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I've been thinking this more and more. What if someone took common hyperbolic political rhetoric literally and then acted on it?
Like Bush and early Obama era American evangelicals in Africa recite their anti-gay talking points to Africans. The Africans listen and take the only sensible response to people corroding society and ruining important institutions in such an insidious manner: Kill them all and mandate reporting such people with stiff penalties for failing to report a secret homosexual. Then the Americans break kayfabe and go "Oh no, we meant they are ruining society but don't take any action against them other than vague campaign rhetoric."
Or some reddit-style "healthcare CEOs are killing us". Or literally "globalizing the intifada". If many people literally believed this sort of rhetoric, some portion would be happily digging the mass graves to put our wicked enemies into. Or pouring burning fuel on old people and children in the streets.
Or "Western countries are about to be overrun by invading immigrants, it's already a civil war, unless we act we are going to be enslaved by Muslims in a short time" and then breaking kayfabe when someone takes up guns and starts fighting the said civil war form the nationalist side.
Counterpoint: I wish a mothafucka would. Unfortunately right-wing nationalist violence often seems to manifest as mass shootings carried out by clearly mentally unstable people that target the entirely wrong targets. I.e. random people in a school or grocery store instead of assassinations targeting politicians, the leadership of NGOs that help illegal migrants illegally migrate, etc
If a nationalist took up arms and actually targeted relevant targets I think you'd see a lot more sympathy instead of what you call breaking kayfabe. See, for example, the lionization that Timothy McVeigh gets from certain corners of the gun rights crowd. If he hadn't blown up a daycare in the process I think support for him would have been even more widespread. McVeigh claimed he was unaware of the daycare in the building, meanwhile one of his co-conspirator claims they did know and didn't care, no easy way to know who is telling the truth.
I think a lot of political-extremists-by-night-milquetoast-law-abiding-citizen-by-day people, i.e. most people who comment on politics online, do actually sincerely believe that open war should be waged against their political extremist enemies, but at the same time it should obviously not be waged at the expense of the milquetoast law abiding citizen life they enjoy. It's easy to say that yeah, you support breaking out the long knives, but at lot less easy to go the extra mile to actually accept that you might lose everything you value and enjoy in the process.
So in my view it's not - not consciously - all just empty rhetorics and jokes to be in on.
Rather, the calls for violence come with the unspoken assumption that you and the people on your side can crush the despicable enemy without much resistance, because that's how people talk themelves up. Obviously my side will win, we're on the right side of history, our values are better, our enemies are idiots. But when someone nominally aligned with you goes through with acts of political violence, you suddenly realize that you aren't the well-regimented, organized and coordinated forces of good about to exterminate your weak and irredeemable enemy - you personally are sitting in comfort and luxury at home while your cause's champion is a deranged mass murderer who just killed a bunch of random people, picked a fight with the very establishment that guarantees your comfort and luxury, and got absolutely crushed by it. Your actual political enemies didn't even get to factor into it.
And there you are, left holding the bag full of needing to square that okay, that guy's intentions technically aligned with what you demanded, but obviously he's not supposed to
Everyone who isn't Uncle-Tedding it by going off the grid entirely is a first-world citizen first, and a political extremist second.
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First, this reads as a touch fedpost-y (I say as someone who's eaten some bans for the same). Secondly, I don't recall where I've read it, but I know I've encountered at least a couple of people on the right arguing that the Labour Party of Norway was noticeably weakened by their loss of up-and-coming young talent at Utøya, and thus, contra Yarvin, Breivik did make a difference for his side. (I'd argue that this is actually why Yarvin spent so long pooh-poohing ABB, because — particularly after listening to him on podcasts — so much of Yarvin's political program seems to be aimed first and foremost at preventing this sort of thing — for entirely understandable historical reasons.)
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Whatever the attack, I'm fairly sure that a larger amount of people engaging casually in rhetoric described above are suddenly going to indicate that they didn't mean it that way than say that yes, that's exactly what they meant. Or do what other gun rights people do regarding McVeigh: indicate that the perp was a fed or that it was a fed false flag attack some other way.
There's been a lot of cases where the shooter has deliberately targeted immigrants (in a mosque, a place frequented by immigrants otherwise etc.) and the logic, if cruel, is obvious: create an atmosphere of fear encouraging other immigrants to return back to where they came from and discourage new immigrants from coming in. Some shooters have indicated as much. The same logic as when Hamas continues to shoot rockets seemingly at random or encourage civilian attacks: create fear to discourage aliyah and encourage yerida.
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