swiftly doxxed, should be fired and his license suspended pursuant to a lengthy readmission process that isn't so much about making him kiss the ring as it is browbeating him with the knowledge of "now any time there's an issue with a patient we're going to have to rule out willful misconduct" -- I'm deeply ignorant on this but I guess I just assume if you asked your hospital's lawyers "How bad would it be if I got caught publicly gloating about the assassination of a political figure?" you'd get Ted's thousand-yard stare. Obviously same for nurses and pharmacists, same for cops, minus being allowed to be a cop again, and same with teachers. I'll explain.

I have close leftists friends to whom I assume I come across as something like a highly contrarian perfectly-line-straddling libertarian with socialist leanings, probably because that's what I am in the strictest sense. It's meant since this happened I've been able to engage them in clear air, non-combatively. I was able to gently chastise those who mentioned Kirk and began to express positive feelings about his death. For each, I got them to take back their words, and though for each they said some variation of "Well . . . I don't know that I can feel bad about him" none of them said it as a petty retort. These were calls and face-to-face, I heard their understanding in their voices, I saw in some the actual moment of realization on their face, and I wasn't asking them to mourn the man, but perhaps mourn the state of things, to realize it's bad, and they did. This all because I can talk to them honestly because I know how to talk to them, and yes, because I don't raise flags as an enemy soldier. I shouldn't! I'm their friend, I love them dearly, it's part of why I felt so heartsick Wednesday and the psychic hangover Thursday, fear that my friends are going to get themselves killed.

These friends, some of them still live with their parents, or else are renting an apartment or a house, often with a sibling. Not one of them owns a house. They work service industry jobs, or similar, at best nice and proper careers but nothing critical, nothing where lives are in their hands directly or effectually. They're single and at most dating but nothing serious, obviously no kids, and altogether, no meaningful expectations in their lives. They are stunted, they are immature, and they've been let down by so many people in their lives. I don't want to say they were let down by their parents, but they were, they were let down by their schools, and they were let down by their leaders. Their leaders do know better, their leaders do act from the conflict side, but just as I know that with certainty, I know my friends act from mistake. They don't understand what they're saying because they are still, essentially, children.

A doctor can't be a child, you can't have that level of trust invested in you and be a child. A doctor must know better, his thoughts must be adequately ordered in, if truly nothing else, understanding you can't out yourself as having such beliefs for goddamned upvotes. Children can be trusted with guns, some of them, in very specific circumstances, they don't get to arrest criminals, and we don't let children lead classrooms of other children. You could say it's exactly this last case that is responsible for so many problems in modern education. I don't disagree.

It would be wrong for me to treat this as all so certain. It is incredibly inflammatory, necessarily, in being maximally patronizing and almost maximally denying of agency when I say, oh, that's fine, they're just stupid kids, only kids could find such ideas compelling. I'll square this as best I can:

I think each position in their platform has some essential truth and reason it it. If they were correct about the world, their behavior would, largely, be in congruence with the Christian moral paradigm on which western civilization was raised. If policing in fact caused the problems it was purported to solve, it would make sense to abolish policing. If it were a racist justice system and racism-originating disparities in socioeconomic conditions, progressive "equity" based policies would make sense. If we were certain that tabula rasa was our objective reality and anybody could be an American if you raised them right, it would make sense to be extremely lax about immigration, though still to an extent, as moderated by the simple logistical problem of it all. If we were correct about the etiology of gender dysphoria and that self-harm and suicide occurs in such numbers solely because of a lack of social acceptance, it would make sense to treat it as quickly as identified and implement a measure of structural protections for such people. And if there really were a problem with fascism and neonazism among the right, it would make sense to come down hard against it, though what I mean by "hard" and what they mean by "hard" are very different.

Preemptive violence is not justified inside that Christian paradigm or outside in the at least idealized postwar order. Here I will put my foot down. It is maximally charitable and good faith to consider celebrating the death of a man who simply talked to college students as the behavior of a child. It is the behavior of a child to consider words as ever constituting violence and so respond to those words with violence. It is the behavior of a child to throw tantrums and threaten self-harm over real or perceived slights; it's also the most classic behavior of an abuser to threaten self-harm and suicide over real or perceived slights. It is the behavior of a child to outsource their thinking to the group and say whatever the group says to fit in. Children don't, or shouldn't, understand real violence. Adults do.

It's also charitable because of the alternative. I think the left needs to purge itself, and should probably be adequately coerced into it, but that ultimately it should still exist and be permitted to rebuild around its traditional strengths. If this is a movement where the majority of its adherents are agentic and have arrived individually and organically at the support for assassinations, the appropriate conclusion is the movement doesn't get to exist anymore.

A doctor can't be a child, you can't have that level of trust invested in you and be a child. A doctor must know better, his thoughts must be adequately ordered in, if truly nothing else, understanding you can't out yourself as having such beliefs for goddamned upvotes. Children can be trusted with guns, some of them, in very specific circumstances, they don't get to arrest criminals, and we don't let children lead classrooms of other children. You could say it's exactly this last case that is responsible for so many problems in modern education. I don't disagree.

I'm currently watching Center Left Twitter (Ryan Grim, Zaid Jilani, etc) run with the euphemism of "criticism". These people in positions of trust over others aren't being fired for cheering the murder of someone like me whom they will be in a position of trust over. It's criticism. Mere criticism. That's all. That sure sounds unfair, doesn't it? No mention of what they are saying, no mention of their specific jobs where harboring hatreds that deep makes them fundamentally unsuitable for the role.

As things stand, even now, the reward for these commentators is the next decade of watching powerlessly as their political party fades to nothing. At best their names will be remembered for when their presence is ejected from a reborn left that has wholly excised its bond with identitarian politics. These commentators themselves will fade into nothing and die in irrelevance. The punishment has been imposed, their deserts ever-coming.

At worst, for them not everyone, the violence continues, and each new perpetuation will be cause to take more scalps. The punishment then will also not be death, it will be what Stephen Miller wants, as he understands what is both the most effective and the most righteous punishment: exile.

As things stand, even now, the reward for these commentators is the next decade of watching powerlessly as their political party fades to nothing.

Last I saw, Democrats are still projected to win the 2026 midterms. (See Brookings here and Politico here.)

The level of dishonesty I’m seeing about his motives is making feel truly insane. I don’t even think most the people saying he was a Groyper could even possibly believe it themselves. There is a degree of cynicism and joyful deceit that I’m finding hard to comprehend. I have come to believe in the true evil of our enemies.

Trump made noise about using the RICO act on Soros, what you're looking at here is just what the maximal blue moneyblob defensive reaction looks like under these circumstances.

Some, I (have to) believe are in corrupted information environments. That’s not much of a defense when they ban and/or threaten anyone who would give true information they don’t like, but it’s a defense.

And then there’s Ken White.

Has anyone fallen farther than Ken? Trump derangement syndrome wrecked him.

While I loath Sam Hyde he was right about at least to a large extent that the other side wants you dead, your kids raped, and they think it’s funny. This has all been borne out over and over again.

The website CharliesMurderers has amassed twenty THOUSAND (and counting, Edit: now 40k) reports of people celebrating CKs death all under their real names. It doesn’t count any of the anon accounts.

"Dark Humor" guys when the joke isn't about women or niggers.

I don't think I've seen an actual joke, just clapter stuff. I mean, there's gotta be something there, with the small face meme, right? I did have a good laugh at the thought that I'm probably going to have to explain horny anime memes to my parents. Some comedian is going to get a fantastic five out of the situation. It's just not going to be any of the Daily SHow wannabes.

Getting back to you, found the Charlie Kirk jokes that made me guffaw, and are still dirty enough to shock my conscience after a three years of scout camp doing dead baby jokes. From who? The sick fucks at NFC East Meme War of course!

Let's get Brian Daboll fired

Using Kirk as essentially the new version of the gangbang meme to show a player is gonna get wrecked

Using Robinson as an edgy version of Goku to show a player is going to be accurate

when you kill fascists

lmao bottom text

It’s about 9000 words too short to be a lefty meme but thanks for trying

You see, this was meant to demonstrate that an edgy Charlie Kirk joke doesn't owe it to you to be funny, just like nigger jokes are often unfunny and serve as an ingroup signal rather than an expression of wit... will that be enough words?

  • -11

Never watched any of his content so I don't know.

In case you're trying to lead me into some sort of a gotcha about approving of his death or whatever, I gotta say in advance I do not live in a country that venerates free speech, the lack of free speech is currently not on the side on my ingroup and neither were Kirk's ideas, aside from perhaps being pro-Israel. If he was performing his dunk debates in my country I would see his death as one small step in getting even with the state.

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Does this mean we have open season for dark humor, and you will defend the type of humor you don't like, or is this a lame gotcha attempt?

I'm not really sure there exists a type of humor I don't think is funny because of the subject matter, though there exist many jokes I don't think are funny because of the execution and I suppose you could probably draw a through line that would separate some subject matter out (lazy ypipo jokes that are really about yuppies annoy me, I'm a little old for jokes where the punchline is just foul language). As a general rule I'm a free speech absolutist, and that includes attempts at humor by nature. There's probably a context here, if my priest made a Charlie Kirk assassination joke on the pulpit tomorrow morning I'd be offended.

I genuinely think everything is open for humor, if it makes people laugh it's funny. Please, make this thread your best effort to tell a joke that offends me, I could use a laugh today.

if my priest made a Charlie Kirk assassination joke on the pulpit tomorrow morning I'd be offended.

Then the lord said to Moses, "triggered much, snowflake?"

But seriously, I agree. Some time has passed and tempers have cool down, and in the meantime make your jokes in private, with people who you know aren't going to be bothered.

An old Jewish Holocaust survivor dies and goes to heaven. He gets the chance to speak to God when he gets there. God tells the old Jew, you have a moment to speak to me directly is there anything you want to ask me or have me explain to you? The old Jew says actually I want to take this time to tell you a joke, I'm going to tell you my favorite Holocaust joke. He tells God the joke. God says, man, that's not funny. The old Jew says eh I guess you had to be there.

This is the correct reaction to have. It's a good excuse for me to shoe horn in shoe0nHead's reaction that went semi-viral and for many people put into words exactly what they were feeling. And something about it seems especially poignant in the style of a sleep deprived, unedited, 1000 word run on sentence. It ends with

posting videos and pictures of charlie’s wife and young kids will not move them because they cannot relate and never will. they are atomized bug people who hate their families and themselves. the unfortunate product of modern society. they are miserable evil human beings and i owe many people many apologies for ever thinking otherwise. maybe i will calm down, but i couldnt sleep, but i am absolutely demoralized and blackpilled beyond belief. i do not want my child growing up in a world like this. sick evil shit.

The last few days have been the clearest demonstration of evil I've ever witnessed. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, federal employees, friends, family all jubilant that a man different from me in the smallest of degrees was publicly executed, and his wife, not very different from my wife, and his children, about the same age as my child, are now widowed and fatherless. And they cheer. To bounce it back to shoe

it is clear how they reacted about charlie is how they would react about me, my friends, my family, any of you, your friends, your family that have ever stepped out of line of the nebulous ever changing definition of “progressive”, anyone who has ever been called a “nazi” for the stupidest shit in the last 10+ years.

And if it happened to you, they'd go over everything you ever said online, and cherry pick the worst of it, or the worst of it they could take out of context. And then tens of millions of people would receive their talking points and go around repeating how you deserved to die because you said "X". Did you actually say "X"? Did you actually say "X" in they way they thought you said "X"? Doesn't matter.

I've been beating the drum for over a year, and occasionally got in some mod trouble, that the left is roiling up their base to pogrom the right. Can there be any more doubt? Teachers are celebrating the murder of an innocent father and husband, publicly, under their real name, and we leave our children with them 40 hours a week. I keep seeing people push back "How do we know he was radicalized at college?" Now we don't have the ironclad chain of evidence to show. But we can plainly see that even in the moment he's shot, the crowd at that college is cheering. Sure looks like a radicalizing environment to me. Makes me wonder what the fuck they've been teaching there.

The last few days have been the clearest demonstration of evil I've ever witnessed. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, federal employees, friends, family all jubilant that a man different from me in the smallest of degrees was publicly executed, and his wife, not very different from my wife, and his children, about the same age as my child, are now widowed and fatherless. And they cheer.

Why do you care so much? It’s just some crazy teachers, doctors, lawyers, federal employees, friends, family on campus, bro.

Also: first time? It was basically in the Paleolithic era when Sam Hyde said “these people want you broke, dead, your kids raped and brainwashed, and they think it's funny.” I think anthropologists even found a cave painting in Spain of this quote depicted with stick figures.

Teachers are celebrating the murder of an innocent father and husband, publicly, under their real name, and we leave our children with them 40 hours a week.

The same teachers who do things like celebrate the murder of a law-abiding white conservative father will then act incredulous that some large subset of white conservative fathers is against things like drag queens interacting with their children in school. Surely white conservative fathers have no probable cause to think progressive teachers don’t have their children’s best interests in mind?

I don’t know anything about shoe0nhead beyond what’s been discussed here, that Tweet of hers, and from a brief Googling. However, for a SJW-critical economic leftist internet personality, it strikes me that it takes a certain amount of blindness, naivete, or willful obliviousness to have not at least wondered earlier that if—as a white mother of a white child—she’s at best a situationally useful idiot ally to the left and an enemy by default (except when there’s potentially a greater enemy at hand: white men).

I was gritting my teeth somewhat skimming her Tweet, due to the lack of capitalization (who does she think she is, hbd chick?), run-on-sentences, and general wall-of-textiness, but I powered through (I know, I know, what a heroic act of Emotional Labor). Interestingly, much of her stream-of-consciousness sounds like her independently arriving at the viral Tweet that “If you call yourself leftist, you can get away with embracing non-socialist economic positions, and won’t be kicked out of the club by peers. You can not get away with not affirming black worship, trannyism, and replacement migration. Therefore, that is what leftism is”:

i am not “leaving the left” i still have all my economic left positions, i am quintessentially a 2015 berniebro, a huey long disciple, for strong social safety nets, workers rights etc that hasnt changed and only has gotten stronger with time. i side with them on things like Israel & war in general. but is that even what left is nowadays? i dont know. looking around, socially, *personally*, on a human level, if this is what the left is i am not left…

from the insane, bizarre reaction to the murder of an innocent woman on a train reflexively getting madder about people being mad about it than the actual murder, dismissing people’s very real concerns about a dying decaying society to “well thats just living in a city, chud!” “car accidents are more common!” to celebrating the gruesome murder of a husband, father, just a guy. not a politician, not a CEO- a fucking guy. for having normiecon campus conservative coworker politics…

many things have made me feel this way over the years (dnc fucking bernie twice, covid lockdowns, trucker protest, being lied to about kyle rittenhouse and believing it like a moron, drag kid shit, being gaslit with the balenciaga “drama”, realizing “adults should be able to do what they want” is becoming a fascist belief, the “bike karen” lie, how they wanted Daniel Penny’s head for doing the exact community policing they talked about wanting, i can go on) but this week in particular has been eye opening”

Better late than never, I suppose.

posting videos and pictures of charlie’s wife and young kids will not move them because they cannot relate and never will.

It can move them all right, albeit contrary to the direction for which shoe0nhead might hope. As The Motte has discussed before, many people have an instinctual disgust reaction to seeing a white mother with white children, even with father not pictured. I suspect white mother and children with white-father-not-pictured-due-to-a-minor-case-of-murdered will not be an exception here.

I do not think it is because being a father means nothing to them. Rather that, because Kirk is their enemy, he is worse for being a father - either he created more evil children or his innocent children were forced to live with an evil father.

A relative expressed that at least Kirk couldn't force his daughter to not have an abortion from rape.

shoe0nHead's reaction

I went and read all her tweets over the last few days. I really think the assassination genuinely shifted her political views and view of the current political climate. She seems quite distressed about the whole thing. Some of this would be because she is also a moderate influencer with a fairly large platform, who is married with kids. Many in that position (some on the left too) feel very vulnerable right now.

I think there's a large amount of people like shoe that thought a lot of the spicy takes and fascist labeling from the far left was just rhetorical larping. Now however it seems the radicals actually did drink the koolaid and see even moderate right wing influencers as goose stepping Hugo Boss enjoyers.

She was always an economic-left / cultural-righ type. I don't think her views changed much at all outside of coming to certain unflattering conclusions about the state of the contemporary left.

We can talk about cooling the rhetoric once the 2026 elections happen.

Of all the things to say... I don't suppose it crossd their kind this incident might have a negative impact on the coming elections?

Elections? What elections?

(Just joking….maybe?)

I gotta say, I had never even heard of Kirk before the shooting. Maybe this is because I deliberately try not to engage in politics anymore (except on the Motte), don't know. It's completely possible I'm years out of date on this stuff. To be honest, I still don't know much about him at all.

Now I'm seeing all of my leftist friends rattle off lists of why Kirk was basically in bed with Hitler. It makes me wonder if they'd heard as little about him as I had, and are simply regurgitating the talking points they heard other leftists say after his death, essentially as a mechanism for virtue signaling.

For an additional data point, I "knew" this much about him before the shooting. I'm a trad social conservative, centrist on economic issues.

  • He was some debate guy who went to colleges and did gotcha stuff
  • He was the leader of Turning Point USA, a boomercon "college Republican org" that was about 20 years behind the times in terms of grasping the current political climate
  • TP USA was the org that regur published cringe "wow imagine if the situation were reversed" style memes that were widely mocked both on the left and the online right

I'm trying not to get taken in by the St Charlie mythos that is popping up overnight. He seems like a decent family man and I don't think he was "evil," but he was definitely a talking head and political activist, two occupations that many Americans find vaguely distasteful on both sides of the aisle. That doesn't make his assassination any less horrifying or, frankly, radicalizing to me, but I'm resisting turning him into a Lei Feng or Horst Wessel in my mind.

I've come to the conclusion that the reason he flew under my radar was because he was doing normal, boring, decent things in a relatively respectful manner. I keep seeing people call him a provocateur, and it's true that he could be aggressive, but from what I've seen his style wasn't conducive to soundbites; in fact, everything allegedly bad that he said came from a longer nuanced speech which had to be quoted in full to be understood. The kind of speeches that no-one who was habitually media-savvy would make.

I think a lot of people are going to experience what happened to Stephen King, where they assume that he was some kind of hard-right debate bro caricature who said the wildest things, and find out that, no, this was just an articulate, well-prepared guy who took thinking and discussion seriously, and put much more effort than expected into being charitable with his opponents.

It makes me wonder if they'd heard as little about him as I had, and are simply regurgitating the talking points they heard other leftists say after his death, essentially as a mechanism for virtue signaling.

Bingo -- I'm in Canada, Extremely Online, and at least 99th percentile in 'knows about US CW' -- had never heard of the guy. So when my normie friends are talking about what an extremist he was, it's not an opinion they've formed themselves.

I think part of the reason Kirk wasn't brought up here in the Motte despite his enormous popularity is that he's not known for having insightful, original thought, Instead he was good at getting ideas out to young people. His positions are mostly moderate republican and ultimately he's a political activist, albeit an effective one. So unless he's part of a culture war event of substance, there isn't much reason to talk about him. The only thing of interest I can think of that might have been worth discussing prior to his assassination would be his role in founding Turning Point USA and the role he played in helping get Trump elected.

I think normie leftists don't know him, but the one's that engage with leftist influencers probably did know him a little. I think you are right that most of them are regurgitating talking points, considering just how many of those talking points break down when you examine them in context.

I think normie leftists don't know him, but the one's that engage with leftist influencers probably did know him a little. I think you are right that most of them are regurgitating talking points

I wonder if it's close to the way I know Jimmy Kimmel. The only clips I've seen from him in recent memory are him crying when trump won (about all the soon-to-be-victims he's sorry that our country let down), and then him in various clip compilations of establishment narrative control. I don't really know what he's actually like. But after just about every single topical youtube video I watch, one of the algorithmic suggested 'related' videos that pop up will be the latest official Kimmel monologue clip, including him looking smug with a headline about his latest wrecking of Trump/Elon/reds.

People here have been trying to come up with a 'flipside' hated/effective figure to investigate how those on the right might react similarly or differently. With the usual candidates of AOC or Hasan, or even for me maybe Schiff or Chris Murphy, I would still be appalled by a murder, and at least not celebratory from a random lightning bolt death. But with Kimmel, for whatever reason, it's starting to get warmer.

Maybe it's something along the lines of someone who is a volunteer activist culture warrior (rather than an obvious partisan politician or a clearly delineated fox/msnbc participant), who gets big visibility and always presents themselves as smugly winning & wrecking. That seems to be the same kind of flavor of irritated rage that plenty of people get instinctively from seeing a small bit of Kirk, even from just a thumbnail.

I agree with this, but I think the reason more is about a Hanania article that goes "Liberals read, conservatives watch TV". Obviously, reading just about any comment here on The Motte is a lot more insightful than letting the YouTube algorithm take you away. And if you're a conservative who likes to read, you're just not going to have any opinion on him at all, because he was more of a TV personality. Since you're trying to understand deeper aspects of the culture war, and most credible news sites are left-leaning, you will have much more to say about all the news articles with framing that pisses you off, rather than Charlie Kirk, who while his argumentation was good, he was still just using the same statistics and lines of argumentation we've seen many times and showing it to people outside of this bubble.

I only know Kirk as the smallface meme of a smugfuck conservatard parodied as dunking on strawmanned liberals. In otherwords, a modal mottizen. Which is why the reaction of liberals to basically be gloating that Kirk is dead is one part personally impactful since I'm not that far removed from Kirks relatively anodyne willingness to entertain novel arguments and impatience with devoting too many brain cells to argue into infinity against categorically bad faith opinions. The end state of that difference in opinion should be 'fuck that guy', not 'cap that fool'. Frankly, most liberals don't really know Kirk either. He's a totem, a standin for Trump and all the men they hate. The bad taste jokes of Kirk dying doing what he loved aren't funny they're schaudenfraude (understandable) escalating into wishcasting for every other conservative to die (bad). Political violence when its social is corrosive to a country. Culture arms races for privileged access cripples any measure of prosocial cooperation. An actual arms race cripples cooperation while also destroying whatever makes the spoils have value in the first place.

I suppose as a measuring stick I should say I also had not heard of Kirk before his death, although I think I had heard of Turning Point.

That's how my wife describes her knowledge of him as well, didn't know him, did know Turning Point. I personally had never heard of Turning Point, myself.

I was aware of Kirk but more as 'Shapiro clone with a moon face' and some vague Prager-associated memories of him getting lashed for something about Slavery (but I may have misremembered them) but now I've done a bit of research he's less obnoxious.

What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war. What are the issues really when you boil it down? Whether trans women should have access to female-only spaces or not? Whether immigration law should be enforced, and how much immigration should occur and how difficult it should be? What the limits of free speech are? How tough on crime people should be? These aren't issues that should be tearing nations apart. These should be normal political issues people can discuss civily and disagree on without thinking of themselves as soldiers in an apocalyptic all-consuming war for the soul of the West. If people could politely disagree on gay marriage they could certainly do it for any kind of trans issue, or so you'd think.

Maybe I'm naive, I don't know. I suppose the right-wing partisans would speak of this being an issue of whether their people have a right to continued existence, their children a right not to be brainwashed and subjected to horrifying medical procedures akin to lobotomies, while left-wingers would claim they're seeing the rise of out-and-out white supremacy and antisemitism. There are certainly actors out there amplifying the most extreme positions and escalating things as much as they can, but most people I'd have to imagine don't agree with them. Most people, I'm told, don't like woke and are a little conservative on trans issues and immigration, but I'd have to assume they're not raring to vote in theocrats or fascists either. Yet we never seem to hear from them, it's just endless escalation by zealous partisans on either side ready to literally murder each other, or at least cheer when it happens.

It didn't feel like this to me a decade ago, back then these people felt marginal and broadly mocked. It just doesn't feel like these issues have to be discussed this way, but maybe it's too late now. Even if both sides moderated, conservatives dropped the conspiracy theories and accusing every trans person of being a groomer, liberals reaffirmed a commitment to free expression and pulled back a little on trans and immigration, even just conceded not every dissenting opinion is beyond the pale, too much of the base is radicalised now on both ends. I'm sure many people here would say it would be useless even if it could be accomplished, certainly. You have to wonder though, if just a few things had gone differently, Trump not being elected, liberals moderating even a little, Pizzagate not being a thing, Sherrod DeGrippo not deleting Encyclopedia Dramatica, maybe we wouldn't be in this situation.

Trump not being elected

I am increasingly coming round to the view that you can only have a healthy political culture if you have a strong centre-right party (or centre-right faction within a big-tent right-wing party - as long as it is powerful enough to keep the centre-left honest). If there is nobody for the small-c conservative normies to vote for in order to signal "actually, don't blow up the system" then someone is going to try to blow up the system. The nature of factional politics in left-wing parties means that the faction that will blow up the system (either deliberately or through naivety) will beat the faction that is committed to not doing so - the only thing that stops this happening is fear of losing elections. You see this with Trump in the US - the Democrats' instinctual response to his nomination wasn't "All hands on deck to stop the orange fascist" - it was "Now the Republicans have nominated a non-serious candidate we can engage in infighting rather then focussing on winning."

You can have healthy political cultures where the two largest parties are a centre-right and a far-right party (Poland, Czech Republic), where they are both centre-right (Ireland), or even a healthy political culture with only one strong political party - as long as it is centre-right (Japan, Singapore). The main examples of healthy political cultures with consistently left-wing governments are Sweden (1936-1973) and Israel (1945-1977). In Sweden the possibility of a coalition between the Moderates, the Liberals, and the Centre Party (all centre-right) was sufficient to keep the Social Democrats honest throughout the period, but there was no serious centre-right opposition to Mapai in Israel until 1965.

The strongest non-Trump candidate in the 2016 primary was Ted Cruz, who is not centre-right in the sense I am using here - he was definitely committed to blowing up the system, just in a different way to Trump. I suppose the GOPe gets another chance in 2020 if Trump loses in 2016, but I see a Ted Cruz-style movement conservative winning on a "Trump wasn't conventionally right-wing enough, plus his character stinks" platform or Trump running again on an "I woz robbed" platform (like he did in 2024 - he had the false allegations of election fraud teed up in 2016 too) as more likely outcomes for the hypothetical 2020 primary.

What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war.

I disagree actually. All of those examples are just proof that we can't suspend judgment on values. They all matter a lot. To what you can say, do, to the very composition of the republic (what could be more important?).

The only question is whether the groups debating it come to some sort of compromise, one crushes the other or both sides are given enough space to live their lives in a manner congruent with their values and away from the tribe with inimical values.

Part of the problem with many of these values issues is that the last of these has been removed from the game (the internet doesn't help here) and values are often zero sum (even within the left-wing coalition some of the tension between rights claims don't seem resolvable in a way that satisfies both sides)

It didn't feel like this to me a decade ago, back then these people felt marginal and broadly mocked.

Part of the problem is precisely that they were mocked. Whether they were prophets or actively brought about their worst fears, I think there's a backlash effect where people feel that attempts to keep things within some reasonable window were actively used against them by defectors on the other side. Once you get burned on "no one is saying/doing X" you become less charitable.

I suppose the right-wing partisans would speak of this being an issue of whether their people have a right to continued existence, their children a right not to be brainwashed and subjected to horrifying medical procedures akin to lobotomies, while left-wingers would claim they're seeing the rise of out-and-out white supremacy and antisemitism.

In fairness, you could be more charitable in depicting the parallelism with the Left position. "[our people] have a right to continued existence" is the actual wording that leftists use on the Trans question, and while I find it ridiculous enough myself when applied to the individual transsexual's ability to get their chosen pronouns to be used in traffic tickets, on the level of populations it seems similar enough. If "the white population is diluted and intermixed with immigrants until nary a recognisably white person remains" is the "my people's existence has been snuffed out" condition for right-wingers, why can't "the Trans pipeline and coherence of the memetic package is disrupted by open messaging that it is a mental illness, unrestrained bullying and ejection of its symbols from the public space" be a similar condition for left-wingers? Moreover, I don't think it is actually so unrealistic to expect that in a Red utopia, gay conversion camps would be fully legal (through a combination of parental rights, normative Christianity and autonomy for the churches), which likewise symmetrises the fear of "brainwashing and horrifying medical procedures".

Also, antisemitism seems to always have been a fairly bipartisan concern, and now is becoming coded Red as the Left is straightening the cognitive-dissonance frontlines to support Palestine.

Gay conversion camps are legal in much of the country, driving your kids to a different state is I suppose friction but it doesn't really stop anyone who would send their kid to conversion therapy anyways.

What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war. What are the issues really when you boil it down? Whether trans women should have access to female-only spaces or not? Whether immigration law should be enforced, and how much immigration should occur and how difficult it should be? What the limits of free speech are? How tough on crime people should be? These aren't issues that should be tearing nations apart.

Why not? Free speech and immigration seem pretty damned important to me. I expect the female-only space thing is pretty important to women. And especially when you add the overarching thing you've missed: Whether the "progressive stack" will be enforced in everyday life -- that is, whether trans people and other sexual minorities, racial minorities, women, and disabled people will be given preferential treatment in hiring, welfare, and other aspects of society and whether those lower on the stack will be required to defer to those higher in all things, even to the level of acceeding to violent crimes against themselves.

Whether trans women should have access to female-only spaces or not? Whether immigration law should be enforced, and how much immigration should occur and how difficult it should be? What the limits of free speech are? How tough on crime people should be?

Agree on the other points, but 10 million plus immigrants per year from the shittiest countries in the world can quickly and easily ruin your country.

What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war. What are the issues really when you boil it down? Whether trans women should have access to female-only spaces or not? Whether immigration law should be enforced, and how much immigration should occur and how difficult it should be? What the limits of free speech are? How tough on crime people should be? These aren't issues that should be tearing nations apart. These should be normal political issues people can discuss civily and disagree on without thinking of themselves as soldiers in an apocalyptic all-consuming war for the soul of the West. If people could politely disagree on gay marriage they could certainly do it for any kind of trans issue, or so you'd think.

I agree with you wholeheartedly here. A lot of these issues are absolutely small potatoes.

I'm one of the Motte's more pro-trans people, and even I can admit that from a purely consequentialist perspective if the "victory" against trans people looks like the segregation of female-only bathrooms, prisons, and sports leagues and ID cards using biological sex markers, then that is less than ideal from my perspective, but it still leaves a ton of latitude for trans people to seek out their version of human flourishing as best they can according to their own lights in a liberal city somewhere. Private businesses that want to be inclusive can switch to unisex bathrooms if they want, sympathetic friends and family can still engage in pronoun hospitality, parents of trans children can home school or send them to progressive private schools (with concerned private donors helping families that might not otherwise be able to afford that option), and the Earth will keep turning.

But I think the algorithmic Web 2.0 sites that have swallowed the internet have turned everything into a supposedly life and death struggle. It can't just be that a group of people whose interests you care about will have lives that are about 90% as good as they might have in a counterfactual world where your political tribe got everything they wanted, you need to catastrophize about that missing 10% of well-being, and make up outrages and scandals to justify hating the opposing side. It's not very conducive to having nuanced societal debates, with respectful disagreement when you don't agree with someone else's stance.

But I think the algorithmic Web 2.0 sites that have swallowed the internet have turned everything into a supposedly life and death struggle. It can't just be that a group of people whose interests you care about will have lives that are about 90% as good as they might have in a counterfactual world where your political tribe got everything they wanted, you need to catastrophize about that missing 10% of well-being, and make up outrages and scandals to justify hating the opposing side.

It's zero sum because people understand that it's at least theoretically possible to get all you want by appealing to rights without convincing the other side. So there's less incentive to be sensible.

The activists like Chase Strangio have done far more damage than any online crazy like Gretchen Felker-Martin. You can ignore crazies.

That's nice that you can admit that sort of thing. For what it's worth, I can admit that every time I have to act pro trans against my will in small or large ways, I usually am surprised that it doesn't feel as bad or hurtful to me or my pride as much as I thought it would. At the very least I feel like it's definitely worth it in order to have a job.

it still leaves a ton of latitude for trans people to seek out their version of human flourishing as best they can

The pro trans argument regarding the small things usually comes to "if you don't do these things than you're denying that trans people are people". That's such a silly phrasing that they've chosen, and I'm always surprised that more non leftists don't call it out. Since when is it a given that getting to choose your own gender is a defining aspect of being a person?

Read this and this if you genuinely want to understand it. People can't agree on what's right or wrong, what's legal or illegal or what ought to be either. They can't agree on what's murder and what's self-defense and on a million other questions of similar import. They can't agree because their core values drifted too far apart. Liberalism got high on its own supply and lost track of the fact that core human values could differ, and could drift over time unless coherence is enforced. Liberalism didn't want to enforce conformity because that seemed mean and unnecessary, so it declined to do so, and so the values drifted.

All of society is built on a foundation of shared values. When the values are no longer shared, nothing we've built on them works either. Society breaks down, because it all runs on compromise, and humans compromise other things to secure core values, not core values for other things. No more compromise, and shortly thereafter no more society. It's not really complicated, it's just what humans do. More or less everyone has now realized that values have to be enforced, but now they can't agree on whose values get enforced and whose get suppressed. And so we fight.

As someone who is moderately left-leaning, this assassination also fills me with sadness. I spent quite a bit of time on Reddit in the immediate aftermath getting my share of downvotes telling people he was not a Nazi or a fascist or far-right, and the thinly veiled, and unveiled, elation was disgusting and vile until I had to mentally check out from social media. In the real world, though, people at least seemed to be much more reasonable. I live in a very blue area and work with all blue-tribe people, and when this topic was brought up, the mood was generally of concern and there was not an ounce of celebration. (Though it could just be people I work with know how to conduct themselves properly in a work environment.) Still, I don't know how this country can recover from this death spiral.

None of what happened afterwards was what I expected at all. Immediately, celebrations, dark ironic pitiless humor, and hideous one-liners with no thought put into them started everywhere. It was official, the Hermann Cain Award logic about when it's acceptable to dance on the graves of your enemies extends about as far as certain leftists want it to.

I’m not sure how closely you followed his development when his name first began to crop up, but the reaction I saw from a lot of people were very predictable.

And to be frank, I roll my eyes and really get tired of the straight-laced, “you’re better than that,” “act like an adult,” high minded moralizing of unfortunate events. Expressing glee over very unpleasant opinions you have about others means you’re human. Going out of your way to take a shovel and knock someone’s gravestone off sets you apart from everyone else.

… there are even more people out there who will run cover even for this awful behavior…

Pretty much. But I continue to be amazed how anyone gets surprised over this. Do people have that much sheltered of a childhood?

Here's a small collection of everything I've witnessed: They're all bots. There aren't that many of them. They're only online.

This is where I believe you’re wrong. You don’t see this largely in interpersonal interactions because it’s potentially costly and damaging to people’s reputations and “painful truths,” were replaced long ago by politically correct sugarcoating and misdirection.

Your rdrama.net-style "get over it, it's not a big deal. These things happen all the time." viscerally disgusts me, and I hope you know that your words here are exactly why this is going to get worse, not better. I hope you realize that before it's too late, if it's not too late already.

I get where you're coming from, but there is no way to turn down the temperature. The brainwormed extremist 5% on each side have control of the thermostat and are only interested in turning it up. The moderate left and right want the other side's extremists to stop raising the temperature, but they are unwilling to police their own extremists (or if they are, they are denounced as traitors and are sidelined). Neither side is willing to unilaterally disarm for fear of what the other side will do to them (though to be fair, I think the right is more justified in this fear based on the last 10 years). So the temperature will ratchet up until some event releases all the pressure.

I get where you're coming from, but there is no way to turn down the temperature. The brainwormed extremist 5% on each side have control of the thermostat and are only interested in turning it up.

The people turning up the temperature for me right now are the "reasonable centrist" types, much moreso than the extremists. I can tell when someone has brainworms, and roll my eyes at them as long as they're not a danger to anyone.

The centists? Ho, boy. From immeditely going o a NEVER AGAIN crusade against cancel culture, even thoughvhe was completelt unbothered by it for 10 years straight, to writing massive essays about how it's okbto shit on a man's corpse before his family had time to bury it, because "something something grifter" and he wasn't an autitic rationalist setting aside his biases at every step, to "actually he wasn't leftist, he was a gamer", to "it's the victim's fault, the shooter would have walked away, if the guy wasn't so mean to trans people", the centrists have been far more radicalizing than the radicals.

The ones walking away from this looking the best, are the ones who at least have the decency to not say anything. Their approach makes it hard to get a headcount, but I noticed a few, and appreciate them.

Yes, exactly. I expect the ghoulishness from the proper Marxists, but seeing the exact same bullshit from "respectable" center lefts that we saw during BLM, covid, and Gaza is mind-ruining. Seeing Wikipedia, Snopes, the LA Times, all jumping through the same hoops as before as if nothing has changed, it's genuinely impossible to comprehend. I saw an NBC article talking about the response to his murder, but right in the subheader, they threw in that he was known for saying extreme things online, justifying it right there with something that isn't even true. This is just who they are. There is no crime that could be committed by their side that will make them set aside the bullshit. They are now the bullshit. They can never not be the bullshit.

Being mortified at the evil in others is also a part of the human condition. His reaction should also be predictable

Expressing glee over very unpleasant opinions you have about others means you’re human.

Plenty of evil things are done by humans and are part of the human condition.

I think a lot of these posts are missing the horror that I am feeling.

You're sentiments are what make this a huge fucking deal. What ever circle most people on The Motte exist in, I think Charlie was outside of. I had heard his name but when I heard "Charlie Kirk has been shot" I asked "Is that that guy who sits at the 'Change my mind' table? Wait no, that's Crowder? Is that the guy where they mess with his eyes in the meme?"

My wife messaged me telling me how she was struggling and was crying. My sister sobbed her makeup off. Not calling you necessarily a normie but Kirk was a conservative of the normies. I've said or alluded to this many times in the thread, but that's what the Left isn't getting. There are people like @JeremiahDJohns or @ArmandDoma [1] [2] who are very critical of the far left, but also seem to not understand how Kirk isn't "far right".

Lmao I also initially thought he was the guy from the change my mind meme.

Oh damn, I just realized they're different guys.

There are people like @JeremiahDJohns or @ArmandDoma [1] [2] who are very critical of the far left, but also seem to not understand how Kirk isn't "far right".

TheMotte's idea of far-right and YIMBY twitter's idea of far-right are two non-overlapping circles.

Not only was Kirk not far-right but the far-right hated him more than the far-left does.

the far-right hated him more than the far-left

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think this may be observably not true, given the information that has come out about the assassination.

Can confirm, its such a weird target. He was disdained for being a buffer, some one who could take the building pressure of the masses and redirect them to a mid/milktoast rail road away from the actually dangerous to the establishment public figures.

Kirk opposed the civil rights act. Motteposters may not consider that a far-right political view, but normies do.

He was also all-in on Trump's attempt to remain in office despite losing the 2020 election. If you think (as Orwell did and you should, although most people don't) that the main danger of the far right is the same as the main danger of the far left - the threat to democracy and the rule of law - then that makes Kirk (and Trump, and most of MAGA) far-right in the way that matters. That is what I mean by Jan 6th being the ultimate scissor.

PS. If an American publisher were typesetting this post those hyphens would be rendered as em-dashes. (British style is to render parenthetic dashes as en-dashes between spaces, which is why I was so confused by the first few months of the em-dash discourse). Still not a bot.

Kirk opposed the civil rights act. Motteposters may not consider that a far-right political view, but normies do.

If you just drop that little factoid and leave it at that, this might be true. When you explain why he opposes it it will probablynturn out that even a good chunk of liberals agree with him.

It's always then same story with these slogans.

The remedy is to take a break from going to social media sites where people who sit online 18 hours a day fling shit at each other, and to take a break from hanging out with ideologues in real life, and to go interact with people in general.

Out in the world, life continues. The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming. The majority of people are not paying attention to this stuff.

You are reacting the way that many people reacted when they heard that JFK was assassinated, or that MLK was assassinated. An emotional shock. But the rational response, I think, is to remember that assassinations are really really rare. There is no actual civil war going on. Well, there's a cold civil war going on, but not a hot one.

Why is that the case?

It's because of law and order. Which, for all of the current system's faults, and I sure would love it to do a better job of taking care of ordinary people like me instead of exposing me to random street violence and so on, is doing a good job of dissuading that subset of the left who would love to kill right-wingers and that subset of the right who would love to kill left-wingers from actually doing it.

Liberalism, for now, is holding. I mean classical liberalism, not the weird American "liberals = the left" definition.

Yes, there are plenty of angry people in this country who would love to assassinate the leaders of their political opponents, or maybe even put their political opponents in mass into extermination camps.

But liberalism, for now, is holding. As a centrist moderate, I sure hope that it continues to hold. There are some good reasons to believe that it will continue to hold. For one, I think that probably the majority of rich people have no use for a civil war full of populists who are ready to murder anyone who is more successful than them and can be painted as being on the other side.

Given how many guns are in private hands in the US and how many politically angry people there are, assassinations are actually surprisingly rare.

People almost never get killed for their political opinions in the US. It happens very rarely. Now, people do get frequently killed because of political policies in general... and that's one area where I sympathize with the right, despite disagreeing with them on most things. What I mean specifically is, pathological empathy-driven progressive policies that end up unleashing street criminals on the public. That's something I disagree with progressives on.

But the murder of someone like Charlie Kirk is an easily foreseeable consequence of what happens when you have hundreds of millions of guns in private hands in a country that is politically polarized.

Note, when I say that I am not calling for gun ownership rights to be reduced. I'm just saying that statistically, it's an obvious consequence. These things are inevitably going to happen from time to time. It's surprising that they happen so infrequently.

Social media is currently awash with people who are using this incident to get cheap dopamine hits and/or to propagandize for their side of the great chimp shit-flinging fight that is the culture war.

They're deranged. And they should not be taken seriously. Most of them are sad people who are using political engagement to make up for the failures of their individual lives.

Someone who is highly politically engaged and spends 18 hours a day writing angry comments on social media will end up creating more online political content than 100 ordinary people. Social media enormously over-represents the opinions of angry no-life losers on both sides of the culture war.

Some view it all as a war between good and evil. And, if I was in some part of Mexico where people fought against murderous cartels, I'd see it that way too. But I live in the US. I am lucky enough, because of the continuing success (for all their faults) of the US' liberal systems and norms, to be able to see our situation in the US as a war between the stupid and the smart. A delineation that cuts across left/right lines.

As in the famous Revenge of the Sith crawl, "there are heroes on both sides"... well, in our reality it's not quite that epic, it's more like "there are smart and stupid people on both sides". And "there are decent people and sociopaths on both sides". I'm lucky to live in a part of the world where that's actually the case. But it is the case.

Look, I don't think you're doing something grisly here, unlike my other examples. You clearly just want to reduce my level of mental pain. That's cool and all, but I still think you're missing the point here. When JFK died, did you see a wave of celebratory people throwing parties in the street? There are multiple people in my small town alone who have gotten fired for celebrating this on Facebook under their real name. They're real. They represent real people who live in the world and do things.

Liberalism is holding? That's great. But the gate has just been hit by a massive battering ram, and the battering ram seems to want to smash into it again, so again, it's a little rich that you think this is a point of comfort. I've been seeing that there's a massive loneliness crisis, that young people can't buy houses, and increasingly sign out of life to pick pineapples. What do you think happens when these societal losers see what they can become with a $400 bolt action rifle that you can buy in any ban state?

What do you think happens when these societal losers see what they can become with a $400 bolt action rifle that you can buy in any ban state?

You still need a permit to buy it in New Jersey and I think Illinois.

So what? I live in Illinois. You need a FOID card to buy any gun, sure, but it's easy to get besides the wait time. Otherwise, you could just buy it on the private market in another state. And both this murderer and Luigi Mangione are the types to not have a rap sheet, so a FOID card is easy.

Otherwise, you could just buy it on the private market in another state.

It is federally illegal to buy a firearm in another state if you do not meet the legal requirements in your own state.

I live in NJ; I cannot lawfully purchase a similar rifle anywhere in the country, because NJs firearms owners permit is too hard to get. You need to tell them the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health practitioner you have ever seen, since birth, and you need to have two unrelated adult references swear you're moral enough to buy a gun.

For buying a gun from a federal firearms licensed dealer, right? Just drive to the nearest red state and make a friend. Or, hell, 3D print one yourself. We're talking about murder here, so a federal gun crime is small potatoes, and it's easy to do with so many guns in the country. But this is a pretty narrow point, because that's two states out of fifty.

For buying a gun from a federal firearms licensed dealer, right?

No.

Okay. That's strange to me. How can they enforce the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health practicioner you have ever seen since birth with an additional two unrelated adult references, if it's a private purchase? Who's going to check? Did anyone put any thought into this law?

This does relate to my original post. AOC wants more of these gun laws implemented in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, even though they don't save anyone and are trivially overcome. When they inevitably don't save anyone, they'll want more gun laws. This is not a new observation, but it is part of the reason why the usual rhetoric of "well he accepted deaths from guns, guess it's ironic he died." He was actually more willing to confront the truth than them, by far, because they still believe that they wouldn't need to repeal the 2nd Amendment and ban every gun and zealously swipe up and destroy every gun they can find over the course of decades to get what they want.

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Out in the world, life continues. The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming. The majority of people are not paying attention to this stuff.

Out in the world, most people are on their phone when I’m walking on the sidewalk or driving in traffic.

Well, it sounds like you live in a city. That was probably your first mistake. Cities are a distorted parody of "the world".

Cities are most of the world in the 21st century.

Thus, dystopia.

Out in the world, life continues.

...but not for Charlie Kirk.

"Just don't worry about it lol" is a really tone deaf response right now.

It certainly is tone deaf, but it's also par for the course for political discourse in this country. The left hears it all the time after school shootings.

School shootings are artificially magnified and ironically the reason they continue is because we can’t stop talking about them

Maybe so are assassinations. They're really really rare, but sometimes they have a huge emotional impact on society.

I don’t think that was the case but that seems to be changing.

School shootings are not generally committed by ideological allies of the right, nor aimed specifically at leftists because they are leftists. This was not random badness striking a man down. The people saying get over it are the same people who convinced this person to kill.

I don't believe Goodguy is part of the group that convinced this person to kill or that he thinks this was a good thing that happened.

the people saying get over it are the same people who convinced this person to kill.

The stochastic-terrorism angle doesn't convince me as a unilateral sin of the Left. A right-winger going on a rant about how wokeness, or some specific faction of it, is an unprecedented existential threat to Western civilization which must be destroyed at all costs, sounding every bit as shrill as the most hyperbolic rhetoric about the dangers of Trumpism... that's basically what the Motte calls "Tuesday".

Okay. Show me core red tribe cadre publicly calling for a person to be killed, a red-triber killing them, and then core red-tribe cadre publicly celebrating the killing. That's what we have in this case on the blue side, and you think this is a both-sides thing, so let's see the other side.

Not only that - we've had several domestic incidents stemming from ideas that are fairly normal on the Motte (e.g. Great Replacement Theory).

It reminds me of the disappearance of Jean McConville, or some of the other similarly sickening incidents of the Troubles. The attitude was there too. Stopping your car to jeer at a soldier as he bleeds to death on the road. I think about Northern Ireland a lot lately.

For all the people making clownworld asshats of themselves, the ray of light for me is the shooter’s father. It sounds like he, perhaps with the help of someone from their church, convinced the shooter to not kill himself and to turn himself in.

There were so many other ways to handle that: stay quiet and let the government handle it, disown him, tell him to go ahead and kill himself, etc.

Imagine the strength it took to say, “You will not kill yourself. You will not run. You will submit yourself to the authorities and face the consequences—and if that means your very life, so be it.”

I have my issues with tradcons, but at moments like this, there is a radiance that is almost blinding to gaze upon.

The cope from left wing people I know are discord is insane. I've gotten both that he was groyper and it was a trump ordered false flag. Up until now I considered these people fairly connected to reality and I'm quite shocked at how quickly they're resorting to conspiracy to deny this. Not to mention they usually follow up with him being a piece of shit and it's good he got shot anyway. It's "the holocaust never happened but it should've" tier bad rhetoric.

I'm not sure what to do about it either. When I try to dispute it they suddenly just ignore me and don't even try to defend what they said. Should I just stop talking to these people all together? It's gonna be kinda hard to interact with them with this stuff they said at the back of my mind.

Remind them the shooter was gay and had a trans-bf/gf/whatever.

We didn’t do it

And if we did, it’s no big deal

He liked guns so he deserved it anyway

^ pick one, seems to be the 3 main copes

There seem to be a lot of particularly vile people making hay right now by asserting that the assassin was a groyper as though they had evidence of it, often outright lying to do so.

I've asked for evidence of being a groyper from people saying it and usually they just stop talking at that point. Only one guy actually gave any reason at all and it was that no true leftist would write any of that on the bullet casings and it's obviously a right winger false flagging. Suffice it to say this reasoning is utterly unconvincing.

The evidence AFAICT is that groypers began ironically using the term "bella ciao" at some point, which was written on one of the killer's cartridges.

I know from personal experience that leftists also use the phrase and like the song as well. Again, not particularly convincing.

Yeah. I didn't say it was good evidence.

Lying is an effective political tactic.

  • Numerous lies were told about the events of Jan 6th to cement its political significance. These lies later collapsed, but the significance has largely remained. That was a win for the liars.

  • People earlier this week pointed out that the guy who broke into Pelosi's house with a hammer admitted himself, on the record, that he was motivated by batshit right-wing conspiracy theories. At the time, right-wing bullshit about his motivations flew thick and fast, and while I didn't take much of it seriously, neither did I receive the correct info and had assumed since that it was just a random crazy.

  • Consider the Birther conspiracy theory. That was, by all available evidence, also a lie. People believed it because they wanted to believe it. Believing that Obama was a contract demon who could be banished by speaking the correct secret words was vastly more comforting than believing they'd lost the election, and so a lot of people believed it and actively worked to get others to believe it too.

Lying is effective only because it is the supply meeting the civilisational demand created by rejection of what our cringe ideological grandpa called the Litany of Tarski. The Sequences may not have crossed the boundary from looking quaint in a daft way to looking quaint as in ancient wisdom yet, but there are things in there that we would stand to benefit from rereading occasionally.

No disagreement. Allow me to clarify my statement.

  • lying is very common.
  • It is common because it is, at least in the short-term, effective.
  • Both sides do it, and so the rage felt at an enemy's lies should be tempered by the embarrassment felt for those of your allies. Lying is not a good plan for the long-term, but a lot of people, especially in the trenches, are not really thinking long-term.

Both sides do it,

Both sides don't have equal access to the media. The practical effect is that the left gets to use lies a lot more than the right.

That may be true. I'm pretty sure it is true. But the lies I end up believing are unlikely to be Blue Tribe lies, and fury at the perfidy of the foe can use all the restraint it can get.

Honestly just keep in mind that the large majority of this shit is truly not real (as much foreign interference as the average person thinks there is, times it by at least 10 and they're still probably underestimating) and a lot of the few comments that are real is just edgy chest thumping by people who think it makes them look cool but are cowards in anything real or not even supporting violence like I had showed here.

Political violence is extremely rare nowadays, even with the small increase recently we're still far away from the 60s and 70s. In a short period of time you had JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Evers all killed. And those are just the bigger names. Attacks on Nixon, George Wallace, Vernon Dahmer. KKK bombings and murders, firebombed buses, Bloody Sunday, Weather Underground, Kent State and that's just a small portion of it.

And despite that no one thinks back on the 60s and 70s as some dangerous awful time. Part of it is probably nostalgia washing but part of it is because even then political violence was still a tiny tiny tiny portion of the population dominated by nutjobs.

We're pattern seeking animals evolved to detect and hyperfocus on novel and scary situations, and this means we tend to overestimate them. School shootings are rare, mass shootings are rare, political violence is rare, and kids aren't getting kidnapped by strangers if they walk into the next aisle in the grocery store despite this insane fear

The US is a largely peaceful country with largely peaceful citizens and the rare few that aren't are mostly crazies, gang members killing each other, and rare flukes.

I don't know what to tell you except to tell you that I just straight up don't believe you when you say that it isn't real. Everyone told me the Brian Thompson shooting last year was just edgy chest thumping, too, and now look what happened. It's extremely rich that you are saying that political violence is extremely rare right after Charlie Kirk just bought the farm and tens of thousands of people are publicly declaring they want more, at expense to themselves when they actually have jobs. Do you really think that it will continue to be extremely rare, after seeing the huge waves of support that this murderer got?

How many times have I heard that crime is down, when these I Fucking Love Science fans are forced to confront right afterwards that murders are way up, actually? That the crime was revised in 2021 and 2022 to show that crime increased instead of decreased? When, exactly, do I get to express extreme discomfort with this? Or will I forever be told that nothing is happening when it's something I'm concerned about, instead of what I'm supposed to be concerned about?

Am I supposed to feel happy that we got through the 70s just fine? If I just told you that we were going to go through a wave of leftist violence similar to what happened in the 70s, would you go "wow, what a relief"? Do you think that the country is so cohesive that it can survive an unlimited number of highly televised and celebrated senseless murders? I think you would think again if it was something that happened to someone you respected, and you wouldn't be so quick to downplay everything so much.

I don't know what to tell you except to tell you that I just straight up don't believe you when you say that it isn't real.

I can prove that most of it isn't real by asking you to look around at the real world. There was 75 million Harris voters, if even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of them was engaging in political violence, we should be seeing way more than this! And they shouldn't be constantly ending up as incoherent dudes who don't even have clear politics to slot into (this recent guy didn't even vote).

Even just one percent would be 750,000. .001% would be 750! That's still way more than what political violence we've seen.

Most people are extremely peaceful, and of the very small portion that are meaningfully violent, it's almost always over personal grievances and incentives first. Almost all of those rare truly violent people are beating their spouses, shooting someone who cut them off in traffic, getting in fist fights at the bar or beefing with rival gangs. Not political violence. We don't see roving bands of political gangs hunting and hanging their opponents, we see random one off attacks by nutjobs.

Everyone told me the Brian Thompson shooting last year was just edgy chest thumping, too, and now look what happened. It's extremely rich that you are saying that political violence is extremely rare right after Charlie Kirk just bought the farm and tens of thousands of people are publicly declaring they want more, at expense to themselves when they actually have jobs.

It is extremely rare, in the same way that other violence is extremely rare. Saying it's rare doesn't mean it never happens, it just means it's incredibly uncommon and not what most people actually do. This was an argument that Kirk himself, like pretty much every advocate of the 2nd amendment believes.

There is no reason to take away guns because the large majority of Americans are not violent and can be trusted with them to only use in self-defense. If we are to concede this and claim that a large portion of the population is dangerous and can't be trusted with owning weapons then it dismantles that point and calls for significantly more gun control.

Pretty much all the chest thumping is just edgy people who think it makes them look cool, just like 99% of edgy people. It's the same way some conservative pundits and names are calling for "civil war" now, and yet they aren't picking up their weapons and starting one. They're saying it because it makes them feel cool and strong, but they're actually peaceful people. I know this, because just like almost every edgy leftist poster, almost every edgy right poster hasn't hurt anyone.

If they turn the internal organs of Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, JK Rowling, and Matt Walsh's all into mucilage, it would still be a very low rate of political violence on paper. It turns out that you only need a very small handful of people willing to kill for the cause to have a massively outsized influence on the entire landscape of the country. The more celebrating I see, the more likely that is to happen. Tens of thousands wishing for the death of just a small handful of people is a very concentrated amount of violence. You should fear the reaction very, very much.

If they turn the internal organs of Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, JK Rowling, and Matt Walsh's organs all into mucilage, it would still be a very low rate of political violence on paper.

Sure, when violent leftist groups go around doing a bunch of murder instead a single attack by a brainrotted young man, I'll acknowledge that it's an issue. But right now we have the latter, not the former, so you're arguing a made up scenario and getting scared by your imagination.

  • -13

No, I'm not. You know this. This is the second of the political murders. Brian Thompson was the first. That makes two. That makes a trend. I will lose even more faith in humanity if this happens again and you say this exact same line.

Are you scared of white supremacist/neonazi violence taking over the US?

We've had the Evergreen shooting

A school shooting in Nashville

Attack on Baltimore power grid

Attempted bombing in Nashville

Shooting at a Texas mall

Shooting in Wisconsin

And that's just some of the white supremacist inspired violence in the past few years.

Are you gonna lose your faith in humanity if despite an >2 amount of neonazi killings and bombings, I say it's still rare?

  • -12

Convenient how you ignore every single thing that separates this from the current situation. Did you see thousands of right-wingers openly celebrating those attacks? This murderer was not a brainrotted young man. He was a completely normal person as of a week ago. He was not a schizo with a crossed wire. He was simply someone who believed that the fascists are causing harm and we must fight them outside the bounds of a system they exploit, because what did you think revolution meant, a picnic?

"The past few years," really? Are you fucking serious? We're talking about something that happened days ago. Do you think having a big bad white supremacist rap sheet proves that the other side can never have any legitimate grievance on novel developments?

You should also consider this from a strategic perspective, if you have no interest in understanding others. I can understand why you're so desperate to deflect any attention away from something that could associate the good guy squad with a murderer. But every single word you type is only making it worse for yourself. All this comes off as is a desperate attempt to deny, deflect, and disarm, with your real motives nakedly bare. That you come handily equipped with a laundry list of not even remotely similar attacks is honestly really sad, and betrays your purposes.

And I don't know why you expect this to play out well. Oats_son certainly is not swayed by your argument. I'm not. I agree with everything he said below. Your words only make your side appear more obstinately certain that they can do no wrong by virtue of being on the right side of history. You make absolutely no effort to reach across the aisle and try to appreciate where we're coming from in saying this novel situation is worrisome. You only want to make it about the real bad guys. If you were doing this a month from now, this would be fair, but you are doing this in the immediate aftermath of a shocking, terrifying event, making every effort to reframe the conversation about how right wingers are bad. This will go over as well as if somebody tried to shut down any fears over Kennedy's assassination by bringing up all the black people unjustly killed by police, two days after it happened.

I do not know what you can possibly be thinking, but your arguments are only adding fuel to the fire. You are either a troll or being very, very foolish. Either way, I'd encourage you to stop raising the temperature, for the sake of your own side.

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Are you reading these articles? The Baltimore power grid looks like the only clear-cut example. The Texas mall is the next closest, but the Hispanic guy probably does deserve an astrisk when being used as an example of white supremacist violence (neo-nazi is fair, imo).

But in all the links you've dropped, the school shooters in particular seem much more fixated on the concept of "school shootings" rather than a political angle. Some of them did at least have some far-right or neo-nazi symbolism going on, but for others the connection is "used the OK sign", or the black kid who "may" have been linked to a manifesto that liked some right-wing shooters (and also wanted to kill all the white people and Jews).

The Nashville power plant one might be the most egregious. I've spent 20 fucking years arguing that it is not meaningful when the FBI convinces some autistic Muslim kid to hate America, do something about it, then gives him money to buy fake bomb materials from them, to carry out the plan that they gave him. That doesn't change when they do it to a white guy. What were his ties to white nationalist groups that only appear in the article as something he claimed to his FBI handler? His other FBI handler?

And the thing that jumps out at me is that every one of these articles is drenched in full-throated condemnation and insistant linking. Like there are entire well-funded organizations dedicated to drawing all possible connections here, no matter how tenuous.

Compare that to "The shooter wrote cultural phrases on the bullets" type evasive vagueness that we get from mainstream outlets for violence going the other way. "The killer wrote 'Catch this, fascist!' on the bullet. Experts are unclear if anyone has ever used this phrase before, and certainly can't imagine any extremist groups who might condone such language. This was probably right-on-right violence inspired by Nick Fuentes."

This is what I expected someone like you to say, except I didn't expect you to come out and say it so quickly rather than waiting the amount of time it took for another murder of a public figure to bring it up, hoping that nobody remembered what you said last time.

So, when you said this,

Sure, when violent leftist groups go around doing a bunch of murder instead a single attack by a brainrotted young man, I'll acknowledge that it's an issue.

it was actually a complete, bald-faced lie, used entirely in service of excusing your own rhetoric and downplaying future crimes like this, to be used once and then discarded in favor of whatever new convenient argument you come up with. You are exactly who my original post is talking about. I am still in complete amazement that I still have to go through the exact same dishonest rhetorical tactics with even a murder like this. There is no awful crime that would make you not argue like this. You are permanently broken from politics, and there are a LOT of people like you. There are so many people like you that every comment thread on this site is filled with your rhetoric, even here, on this site that is vastly skewed towards right wingers.

To answer your dishonest question, I am not as scared of white supremacists taking over the US, because their rhetoric is still far outside of the Overton window, and their tragic targets are seemingly random and sadly not as important as YouTubers who get millions of subscribers, and they form part of a background radiation of horrific crimes committed by crazy people similar to the killing of Iryna Zarutska, which while heartbreaking, is not a huge deal like this murder, which was a totally unjustifiable murder for nothing that is getting sanewashed by people like you every day before he's been even put in the ground yet.

I hold no hope of ever convincing anyone like you of anything anymore, so I'm not going to reply to you after this.

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The acts themselves are not particularly concerning, but the reaction is. None of the acts you listed engendered widespread open celebration by normal people.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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