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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   42217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Well, when you thought the week was boring...

Charlie Kirk was just shot at an event, shooter in custody. There's apparently a video going around of the attack, but I haven't a desire to see it. People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead. That makes this the second time that a shooter targeted a conservative political figure at a political event in two years. If Trump hadn't moved his head at the last second, it would've been him, too.

I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.

I fear this is what happens when the culture war is at a fever pitch. Political violence in the US is at heights not seen since the 1970s, from riots in the 2010s and especially 2020 over police-involved shootings, to the capitol riot in 2021, to the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania, to the United Healthcare killing, to finally this murder of a political influencer. I fear for my country when I look at how divided we are, and how immanently we seem to be sliding into violence.

I guess I just find politics tiring nowadays. I vote for a Democrat and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. I vote for a Republican and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. Whether J.D. Vance or Gavin Newsom wins in 28, there will be no future in which Americans look each other eye to eye.

I actually believe things are much better in this country than people think: our economy is surprisingly resilient, we've never suffered under the kind of austerity that's defined post-colonial European governance, our infrastructure, while declining, actually functions in a way that most of the world isn't blessed with, our medical system is mired in governmental and insurance red tape yet the standard of care and state of medical research is world-class, our capacity to innovate technologically is still real and still compelling, and one of our most pressing political issues, illegal immigration, exists solely because people are willing to climb over rocks and drift on rafts simply to try and live here.

We have real problems. And intense escalations on the part of our political tribes are absolutely in the top five. We also have a severe problem with social atomization -- and these two things are related -- which has led to our intimate relationship and loneliness crisis, the rapid decline in social capital, and the technological solitary confinement of the smartphone screen which dehumanizes people like real solitary confinement while confining them to the most intense narrative possible. "If it bleeds, it leads" means that many will be led into bleeding.

I don't know how we rebuild the world, or come to a point where Americans of different views can view each other as well-intentioned. But Kirk is just the latest victim of a crisis that I don't know if there's any way to solve.

ETA: Yeah, nvm. Bad timing delay between WSJ and posting.

So ummmm...I don't want to do too much Gribbling just yet, but is anyone finding it a little spooky that they don't have the shooter in custody yet? Are we adjusting our priors on what this looks like? The trans/antifa inscriptions are being walked back, which really confuses me because I don't understand how the detail could be wrong. Two different guys have been arrested and released. Now there's a picture of a person of interest, but that might not be the guy either?

There's of course conspiracy theories. This guy on Twitter said Charlie was worried about getting killed by Israel a month ago. Various leftists have called false flag, though that seems like macabre wishful thinking. There's been talk about internal rightist squabbling, but I don't put much stock in the idea that the Groypers have expert assassins on staff. Iran? But why would the IRGC hit Charlie Kirk and not claim responsibility for it?

It just feels odd in that my prior for the assassin was some kind of trans-something-or-other insane blue haired loser. I don't picture you they-them barista hitting a 200 yard shot and disappearing.

I suppose if the shooter gets caught in the next day or so, it'll all work out fine and I'll go back to sheepling. But it is definitely starting to feel weird, and if they don't have the shooter in custody this time next week...boy, I don't know.

Shooter is in custody. News conference ongoing. Turned in by his dad.

Edit: Antifa, trans furry and Helldiver 2 messages on the bullet casings. Guessing that this moves toward treating Antifa as a domestic terror org.

The notices bulge one is a furry meme, rather than trans. (Not even girls-with-dicks side of furry, afaik; I've seen it more from the gay side, and not just in the sense that I would see more of the gay side.) Kinda has escaped containment since it originated as a bit of an anti-furry thing making (fair) mockery of cringy RP conventions, so might just be general too-online reference.

Thanks for the correction. Updated.

I'm sorry, am I missing something? The first thing I heard coming into work is that they caught the shooter and that his name is Tyler Robinson. It remains to be seen if he's the actual guy, since Kash Patel has already made a misstep or two on that fashion, but it seems pretty likely, since the FBI put up photos of the guy they were after themselves after collecting themselves.

Wow, extraordinarily bad timing between reading the morning paper and posting this, I guess.

What I found really disgusting were the imgur posts openly celebrating the assassination.

Now, I am not someone who thinks that every human life is sacred. I will celebrate if Trump finally croaks from natural causes, and I would not take any inconveniences to save Trump's life. But if someone were to shoot him (whose death would matter per se, in a way in which shooting a random MAGA proponent I had never heard of before will not matter), that would be quite bad in a lot of different ways, from normalizing political violence to turning him into a martyr.

Trump will not be defeated by murdering his supporters, nor would the cost be worth that.

I was not very upset about the killing of the United Healthcare CEO because I did not consider it to be a step on the slippery slope any more than any non-political murder is. Running a company which sometimes makes decisions which people feel (rightly or wrongly) are ruining their lives comes with certain risks, and even if one health insurance executive was shot every month there seems to be little danger of it spiraling out of control.

By contrast, Kirk was a clear political murder. Any effect the guy may have had as a human will be overshadowed by orders of magnitude by the effects he will have as a murder victim and MAGA martyr. If such a killing happened once a month, things would spiral out of control.

And the idiots who claim that he now became a part of the gun violence he had previously called an acceptable price for the 2A are missing the point. That would be an excellent point to make if he had been randomly gunned down during a routine school shooting. But he was not, he was very deliberately targeted for his political activism. If he had argued that assassinations were a legitimate form of political debate, that would have been mentioned in every other imgur post, so I guess he did not. (Apparently, he called for people to bail out the Pelosi attacker, which seems cringeworthy poor taste to me, but is still different from calling for her to be murdered.)

(Apparently, he called for people to bail out the Pelosi attacker, which seems cringeworthy poor taste to me, but is still different from calling for her to be murdered.)

You could just look this up and see what he actually said (and then discuss it here) rather than just taking it on faith.

I find it disheartening that even when there are easily accessible primary sources, people prefer unsourced rumors. This isn't unique to the things people are saying about Charlie Kirk, but it sometimes seems like the internet has made this human tendency worse. All the information in the world at our fingertips and it doesn't matter one bit.

I don't know, maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds.

It feels like bad faith when a man like Charlie has hundreds upon hundreds of hours of his words out there, but his opponents will snip 5-10 seconds and claim it representative.

At least TRY to find something that would make him seem sympathetic while you're at it, rather than just taking the lastest NPC update and repeating it.

Economically and in other aspects, there is a lot going well the the US, but I think we will start seeing more assassination attempts. These are different from typical riots or school shootings. Even though the Trump shooter failed, society was still disrupted. Assignations exploit a weak point in society and carry symbolic value with efficacy that other forms of political unrest cannot match.

It's been roughly a full day since the assassination, not nearly enough time to get a meaningful sense of the long- or even medium-term effects, if any, on national politics and political discourse, but still enough time to get a first blush. I haven't been looking around too much, but certainly I've humored my morbid curiosity about how things are going (that morbid curiosity doesn't extend to morbidity itself; I have negative interest in actually seeing the video of the murder, and I've managed to avoid it so far).

The main thing I've noticed is just how depressingly predictable it is. From the right, I see the expected mix of "they showed their TRUE faces, time for knives out" and "now is the time to pull back and de-escalate, or else our society will not survive" in roughly equal parts. But what I see overwhelmingly more than either is a fervent push of cancel culture, in exactly the same way as the left were doing and being complained about for the past decade+. Lots of minor and even a few right-wing influencers digging through BlueSky and Tumblr accounts, looking for minor nobodies who said egregious and extreme things in celebration of this murder, and fishing for doxxing info to try to get them fired. It's just more of "I believe in free speech when it's useful for me, but not when it's costly to me or my desire to see people I dislike punished" that we saw the left go through in the past 2 decades. And, again, depressingly predictable.

From the left, it's been all the standard interference that any ideological cluster throws out whenever some member of that cluster does something that almost everyone disapproves of, of the sort of "let's wait to find out - it could be just a random loon," "yawn, it's just another gun murder in a nation full of them," or "this [negative adjectives chosen for maximum affect while barely avoiding crossing the line into libel] right-wing influencer was shot." Along with a generous helping of "he had bad opinions, therefore I don't mind" or "I have exactly as much sympathy for him and his family as he did for [people I've deemed to be oppressed]."

Entirely predictable if your basic assumption is that no one is principled, everyone is always looking for plausibly deniable ways to harm people they disagree with and gloat about it. So depressingly predictable. If you had asked me to speculate how people would react to Kirk's murder 2 days ago, those 2 things would probably have been included in some form, certainly the latter one.

And because it's so predictable, it also makes it somewhat confusing. This reminded me of a couple of topics that I'm sure very many on The Motte are familiar with: signalling and common knowledge. Common knowledge has to do with knowledge shared between multiple people, where not only do they have the same knowledge, they also know that each other has that same knowledge, and they also know that each other knows that each other has that same knowledge, etc. With the polarization and recent history of the US, it's common knowledge at this point that, if someone on one side gets physically harmed in what appears to be an attack from the other side, or if someone who seems to be on one side commits some random act of violence, then the blind partisans on the attacker's side will run interference for them, and people against that side will try to pin it on them and use it to excuse their worst, most selfish and cynical behaviors, such as e.g. adopting cancel culture.

As such, if someone wants to signal that they're not just a blind partisan who can be safely ignored, they need to present something that sets them apart from those. Otherwise, what they're doing is either admitting that they're happy to play the role of a blind partisan or that they are the blind partisan that the role was based off of. But then that's a signal for anyone who isn't already bought in or almost bought in to just ignore them or even use them as ammo for arguing why that person's side needs to be crushed even harder.

Which is all well and good if your priority is to make in-group members clap like seals rather than to convince people that this is a nothingburger/perfect justification for crushing the outgroup. But priorities like that aren't all well and good, at least for the health of USA society.

My own bias makes me really really wish that people on the left would actually attempt to live up to our promise of being better than the right and find ways to de-escalate. In this situation, that would have to involve signalling a commitment against political violence in the face of speech of the sort Kirk practiced, and that signal must be costly for it to actually be a signal. And, unfortunately, the kinds of generic statements of condolences and condemnation that mainstream politicians throw out really don't signal anything of the sort; rather, it's a signal that they're happy enough to pay lipservice against political violence when people they dislike get got. It could take many forms, such as committing to push forward some policies that Kirk liked even if they dislike it, because they believe in setting the precedent that if you murder someone for political reasons, your political allies will do everything they can to make sure that the murdered person's political wishes get fulfilled. Or even something relatively minor like that thing Elon said he'd do, funding murals of that Ukrainian woman who got murdered in NC - set the precedent that if you murder someone for political reasons, then your political allies will do their best to make that person a martyr and someone to be celebrated and revered. Or it could be even more minor, just calling out the ideology that refuses a label that explicitly elides between physical violence and words that people dislike in a way that explicitly justifies physical violence against political commentators like Kirk as long as their views are sufficiently disliked and committing to cross aisles to shut that down, or at least shut down the pro-violence-against-speech part.

I'm sure there are some very minor influencers and politicians out there doing just that, but I worry that they're just dominated, by orders of magnitude, by those of us who just want to keep polarizing the issue.

But what I see overwhelmingly more than either is a fervent push of cancel culture, in exactly the same way as the left were doing and being complained about for the past decade+. Lots of minor and even a few right-wing influencers digging through BlueSky and Tumblr accounts, looking for minor nobodies who said egregious and extreme things in celebration of this murder, and fishing for doxxing info to try to get them fired. It's just more of "I believe in free speech when it's useful for me, but not when it's costly to me or my desire to see people I dislike punished" that we saw the left go through in the past 2 decades. And, again, depressingly predictable.

I had a somewhat different reaction. When I saw what was happening, I felt a sigh of relief. I'm not for doxxing, generally. I was against that one woman getting fired from Home Depot for wishing Trump was assassinated. But I was getting worried that the Right would collectively do something bad. And so if this is the thing the Right does that is collectively bad, then it's a lot better than a lot of other things they could have decided to do.

If they can make it unthinkable for someone to publicly celebrate domestic assassinations, then that would be a step away from the precipice we have been creeping towards. If every public official, military member, cultural influencer, professor, and teacher stops comparing their political opponents to Nazi Fascists who need to be killed, then maybe we can heal as a nation. And one way to get that to happen is to do this cancel culture exercise.

It's not what I wanted, but when I see the Right say things like, "They want to kill you too, they just don't know your name yet," I'm relieved the steam is releasing this way. I don't think it's just opportunistic politicking. People are upset that Kirk was assassinated for civilly expressing views 30% - 70% of people in the country share. People are more upset to see others say that Kirk deserved his assassination for civilly expressing views 30% - 70% of people in the country share. Particularly when they share a few of the views that likely got him killed.

I want them to jail George Soros. I want them to jail Reid Hoffman. I want them to uncover the funding mechanisms that knowledge supported things like antifa and if (as I suspect it does) lead back to Soros and Hoffman I want them to jailed. That is playing for keeps but within the lines.

Yeah, RICO'ing Antifa would be a good start, and if goes up to Soros then that would be good. I wouldn't want necessarily to just start harassing Soros until we could figure out a crime to pin him on and get him that way. Identifying a crime and finding the criminal is how the system should work, not identifying a man and then finding the crime. That's what happened to Trump and it wasn't good.

I would argue with Trump it went even beyond finding the man — they invented a crime largely out of whole cloth and then jury rigged the law to get a conviction. It will be overturned on appeal.

I would argue with Trump it went even beyond finding the man — they invented a crime largely out of whole cloth and then jury rigged the law to get a conviction. It will be overturned on appeal.

Already been sustained by NY's highest court.

I don’t think that’s right. Can you share a link?

I thought I read it HERE, in this thread a few weeks ago.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/n.y.-appeals-court-voids-fine--upholds-judgement-against-trump

However, perhaps this is not the case you were referring to; it's not the election interference case.

More comments

I see a few common types of criticism of Charlie Kirk floating around in response to his death. These appear to be gotchas that people are using to justify his assassination, or that he had it coming. I don't think these gotchas are as valid as some people think they are. It's a mixture of his own quotes and things he has said previously.

  1. Kirk said "I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage" so no empathy for him.
  2. Kirk said "It's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights" so he deserves it.
  3. Charlie Kirk asked his listeners to bail out the person that attacked Paul Pelosi and celebrated it.
  4. The rest that I've seen so far are weaker arguments with less traction about Charlie Kirk saying something mean about people like George Floyd or great replacement theory etc. so I'm not gonna address those.

There are also some comparisons of Kirk's assassination to the assassination of two democrat Minnesota lawmakers, and how the right gave little care for the killing of the two democrat politicians. I go more into detail about why these are not comparable here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/364180?context=8#context

Here is the full context of the empathy quote:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-charlie-kirk-once-001900786.html

So the new communications strategy for Democrats, now that their polling advantage is collapsing in every single state… collapsing in Ohio. It's collapsing even in Arizona. It is now a race where Blake Masters is in striking distance. Kari Lake is doing very, very well. The new communications strategy is not to do what Bill Clinton used to do, where he would say, "I feel your pain." Instead, it is to say, "You're actually not in pain." So let's just, little, very short clip. Bill Clinton in the 1990s. It was all about empathy and sympathy. I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage. But, it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy, I prefer more than empathy. That's a separate topic for a different time.

He also had this to say about empathy

The same people who lecture you about 'empathy' have none for the soldiers discharged for the jab, the children mutilated by Big Medicine, or the lives devastated by fentanyl pouring over the border.

Spare me your fake outrage, your fake science, and your fake moral superiority.

So Kirk is criticizing the liberal use of empathy, and he directly states he prefers sympathy. Not a gotcha. Maybe one doesn't need to empathize with him, but at least show some sympathy since the stated reasoning is he said he doesn't like empathy, but he did not say the same about sympathy? Kirk's stance on the word empathy does not justify gleeful jubilation of his death.

Here is the full context of the second amendment quote:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-charlie-kirk-once-205500283.html

AUDIENCE QUESTION: How's it going, Charlie? I'm Austin. I just had a question related to Second Amendment rights. We saw the shooting that happened recently and a lot of people are upset. But, I'm seeing people argue for the other side that they want to take our Second Amendment rights away. How do we convince them that it's important to have the right to defend ourselves and all that good stuff?

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. So, I'm a big Second Amendment fan but I think most politicians are cowards when it comes to defending why we have a Second Amendment. This is why I would not be a good politician, or maybe I would, I don't know, because I actually speak my mind.

The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — "wow, that's radical, Charlie, I don't know about that" — well then, you have not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. Number two, you've not read any 20th-century history. You're just living in Narnia. By the way, if you're actually living in Narnia, you would be wiser than wherever you're living, because C.S. Lewis was really smart. So I don't know what alternative universe you're living in. You just don't want to face reality that governments tend to get tyrannical and that if people need an ability to protect themselves and their communities and their families.

Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price. 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.

You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am, I, I — I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.

So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do you stop school shootings? I don't know. How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games.. That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?

This is so clearly not a celebration of gun deaths from Charlie Kirk. It's part of a larger argument. He's not calling for or supporting the use of guns in senseless killings. I think this is a stronger "gotcha" and the irony is definitely there. I do think the argument that his stance of gun control directly contributed to an environment that made him being killed by guns more likely does have some element of truth to it. But Kirk's stance is not a gleeful condonation of deaths via guns. It's also a pretty standard pro 2nd amendment stance.

One could argue the rates of death to usage in auto accident deaths is much lower and the benefits much higher compared to the availability of guns in America. But then they would be making the same type of argument Kirk is making here. I don't think people would say someone that dies in an auto accident deserves it because they support driving cars. I do think at a certain point the statistics will shift my stance that the risk of guns outweigh the benfits procured by the second amendment. Most people using this quote are not even willing to have that conversation.

Also, we have to consider the usage of the tool. It would be extremely ironic if Kirk died via gunfire in the process of protecting god-given rights, as he claimed. We don't know the motive of the killer, but I highly doubt the intention was to protect any god-given rights. Going back to the car analogy, if someone were to argue we should allow unlimited speed on a highway but dies from drunk driving, there is some element of irony, but it's not as ironic as if that person were to die from driving high speeds on the highway. Neither did Kirk die from a random altercation on the street or a stray bullet, which I think would give more credence to the irony factor. Kirk was deliberately assassinated via gun for likely politically motivated reasons.

Here is the full context of the Paul Pelosi quote: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/charlie-kirk-bail-out-alleged-paul-pelosi-attacker-1234621493/

"Politico says, ‘top Republicans reject any link between GOP rhetoric and Paul Pelosi assault.’ Of course, you should reject any link!

Why is the Republican party — why is the conservative movement to blame for gay, schizophrenic, nudists that are hemp jewelry makers, breaking into somebody’s home or maybe not breaking into somebody’s home? Why are we to blame for that exactly?

And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions. I wonder what his bail is? They’re going after him with attempted murder, political assassination, all this sort of stuff.

I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful, it’s not right. But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day?

Not an exact comparison for a few reasons. Paul Pelosi is not dead. Furthermore, this statement is made in context of a world that many criminals from blue cities constantly get out on bail. See Karmelo Anthony or Decarlos Brown Jr. as recent high profile examples of criminals getting out on bail (In the case of Decarlos Brown, he is not out on bail for murder, but he was out on bail when he murdered the Ukrainian girl).

Kirk is not stating the attacker is a hero. He's saying we should bail him out to ask questions. He does come off a bit celebratory of the attack. But Paul Pelosi is not dead, and I'm fairly certain news was out by this point that he was recovering, which gives for more room to makes jokes about the other side than murder.

He also literally states that he thinks the attack was awful and it's not right.

The constant use of out of context quotes to push an agenda or to condone murder is frankly sickening and all so tiresome. Find me an example of Charlie Kirk being gleeful at the deaths of others, and I'll adjust my stances a bit. But so far, these are not it.

EDIT: Adding in this as one more example of a criticism I just saw from someone I consider a centrist.

  • Kirk thinks 11 year old rape victims should be forced to deliver their babies if impregnated.

This is followed up by a statement that Kirk has "abhorent" politics, he was perpetuating bad ideas to a wide audience, and that we're better off without him. He did express symapthy for his wife and kids. My benefit of the doubt is that all but 2 of the people he is talking to had been making fun of Charlie and criticising him, so he subconsciously adopts a more critical stance.

Source of that claim is around 18:20 in this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aL1k2I1HtXE&t=1066

By the way this is really fucking painful to transcript becuase Charlie and the other person speaking keep talking over each other so I will put this AI transcript for now and clean up later. Just watch the video at the timestamp i gave if you want the full context.

I how are you nice to see you um so I just have one question there's like in any case you don't think there's any case where abortion should be legal there's a very very rare couple cases Okay so you do think that a couple cases is legal if if if cesarian section is not going to save the mother's life and the mother's life is actually at risk which is debated amongst growing numbers of OBGYNs okay that is the only case where abortion should be should be allowed but people say it is a growing consensus in the pro-life world that abortion is never medically necessary okay so if you had a daughter and she was 10 and she got red and she was going to give birth and she no wait oh and she was going to give birth and she was going to live would you want her to go through that and carry her that's awfully graphic it's no but it's a real life scenario that happens to many the answer is yes the baby would be delivered oh okay great so I that's insane um but let me tell you why no hold on let me ask you a question there's two ultrasounds I have one is a baby conceived in one is a baby conceived by a loving couple which one is which which which person here was conceived by tell me which one was conceived by you don't know exactly cuz it's all human rights and it's all human matter but it's about your daughter who's pass to give birth to it and it's going to be tortured by that for the rest of her life that's going to take away every freedom she's ever going to have that's going to ruin her life she's going to grow up and she's going to be attached crime the the point is how you were conceived is irrelevant to what human rights you get when hold on one second if a person can see the walks down the side of the street it's not like they don't get First Amendment rights or second amendment rights the worst thing to do to that do the daughter is to then say hey we're going to go murder the being inside of you they would wouldn't even know like listen they they wouldn't know listen listen listen listen but wouldn't it wouldn't it be a better story to say something evil happened and we do something good in the face of evil instead of saying we're going to do evil and then murder the being because we're going to we're going to we're going to Pander to the evil no what makes what makes the West great is that we do good after evil not evil after evil it's not not about the being and the the cells it's not about no no no I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking thank you so it's not I'm not talking about that I'm talking about the person no I'm talking about the person who is dealing with the pregnancy I am not talking about the cells I don't I don't care listen the fetus the whatever I don't care about that right now until it is formed if there is if there is a 5-year-old child who is pregnant and the baby is 2 weeks can't get prant actually they have and they have given birth there is one recorded case of a 5-year-old gave birth is is that is that common yes not it's common for 5-year-old get sometimes and it's if they get pregnant I think they should be able to have medical access to something that could save not only just their life but like their livelihood how many how many I'm curious how many I hope your daughter lives a very happy life and gets away from you okay so that is really nasty and so her her belief system just so we're clear is that the time's up yeah no I got it it's fine I mean it's insanely nasty and we'll talk again

I expect a better take or example from someone with a centrist view. The reason that claim might come off as shocking is because the imagery of a raped 11 year old being forced to give birth is sickening. But if your stance is that is that the fetus are human beings with rights and that abortion is murder, it is not an absurd position to hold that aborting the child in an 11 year old is wrong even if the circumstances of that pregnancy is horrifying and evil. This is a logical conclusion from his openly stated beliefs about abortion. Also this is an absurdly rare scenario that the other person, Maren, brought up to justify abortions. It's not like Kirk randomly made that statement to be edgy, it's in response to a hypothetical scenario made by his opponent.

With regards to the bail comment, it seems like the point he was making was that san fransisco liberals live to let everyone out with little or no bail, so why is this guy still in jail.

Then he made an aside that someone should bail him out and question him.

Yeah and there's a substantial difference between bailing somebody and saying they're innocent.

All this makes me wonder all the more about the shooter. He used a bolt action hunting rifle, and fired when Kirk was asked about gun violence, killed no one else, and successfully escaped the scene. However it’s not clear how many, if any, of the previous were conscious, or even pre-planned, decisions. Was the intention in one or all of those aspects to try and mold conversation in some fashion? On some level most shooters or assassins have become aware that their survival rate is usually not very good, and that they will be at some point over-analyzed by the media. There is rising meta-awareness there. And also, the basic of “get on roof with scoped gun” is in fact absurdly effective, apparently even against presidents, though most people smart enough to realize this are smart enough not to do it.

This is, in some very real sense, a trap. If you ask me, both science/psychology AND politics demands that if this keeps happening, the best solution is actually something like this: form some kind of loose compact, whether between individuals or news media or whatever, to focus on victims and not give shooters the time of day. Show, don’t tell, the stories of bereaved family; show, don’t tell, the good parts of the person shot; show, don’t just tell, the harm this causes bystanders. I’m pretty sure that although a handful of would be shooters are true sickos, a good chunk of them are still vulnerable to this kind of appeal. Sort of like suicide prevention, glorification or even just painting it in a literary light is bad - focus on how family and friends will be sad is good.

Hey this is a great post. Reported for quality!

I really appreciated this post. I thought about asking in my post in this thread for examples of the worst things Charlie has said. My local subreddit majority a variation of "I'll show as much empathy for the Nazi as he showed for others."

Attacking someone over acknowledging trade-offs is extremely toxic to dialogue. One of my primary criticism of the left (the right isn't much better) for years is that for the left "there are no had answers". Closely related is having little awareness of tradeoffs and unintended consequences.

Here are some more of the stuff he said that some people I know are pointing out as some of the worst things he said.

Consider what Kirk said about Black women leaders and affirmative action. Assailing affirmative action “picks” Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Kirk said, sickeningly, “you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously” without affirmative action. “You had to steal a white person’s slot.”

Kirk was an equal opportunity hater who called Martin Luther King, Jr. “awful,” and “not a good person,” while insisting, “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”

He also opposed gay marriage was stated as another reason.

I'm going to throw his stance on trans people onto the list as well, I guess.

I'm not going to defend his stances here or bother finding the context of these quotes or stances, but I will note the automatic assumption from folks that are saying what Kirk is saying is bad with little to no attempt to explain why it is bad. No attempt to understand his arguments or to point out the flaws in his arguments.

Even if I were to agree 100% that these are bad takes, and he is wrong, these specific claims don't make him a Nazi or a fascist.

Even if I were to agree 100% that these are bad takes, and he is wrong, these specific claims don't make him a Nazi or a fascist.

And this is a key point many on the Left need to grasp. Charlie was not radical/far right. He is well within the Overton Window of Conservative Republican beliefs. So when you call him a Nazi and at best shrug if not celebrate his death the message is very clear: normie Republican are Nazis and brutally murdering them is within the Overton Window.

Except the problem was not really his beliefs. They can tolerate him having those beliefs, but not when he brings those beliefs to college campuses, and certainly not when he is effective at spreading those beliefs. That is what they cannot tolerate.

I’d be lying if I said I was particularly sad to see him go.

Nonetheless, he was a human being; despite his odious actions, I’m certainly not happy to see him murdered. Hopefully whoever assassinated him gets apprehended.

Nor, for that matter, am I looking forward to the potential fallout of his assassination.

Latest updates

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c206zm81z4gt

  • Murder Weapon found, pro-trans inscriptions upon the magazines
  • FBI have photos and video of the suspect, seem confident they'll find him. Not interested in releasing a description or photo to the public at this time.

Editorializing but feels like it narrows down the field a lot.

pro-trans inscriptions upon the magazines

I can't find this in the news articles.

Most of the coverage is downstream of this WSJ article, which is unfortunately paywalled in a way that archive.is can't bypass; see here for visible-text.

older-model .30 caliber hunting rifle

Time to call for an AR-15 ban, I guess.

This is actually making me wonder if you can predict the type of crime or the victim based on how much info newspapers release about the weapon. @gattsuru?

The standard joke is usually something like this, though given How The Experts have gotten things, it's probably a little outdated.

Update: this was written before the shooter had been arrested. It now appears he isn't trans. Mea culpa.

This morning I was talking about the Iryna Zarutska case with my girlfriend over breakfast (she knows a lot of Ukrainians so has heard a great deal about it). We were talking about the United States's dysfunctional attitude towards mental illness, and I recycled a lot of Freddie deBoer's points about how deinstitutionalisation has gone too far, to the point that it's now nigh-impossible to get someone involuntarily committed even if they obviously pose a grave danger to themselves and/or others. A common talking point in this conversation is that "mentally ill people aren't dangerous - in fact, they're far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators" which, though likely true, is rather meaningless: such a small number of people commit violent crimes that the observation "X are more likely to be victims than perpetrators" is true of essentially every demographic, and there's persuasive evidence that, ceteris paribus, mentally ill people are more likely to commit violent crimes than sane people.

I'm now revisiting a related thought I had after the Annunciation Catholic shooting. For years, every trans rights activist has assured me that transgender people are one of the most vulnerable, marginalised groups in the world. When I ask what exactly about them makes them vulnerable or marginalised, trans rights activists routinely cite the allegedly high rate at which trans people are murdered (some going so far as to call it a "genocide"), along with claiming that the perpetrators of these murders often go free after citing the "trans panic" defense in their murder trials (I've been looking for evidence of this for years and have not yet been able to identify a single case in which an accused murderer made this defense and was acquitted - as far as I can tell, the entire claim was simply invented from whole cloth). Digging into the "trans people more likely to be murdered" claim invariably demonstrates that it's baseless: in the US, cis men are more likely to be murdered than trans-identified males, and cis women are more likely to be murdered than trans-identified females. As with murders in general, most of the murder victims were killed by someone close to them (in at least one case last year, by a fellow trans person; in another from this year, by a group of LGBT people), and of those that weren't, most were prostitutes killed by a punter. As tragic and regrettable as this is, prostitution is a high-risk endeavour for anyone who practises it, trans and cis alike. Any claims of an epidemic of transphobic hate crimes sweeping the nation are, as far as I can tell, baseless.

If indeed the person who killed Charlie Kirk is a trans person (who was perhaps motivated to assassinate Kirk because of Kirk's transphobic views or whatever such nonsense), by my count that will make 3 premeditated murders committed by trans people in the US so far this year. Before the end of the year, will it be possible that the total number of cis people murdered by trans people in the US will exceed the converse? It seems an eminent possibility. Will we then be permitted to discuss openly the role that trans identification seems to play in political radicalisation?

Will we then be permitted to discuss openly the role that trans identification seems to play in political radicalisation?

I think the whole story is pretty straightforward. you have a group told by their allies that their political opponents want them dead and whose political opponents often take glee in being cruel to them. It's really not rocket science how you get radicalized people out of this. Especially if you believe, like I do, that this is a population particularly susceptible to memes and inserting themselves into narratives. People looking for reasons that they don't fit into society.

I've many disagreements with trans activists but I really don't think this is like a hormones cause radicalization thing. If they were left alone and allowed to live out their fantastical identity then I don't think they'd be particularly violent, well at least as far as the baseline for men.

I've many disagreements with trans activists but I really don't think this is like a hormones cause radicalization thing

Yeah, it's not hormones, the community itself is quite culty, and the ideology is radical.

I've many disagreements with trans activists but I really don't think this is like a hormones cause radicalization thing.

Nor do I. I'm confident the radicalisation pathway looks a lot more like "spending a lot of time in online echo chambers in which violent 'resistance' is seen as an urgent necessity" as opposed to anything to do with medical transition itself. That being said, testosterone does increase aggression - I don't know if we know for a fact that the shooter in Nashville had ever taken T, but given the demographic it seems likely, and maybe in the counterfactual world where she hadn't taken it, she doesn't go through with the shooting.

(This turned into a kind of meandering post on epistemics rather than a direct reply. Feel free to ignore)

A common talking point in this conversation is that "mentally ill people aren't dangerous - in fact, they're far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators" which, though likely true, is rather meaningless: such a small number of people commit violent crimes that the observation "X are more likely to be victims than perpetrators" is true of essentially every demographic, and there's persuasive evidence that, ceteris paribus, mentally ill people are more likely to commit violent crimes than sane people.

Huh. You know, I had this exact thought on first hearing that line a couple months ago. It is a clever little evasion, and one I suspect gets most people. It's a notable entry in the genre of 'The Media [and Officialdom More Generally] Very Rarely Lies...' but very often tries to deceive.

The lesson I took from it was 'be wary of those offering metrics no one asked for.' Obviously the intended question is the one you mention: Do the mentally ill possess a higher propensity for violence? I am actually not sure, prima facia, if they do -- those with some disorders certainly do, but major depressive disorder presumably has the opposite effect, and it's comparatively common -- but the fact the politically correct answer is the above rather than 'no' suggests strongly the answer is 'yes.'

Unfortunately, it turns out in practice getting the obvious metrics is often difficult for some reason, or they don't actually mean what you'd think they do. My attempts to apply the rule ran into a barrage of false positives and a bare handful of likely hits, all of which were political activism which raised much more obvious red flags. Not sure there's really anything to glean here, besides 'carefully consider what you're being told on a case-by-case basis,' which is good advice I'm sure everyone's heard a thousand times before.

Mid-2010s Scott would have written up a classic post called like "Beware Proxy Metrics" or some such.

common talking point in this conversation is that "mentally ill people aren't dangerous - in fact, they're far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators" which, though likely true

This is not actually true. At least with schizophrenics they are far more likely to inflict aggression than to suffer it

And I am sure that you have plenty of data to back that up right? Or any data? Because lots of studies have been done on this and actually schizophrenics who turn violent are overwhelmingly dealing with substance abuse, which turns everyone - even normies - into violent psychopaths. Schizophrenics are more likely to commit violence than normies, that would be a defensible statement, but no, they are not more likely to inflict aggression than to suffer it.

It came up on a monthly links on astral codex ten, I’ll see if I can find it

Now who knows how politicized this is (or if recent data has changed) but when I was in Med School this was one of those facts that all med students were supposed to know for exams.

It's probably true in the sense that the average person with Serious Mental Illness is mostly harmless - the presence of significant outliers does not change the overall stats.

  • Before the end of the year, will it be possible that the total number of cis people murdered by trans people in the US will exceed the converse? It seems an eminent possibility. Will we then be permitted to discuss openly the role that trans identification seems to play in political radicalisation?

Anything is possible. But you are starting from three cases and making up a concept of a reality of 350M.

Furthermore, even a significant correlation would not mean a causation. For example, I would expect that white anti-vaxers are more prone to violence than the general white population, simply because being an anti-vaxer is a more common belief among the poorer classes, and for reasons of either nature or nurture, these are statistically more prone to violence. Of course, some anti-vaxers may specifically commit violence motivated from these beliefs, but most of their violence will be for unrelated reasons.

Likewise, I think it is possible that a trans identity is more appealing to people who are generally less neurotypical, and that this includes some disorder groups (such as psychotic disorders) which are (possibly) correlated with higher likelihood of violence.

A straightforward "normal people become trans, and then become more prone to violence" seems less likely (except that FtM on T might probably catch up to cis men).

Sure, the people who get radicalised by online Trantifa fora are a heavily selected bunch, much like the lonely frustrated young men who get radicalised by incel fora or far-right fora. I don't recall ever even suggesting that the pipeline looks like "normal person -> trans -> assassination/mass shooting". While the proportion of people identifying as trans has shot up in recent decades, I'm pretty sure virtually everyone doing so is still "weird" on one axis or another. (I'm not including the NBs here.)

AFAIK most of the 'gay panic' cases were more about crossdressing prostitutes assaulted by their clients, though I'm also not aware of any cases where that had led to an acquittal. I'm also reminded of a friend I once had who was MtF and believed, somehow, that they were better off not flagging their status on dating apps since in their mind the chances of somebody specifically luring them for violence due to being trans was greater than somebody not realizing and then taking it badly when they learned in person. I was fairly skeptical of that line of argumentation.

I'm also reminded of a friend I once had who was MtF and believed, somehow, that they were better off not flagging their status on dating apps since in their mind the chances of somebody specifically luring them for violence due to being trans was greater than somebody not realizing and then taking it badly when they learned in person. I was fairly skeptical of that line of argumentation.

Such a practice reminds me of some single mothers who flag themselves as childless on dating sites/apps, and when later outed they then recoil and shriek it was only out of safety to avoid pedophiles trying to use single mothers to gain access to children. sure_jan.jpg

Yes, but the cultural lie that "people legitimately cannot tell an ex-man from an actual woman" only strengthens that argument.

it was only out of safety to avoid pedophiles trying to use single mothers to gain access to children

Much like war, grown women have always been the primary victims of pedophilia.

Not the daughters functionally pimped out to get a man to commit to mom- they're mom's sexual competition, so mom has no vested interest in keeping them unmolested. (Sons, as surplus male(s) in the 'tribe', either get beaten hard enough they drive off or are simply killed in this case.)

I'm also reminded of a friend I once had who was MtF and believed, somehow, that they were better off not flagging their status on dating apps since in their mind the chances of somebody specifically luring them for violence due to being trans was greater than somebody not realizing and then taking it badly when they learned in person.

I think the big problem here is that they're assuming the people they're talking to mean them harm and trying to extrapolate how to minimize that when crafting their profile. Rather than thinking about what the most relevant details about them are and how to attract someone who likes them or is open to them.

That said, I suspect the "danger of violence" frame is tied up with the "I want to avoid chasers" frame, but the reality is that a trans person on a dating app can't avoid getting some level of attention from people interested in trans people specifically, just like women on dating apps can't avoid getting some level of attention from men who want to hookup with them.

There are very few heterosexual men who want to date a trans woman, so being up front about it in order to filter heavily for bisexual or heteroflexible men who are open to transgender dates just seems like a much better filter mechanism than assuming that you're going to be violently attacked if you divulge the info. Revealing your gender identity at any point after someone has already formed a connection with you just sets you up for anger, frustration, or wasted effort.

But I also thought MathWizard was smart for putting D&D on his dating profile, so what do I know, dating apps aren't my thing. But maybe the whole concept of meeting strangers off the internet is just not a great plan.

I did some reading on dating app trans violence after this conversation and it seemed like one of the main motivations was some sort of 'Trans person goes on a date with somebody from a background where Trans aren't prevalent, who then loses their shit after not realizing that they're trans despite signs that'd be trivial to a fellow young person Westerner'

I remember a "trans panic" murder getting a lot of attention when I was attending college in California (google says: Gwen Araujo, killed in 2002), and Gwen wasn't a prostitute, just a teen who thought it was a good idea to hide his/her penis and have sex with a couple of different dudes in the same friend group. The dudes got prison, though.

I was fairly skeptical of that line of argumentation.

I think that not outing yourself in the profile is fine. But when you plan a date, you might also want to specify what your naughty bits are. Waiting for them to discover that once they take of your underpants seems impolite. And also dangerous, I think there have been some cases of MtF getting killed when their (Muslim culture) date realized that they were making out with a dick-having person.

I cannot express an opinion on whether or not anyone has been acquitted using the "gay panic" defense, as I have simply haven't investigated it. I have investigated the question of whether anyone accused of murder has been acquitted after using the "trans panic" defense, and have been unable to find even a single example of a case meeting this description. In all of the examples cited on the Wikipedia page, all of the people who used the "trans panic" defense were still convicted. I have searched high and low, and I'm open to correction, but until someone can show me a specific case in which

  • a trans person was murdered
  • the perpetrator admitted to having killed the victim, but defended themselves by claiming it was a panicked reaction upon learning that the victim was trans
  • a jury accepted this defense and acquitted the perpetrator

then I think the only reasonable response is to assume that this is just a myth ginned up from whole cloth.

It's also interesting that the Wikipedia article includes paragraph after paragraph about the various jurisdictions in which the gay and/or trans panic defense is formally banned. How strange to put so much legislative legwork into banning a criminal defense which seems to have a 0% success rate.

The 'she wasn't a virgin' defense to rape allegations didn't get accepted by juries very often in the modern era, but it was still pretty costly for genuine victims even where they were successful in getting their attackers brought down. What extent people don't bring charges in marginal cases where those costs are high is an unknowable number, but it's probably not zero.

Victims generally aren't present in the courtroom during murder trials.

Barring bad soap operas, no. But prosecutors will want to bring witnesses, have to question the target, and (while I'd argue shouldn't) handle the media, and all those things are more expensive when the first question is 'did you know she had a dick'.

I’m wondering if it has succeeded as a defense against lesser violent crimes, maybe battery? Beating up a hooker is often treated as a less serious crime than it should be anyways.

Is there a list of allowed defenses in court? I suppose there are explicit ones (self-defense), so the existence of explicit not-allowed defenses seems plausible (although I'm not quite sure if that should square with jury nullification existing), but if you and your attorney really want to run the Chewbacca defense I didn't think there was a rule against it. Even if the jury accepts that defense, I suppose, although it'd probably make me question the jury selection process.

Yeah, that's the argument I've made whenever the topic comes up: defendants can use any ridiculous defense they want to. Pretty much everyone agrees that serving as your own defense attorney or taking the stand as a defendant are spectacularly bad ideas, but no one can actually stop you from doing either if you're really determined to. Multiple defendants have used the "Matrix defense": I don't believe anyone has ever used it and been acquitted (the closest they came was a ruling of not guilty by reason of insanity), but if someone really wants to, why stop them?

Assuming the antifa and pro-trans inscriptions are true... those were meant to be found. Argues at least as strongly for false flag as it does actual leftist, and crazy person (like the recent church shooter, who I think had such inscriptions) remains a strong possibility. I'll reserve judgement for now.

Hm. All the antifa guys* I know cover their guns in this kind of stuff. I feel like it's a kind of purity ritual, in addition to the "autistic guy with too many laptop stickers" effect.

It's not necessarily for external consumption.

Feels weird to be a false flag without, as of yet, an internet manifesto, but I guess anything is possible.

I'm gonna speculate wildly that the suspect is going to be trans, probably motivated by some wild mishmash of Palestine freedom/Trans rights and probably ex-military.

Note that BBC does not mention the pro-trans, anti-fascist inscriptions. (Or least CTRL+F ing on the mobile live page does not return any results). Steven Crowder does, he claims his team received an e-mail from officer at ATF.

Apologies just saw the Trans, anti-fascist things at a few places beforehand.

WSJ confirming the engraved slogan.

I’m very curious to know how you analyse a “forearm imprint”. I guess you can get height, muscle mass, and fatness maybe?

Maybe DNA from sweat/bodyhair?

Fuck.

I learned about this by overhearing a hushed conversation between coworkers. Feels different than if I’d just seen the firehose on social media.

Have they not caught the shooter yet? Sites reported a “person of interest” in custody. If that’s not the killer, I’m guessing it’s whoever asked a gun question seconds before he was killed. Hell of a coincidence.

I guess I’ll register a corresponding prediction. The shooter won’t turn out to be trans. Synchronizing an assassination to a political question is strictly more insane than just killing someone. As such, the specific question probably wasn’t relevant, and I’m falling back on base rates.

Not sure where I am going with this comment, but I’m surprised at the number of negative or respectful reactions I’ve seen. Yes, there have been people who are happy, celebrating, or at least unsympathetic about the shooting.

But I’ve also see that the Yankees had a moment of silence for Kirk before last night’s game and that an MTSU administrator was fired for her comments about the shooting. Can’t provide links ATM, and these are just a sample, but I feel like this is a sea change. When was the last time you saw outrage of this level because of something that happened to a conservative?

In related but "lighter" news (if such can be said): y'all remember Gretchen Felker-Martin, the transwoman who wrote that post-apocalyptic zombie novel in which all men (technically anyone with testosterone) turn into monsters and there's a throw-away line about JK Rowling being burned alive in her mansion? Felker-Martin has in the past publicly advocated killing people such as JK Rowling and Jesse Singhal, and recently went on a rant about Brandon Sanderson and how he shouldn't be "tolerated" in the SFF community (because he's a Mormon, therefore he is funding "conversion camps").

So anyway, as I pointed out recently, C-list writers like Felker-Martin often get a gig writing superhero comics, and Felker-Martin was writing a new series for DC about Red Hood (a vigilante anti-hero who used to be one of the Robins). It got cancelled after one issue. Guess why?

Very on-brand. Bluesky account is now suspended. I am not sure this represents a "vibe shift" (DC and Marvel would always be likely to fire a writer who openly cheers an assassination) but it is interesting how quickly Felker-Martin got "cancelled."

By the way, @gattsuru, I guess this is where I should clear my throat and say "Political violence is bad and I condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk"?

Given how poorly that Red Hood comic went, I'm not sure Felker-Martin's barely a tenth of a Tara Strong. Dowd is more persuasive, with the caveat that it falters if pulls a Toobin and is back in six months.

I guess this is where I should clear my throat and say "Political violence is bad and I condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk"?

I genuinely do appreciate that. I will note others: I've mentioned KelseyTUOC already, but there's been some number of decent prominent and not-so-prominent people who've spoken up, sometimes even in credible or costly ways. Even some pretty awful scumbags are at least trying to motion around it, if not very sincerely. Some of them are even sincere-seeming: I genuinely neither expected nor hoped a Young Turk to have tried, even if he's still pointing the wrong direction.

It's also a long way from persuasive enough. This is a moderator at NeoForge Discord. This is a moderator at the Hexcasting Discord (to her credit, the mod dev herself has been more responsible, albeit in a 'don't make people watch someone die' sense than a 'aggressive violence is bad even when it happens to people I don't like' one). This is imgur yesterday, this is the front page sorted by viral today. This was tumblr yesterday, hastag his name, sorted by top; this is tumblr with the same constraints today. I logged into Star Citizen last night to take my mind off things, and had literally could not get out of the in-game bed before I had chat cheering it on; this is from an FFXIV guild I dropped before the election, and a discord I'm gonna leave in a few months.

And it's not just the nameless and faceless grunts, or bluesky, or the people who skinsuited a project I once respected. This is Ken White, who to what minimal credit he deserves says that Violence Is Bad before going straight into 'you can't defame the dead' mode. This is Barry Deustch, B from Radicalizing the Romanceless. This is from the writer of NeoReaction: A Basilisk, and was well-respected in the tumblr ratsphere for almost a decade. There were 51 posts over 12 hours in the rpg.net thread (cw: big image), and while there's a couple that aren't dancing in blood, there's literally five times as many where people who I once took seriously now going full :

On the other hand, my immediate reaction is fuck them, they get NOTHING.

It's like the person upthread saying how we shouldn't have this thread at all - is this how we defend actual free speech and small-d democratic values? By running and hiding and staying quiet? Nah, screw that. Charlie Kirk was an awful person and I feel bad for the family he left behind, but I would feel bad for them beforehand, too, for having that kind of guy as a father and husband.

Now, anyone getting revenge porny or actually cheering on political assassinations isn't correct, either. Frankly, given how parts of his fanbase were turning on him from going from 'release the Epstein files" to "it's a Democrat hoax", I expect this to be part of the occasionally seen far-right "you aren't hating enough or the right people" circular firing squad, which unlike the leftist version tends to involve actual firearms.

I can keep doing this, if you'd like, but I don't think it's healthy for either of us.

I've gotten it from someone I let live in my home for six months while they were getting back on their feet. Didn't even go looking for them, I don't follow them on tumblr anymore, just bam, snuff video with a Dark Souls meme thrown into it, with a 'leopards eating faces' tag in case they needed to make it clearer what they were condoning. Do you want a list of exactly what thoughts, in what order, went through my mind? It's not just me; KendricTonn is another guy who fled to the heartland (poor bastard ended up in Ohio!) and he's getting it, too.

I considered looking up the social media of some of my past partners. Do you think it would help, or not? I'm pointedly not doing it, because that way lies even more psychosis than looking up your exes normally does.

As a prediction, which I will send you in plaintext in PM and post publicly here in a week, sha256: a009fcb948bd1a70a38d133d81f0cc96af6efa94904133184a5f40d0cb5d6004

Because ten years ago, it would have been useful to have a decent handful of examples of prominent speakers who would consistently speak in defense of "bad argument gets argument, not bullet". We have not been dumped ten years in the past. We have a decade of people Friedersdorfing these grand principles about how they'll defend people that they totally didn't defend in the past.

Jerk That Can't Write A Comic Story Worth Shit isn't a costly signal. Matt Dowd might be, if it sticks. Actually blackballing people and organizations that promote or defend this sorta stuff is. Either people haven't brought serious and costly signals of enforcement against their own side, or people think these examples you're bringing forward are the serious and costly signals. If that's the central example from the aftermath, I'm going to point to Forge again, and Damore again, and Kashur again, and show exactly how much political debt their alliance is in.

They might not have done it, themselves! They might even, in their heart of hearts, have whispered words about how it tots would have been better if no one did these terrible things. It's genuinely terrible that people have to handle the weight of bad acts from people they might not even like, just because their political alliance. It's also a little late for them to complain.

The sha256 above was calculated from this. I'll skip over a couple inside baseball ones because Amadan has convinced me that they're pretty, but they don't really break the specific metrics and they're easy for anyone who wants to call me out to check themselves:

Not a single person from that RPGNet thread is getting a ban or a warning for it: this is what their definition of A+ means.

Not a huge surprise, here; zero infractions for this entire thread. There's been one person slapped in their Infractions forum in the last week (for fighting over the Superman movie). Trouble Tickets has a thread asking about boycotting people for supporting Kirk; the mods haven't condoned it (though it's happening anyway without their intervention)... because they're worried about brigading and user safety. Today, there's a new thread terrified of the fascism going after Jimmy Kimmell, by an entire forum that's incapable of even noticing what Kimmel said or what the murderer did or was.

To be explicit, that means that there's a mainstream part of the web where "Do not feel sorry for this piece of shit. He, in an absolute sense, got what he wanted. He succeeded. And so laughter, sneers, and a desire to piss on his grave are much more appropriate reactions than grief or empathy. In a real sense, the world has been made better by his death. His killer committed a just act. There will be less tragedy on this Earth because he is underground and cannot commit further harm. And therefore my only reaction is 'good!'." and "I am grateful that his evil influence has been removed." is acceptable and 'Dobbs was correctly decided' is a dire attack.

And, unsurprisingly, they have not gotten the ARFCOM treatment from their DNS registrar. There's no boycott of their advertisers, or panicked newscasters diving into their politics, or anti-hate-groups supported by Harvard hacking in to call anyone's employers.

Not a single one of the Discords I've seen tolerate or blast out this sort of advocacy are going to get banned.

The same, and as far as I can tell, not a single one has. Most of them haven't even updated to reality as-is -- the best I can offer is the FFXIV FC that's at least struggling to recognize the obvious.

Julia Ioffe won't be blackballed from every publishing outfit right of TNR.

Ditto.

Neither Megan McArdle nor Conor Friedersdorf will have called out Matt Yglesias on an X page, and I've give 60% odds that they don't have three specific bad actors at all that they've called out.

Obviously on Yglesias, harder to prove for calling out specific bad actors. McArdle has two pieces at WaPo, pretty clearly all without specifics (albeit some humor when she 100%'s her cohost warning about "Democrats are so feckless as an opposition party, more disgruntled young men (and women) will give up on the political process"). Friedersdorf's only post-assassination article is a short piece blasting... Bondi, which fair and technically a name and also a got a fascinating case of dancing around the elephant in the room. Neither look better from their twitter feeds, but I'm open to correction if I missed something.

Khymani James still won't be expelled from Columbia.

Nope. He's also promoting a conspiracy theory about some other schmuck's suicide as a racially-motivated lynching, not that anyone cares about disinformation anymore.

The SPLC isn't going to trim back its "hate map" to only focus on actualfa; it's not even going to public recognize that TPUSA didn't fit...

Duh. Also promoting the same conspiracy theories, coincidentally, as the only post on their Apathy Isn't An Option-branded website.

... and none of CNN/NBC/CBS/New York Times will go the full Palin.

Hahahahaha. CNN, NBC, CBS, even now seem to be trying to push hard on the We'll Never Know The True Motive. NYT finally got there despite their own best efforts. I missed them in my list, but ABC had a reporter give the shooter a loving and entirely hallucinated tongue-bath of his own. And that's just for the killer, specifically.

No left-wing or 'centrist' media is diving into rhetorical motivations, and you'd think Trump had banned the word stochastic.

We're not going to get the name of the guy who yelled "Hell No" at the federal house of representatives...

I'm open to correction, here, but as far as I can tell, no.

Pritzker isn't any more likely to get censured than Lujan Grisham was.

Okay, that's less of a prediction than 2+2 = 4. He's in the news now for asking everybody else ratchet down the rhetoric, while (falsely) denying that he called Republicans Nazis. Someone filed a bill of impeachment, and it's going nowhere, and everybody with an IQ above the single digits knows it. (also for taking a photo-op with a different murderer.)

I made some other predictions, in the last week, in PM. On Friday:

Will the DNC censure Ilhan Omar before the Republican Congress does (or will neither)?

The answer is neither; not a single Democratic congresscritter voted in favor of censuring Omar, and four people with Rs after their names refused to as well. I would like to make a contrast.

Will news organization slap down reporters publicly before the Eye of Sauron LibsOfTikTok brings it forward?

Today's conversation is about the government pressuring ABC over a 'comedian' making pretty overt lies, and the only thing remotely funny about it is that it'll end up with ABC's entertainment section having higher standards than their newscorps by a significant amount, and only thanks to harsh pressure. I haven't been able to find a single example of someone coming out of the blue and say they were fired before publication or the conservative outrage; I'm certainly open to correction.

Will any college treat a professor endorsing murder more harshly than they do a prospective student that said the n word, without the threat of conservative oversight?

Hah. There's been firings, but even the most overt calls to evil action by professors has taken direct threat from conservative lawmakers to get anywhere.

Will twitch and youtube start purging Hassan-likes before subpeonas start flying, where they already booted guntubers for such crimes as 'lawfully firing a machine gun'?

No. Hassan specifically got an NYT opinion slot to promote his positions about increasingly punitive rhetoric, and no one on the Grey Lady of Bullshit Record has felt it worth mentioning his less-than-one-month-old call to literally disembowel his political opponents. There is a post of Destiny getting banned from Twitch floating around... and it's from 2020.

Will the people -- even now! -- trying to confidently paint the murderer as some Groyper get banned from reddit for disinformation posting?

somethingiswrong2024's still there, and still apparently huffing whippits as hard as possible. Open to having missed anything, here.

For completeness, TheSchism has managed a post on it, the day after I wrote the above and two days after my original "in a week" deadline. I'll leave as an exercise to the viewer where to place it

But if they're not debating whether the shooter was a groyper, still, I suppose they're ahead of the curve.

The alleged shooter has been caught, and this time they seem confident enough about it to give a press conference.

We've gotten more details about the etched messages on shell casings, and they seem a mix of general antifa and memelord. The supposedly trans-related one looks to have actually been the furry-originated 'owo notices your bulge' joke, and that's usually more cis gay (or even, rarely, cis M/F) roleplay before it turned into a general cringey joke, but along with the rest of the details, it's looking pretty explicitly like radicalized iso-standard lefty.

I can't link to it without self-doxxing, but a teacher in a nearby school, one who I worked with for STEM outreach post-COVID, is now in state-level news for the same stuff as the Home Depot lady from months ago. I'm pointedly getting out of any chat or social media around that entire conversation and its downstream effects, and it's too early to drink, and I'm going to be working with students from that school later today and I'm not going to mention it and I used to respect him and I'm done.

And it's not just the nameless and faceless grunts, or bluesky, or the people who skinsuited a project I once respected.

I'll add to this a Public Affairs officer for the Army at Fort Bragg, Major Guillermo Muñiz:

Ladies and gentlemen, the constitution exists to protect you from government persecution. It does not protect you from being held accountable for your actions by other people.

If you choose to make a living by actively talking crapand pissing people off, you should expect for someone to want to hurt you someday.

It's literally a FAFO situation

with the caveat that it falters if pulls a Toobin and is back in six months.

a) I had no idea that happened, but more importantly

b) I'm shocked anyone that worked with him would even want him back, or that he could look anyone he worked with in the eyes...

Felled-Martin’s novel is poorly written, sanctimonious, masturbatory drivel and it absolutely did not deserve the praise that it got. I stopped reading after one of the main characters (a trans woman) got a hard-on from shooting at a TERF militia called “the Knights of JK Rowling”. I wasn’t aware before but it doesn’t surprise me that the author called for the death of public figures she disagreed with, I’m glad she’s being cancelled after celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death, and I genuinely hope it represents a vibe shift from the politics that dominate the kinds of media she’s involved with.

And I say all of this as a liberal trans woman who heavily disliked Charlie Kirk and found his politics morally reprehensible. You don’t have to mourn the man, you can even comment on the irony of his final words, but actively cheering on his death, a gory assassination in front of thousands of college students, should be completely unacceptable.

By the way, @gattsuru, I guess this is where I should clear my throat and say "Political violence is bad and I condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk"?

Actual demands that people say this are usually because they've been making statements that support the assassination with some plausible deniability. You don't need to say this out of the blue.

Probably a reference to this conversation and its predecessors.

There was also this from the author:

https://old.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fitykxtes6hof1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D959%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D15cee29101561d09d535736d72f08f766fb76240

kept seeing people tw RED HOOD #1 for suicide, and for the life of me I could not figure out why until I remembered it opens with a bunch of cops shooting themselves. i just don't really consider them people.

I am not sure this represents a "vibe shift" (DC and Marvel would always be likely to fire a writer who openly cheers an assassination) but it is interesting how quickly Felker-Martin got "cancelled."

Within hours, Matthew Dowd got fired from MSNBC for implying Kirk brought this on himself. Yeah, it might be premature to say this is the "vibe shift", but at least institutional left-leaning media is enforcing messaging discipline right now, which is something I don't think they would have felt they needed to do a few years ago. They barely did for the attempt on Trump.

Felker-Martin was writing a new series for DC about Red Hood

Man, DC is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. How on earth did this specimen wangle that?

Have comic books writers ever been high flying?

Man, DC is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. How on earth did this specimen wangle that?

This isn't actually news - the comics industry has been fully captured by the progressive left for at least a decade. Look up I Am Not Starfire or Gotham High for some examples. On the Marvel side, there was The New Warriors, which had a non-binary superhero called Snowflake (twin of Safe Space), and no, this isn't a joke or satire. They were 100% serious about this release.

I do remember those, but at least the writers were safely mediocre nobodies. This person has minor notoriety about being extremely unpleasant (plus look at those crazy eyes) so how did a comics publisher think "ah yes, exactly the kind of writer who will do stories that will revitalise the title and bring in new sales"?

Lots of fawning identity-related media coverage despite a marked lack of sales numbers makes Felker-Martin the sort of "stunt-casting" writer who generates buzz about an equally C-list title.

This event has effected me in a way I didn't expect, which makes me feel vulnerable. I had no idea how sociopathic a substantial number of my close friends are. I also had no idea how simply dumb they are. One of the things I keep seeing them post is "well he said that some gun violence was an acceptable price to pay for the freedoms associated with the 2nd amendment, so fuck him! Haha reap what you sow" etc.

They say this while at the same time arguing that the small number of detrans people are a small price to pay for the benefit of trans procedures overall. Or that the small number of vaccine injuries are a small price to pay for the benefits of vaccines, etc.

They also seem unable to extrapolate what their ideas imply at all. "Charlie Kirk was a nazi, he had bad views, I'm happy he's dead" etc. But how can they honestly not see that this could also be applied to their bad views? Or imagine any higher order effects?

It's very perception-shifting to see people say this stuff. I don't like it.

I don't condone the celebration of it but is it really so far fetched to accept this as a "Sword of Damocles" situation? Kirk advocated and is directly on record for saying: "the few deaths is worth it for our second amendment rights". Live by the sword and die by the sword. If people want to advocate for positions then they need to personally be willing to pay for the consequences of those positions. Passing the cost onto other people if how we get in this mess. Note this 100% applies to all sorts of lefty positions that elite lefties want to be free of the consequences of.

Now we can't personally ask Kirk if he was willing to die for the second amendment rights but I think the charitable answer is yes. I think all the discussion about killing political opponents is worth having but all the wailing about lefties wanting to kill you rings hollow. They disagree with you and want you to pay for the cost of your beliefs just like you want them to pay the cost of their immigration or "anti-racism" beliefs.

  • -19

We could bring murders to 0 by locking everybody in their homes forever and never allowing them to leave or interact with other humans.

Should we?

https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/364548?context=8#context

Any more straw people you want to light on fire?

  • -20

You’re assiduously dodging the same objection multiple people have brought up to you.

I clearly answered it when responding to you, so the accusation of dodging rings a bit hollow. Go dogpile someone else

  • -21

Reduce your antagonism.

This is not a straw man. I’m asking you this question, not saying this is your argument.

The answer is very inconvenient to the point you are trying to make, though, which is why I don’t think you want to answer it.

The point I am trying to make is: Experiencing schadenfreude for political, social, whatever opponents is a very human thing. People on this very forum express satisfaction watching lefties experience the comeuppance for their policy positions. I imagine those same lefties view that behavior as sociopathic, if they witnessed it. You expressing the same horror of that "sociopathic behavior" when the shoe is on the other foot rings very hollow to me.

I think Kirk would have disagreed that he ought to be murdered but wouldn’t want his murder to justify restrictions on gun rights.

The optimal number of murders is not zero. The cost of what we would have to do to implement a zero murder society would not be worth it.

The optimal number of murders is not zero. The cost of what we would have to do to implement a zero murder society would not be worth it.

I agree with this.

I think Kirk would have disagreed that he ought to be murdered but wouldn’t want his murder to justify restrictions on gun rights.

Nobody wants to be murdered. But if you callously state that people being murdered is a worthy cost. Then by the golden rule you need to be ok with it, when you get murdered people consider that a worthy cost. We still punish murderers, because murder is not a stable equilibrium and societies that consider it so don't survive.

  • -23

Man this is such a foreign concept to me.

Bad things happen, they are bad when they happen, but sometimes they must happen, but they're still bad.

To make this obvious: if a guy heroically runs into a burning building and saves a bunch of children, then dies, we can acknowledge that the society is better because men are encouraged to do things like this, AND we can acknowledge that it is sad that he died, and that he didn't want to die, but that even though he didn't want to die he would still run into the burning building.

It's actually somewhat concerning to me that there are people who can't make this connection.

Bad things happen, they are bad when they happen, but sometimes they must happen, but they're still bad.

So Kirk needed to callously advocate for other people to pay the cost for his beliefs and it was bad that that happened but it must happen?

I'm really not sure what your point is here.

Man this is such a foreign concept to me.

Political accountability and taking responsibility for your beliefs is foreign to you? It concerns ME that you think asking for your tribe to not pay the cost of your beliefs but the other tribe should is something that doesn't compute for you. Can you not put yourself into the shoes of the people across the isle from you? See how they view the worlds and how they feel. idk have some empathy for your fellow man.

  • -23

So Kirk needed to callously advocate for other people to pay the cost for his beliefs and it was bad that that happened but it must happen?

Is there any other way to advocate for that? Considering that literally every piece of campaigning or lobbying is advocating for other people to pay the cost for one's beliefs, we all have to advocate for that. Advocating it without acknowledging that innocent people will be subject to violence by my preferred policy prescriptions, no matter what they are, is far more callous; and not even understanding that innocent people will be subject to violence is that much even moreso. Compared to those, just plainly stating that there will be extra innocent deaths, and that it's worth the cost, is one of the least callous ways to advocate for basically any policy.

It's true that the way Kirk phrased his comment on the tradeoffs between preventing violence and protecting the rights of citizens to own guns was politically inopportune. But the actual argument he made was indistinguishable from the "the optimal number of murders is not zero" argument.

Thinking that "he phrased it without a dozen hems and haws so he doesn't care about people being murdered, so its ironic he himself was murdered and I don't care about it" is a fair argument is a huge part of what's wrong with democratic politics. No one can talk seriously and frankly about tradeoffs, because anytime you do, you create political hay for your opposition, who jumps on every slightly-inopportune phrasing in your commentary and turns you into a monster. This kind of thing is why politicians are so fake and their lines are so rehearsed.

Part of having empathy for your fellow man, and especially for the opposite tribe, is not to accuse them of murderism or callousness based on a single comment when it's just as easy to think about their words in the context of their entire person and life, and read them charitably and rationally. Empathy ceases to become empathy when it becomes a weapon to use against your enemy, and my biggest problem with the political left is they so often use it in this way.

More comments

I don't condone the celebration of it but is it really so far fetched to accept this as a "Sword of Damocles" situation? Kirk advocated and is directly on record for saying: "the few deaths is worth it for our second amendment rights". Live by the sword and die by the sword.

Saying "the few deaths is worth it for our second amendment rights" is specifically living by the word and specifically not living by the sword. Living by the sword would be "watch me as I assassinate this politician who's pro gun-control." No argument that Kirk could ever state around gun control could ever rise to him "living by the sword." Words don't become violence just because they are about violence or condoning violence. Nor do they become equivalent to physical violence.

Campaigning to use the state's monopoly on violence to enforce your beliefs is violence by another name. Just because you can abstract it away doesn't be you are absolved. Trying to enforce your tribal beliefs on others is almost always the non-material reason for war.

One of the lessons in the fable about the Sword of Damocles is about living by the ramifications of your own positions. Kirk clearly had a position that the 2nd amendment is worth a certain amount of blood. Is he willing to pay that cost? Or does he want other people to pay it for him? One is the principled position, the other is a cur not worthy of anything.

  • -25

One of the lessons in the fable about the Sword of Damocles is about living by the ramifications of your own positions.

There's often this kind of misunderstanding of risk at the heart of internet disagreements. He was obviously willing to live with the ramifications of his positions, some negligible risk of dying by gun violence. That is discharged already just by him going about day to day in a world with higher than counterfactual risk of gun violence. This doesn't at all mean him pulling the short straw and the risk coming due isn't tragic as he acknowledged in his comment.

This doesn't at all mean him pulling the short straw and the risk coming due isn't tragic as he acknowledged in his comment.

Sure it is tragic, but it doesn't mean he is owed sympathy. And the lack of that sympathy doesn't make people sociopaths any more than a lack of sympathy for illegal immigrant mothers being pulled from their homes and deported, makes other people sociopaths.

I am completely unsympathetic to both appeals for sympathy and cries of sociopathy at ones outgroup.

Sure it is tragic, but it doesn't mean he is owed sympathy. And the lack of that sympathy doesn't make people sociopaths any more than a lack of sympathy for illegal immigrant mothers being pulled from their homes and deported, makes other people not sociopaths.

The concept of being "owed" sympathy is just kind of incoherent to me. You should feel sympathy for someone who finds a bad and undeserved end, who leaves a wife and young daughter behind. Not because they're owed anything but because you are a human who should sympathize with such a person and situation. If you fail to sympathize with this then it's not really about him, it's about you. I think we must enforce the borders and acknowledge that there are sympathetic people that will be harmed because of that. Sympathy doesn't mean you drop everything and do whatever helps the person you're sympathetic to.

I mean the concept might be foreign to you but you just invoked it. The "Should" is saying you expect me to feel sympathetic. It is prescriptive. You believe I owe sympathy in this situation. You insist that if I don’t sympathize, that reveals a deficiency in me. That means you are treating sympathy as an obligation, just in moral rather than transactional terms. My emotional framework is different than yours, you and I feel sympathy for different things and different causes but you want me to work in your emotional framework, rather than accept my own. It's no different than what my lefty friends do, I reject it here as much as I reject it there.

More comments

Campaigning to use the state's monopoly on violence to enforce your beliefs is violence by another name. Just because you can abstract it away doesn't be you are absolved.

Yeah, no. You're the one who's trying to abstract violence into it. Campaigning isn't violence. It's convincing. If you convince someone to commit violence, that person chose to commit violence, based on your speech. Depending on the nature of the convincing, that speech certainly could be legally restricted and censured. That doesn't make it not speech. You're free to play games about cause-and-effect and such, but those games don't actually change what things are.

In any case, the point of using the word "violence" is semantic, anyway. Let's say that using words to campaign for some political position is violence. In that case, literally everyone who has ever stated a political statement with approval has committed violence, and they're living by the sword, and so they could die by the sword. Which is a fair enough view to have, but it also cuts out any possibility of people actually having discourse about policy.

Like, if your claim is that there are no words, only swords, then that's perfectly cromulent, but also very different from what's implied by pointing at a specific person and their specific circumstances and saying "live by the sword, die by the sword."

Kirk clearly had a position that the 2nd amendment is worth a certain amount of blood. Is he willing to pay that cost? Or does he want other people to pay it for him? One is the principled position, the other is a cur not worthy of anything.

This is a vapid statement, though. Because literally everyone with any ideological or political view has a position that some things are worth a certain amount of blood. We can speculate all we like about what Kirk himself would have thought, in terms of his own death being worth the cost, but the one thing we know is that no one will ever know or even have much confidence in a guess (at least on this Earth), and so speculating about it is just... vapid. And it's something that could be equally speculated about with anyone.

Yeah, no. You're the one who's trying to abstract violence into it. Campaigning isn't violence. It's convincing. If you convince someone to commit violence, that person chose to commit violence, based on your speech. Depending on the nature of the convincing, that speech certainly could be legally restricted and censured. That doesn't make it not speech. You're free to play games about cause-and-effect and such, but those games don't actually change what things are.

I'm not really a Hylanka-stan so maybe one of his torchbearers can swing by and tell me if I'm using this term wrong. But to me there is a "Leviathan-shaped hole" with your understanding on politics and the dynamics of power in a society. The role of the state is to enforce violence through the monopoly it extracts from its citizens. By creating laws it is threatening violence on citizens that fail to comply. Creating laws that force people to behave certain ways is by definition using violence. You just get to call it nice words like "Vote", "Campaign", and "Lobby". So a professional political pundit who runs around trying to create laws, and drive political actions is using the state to enact his/her own tribe beliefs and force them on all other tribes that exist in that state-polity. Otherwise why would people commit violence for political means. They are just discarding the useful social tech that we've used to abstract violence away from individual control.

For example if I give speech that: "Gay-ness is an abomination before the eyes of God and we should not allow it in our government or our society" Am I inflicting violence? By your definition I am not, nothing I say is legally able to be restricted as I am not directly threatening anyone. However, say I do get this law to pass, now some faceless bureaucrat is going to punish any gay person they find because they are illegal, and they are going to do so with the full might on the state. Its back to stoning, conversion torture, or throwing the gays off roof tops. By my definition I have advocated for those policies, I have advocated for violence. So I think your definition is naive in the extreme.

Gay people upon hearing my speech AND my effort to get that speech codified into law should rightly see that as violence. Just like Christians do if I were to say "believing in religion is an abomination" AND advocated for laws banning teaching people religious beliefs. Speech does require action but that action doesn't need to be directly violent. I am abstracting that violence to the state to enforce.

The average person isn't really in a lobbying position but Kirk very much was.

  • -20

For example if I give speech that: "Gay-ness is an abomination before the eyes of God and we should not allow it in our government or our society" Am I inflicting violence? By your definition I am not, nothing I say is legally able to be restricted as I am not directly threatening anyone. However, say I do get this law to pass, now some faceless bureaucrat is going to punish any gay person they find because they are illegal, and they are going to do so with the full might on the state. Its back to stoning, conversion torture, or throwing the gays off roof tops. By my definition I have advocated for those policies, I have advocated for violence.

You've taken a couple of logical leaps here which are not well founded, and your argument suffers greatly as a result. First, the assumption that to have the government effect policy is tantamount to using violence to effect that policy. I think that this is very much not the case. It's not exactly a new argument (libertarians have been arguing that taxation is theft on more or less the same basis since forever), but it's not a good argument either. There's a reason Scott Alexander calls this form of argument "the worst argument in the world" (and against which he argued much more eloquently than I can). When you invoke a rhetorical phrase for an extreme edge case, it unreasonably connects the edge case in people's minds to the severity of the central example. That is (at best) unintentionally misleading, and (more often) an attempt at rhetorical sleight of hand to try to get people to accept a point they never would if you made it straight out.

Second, all of this seems to be in service to your original question of whether someone has inflicted violence. Even if I was to grant for the sake of argument that such government action was violent (which I don't), advocating for this government policy still would not be inflicting violence. Words can never, ever, constitute violence. Violence only means inflicting actual physical harm upon people. Even a direct threat of violence, like telling someone you're going to hurt them, is not violence in itself. Perhaps you weren't trying to say that advocating for violence (the phrase you used towards the end) is the same as inflicting violence (the phrase you used towards the beginning). But as written, it kind of comes off like you are. And if you are indeed trying to say those things are equivalent, then you're using a completely nonstandard definition of "violence" and there can be no productive discussion until that changes.

Let's entertain a hypothetical, some law gets passed that says "Saying the Democratically elected President has no clothes is now illegal punishable by jail time" I say the President has no clothes. Cops show up outside my house. I refuse to let them enter. What do they do?

In your world the distinction is that when they bust down my door and take me to jail they are the only ones inflicting violence, the law is not violent even though it backed up its authority with the social-derived power to inflict violence as an enforcement mechanism. I obviously disagree. I can infer the causality of that law and directly hold the people who proposed, lobbied, agitated for, etc. responsible for attempting to use the state's power to enforce violence for their own ends.

I feel like your rebuttal fails to understand the social reality of laws and how they are enforced. Can someone break the law and ignore the consequences? Governments that allow their power to be ignored don't survive.

The whole libertarian argument is farcical because those libertarians want the creature comforts that society provides them without wanting to pay for them. By living in society you agree to the implicit social contract. You are welcome to reject the contract and go live in a lawless place. Obviously since societies are land based, they tend to lay claim to all the land and its in their best interest to remove game-theoretical defectors.

That is (at best) unintentionally misleading, and (more often) an attempt at rhetorical sleight of hand to try to get people to accept a point they never would if you made it straight out.

idk what slight of hand you think I am doing. My explicit point is that governments are formed on the basis of a monopoly on violence and social consensus (for democratic systems) and their authority is derived from those basses. Thus any action by the government to enforce a law carries an implicit threat of violence against lawbreakers. I am open to you explaining to me how that is not the case but I have yet to see anything to the contrary

Words can never, ever, constitute violence. Violence only means inflicting actual physical harm upon people.

I agree that words alone in a vacuum can never, ever, constitute violence. I disagree that advocating for policies that lead to violent action absolves the speaker of blame. How do you think laws and policies get made? Do people not speak words when doing so? When they proposed the "President has no clothes" law was there not someone using words? If the end result is violence is there not some causal chain we can draw to such Words + Actions that directly led to that violence?

EDIT: I feel sort of confused on how my argument relates to the non-central fallacy that Scott is addressing, I'd need to go reread the blogpost. My argument is derived from a Hobbesian sense of social contract theory with observation on how people/collectives/governments actually accrue and use power.

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For example if I give speech that: "Gay-ness is an abomination before the eyes of God and we should not allow it in our government or our society" Am I inflicting violence? By your definition I am not, nothing I say is legally able to be restricted as I am not directly threatening anyone. However, say I do get this law to pass, now some faceless bureaucrat is going to punish any gay person they find because they are illegal, and they are going to do so with the full might on the state. Its back to stoning, conversion torture, or throwing the gays off roof tops. By my definition I have advocated for those policies, I have advocated for violence. So I think your definition is naive in the extreme.

So do you think that politicians that advocate for increased speed limits (= more highway deaths) are fair game for assassination? Or is it just the gay stuff?

(Kind of irrelevant since Kirk was explicitly not a politician -- so the chances of him getting elected and passing a gulags for gays law were zero -- so the ad absurdum of your position is that it would be OK to shoot some guy mouthing off in a bar about how much he hates gays -- which actually is kind of what's worrying to normiecons about this particular rationalization)

Did you see the section where I said that it requires action? A normiecon mouthing off at the bar isn't taking direct action to create said law. Kirk wasn't just a random dude running around to debate people. He was actively involved in political lobbying, funding, and trying to get laws passed.

Or is it just the gay stuff?

What about religious stuff, gun stuff, free speech stuff, tax stuff. You seem to think this is some sort of gotcha, when you have clearly failed to ascertain my political tribe

  • -17
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For example if I give speech that: "Gay-ness is an abomination before the eyes of God and we should not allow it in our government or our society" Am I inflicting violence? By your definition I am not, nothing I say is legally able to be restricted as I am not directly threatening anyone. However, say I do get this law to pass, now some faceless bureaucrat is going to punish any gay person they find because they are illegal, and they are going to do so with the full might on the state. Its back to stoning, conversion torture, or throwing the gays off roof tops. By my definition I have advocated for those policies, I have advocated for violence. So I think your definition is naive in the extreme.

I'm honestly pretty confused by this paragraph. By my definition in this example, you have advocated for violence. Advocating for violence is not the same as committing violence. Furthermore, if you want to say that advocating for violence in the sense of pushing for the state's monopoly on violence to be wielded in some direction is violence, it seems to me that, again, you're saying that, in the realm of politics, all words are swords. Again, fair enough if that's your worldview (but, again, then that raises the question of why you decided to point to this specific incident as if his status as a sword-user differentiated him from any other person who has ever stated a political opinion with the intent to change government policy, i.e. campaigned). I think some nuance between words and violence is valuable for keeping modern Western civilization as prosperous and easy to survive in, but there's plenty of room for me to be wrong.

So, again, there's a difference between convincing someone to enact violence and enacting violence oneself. Depending on the case, e.g. ordering a hitman to murder someone, the former can be just as bad as the latter. That doesn't make them equivalent or the same. I do believe that there's a significant difference in the "violence" committed by someone lobbying AOC or even AOC herself and the "violence" committed by Mangione such that, if we decide to redefine "violence" to include things like the former, then we'd have to create subcategories of "violence" such that we're comparing like for like. Because the word "violence" is just a label, after all, and the point of separating it out from argumentation is that there's something meaningfully different between enacting violence itself and saying something, even if that saying is advocating for actions that play out in violence (i.e. literally every law ever).

Most everyone supports the right to own and drive cars despite the accepted cost of traffic deaths and drunk drivers. If I was killed by a drunk driver would the fair response be “Well, he supported car ownership so his death is deserved”?

Only if your position is that its ok to drink and drive and if we need to accept that some people will die for our freedom to do so. Then if you were killed by a drunk driver would that not be a logical conclusion of your position applied fairly to all agents in the societal system?

  • -23

No. In the analogy car ownership=gun ownership. Some bad actors will ill use cars, some will ill use guns. It is exactly analogous as I stated it. Should I be accepting of the possibility I will be killed by a drunk driver if I support car ownership? Yes, I suppose. But virtually no one would say my death is deserved, laughable or worthy of mockery because of it.

Car=gun. Drunk driver=insane assassin.

The analogy is then you advocate for cars, and think that people driving cars is worth the few deaths they cause. you get into a car and are killed by someone else using a car maliciously/or not. I'm sure a horse drawn carriage lobby would laugh at your death, as you getting the just desserts of your position.

Drunk driving would be the gun control position: that we should stop people who use cars dangerously from operating them. You say we that doing so is an infringement on the right to drive cars. You are then killed by a drunk driver. Your original analogy was too biased towards your position.

Notice I said I don't condone the celebration. But people are allowed to point it out, and appreciate the irony. That's not 300000 mil lefties thirsting for your blood or whatever nonsense you are working your head into.

  • -24

I'm shocked anyone is shocked. These people have not been quiet or subtle about wanting you dead for like, 10 years now.

Back when I used to live in Northern VA, and it was just assumed by everyone living there that an evil Trump supporter could not possibly be among them, you heard it all the time. The guy working at Trader Joe's who did their wine tastings and was friends with my wife making offhand comments about how great it would be if someone killed Trump. Chatter at the farmer's market around the local Democrat chapter's booth. The weird boomer-folk concert at Wolf Trap I got dragged to by my father in law that opened with an affirmation that it would be great if someone murdered Trump, and his supporters really don't deserve any sympathy either. The NYT publishing their assassination fan fiction, Kathy Griffin holding Trump's severed head, etc, etc. My mother in law got suspended from Twitter for Tweeting that someone should assassinate Trump. That guy who opened for Weird Al that went on the rant about how great it is that the unvaxed are all going to die.

It was only when Trump was finally shot at that the public, mainstream, casual calls for his death started getting tamped down slightly. Tenacious D comes to mind. Of course that didn't stop Destiny from saying it's a good thing an innocent bystander was killed, because that still means one less Trump supporter. Didn't seem to impact his career one iota, though it seems his unhinged behavior has finally dimmed his star somewhat in recent months.

There are stories like this all over that people are sharing, of living covert lives in deep blue areas, and the naked bloodlust on display constantly. If you think wanting Trump, his supporters, and his staff dead isn't a mainstream Democrat position, you have either constructed a labyrinth of cognitive dissonance about why it "doesn't count" because it's simply so common it's normal to you, or you are lying. And I don't care how many liars come out now with their mealy mouthed "We do not condone violence" rehearsed speeches. I refuse to forget the last 10 years.

There are stories like this all over that people are sharing, of living covert lives in deep blue areas, and the naked bloodlust on display constantly. If you think wanting Trump, his supporters, and his staff dead isn't a mainstream Democrat position, you have either constructed a labyrinth of cognitive dissonance about why it "doesn't count" because it's simply so common it's normal to you, or you are lying. And I don't care how many liars come out now with their mealy mouthed "We do not condone violence" rehearsed speeches. I refuse to forget the last 10 years.

Yes, a thousand times, this.

I think it was Seamus Coughlin on Auron MacIntyre's recent show who made the point that the Left have always been violent at their core, since they first began in the French Revolution and brought the Reign of Terror. (And I think it was Auron who went from there that this explains why they tend to ally with Muslims — despite all their differences, they're both violent movements that want sincere Christians dead.)

Edit:

Of course that didn't stop Destiny from saying it's a good thing an innocent bystander was killed, because that still means one less Trump supporter. Didn't seem to impact his career one iota, though it seems his unhinged behavior has finally dimmed his star somewhat in recent months.

And now we'll see what the effect on his popularity is from his current take on this issue:

It's gonna be a call for the left to condemn, or disavow, or whatever the fuck. Anybody on the left that does any sort of disavowal whatever bullshit, I think is cucked and weak. I saw Newsom doing it earlier. Umm, no.

FreedomToons' video after the Trump assassination attempt satirized this quite well. "Trump supporters are already alleging that we encouraged the brave hero who shot at him." "There is no room for political violence against the Nazi who is a living embodiment of all our trauma." It's sadly not all that far from actual rhetoric.

There are a few principled voices who unequivocally condemn political violence, for or against their side. But that's not what engages people.

I'll toss out, I don't follow him a lot, or at all really. But Cenk Uygur is virtually the only lefty I've seen not 1000% on board the "Trump is evil and we must murder all his followers" train. I watched him argue for an hour with Krystal Ball, before I couldn't stand her anymore, that there was tons of populist common ground between MAGA and the populist left where progress could be made. That MAGA is not a cult, and they push back when Trump doesn't follow through with his populist agenda. That Don Jr and JD Vance are open to a lot of populist left proposals.

Krystal of course dismissed all this as hopeless because they're all brainwashed fascist and there is no hope in stopping or reforming any of them inside the democratic system.

Even now Cenk is saying that we need peace and reconciliation after this shooting, and because he's on the left, he'll apologize first. And I believe him.

Krystal's latest round of fake tears and pretending that blanket dismissing everyone who disagrees with her as capital F-Fascist who are irredeemable had nothing to do with this I find less convincing.

Thanks for sharing this bit about Cenk. I know very little about him but, in times like these it's heartening to discover that prominent members of your outgroup are more honorable and principled than you had assumed. A little ray of hope.

Wow, yeah. Cenk's tweet is perfect. And I remember he was similarly classy and principled after Trump's near miss. He's way to the left of me, but it's clear that he's just a fundamentally decent person. If we could only incentivize having more pundits like him, political discourse in this country would be much, much healthier.

Wow some niche internet gossip I rarely see around here! What the hell happened to Krystal? It seems like her brain is just fully broken at this point. She broke up her family to go marry the coworker she was obviously cheating with, and the show she in some sense started with Saagar Enjeti rarely features him anymore. The times where he and Krystal are together, they frequently end up just bicker: https://youtube.com/watch?v=fcLqYwo4Z4o

I'll be honest I used to watch their show daily, and even tried to become a premium subscriber. Now I'll tune in sometimes as a hate listen, and can rarely make it more than a minute or so.

I donno man. I was a premium subscriber since they started Breaking Points, they were my goto for live coverage or reactions to the debates or election nights. But I made it about a month into this administration before I just couldn't handle it anymore, unsubscribed after years, and told them explicitly why. I don't hate watch, or check clips, or anything anymore. It's best to make a clean break from people you were fans of. No need to add insult to injury watching their trajectory.

Kathy Griffin holding Trump's severed head, etc, etc.

Honestly, I always thought that one was in bounds. Killing your opponents in effigy is good clean political fun; I think Griffin got the outsized reaction because the head was so viscerally disturbing. There's a lot that you mentioned that's worse.

But we all know that if James Woods had posed holding an effigy of the severed head of Hillary Clinton he'd be accused of misogyny, inciting violence, stochastic terrorism etc.

There's not even a need to speculate: A rodeo clown in Texas lost his job for wearing an Obama mask. And the State Fair apologized profusely. One side of the aisle is considered out of bounds when it comes to mockery.

Taken in isolation, perhaps it is in bounds. But the vast aggregate of other incidents drag it out of bounds IMHO.

Most of them came after, I believe.

Yeah as a big believer in the fundamental strength of “the system” and very much a “nothing ever happens” guy…seeing the normiesadism from people on my Facebook feed has definitely shaken me. I’m fortunate enough to not call any of these people good friends, although some were once, but it actually hurts in a way. While we weren’t 100% aligned my views definitely align more with Kirk’s views than they do with the left. We’re also the same age, our kids are the same age…would these people be happy at my death too? It is perception shifting and not in a positive way

We’re also the same age, our kids are the same age.

This is exactly my feeling. These are people I have dinner with. I have a dinner scheduled with them for next month...do they want to kill me?

Posting the second amendment quote is kind of low IQ (every policy position has trade offs) and is pretty tasteless but I wouldn’t consider it beyond the pale. But I wouldn’t want to be around the people actively celebrating it

I’ve seen like a dozen tweets from people whose opinions I normally respect which are some variation of, “I used to think cancel culture was bad, but then I saw these absolutely despicable comments from leftists and of course they need to lose their irrelevant-to-politics service-sector job.” And then I look at the screenshots and it’s just some lady who didn’t like Charlie Kirk pointing out the irony of his positions on gun control.

a crisis that I don't know if there's any way to solve.

Consider the possibility that there may not be such a way. That Left and Right, as they stand nowadays, represent mutually exclusive memeplexes that are both internally cohesive enough to not collapse on their own. That the conflict must escalate until one side conclusively defeats the other, or until a third party forces an entirely new paradigm onto the belligerents.

From the Irish perspective, all my normie colleagues in work (one of whom is a liberal Canadian expat) are saying he had it coming. I expect there'll be a lot of tongue-biting today.

There's apparently a video going around of the attack, but I haven't a desire to see it.

Mildly interesting article from the Associated Press: Graphic video of Kirk shooting was everywhere online, showing how media gatekeeper role has changed (original title "Graphic Charlie Kirk video spread fast, showing media’s fading grip")

Traditional news organizations were cautious in their midafternoon coverage of Charlie Kirk’s assassination Wednesday not to depict the moment he was shot, instead showing video of him tossing a hat to his audience moments before, and panicked onlookers scattering wildly in the moments after.

In practical terms, though, it mattered little. Gory video of the shooting was available almost instantly online, from several angles, in slow-motion and real-time speed. Millions of people watched.

On X, there was a video showing a direct view of Kirk being shot, his body recoiling and blood gushing from a wound. One video was a loop showing the moment of impact in slow-motion, stopping before blood is seen. Another, taken from Kirk’s left, included audio that suggested Kirk was talking about gun violence at the moment he was shot.

For more than 150 years, news organizations like newspapers and television networks have long been accustomed to “gatekeeping” when it comes to explicit content—making editorial decisions around violent events to decide what images and words appear on their platforms for their readers or viewers. But in the fragmented era of social media, smartphones and instant video uploads, editorial decisions by legacy media are less impactful than ever.

Across the country in Ithaca, New York, college professor Sarah Kreps’ teenage sons texted her about Kirk’s assassination shortly after school was dismissed and they could access their phones.

No, she told them. He was shot, but there were no reports that he had died. Her son answered: Have you seen the video? There’s no way he could have survived that.

I feel like media norms around sharing footage have loosened a bit. There was a recent machete attack in Melbourne, Australia a week or so ago and major news platforms had the video on autoplay when you clicked the article which really feels like something that wouldn't have been a thing a couple years back.

I think I remember reading somewhere that, when Oliver Stone's film JFK came out, for many audiences it was the first time they'd seen the Zapruder film which shows the moment Kennedy was shot, and there were audible gasps of horror during screenings. It's hard to imagine a similar reaction nowadays.

It's interesting, because per capita murder rates have steeply declined in the last hundred years. In 1924, the USA's homicide rate was 10.8/100k; in 2023, it was 5.8/100k. On its face, this suggests that the number of people who personally witness a murder in a given calendar year has roughly halved, and likewise that the number of people who would truthfully answer in the affirmative to the question "in your lifetime, have you personally witnessed someone being murdered?" has fallen precipitously. If you expand the question to "personally witnessed someone being killed", the comparison would be even more striking given the fall in military enlistment over the period (in 1980, 18% of American adults were veterans, compared to 6% in 2022).

And yet over the same period, the number of people who have watched graphic, high-definition footage of someone being killed has shot up, when as little as two generations ago the number of people who could accurately claim to have seen footage of this type would have been a rounding error.

This invites the question - are current generations more desensitised to violence than previous generations, or less?

This invites the question - are current generations more desensitised to violence than previous generations, or less?

Desensitized towards media violence, but violence that would have been essentially completely unnotable 100 years ago such as wife beating or random pub punch-ons stick out a lot more. I'm in my thirties and can't really remember the last meaningful unlawful violence I saw in person that wasn't essentially just direct escalation from sport into punches being thrown.

number of people who would truthfully answer in the affirmative to the question "in your lifetime, have you personally witnessed someone being murdered?" has fallen precipitously.

Might this be confounded by advances in medical technology and practice?

Violence that resulted in death in 1924 would likely be more survivable in 2023.

Some number of 1924's murders would be 2023's attempted murder or assault with intent, etc.

I have read the decline in the homicide rate is dominated by better medical care.

I think this, combined with much stronger deterrents against violence like virtually omnipresent surveillance & a much stricter identification system, actually suggests that as a society we are actually more violent than before, at least on the long tail of extreme violence.

It does certainly seems true that low level violence like fist fights or domestic abuse seems to have lessened, but that seems to me a function of deterrence against relatively rational actors. Extreme violent actors are less easy to deter, maybe near impossible.

I think the desire and ability to conduct extreme levels of violence has plainly never been easier, and I think on a memetic / psychological level the desire for violence is through the goddamn roof.

I think in ways that are difficult to point to statistically, we very well might be in the most violent age of man since we lived as hunter gatherers and the most likely cause of death for men was murder.

A forum / memeplex founded by rationalist quokka types are going to be logically one of the last places to really feel this in their gut. I applaud the pro-social nature of some of the puzzled faces around here but the heat just got turned up a whole lot and I’m nervously looking at the clock tick up towards midnight.

This invites the question - are current generations more desensitised to violence than previous generations, or less?

Desensitised to violent media, fictional and otherwise, certainly more.

Desensitised to violence happening in their immediate physical surroundings, certainly less.

Of course, but I'm wondering how the two interact. If you've personally witnessed someone being killed right in front of you, does it make you less upset when you watch a violent film, or more (i.e. does it "trigger" you, in the literal, non-ironic sense of the term)? If you've watched countless hours of high-definition footage of people really being killed, would you find it less upsetting to see the real thing right before your eyes, or more?

I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.

When Charlie Kirk was on the up and up along with other figures like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes riding the new political wave Trump ushered in, I can remember the presence of numerous conservatives who hated him for his gatekeeping of the mainstream within the new conservative movement. I'm not just talking about the Nick Fuentes faction either. Kirk attacked quite a few conservatives because they didn't fall in line by upholding the status quo of the mainline punditry and conservative mainstream. And that was a cheap and quick path to be catapulted into riches and be put in front of cameras. Nothing Charlie Kirk did was unique in the larger view of his activities. Fuentes is presently mourning over the loss, but the response I'm being hit with tells me even more right-wingers hated Charlie Kirk than his actual opposition does. There's quite a bit of celebrating here on my back end of things.

I think this is underestimating his influence. In the aftermath of the shooting I could not find the actual articles and videos, but I watched some discussion of Democrat operatives who were actually praising how Charlie Kirk was actually an exceptionally shrewd operator for Republicans, especially in the space of young men the Democrats are now talking about in the aftermath of the last presidential election - and I am talking about day-to-day operations, how his activities actually translated into voter registrations or organizational movement toward concrete political action.

He was apparently more than just some right-wing talking head or influencer with clips and gotchas on social media. He was able to organize, lead and move things on the ground politically - he literally cofounded Turning Point USA in 2012 and worked in the same way since then. Think of him as a combination of let's say Andrew Wilson or Ben Shapiro with their debate skills, combined with organizer like Scott Presler. I think he was a prototype of the new type of politician, which is rather rare. Not all internet influencers can translate their audience into mainstream success. It is a shame that he is dead, he really had a bright career ahead of him.

This all goes to the point I was making earlier. This is why I said he was good for the right-wing establishment, but was bad for philosophical conservatism. I'm sure he was effective when it came to mobilizing resources and support for the establishment cause, which is why the money began to flow in for him. It was all but guaranteed to happen if you're someone who says to the media establishment and major political power brokers that you'll uphold their cause and talking points if given their backing.

This is why I consider people like like Charlie Kirk a stooge more than some kind of deep thinker, because he wasn't intellectually sophisticated at all. I forget what the occasion was and can't find the video presently, but I remember one of Nick Fuentes fan's heckling him during a speech Q&A where he's droning on about the Bush tax cuts, and the guy practically rolls his eyes and says to the rest of the audience, "okay, does anyone here care one damn bit about the 'Bush tax cuts'?" This is what most people I knew thought of Charlie Kirk. What people wanted at the time he first appeared on the scene was the entire political framework of assumptions thrown out. Fuentes wanted a new set of assumptions, I'm not sure what Owens wanted, but several people no longer wanted to hear the same tired diatribe on repeat, because Trump himself in 2016 threw the whole political playbook completely out the window and a new generation of activists saw it as their opportunity to make change. People like Charlie Kirk were quick to prevent that change from happening by bolting down the same frame of arguments to stop the challenge to American political orthodoxy. This is why he was bad for philosophical conservatism. Not emblematic of a deep thinker.

Can confirm, I never liked the guy, his whole shtick was delivering mild takes and being some one who could soak up the random normies so they don't discover anything more real. I'm really wonder why would anyone want to shoot him specifically, was it a glowie op to escalate tensions? Was it some deranged TDS leftoid who thinks a milquetoast nobody like Charlie Kirk is a real threat. I don't know. It's going to be interesting to see if the shooter has a manifesto.

A lot of people on the right didn't like him, but the only group on the right I know who really hated him were the groypers. Were there more?

Were there more?

The TRS/1488 crowd? Particularly the ones who are currently blaming this on Da Joos, like this specimen on Twitter:

It had to be Mossad.

They did this to say “if you step out of line in the slightest, we will kill you in the most gruesome way, while the entire world is watching and then laugh. Fall in line goyim.”

Signals need to be somewhat unambiguous to be effective though. That’s why Putin conducts his assassinations with Russian-government-accessible-only poisons.

Agreed. I didn't say it was a good argument, just that this is another sort of person on the right who disliked Kirk.

Of course, just thinking aloud.

A “trantifa” posted this the day before. Might be the shooter

/images/17575931064610343.webp

I'm still a "Nothing Ever Happens" kind of person, but the last two weeks have been some of the worst I've seen for the left.

August 27, 2025: Annunciation Catholic Church shooting

The Charlotte stabbing occurred on August 22, but the video was released on September 5.

And now this.

I was checking the temperature with my leftie friends about the Charlotte stabbing. I thought that what had the chance to be a disruptor seemed to barely be on my left-wing friends' radar. This cranks it to 11. Now their response to this is... "Well, from me he'll get all of the same empathy and compassion he gave to marginalized groups." I asked for some of the worse things he said and got the gun control quote:

I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.

These are more left-wing than the average Democrat but not crazy blue-haired antifa types. Charlie is such an awful target. Trump, Fuentes, I could wrap my head around. But in this case, they really did just kill a rather milquetoast Republican.

William Wolfe, retweeted by JD Vance:

This gets even worse when you consider that Charlie Kirk—more than anyone else in America on the right or the left—built his platform making a good faith effort to model civil poltical discourse and debate in the public square.

His entire project was built on reaching across the divide and using speech, not violence, to address and resolve the issues!

Edit: A comment on the gun control take. What's a great gun to take someone out from 200 yards? Papa's deer rifle.

There's unconfirmed reports that the rifle was a Mauser bolt-action, with antifa/pro-trans statements carved on the cartridges found alongside the weapon.

https://xcancel.com/scrowder/status/1966118431511433267

If it is indeed a dirt old, cheap, relatively abundant surplus bolt action, and considering the shooter only had to take one shot, I think it'll be hard to make the usual gun control arguments for this one. At least regarding the weapon.

There's unconfirmed reports that the rifle was a Mauser bolt-action, with antifa/pro-trans statements carved on the cartridges found alongside the weapon.

CNN referred to them as "cultural phrases" and "phrases related to cultural issues" in their reporting.

Oh my, I have choice "cultural phrases" to say about this new euphemism

If it is indeed a dirt old, cheap, relatively abundant surplus bolt action, and considering the shooter only had to take one shot, I think it'll be hard to make the usual gun control arguments for this one. At least regarding the weapon.

Former NYC mayor David Dinkins made a push for gun control after a rash of stabbings.

Kirk bit the bullet and acknowledged his preferred policy option had a drawback and the internet mercilessly bullied him after he was murdered. Almost all policy options have some drawback but a lot of advocates will not acknowledge this and will not try and defend the tradeoff. Policy options that have no tradeoffs are presumably rare because such a policy would be very popular and so presumably would already be implemented. People acknowledging drawbacks is something the rationalist space should be getting behind but it wouldn't surprise me if part of that community were needling Kirk as well.

Any policy option that is without drawbacks or tradeoffs is also merely symbolic and, quite literally, ineffective.

its theoretically possible the government could be running a policy that is harmful to everyone or harmful to a subset of people and neutral to everyone else and so removing such a policy would leave no one worse off. there is also bunch of literature in economics about pareto improvements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency). though, i think they there is a larger possible space of such improvements if you tax the winners of improvements and compensate the losers so the losers are no worse off. also, i think there is some term for doing this but then not doing the compensation because of 'efficiency' or some other reason.

An old economics professor once told me that "unfortunately, the only actual Pareto improvement I know of is to allow right turns on red"

Right on red intersections have like 30% more pedestrians run over by cars, I'm not sure that's a good example of a pareto improvement. Did the prof have legs?

Well there you go, I guess there are no Pareto improvements in the world.

As always, disgusting. As always, it's going to backfire on whatever political positions the perpetrator holds. Dems are either going to have to moderate and cut off crazy fringe to avoid alienating the majority, or they'll just lose. Either way, whatever causes the shooter believed in are worse off for it. Abject stupidity and waste of life.

Dems are either going to have to moderate and cut off crazy fringe to avoid alienating the majority

A man can dream.

Abject stupidity and waste of life.

Amen.

As always, it's going to backfire on whatever political positions the perpetrator holds. Dems are either going to have to moderate and cut off crazy fringe to avoid alienating the majority, or they'll just lose.

Much like Republicans moderated, cut off the crazy fringe, or "just lost" after Gabby Giffords got shot in 2011.

There may be a short term reaction to this, but it's an off year so any electoral impact will be limited to odd local and state elections. Too much runway before we hit the midterms, there are by a normal year pace going to be a half dozen more mass shootings before that. The left might lose a few randomly selected commentators who are disgraced by their reaction to this, but by 2028 Charlie Kirk will be the conservative wonk's Lane Frost: a T shirt slogan, but no ongoing impact.

Possibly. I had thought there was more space between Floyd and the 2020 election.

I'm not expecting people to be specifically fired up about Charlie Kirk in 2026, but by the same token, 2026 is not shaping up to be 2018. From 2016-2018 we had massive protests and anger. From inauguration 'til now, it's been one thing after another taking the wind out of Dems sails and motivating voters on the right. Gun control, trans rights, racial equity are all 100% out the window until at least 2028 and even then I doubt the public will have much appetite for any of those issues, no? Isn't that forcing them to moderate and move away from the left?

But who knows, you're right that a couple years is a long time and I sure as hell wouldn't have had a good prediction record if you asked me in the fall of 2021/2017 what would happen that election cycle.

Gun control's back on the agenda. Banning guns for transgenders and also (checks notes) bolt action hunting rifles.

I think you're wrong because of one very specific and personal reason. Charlie Kirk was a personal friend with most or all of the conservative and right wing pundits. The video of Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck both getting emotional when they're live streaming and learn that Kirk died is all over the place. A ton of others - Ben Shapiro and the DailyWire gang, Benny Johnson, etc. also had really personal stories to share about Kirk.

So, a year from now, right before midterms, these people aren't going to make the cold journalistic calculation of what the remaining salience of Kirk is for their viewers. They're going to remember their friend and talk about him.

Gabby Giffords was, you know, in Congress. And presumably knew many fellow congressmen personally, who had no interest in letting the issue drop. She also had the advantage of being a woman, and of being horrifically crippled rather than killed, which is I think worse. The results in 2012 were, I suppose, a Democratic bump but moderate in impact: they added two seats to their Senate majority and bit eight seats out of the Republican House majority. The equivalent impact towards R next year would add up to the R's holding 227 seats in the House, and 56 in the Senate. Which would improve the Republican position quite a bit when trying to corral the loony bin for budget bills, but it's not the death of the Democrats.

And four years later the Republicans would return with much extremer rhetoric and win the Presidency, House, and Senate in a huge upset.

Charlie Kirk's death is unfortunate, but it's not some kind of win-now button. If it were, we would have actually seen a false flag before.

Much like Republicans moderated, cut off the crazy fringe, or "just lost" after Gabby Giffords got shot in 2011.

I think there's a meaningful difference here, which is that per my memory, the Republicans did not endorse Gabby Giffords' shooting. I remember where I was when I heard about it, and the horror and anger in the room were more intense because of the strength of our right-wing convictions, not less. Insofar as I remember our reaction being ghoulish, it was only that we were worried we'd be blamed for it, not that there was any celebrating.

It's a while ago now, so I'm not going to claim I have the mood dead to rights, but I mostly recall Republicans quickly circling the wagons around avoiding gun control legislation more than anything.

What I'm saying that Republicans didn't do was moderate on their rhetoric, or disappear from public life. The modern Republican party is more extreme in its rhetoric in every way than the party in 2011, and it's in power. Mitt Romney vs Donald Trump as standard bearer.

What they didn't do was publicly dance on Gabby Giffords' grave everywhere on the internet within five minutes of her being gruesomely blown away live in front of the entire internet. These are not remotely comparable situations.

  1. Did they find the shooter by now? If not, then the only thing anyone has to go on is his choice of target. And as far as I know, crazies choose targets for the most harebrained reasons.
  2. It's often hard to conclusively determine what someone thinks. Making it easy requires having previously observed him consistently occupying the same position over a long time. But what one usually gets instead is a biography of political flip-flopping and a schizo manifesto at the end that may as well be a deliberate false flag.
  3. Even when you can clearly tell which side someone belonged to, there's not actually a need for anyone on that side to act in any manner. In this case, the Dems don't have to do a damn thing. The man was clearly a lone wolf, and crazy, and besides gun violence is a systemic problem and we needn't get all flustered now just because it was a Republican who got shot for once, thoughts and prayers etc.
  4. Next big thing comes along and the whole story is forgotten again.

This works both ways, of course.

The biggest shock to me was that this happened in Utah of all places. That's like a fat, blue haired activist giving a lecture on transphobia getting shot in the middle of Seattle.

Relatively low security university, easy escape into low surveillance territory. Possibly suggests it's someone a little more thinking than the average schizo but who knows.

This misunderstands the nature of blue vs red states. Even the reddest states contain blue tribe towns, even in the bluest cities the cops and construction workers are red tribe. At a glance, only in West Virginia did either Kamala or Trump get below 30% of the vote, with Kamala coming in at 29%.

No I get it. Just as outside the urban centers most of California is red. I always tell people whenever they ask, that I was born in "Red State California." It's just not the typical place people would place their bets on.

That shows you the remaining divide between "Blue Tribe" and "Democrat". West Virginia isn't dominantly Republican but it is certainly dominantly "Red Tribe".

Red tribe democrats still exist, but They Are Old and a shrinking minority.

I'm not sure what you're saying. West Virginia is dominantly Republican, the most republican state by vote share in 2024!

But even if you peel off half or more of that Democratic vote share as red tribe democrats and ignore the possibility of blue tribe Republicans, that still leaves 10-15% of the voters as blue tribe. Which is more than enough people to produce a single lone gunman, QED.

There's nowhere in the continental united states where you're more than a few hours on the highway from members of your outgroup.

I guess they are dominantly Republican now. But they elected Manchin and Byrd for many years on end, not so long ago.

Oh ok sorry I get what you're saying now. I agree West Virginia is certainly more Red Tribe or MAGA than it is doctrinaire partisan Republican; what I'm getting at is more that even in a Red Tribe state there are Blue Tribe individuals and communities within driving distance. Ergo it's not that surprising for there to be a (presumably) leftist assassin in Utah, or in turn a Proud Boys march/riot in the PNW.

it's going to backfire on whatever political positions the perpetrator holds

I'm going to reiterate the bit where a right-wing nut murdered two Democratic politicians in July, planned to murder more, and the right just brassed it out and said he was secretly a leftist. Why moderate? What's the point? Who will be swayed by it? Their enemies won't care and won't respect it.

The guy's motivations were all over the place and the footprint of the legislators was comparatively tiny. Trying to equivocate that to this public shooting is just insane gotchaism

IMO the point is valid: Both sides are perfectly capable of ignoring or quickly forgetting about political violence that hits the other side. But they do remember when their own side is hit.

What was the political motivations of the Minnesota shooter? Seemed like it never got confirmed one way or another

At least one redditor I reasonably trust to not lie through their teeth says it was confirmed it was about his anti-abortion stance but they didn't have a link convenient, and I haven't found any news article on the topic that confirms that.

You might need to reevaluate your trust in this unknown Redditor

/images/1757623501525839.webp

LOL will do!

I just think trying to parallel the two is asinine. The whole legislators story barely even lasted in the news since it wasn't compelling enough once they figured out the shooter was more of a crazy person and nobody particularly cared about the victims enough to generate that level of notability.

Well, when the guy said he was on a mission from Tim Walz it seems hard to brand him as a right-wing nut.
Though I agree there's no point in moderating. Don't think such a thing even lasted a day when Trump was shot and it's debatable whether there was any price for that.

The dude was definitely a right winger who was deep into qanon style conspiracies.

He could have also been crazy, the two are not mutually exclusive.

right winger who was deep into qanon style conspiracies.

He could have also been crazy, the two are not mutually exclusive.

I would say for qanon the two are mutually required.

I also am skeptical that this will obviously backfire. I think I have to admit that disgusting as it is, this is a pretty big win for the left, as Kirk was unusually successful at grassroots organizing and reaching young people. There will be 15 minutes of outrage obviously, but his effective work, which might have continued for decades, is done permanently.

disgusting as it is, this is a pretty big win for the left

The chilling effect is likely to be extreme, but that might cut both ways.

Kirk would have been a serious contender for holding Office as well, maybe even higher office, it's a significant blow to the Conservative movement.

They will not moderate, they will double down. Their base demands it. All bluesky is now alight in celebration of the murder. There are a lot of reports and posts in public of people celebrating, many more just do it privately. And I am not so convinced they will lose. Madmani seems to be doing pretty well, despite his open support of political violence and his absolutely nutty plans of building New-York SSR. I don't think we have revulsion to political violence as a common value anymore.

Reddit is a lot bigger than bluesky, and it is also full of this stuff. Reddit is a problem

More and more I feel like deleting reddit from my phone and nearly never visiting the site (it has been about a month this time) has been a very good choice.

It's not Reddit that is a problem. Reddit allows the demons to reveal themselves, but it didn't create them. It's schools, academia, press, Hollywood and other cultural conduits that had normalized violence for years. Look how many teachers are publicly endorsing the murder. They all think it's completely fine, and encouraging more of it. And it's not like it's new - same happened after Trump assassinations and after Thompson murder. It's a deeply sick culture, whose sickness had been cultivated and endorsed for years, Reddit and bluesky just lay it bare for everybody to see.

All bluesky is now alight in celebration of the murder

I doubt /all/ of them are. I have seen many calls for lowering temperatures, denouncing it, etc. meanwhile I have seen several highly popular right wing facebook groups that seem positively giddy that this might give them some excuse to kill leftists.

It is clear that your purpose in making that statement is political rather than factual.

Of course it's political. We have a party that had been calling all the opponents "Nazis", "enemies of democracy", "worse than Hitler", and thousand more variants, and it had led to a number of murders and attempted murders already (anybody remembers James Hodgkinson?). It's not like it's some kind of random occurrence, a meteor strike out of the blue, a random victim of senseless violence outburst. It's a predictable result of a coordinated and deliberate campaign of hate. Yes, not literally everybody on the left participates in this campaign - but all observable leftist spaces are ripe with it, there are hundreds of examples, and there is no meaningful pushback on it. We know how hard the left can push to drive out an unpopular opinion. This obviously is not one of those opinions. No prominent leftist figure - except for Sen. Fetterman, who is an exception in many cases concerning the left nowdays - had done anything more than rote "oh noes, we don't endorse violence, please keep on keeping on" kind of condemnation. And many of those who is doing rote condemnations now had been participating in the hate campaign days or weeks before. People on the lower rungs of the ladder don't even bother with that - the leftist press if basically "well, he spoke things we didn't like, what do you expect would happen?!" and the masses on social media are like "good job, let's have a celebratory drink, who's next?" Yes, not literally everybody, but enough to see where the dominating vector is pointing to.

So yes, this is a political thing and it's totally appropriate to discuss it as a political thing. It's a political murder.

The only ones I see denouncing it on leftie spaces are saying “think of the backlash against peaceful democrats”

I just went on Bluesky with a fresh new account and searched for Kirk and sorted by top and scrolled by around 30 posts before I found one saying the death of Charlie Kirk was wrong and it was still accompanied by "And Charlie Kirk was a horrible, hateful man who spent his life radicalizing young people to embrace their worst demons by targeting women, people of color, immigrants, and the marginalized."

Gavin Newsom did create a series of post trying to lower temperature and denouncing it. The top reply is calling this sympathy stupid because Gavin Newsome had something nice to say about Charlie Kirk. Most of the top replies are talking trash about Charlie Kirk.

We should expect politicians to denounce political violence, as they have skin in the game. The lack of top posts from non politicians showing any sympathy is pretty telling. I scrolled around 100 posts and found 4 sympathetic messages from top democrat leaders/politicians, 2 from people I don't know stating celebrating his death is wrong, like 7-8 news articles and the rest is a mix of gleeful, critical, or who cares messaging. " 80-90% of the top 100 posts celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk is about as close to all as you can in how the word "all" is used colloquially. Although yes I guess jarjarjedi could've been more precise in his speech I don't think it's far off from the truth.

I just went on Bluesky with a fresh new account and searched for Kirk and sorted by top and scrolled by around 30 posts before I found one saying the death of Charlie Kirk was wrong and it was still accompanied by "And Charlie Kirk was a horrible, hateful man who spent his life radicalizing young people to embrace their worst demons by targeting women, people of color, immigrants, and the marginalized."

I consider myself a dissident rightist harboring no illusions about this entire matter but I do sort of wonder – is there any school of thought that is not of the third/fourth wave lipstick feminist / liberal / ‘progressive’ variety that these posters would ever be willing to not categorize as horrible, hateful, radicalizing (whatever that word even means in their minds) and demonic?

Islam when considered as a distant belief system of oppressed people

Interesting. I don't doubt you but I don't use blue sky. My reddit feed is not filled with anything I'd call celebrating. Many sarcastic "thoughts and prayers", and many pointing out supposed ironies about his stance on gun control, lots of " this is a bad for the country".

I don’t use Reddit, but I’ve been checking /r/politics periodically over the past 24 hours to see the reaction there. The reaction from the mods has been to delete every post about his death. Most of the comments I saw before the posts were deleted were either celebratory or smugly satisfied.

I don't either, which is why I took a few minutes to check, and I'm sure if I dig deep enough I can find more people on bluesky who at least has the ability to acknowledge this is not something to be celebrated. I think this just means your feed consists of Subreddits with higher quality users, which I would not be surprised for someone who has come to the motte.

Yeah I clicked over to the "popular" feed on reddit, but, same thing? Maybe I am in a weird filter bubble

I have heard that reddit admins were rapidly purging anything celebrating his death from the site. There were apparently entire popular posts from /r/politics that were removed.

More comments

Bluesky is, as we speak, dogpiling Gavin Newsom for saying political assassinations are bad. Yes it is an exaggeration to suggest that literally every single bskyist is like that, but it definitely seems like a prevailing sentiment to me. "All [place] is alight" is less of a declaration of universal characterization across all individuals, and more a general description of the room.

It is very strange how I must be on the backfoot arguing that radical violence-enjoyer leftists exist, year after year, when they completely color every corner of the internet that isn't a total right wing bubble. Especially today, when I can engage with literally any left-leaning website on its own terms and see tons of justifications of this attack, and a sickening glee for it. I am sure emotions run high now even for me, but does this tell you nothing? Do you think these people do not exist?

I agree that there are a lot of opportunistic right wing extremists using this as an excuse to appeal to normies, by the way. These accounts were only looking for a pretense to violence pill conservanormies. Sure. But their job is extremely easy when you can do what I did and immediately find tons of people cheering the attack. This is not a fringe element you have to go out of your way to find, you will instead be shouted at for not embracing violence enthusiastically enough all across the usual sites. Are you not seeing it? The temperature is not lowered by the fact that these right-wingers are, by a simple glance at the state of lefty internet spaces, apparently factually correct in their assessment that the prevailing leftist voice wants their audience dead.

All bluesky is now alight in celebration of the murder

I doubt /all/ of them are.

It is very strange how I must be on the backfoot arguing that radical violence-enjoyer leftists exist, year after year, when they completely color every corner of the internet that isn't a total right wing bubble.

I was in the same position as Doubletree or 4bpp yesterday, reflexively ascribing this to a few left extremists nutpicked by the algorithm. But "he got what was coming to him, I have no empathy" really does seem to be the prevailing vibe on Reddit at least.

I've done well enough insulating myself from leftist online spaces after we left Reddit, I had somehow forgotten what it's like.

The News mods were doing their damndest to trim that while still allowing discussion, though - I recall them putting a temporary lock on the thread so thay could catch up with all the reports.

I'm not saying these people don't exist. I'm saying two things:

  1. The conservative fascination with politic violence goes far deeper than just a few "right wing extremist" accounts. This is just what the whole 2A/tree of liberty stuff is about. I

  2. we are in this (bad) place because of a runaway tribal culture war dynamic. Highly emotive statements that are not measured or specific in their claims oftenmake this problem worse, not better, and so anyone who wants the temperature to decrease should be careful about how they frame their posts.

Especially today, when I can engage with literally any left-leaning website on its own terms and see tons of justifications of this attack, and a sickening glee for it.

I have personally observed many sickening statements concerning, for example, Kilmar Garcia, coming from conservatives. what would your point be exactly?

  • -11

I will just be upfront and tell you that my concern is because the reasons people list that make Charlie Kirk murderable are reasons that could easily justify killing me all the same. This from a great deal of people I know. Charlie Kirk's rap sheet is seldom even about any tangible Harms, but just having bad takes. That is why people are celebrating. This isn't equivalent to wishing ill will on someone who was factually an illegal immigrant. In a moral human nature sense these can be equivocated I suppose, and I don't actually think him spending the rest of his life in a Venezuelan torture hole is a just outcome, but I do not think that is a fair comparison to my neighbors implicitly expressing that they would want my arteries perforated if they knew better.

I understand where you're coming from. Though realistically these people celebrating, it's all performative, for all except 1e-6% of them.

This isn't equivalent to wishing ill will on someone who was factually an illegal immigrant

theres a difference, but it's not huge. It's a crime to be here illegally but not such a crime that they deserve to be shipped off to a supermax prison, probably sodomized, etc.

This is just what the whole 2A/tree of liberty stuff is about.

No it is not. 2A is not for shooting people who try to debate us. 2A is for shooting people that try to shoot us. Or apply other form of explicit, organized and widespread violence. Kirk tried to talk to people, that's what he was shot for. It's the opposite of what 2A is about.

Yeah, sure, that's the motte. The Bailey is shooting effigies of democratic politicians, brandishing firearms at unarmed leftist protesters, and posting up open carry at polling places.

Conservatives are more than happy to use firearms as a political intimidating tactic.

"Unarmed leftist protesters" are prone to physically attacking people, just ask Andy Ngo. And "unarmed" is such a weasel word - if somebody bashes you skull in with a brick, was he "unarmed"? What about metal bike lock? Skateboard? Plain old glass bottle? Or the same filled with petrol and set on fire? Given how easy it is to conceal a knife, is there even a way to know somebody is "unarmed"? Especially when you facing a mob dressed in a way that is specifically designed to make them intimidating? In some situations, where people are clearly behaving aggressively, it's only prudent to assume they may escalate - and take measures to deter then from doing that.

And have you heard about the group named NFAC? Using the initials only to make it SFW. To be clear, I support the right of these guys to own arms as much as any other person, but what they are doing with their legally owned arms is nothing but intimidation. And Black Panthers are know for posting uniformed big guys "unarmed" with clubs at polling places - just to make coming there more fun and welcoming, I am sure. So when discussing intimidation, let's remember that.

But the most important thing is this: if those conservatives would want to intimidate you, they'd say "stay away from me, or else". What the left is saying is different - "shut up and cease to spread your message, or else". And "or else", in this case, is clearly demonstrated as being murder. And the lower ranks of the left explicitly and enthusiastically endorse it. They don't say "how horrible it is that it come to that", they say "what a joyous day, let's murder Musk and Trump next!".

The conservative fascination with politic violence goes far deeper than just a few "right wing extremist" accounts. This is just what the whole 2A/tree of liberty stuff is about.

I don't think this is quite right. The role of the 2A in both historic and contemporary normiecon consciousness is to provide for the capability of organized (i.e., militia) resistance, not terrorist attacks and political assassinations.

Conservatives generally have a better understanding of the ramifications of violence, instead of the weird channeled Left tendency where 95% of groups are totally off-limits for wishing so much as a stubbed toe upon them and then absolute outlandish threats of violence on whatever the preferred boogeyman. Racism and Transphobia being held as the absolute worst things in the world (since they're approved targets), or the outpourings of deathwishes upon non-vaxxers

Dems are either going to have to moderate and cut off crazy fringe to avoid alienating the majority, or they'll just lose.

Why would this make them lose? I mean, AIUI elections these days are decided primarily by relative turnout of the bases, not by persuading (or alienating) "moderates". And, further, it is also my understanding that an important part of increasing turnout is by improving morale. And, from what I see, what can better lift morale on that side, in this age of the ongoing Fascist takeover of America, than seeing brave compatriots engaging in successful #Resistance of that takeover, by giving one of those vile Nazis what they deserve?

Or maybe I'm just spending too much time on Tumblr (because that seems to be the mood there). Or I just remember too many clips from left-wing video streamers like Destiny talking about how Corey Comperatore deserved to die like he did because he was "a Nazi attending a Nazi rally."

Edit: and apparently Peachy Keenan agrees:

Do you realize what they will do if they ever win back the White House?

It will be Rwanda 2.0. And the worst part is: they can run on this and win. Their voters WANT it.

Gavin Newsom had a full podcast episode with Kirk earlier this year, and on Twitter he had this to say:

The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form.

Banal. But, interestingly, on Bluesky he went much further:

We should all feel a deep sense of grief and outrage at the terrible violence that took place in Utah today. Charlie Kirk’s murder is sick and reprehensible, and our thoughts are with his family, children, and loved ones. I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate. His senseless murder is a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence. The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate — never through violence. Honest disagreement makes us stronger; violence only drives us further apart and corrodes the values at the heart of this nation.

This did not, shall we say, make the Bluesky folks happy. But I do find it interesting that he's targeting Bluesky in particular with that message.

Smart politicians should always be against political violence, because it is the norm of nonviolence which keeps their private security budget reasonable. The more divisive they are and the higher their profile is, the more they need to be against political violence.

That said, there are many politicians who are not smart, who think they can win elections by dunking on the opposition instead of engaging. So it is a little bit refreshing to see Gavin Newsom post this.

Basically every politician is denouncing violence.

What strikes me about Newsom is that he's kicking the hornets nest here. He's going on Bluesky and writing a more extended commentary on Kirk that is positive. There's an intentionality to it: he (or his intern) isn't simply duplicating the same Tweet across platforms.

I'm speculating that this is part of a broader strategy of making the nastier parts of the Left hate him. Instead of going hard left all the time, he wants to take a center track, with his bonafides fortified by the most distasteful parts of the Democratic coalition hating him. (Who knows if it will work, but there's a certain logic to it.)

But it's also good in itself: telling people that Kirk was not the devil incarnate and was a human being with real virtues seems like it's a first step in ratcheting down the place the country finds itself.

Simpler, more cynical answer: His initial "denounce violence" post was met with a bunch of people replying with the photo he staged of himself mocking Trump's assassination attempt, while holding a bottle of ketchup to imply it was staged. He's embarrassed enough to pretend to care.

But I'll at least give him that he knows the proper words to say, which is significantly above the bar for politicians anymore.

Politicians gonna politic. I know what's in Newsom's soul--a gaping abyss--but if he at least pivots to mouthing the right words, I'm happy.

I would say that it is probably the most shocking video I have seen this year. Maybe the most shocking since 9/11. I havent really recovered from it because it was presented to me in a very awkward way and I was totally unprepared to see an assassination play out (more or less someone asked me if "I had seen what happened with Charlie Kirk?" then showed me the video).

But its just a 30-something guy in a button down sitting with a microphone, and then pop-blood. So much blood.

I have been trying to put my finger on why this one feels different, and a Facebook post from Nick Freitas has I think cleared it up for me.

Charlie tried to win that fight through argumentation, through discussion, through peaceful resolution of differences.

And the other side murdered him.

Not because he was “extreme” or “inciting violence” or any other hyperbolic slur they hurled at him. They murdered him because he was effective. Because he was unafraid. Because he inspired others and made them feel like they had a voice, that they were not alone. And he did it at the very institutions which have fomented so much hatred toward conservatives.

Charlie wasn't an elected official. He was a young man who was willing to speak up for his beliefs. His arguments were often not all that sophisticated; he did a better job as an avatar of free, heterodox expression in academic settings, than as an advocate for any particular position.

This was not an untargeted massacre, as sometimes happens. It was also not the assassination of a government figure or candidate for office, quite. When was the last time someone like Kirk was assassinated? Someone who stood for a political view (or, arguably, a tribe) but who was strictly involved at the level of discourse, rather than politics or government operation (e.g. the Israeli staffers)? What would that even look like, with tribal positions reversed? Would it even occur to a violent right-wing nutjob to go after someone like Kirk? Who even is the "Charlie Kirk of the Left?" What other figures in history occupied this peculiar niche? Maybe Martin Luther King, Jr.? Or (less effectively) the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, though that was an Islam thing rather than a red tribe/blue tribe thing.

Whatever the case, this one bothers me a lot more than any of the other recent violence. It feels like a truly, purely ideological hatred--not activism or civil disobedience, not "mostly peaceful protest" or even "unapologetically violent protest," more of an absolutely unhinged, Excessively Online commitment to "fuck the outgroup." Kirk was harmless in a way Donald Trump obviously isn't, even in a way state legislators and law enforcement aren't; he was not in any position to oppress the way even the lowliest of government officers and officials sometimes might. Kirk had no power but that of his voice.

Kirk was just talking.

And he got murdered for it.

Would you count journalists? A lot of these are personal, or credibly "wrong place wrong time," but there are a couple that stand out. Especially if you don't rule out mass killings. I guess I could imagine someone with a (real or, more likely, imagined) grudge against Kirk.

Commenters are going to say they hated him because he told the truth. Because he was somehow uniquely "dangerous" to a nebulous leftist project. But if that were enough, this wouldn't be so unusual.

Would you count journalists?

Possibly? Most of the deaths on that list look like interpersonal grudges, accidental deaths, warzones, etc. Robert Stevens (casualty in the Amerithrax attacks) looks like the most recent cleanish fit, to me--but he didn't quite have the political notoriety, I think. @professorgerm's identification of Alan Berg as a candidate looks like a better fit, to my eyes, and even there Berg does not seem to have been at Kirk's level.

The longer I think about this the more I find myself puzzling over the relative rarity of political celebrity without other celebrity (in particular, political office, but also e.g. Hollywood fame). I remember in the early 1990s there was a lot of "Elect Rush Limbaugh" merchandise floating around, to the point where Rush finally had to very publicly say (to the best of my recollection) "I'm an entertainer, not a politician, I'm not seeking office." It's not like there are no people out there who fall into the "professional political celebrity" bucket, but they're so few and far between that it probably shouldn't be a surprise that there aren't a lot of historic examples. Who else is arguably on Kirk's level? Cenk Uygur, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro? It's probably more common at the level of local or even perhaps state politics, but then people who take it upon themselves to become assassins do not generally prioritize "low value targets," so to speak. Well, depending on their level of derangement?

Commenters are going to say they hated him because he told the truth. Because he was somehow uniquely "dangerous" to a nebulous leftist project. But if that were enough, this wouldn't be so unusual.

I think both things can be true. If reports of trans and antifa slogans on the weapon are true, then "they hated him because he told the truth" looks like a pretty straightforward explanation of events. And no--of course that's not enough by itself. I think a person has to have pretty significant underlying mental and emotional derangement to go down the path of murder. But I'm increasingly concerned that we have not taken adequate account of the ways in which our cultural approach to politics now channels such derangement. Reading the comments on reddit celebrating Kirk's assassination is doing super effective damage to my hopes for America's future.

Who else is arguably on Kirk's level?

Destiny(Steven Bonnell), Hasan Piker, Ethan Klein, Vaush(Ian Anthony Kochinski)

What would that even look like, with tribal positions reversed?

I turned to ChatGPT with a question slightly more general, and the last example it could find of a similar event in the US- political commentator or similar public intellectual non-politician being assassinated or at least attempted- was Alan Berg in 1984. Jewish radio host killed in his driveway by neo-Nazis. Movie came out about the group that killed him last year.

Before that it mentioned the Larry Flynt shooting.

His arguments were often not all that sophisticated; he did a better job as an avatar of free, heterodox expression in academic settings, than as an advocate for any particular position.

That arguably makes him more dangerous.

Very few people actually listen to sophisticated arguments (I myself can only stomach so many in one day). It is the middle managers of culture who take sophisticated arguments, extract what is valuable from them, and repackage their insights in a manner that's rhetorically appealing (which then inspires the men of action, who actually bring about concrete changes in circumstances).

What would that even look like, with tribal positions reversed?

The simple answer is a journalist, and to be fair that has happened, albeit typically with different political valences and, probably more critically, at much more personal scales. And there's a fair cynical analysis that scale matters, and it shouldn't.

The more morbid answer is that it's literally anyone with a social media account. We had discussions here where posters -- well-respected ones! -- thought some level of political engagement put people beyond questions of doxxing or targeting, and pointed to someone who could e-mail and call state politicians, and motioned about how great power came with great responsibility. Before today, you could imagine a world where that had limits, not just ones that the person drew for themselves, but that applied across their political alliance, and 'responsibility' meant nothing more and nothing less than being set right when wrong. I can hope that's what the posters here meant, back then.

Even if we turn down the violence, and I'm not certain that's even possible, at the end of the day there's no going back to that. This is not someone getting kicked out of college, and it's only deniable in the sense that people will deny it.

Because there are countless ways to say Kirk wasn't harmless; my tumblr and bluesky and discord feed has no small number of them, and I can't even log into an MMO without seeing it (thank you Star Citizen's chat being broken like everyfuckingthingelse). He was impactful, and it doesn't take much impact at a national level to change tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives, and even if you think it was for the better not everyone's going to agree with you. And then you remember Joe The Plumber or Ken Bone, and weep.

We've seen variants of this before -- the doxxing tit-for-tat back in the CCW days cut my teeth and a few others -- but they depended on certain very specific tools, which could be shut off. Now, the only necessary tool is a network account.

Because there are countless ways to say Kirk wasn't harmless; my tumblr and bluesky and discord feed has no small number of them

From Matthew Dowd on MSNBC:

He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.

(Though, apparently MSBC is firing Dowd for this, which I, for one, find rather surprising.)

he also said, "We don't know what happened yet, it could of been one of his pro-gun followers popping off a round in celebration."

not only was it crass, it was so incredibly dumb. He deserved to be fired and shunned.

Ding ding ding.

There is virtually no way to paint him as a 'valid target'. Oh he said things you disagree with? He came into your ideological havens and confronted you directly? Boo fucking hoo get better ideas I guess.

He didn't invite nor go looking for violence, wasn't responsible for any decisions that might have caused any harm on a political level.

And what the lefties celebrating his death don't seem to get.

A) Charlie was WAY more popular among normies, especially young ones, than most thought.

B) A lot of those normies can tell that Charlie got killed for espousing opinions that they, themselves hold. He wasn't some out-and-out radical and he didn't run in radical circles.

Killing a basically normal guy, in his early 30's, with a lovely wife and two young kids. Christian. Didn't even curse. Debated civilly, but (and this was his true sin) was VERY EFFECTIVE at spreading righty ideas and demonstrating that lefty ideas were not universally accepted, even in colleges.

It breaks, I daresay, every single social norm that undergirds a 'liberal' (in the classic sense) society.

If merely "said things most people believe but that lefties don't like to hear" is enough to mark him for death, well, who precisely ISN'T fair game to the other side?

the lefties celebrating his death

Is there a significant number of those? I mean, of course there must be, polarization and all. Let me rephrase that - are there really many leftists publicly stating that this is a good thing?

Well, enough to fill multiple threads on twitter.

The thing that does get me is how many of them are doing it happily with their own name and face attached.

https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1966009268819186132

Crazy enough, people will also do it IN PERSON:

https://x.com/DineshDSouza/status/1966130048882414006

Why is that guy saying "WE got Charlie in the neck," btw? I see complaints about righties lumping all lefties together, but it sure looks like that's what they WANT.

https://x.com/saras76/status/1966112944112156696

https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/1966272838534574119/video/1

You have to explain why these people would feel bold enough to do this within punching range if they're not actually reveling in the outcome.

Yes.

The prominent ones are keeping their mouths shut, but the ones who think they're too small to be noticed are openly celebrating.

In a just world their sentiments would be sent to their employers, and the police.

Could this be a glowie op to create a Conservative/Christian martyr? What for, you might ask. Evangelicals are some of the hardest supporters of Zionism, so if they can get them fired up and optionally convert some more they would get what they wanted and some more wars in the middle east.

  • -13

Who is "they"?

One of the stated purposes of this place is for testing your shady thinking so if you want to concoct conspiracy theories and throw them against the wall to see if they stick, that's allowed, but you should put more effort into making them plausible enough to be worth debating. There's a difference between "testing your thinking" and "posting shower thoughts." And say what you mean directly.

They in this context is the neocon/neolib fusion shadow government that has been pushing for a hot war with Russia and more bombing in the middle east. They are not directly Israel, but they are aligned with them on foreign policy.

There is virtually no way to paint him as a 'valid target'. Oh he said things you disagree with? He came into your ideological havens and confronted you directly? Boo fucking hoo get better ideas I guess.

At least one (now former) MSNBC political activist sure tried:

He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.

Edit: Dowd also speculated that Kirk might have been accidentally shot by "a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration" (because that's totally something conservatives do on college campuses, right?).

This is what I fuckin' mean.

If the liberals aren't willing to rein in their own side, get them to at least SHUT UP for a few days before pulling this stuff, who will?

Had me fooled for a second. I would have thought Ezra Klein wrote this shit.

That weird softvoice "and so i think" type of offensively gentle call to action is quite characteristic of ezra klein, but klein wont even have the balls to explicate the implicit castigation of kirk that dowd exhibited. klein is, if anything, a catastrophist who sees the progressive order of his vox days breaking down internally and instead of progressivism drifting towards his chosen island of centrist stability he is finding that the new island he calls home is itself fracturing. there was a email leak at one point that showed klein did have balls to say mean words, so maybe in the background klien and proximates like shor are screaming "dont you all see how fucking bad this is for us"

Actual Ezra Klein posts on X, for the record, include:

It's ghoulish to mock or justify the shooting of Charlie Kirk. Rising political violence is a horror of our time. Unchecked it will lead to catastrophes none of us want to imagine. [source]

and

The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in it without fear of violence. Political violence is always an attack against us all. You have to be so blind not to see that. [source]

I agree that Klein didn't condone the killing, as I stated in my parent post. I meant to largely point out that Klein scthick is mainly trying to eke out a defensible progressivism and the new ground he staked as abundance ish deliverism is where hes finding out is shaky.

But jesus those tweets don't help. The replies there are basically "im actually celebrating have have to pretend i'm not".

It’s like Trump said “They’re not after me, they’re after you! I’m just in the way.”

If you’re understandably skeptical of that coming out of Trump’s mouth, it’s ten times more credible when you shift the subject to Charlie the relatively milquetoast debate bro.

All over social media seems to be the common refrain; “If leftists wanted Charlie Kirk dead, they want you dead, too, they just don’t know your name yet.”

If people are asking Charlie Kirk of all people to defend their views, they've got problems much more fundamental than that. Charlie Kirk was good for the establishment right. He wasn't good for philosophical conservatism. He was a polished product marketed to people, in the same way Ben Shapiro was the "cool kid's philosopher."

Allow me to rephrase;

“If someone is glad that Charlie Kirk, a moderate conservative squish, is dead and deserved to be killed for what he believed, they’d be ecstatic if I or people like me died / were killed based on what I believe.”

This thought occurred simultaneously to maybe tens of millions of people all at once yesterday.

Kirk apparently said the following:

I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I've thought about it. We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s.

This is, in fact, as far as I've understood, a very, very radical view in the American political sphere on a key issue, one which some might call the defining issue of American politics. It's not the one that would have been shared by the Trump admin: when Trump issued his anti-affirmative-action EO, the framing was that CRA was good and that the things he was banning were going against its spirit. And as the quote says, Kirk himself calls it a radical opinion!

Of course, for many or even most of the leftists celebrating Kirk's demise, the point is not any of the race-based stuff but his strong Christian conservative opinions, such as opposing abortion including for rape and underaged kids, but the people doing that stuff do not do it because they believe Kirk to be a moderate.

I've also seen a number of far right types on social media saying that Kirk was a moderate when he started his career but had been evolving rightwards towards being "/ourguy/" before his tragic death.

This is, in fact, as far as I've understood, a very, very radical view in the American political sphere on a key issue, one which some might call the defining issue of American politics.

Which is strange. As a european who never had much contact with blacks outside of hollywood movies, when I first learned what the Civil rights law actually was, I rejected it. Why can’t they have their own diners? It goes against the basic right of freedom of association. If whites are so oppressive and racist, why would you want to sit next to them? I don't try to get into gay bars or irish bars, because I know they'll taunt me. And if they were known to take away my voting rights and lynch me, it'd be even weirder to suggest attending their bars and schools at the solution to my problems.

For these things I've learned to go straight to the video. Especially after the NYT had to release a revision because they quoted Kirk as saying something he was actually rebutting.

From what i can tell, the article is referencing the event TPUSA's "America Fest 2023". I have watched the video and couldn't find the quote. I have tried to find other videos of this event with Kirk but couldn't. I asked Gemini to help but still can't find the quote on video.

If he said it, based on other things he said that day on the video I could find, the context was probably something like "The Civil Rights Act didn't go far enough to protect all people of all races, whites included." Because on camera that day he's decrying racism against all peoples.

There's a video where he confirms that the quote is true. He says that they talk about why the Civil Rights Act was a mistake once a week. He also confirms that he thinks MLK is a bad guy, which is also a radical view - the latest polling I could find indicates that 81% of Americans think that MLK had a positive impact on the country, with polling division indicating that at least some of the other respondents (for some reason Pew doesn't indicate how many of the others answer in the negative and how many say they don't know) would be black people who think that MLK wasn't radical enough.

If the meaning was as you speculate, why would he call that a very, very radical view?

More comments

moderate conservative

That's part of it, though, isn’t it? Most people I see celebrating lump him firmly into the far right. Not saying their perception is correct, but that's where he lines up in their view.

... Don't ask me what they'd consider a moderate conservative to be; they might very well say there is no such thing, or that it's someone with the social views of circa 2018 Obama.

I suspect to the people who label Charlie Kirk as a “far right white nationalist” (apparently that’s what it says or has said in the past on Wikipedia) whatever constitutes a “moderate” conservative is purely functional; it’s just by definition a conservative that plays within their framework and they can control and don’t feel threatened by.

It's always been in poor taste outside of the ghetto to celebrate over someone's death, but I'd be lying if I said the reports of someone's passing has never made be smirk before.

Sure, there’s gradients to this whole thing.

When I learned Osama Bin Laden died I went out and had a celebratory beer and enjoyed it in quiet, satisfied contemplation. He was unambiguously and directly responsible for the mass murder of thousands of my fellow citizens, and I was glad he was dead. But even then I didn’t gloat or grab a megaphone and shout it from the rooftops.

The behavior I see from leftists en masse from the death of even the mildest right wing figure is so routinely ghoulish that I’ve come to expect from them that I struggle to think of these people as actually human. This isn’t new, either, it’s been this way basically my whole life.

I’m not expecting his political opponents to theatrically shed a tear for him, just not acting like literal demons cackling with glee would suffice to temper my rage towards them. I consider it well earned at this point.

You're thinking of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but yeah.

I grew up in an environment where you either become desensitized to everything or you learn to develop a very thick skin. Leftists can have their parades and celebrations if they like. It doesn't bother me, nor should bother anyone who bought into the "leftist snowflake" or "lispy pussy" rhetoric. On a personal level there are days I feel like Christopher Hitchens did on the debate stage, "Love and peace? Very very overrated in my view." Call me immoral or immature if you like. Likewise I'll celebrate internally when one of theirs gets knocked off and they shouldn't have the gall to complain about it for the same reason I didn't complain about them. I’ve had a couple of moments in my life where I’ve felt a little too good about the death of some people who were truly assholes.

... just not acting like literal demons cackling with glee would suffice to temper my rage towards them. I consider it well earned at this point.

Civility is one thing. Moral policing is another. When I was growing up people just seemed to have so much more of a thicker skin than they do today. Nowadays you call someone faggot here, they act like a pearl clutching moron who looks at you like you just pulled out a gun and shot their dog. Which is odd because that's what the left-wing of old used to attack and criticize the right-wing for, because the stereotypical image of them was of a bunch of straight-laced white people that behaved like soccer moms. We didn't call that "being offensive," we called that "letting off," and most of the community kept quiet in the knowledge that sometimes people really did deserve it and had it coming to them. And it actually toughened those people up and caused them to shift their behavior for the better. I actually miss those days sometime.

The amount of handwringing in this thread as if this is the moment that we've passed some sort of threshold as a society makes me really believe that a lot of people here are quite desperate to witness an event that allows them to declare that a threshold has been passed. Accelerationism and extremism. We know nothing of the shooter, or their motivations. Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota? The red tribe does not have the moral high ground, and some sort of grim moral imperative, simply because a red tribe figure was assassinated. Hysteria.

Also, I mentioned it elsewhere in the thread. Don't rely on the algorithms to feed you the opinion of those who you believe are your outgroup. The algorithms have two focuses: (1) create a bubble for the ingroup to feel comfortable, and (2) create ragebait for the outgroup to feel enraged. Reflect on how you've interacted with social media in the past 24 hours with this in mind. Touch grass and talk to a human - because I definitely know you haven't had the chance to talk to more than a few people since this event happened.

Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota?

There was minimal uproar over that assassination because the assassin was a former colleague of the victims who appears to have gone very unambiguously and very publicly crazy in the runup to the shootings. We had considerable discussion of the assassinations at the time, including a number of people, myself included initially, claiming it appeared to be ideological and was a very big deal. Only, by the next day he was in custody and we could read excerpts of his ramblings, and had testimony from his friends and neighbors showing that he had very clearly gone crazy.

People are ringing their hands in this thread because one of the most prominent political activists in Red Tribe just got very publicly murdered, and leftists were visibly celebrating his murder within literal seconds of the shot being fired. I understand that people pointing out this reality might distress you for a number of different reasons, but this is, in fact, very direct and undeniable culture war.

Further, it seems to me that Red Tribe does in fact pretty clearly have the moral high ground here. As I mentioned above and can substantiate at some length, there does not appear to be any substantive evidence that the Minnesota killings were ideological, and there was no widespread public celebration of the sort we are seeing even before that became clear. This is not me attempting to gerrymander definitions, this is the plain facts as I see them.

The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade. They have repeatedly and communally celebrated political murders over that time, have grown increasingly shameless at doing so, and they are again doing so at this moment, all over the internet. This does not appear to me to be a "both sides" problem. It is not going to be resolved by "touching grass".

As much as I denounce Kirk's murder, especially if it was politically motivated, and denounce any celebration my tribe is engaging in, I have a hard time with the pearl clutching going on in conservative circles about this, and especially statement like "The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade."

For the right, it seems that the acceptance of political violence as a potential solution is just baked in. Many on the right love their guns, and they love to make ""implications"" or even more outright statements that they are willing to use their guns against "tyrants". But if you spend 5 minutes around these types you will see that their definition of "tyranny" is not far from "a liberal policy I don't like". This has been a key pillar of conservative politics going back far more than a decade.

I can rest easier knowing that these things generally stay at the level of fantasy. But it IS a consistent conservative fantasy. If we are comparing like to like, liberals "celebrating" by making bluesky posts and conservatives making gun memes about "the tree of liberty", "ten cent solutions", "kill em all and let God sort em out", or shooting targets with Hillary's face on them, do not strike me as having significantly different moral valence.

"The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade."

I'd say much longer than that, since the Days of Rage were famously mostly committed by leftists. Then they went on hiatus for a while. Restarting in the 10s we had assaults on conservatives speaking on college campuses (ahem), probation for multiple counts of assault with a deadly weapon, followed by a year of excusing or celebrating arson, looting, and riots.

It’s true the right definitely does have its revolutionary fantasies but the form is very different (and less realistic) than what you see on the left. The right wing fantasy of political violence seems to be informed by experiences in American history where we fought the British, or the Indians, or each other in the civil war. Cases where there were clear out groups, often uniformed. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of appetite on the right for random killings of people in their own country for peacefully disagreeing with them. Or for working a job they think is negative utility (Luigi.) Whereas the far left seems to understand that this is what a modern civil war/years of lead/troubles type event looks like.

A good left wing equivalent to Charlie Kirk would be Cenk Uygur. If he was murdered I could definitely imagine some groypers or anime avatar types being smug about it. But I don’t think your normie conservatives would be posting mockery under their real names on Facebook as I’ve seen dozens of leftists do. If a right wing equivalent to Luigi happened (perhaps something like a high level and very woke partner at a law firm getting killed) I don’t think the reaction would be nearly as positive as it was for Luigi. I also think it’s pretty clear these things are less likely to happen in the first place than the reverse

If a right wing equivalent to Luigi happened (perhaps something like a high level and very woke partner at a law firm getting killed) I don’t think the reaction would be nearly as positive as it was for Luigi. I also think it’s pretty clear these things are less likely to happen in the first place than the reverse

If an assassin killed, say, George Soros, or a higher-up in the DEI/ESG program at Blackrock, I could absolutely see the very-online right gloating and joking about it.

I can too. I don’t know if I would see literally dozens of people I knew in real life gloating and joking about it under their real names on Facebook though…

Soros, I'll grant you. I can add a few other cartoon-villainesque people like Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harrari, Ursula von der Leyen or Christine Lagarde. But a noname DEI Blackrok patsy? I doubt it.

The right understands the gravity of using violence for political reasons, and so they don't do it.

The left just murdered a 31 year old father of two little girls who's crime was trying to engage them rhetorically, and a substantial number of the left are cheering it on.

I'm sick of hearing this both sidesism. The left is violent, the right simply isn't. It's not both sides. They're different ideologies.

Would you describe a statement claiming that your side is good and peaceful and the opponent's side is bad and violent, with no evidence to back it up, as waging the culture war?

Right wingers tend to have more nuanced understandings of violence. Left circles it's either nothing or 10000000% full blast 5 minutes of hate upon approved targets such as Racists, whatever'phobes' are under the lens, MAGA or whatever. One's a childish black-white moral scope and the other's a bit more informed.

Your view contrasts interestingly with the usual view (which I favor) that leftists see violence as a dial that can be turned up or down at will, while right wingers see it as a switch: either fully on or fully off.

I think these are 2 different phenomena. One is preference on where and how to apply violence, i.e. 100% at people I dislike, -100% at people I like. The other has to do with the life that violence takes on when you start it. That when you escalate to the next level of violence, it has a tendency to spiral to the next level and then to the next level and so on, since people rarely like to take violence sitting down, and it's not that common that you have such overwhelming force that not even your victim's friends couldn't come after you in the long run. There seems to be an overestimated belief in the ability of combatants to titrate and control violence, and it's a common leftist misconception IME that it's plausible for a cop to shoot-to-injure a suspect in a firefight. Heck, I've even encountered a real human adult who actually complained about some armed suspect being shot to death by cops instead of having his gun shot out of his hand. And it's not uncommon that I see leftists complaining about some suspect being riddled with dozens of bullets when one or two should've sufficed.

It might be mostly an artifact of differences in experience with guns or physical combat.

I never bought into that one. There's clearly a difference between a skirmish in the ol' fistycuffs after some heated words have been exchanged in a bar, "oi mate, you better give me your wallet", and what you'd do to some fool that just broke into your house. Political violence might be more of an on/off switch, as for a right-winger, you're not really supposed to do it, unless you're in war, but once you're there...

FWIW, the left also used to be constantly looking for excuses to start the revolution, where if not here when if not now. This has admittedly faded in the last decades as the left attained mainstream cultural dominance and seemed to no longer need drastic revolution to achieve its goals, but I suppose with their recent setbacks and the general heating-up of the world and the Right growing louder, we're getting back there. Polarization leading to political violence is, as far as a quick look at history tells me, the rather natural course of things. It will either continue to simmer until the underlying causes are obviated by the changing times, or escalate until one side destroys the other. But nobody will turn back the clock. We won't - neither the Americans nor us Europeans - find our way back to some more cooperative state of affairs in which we sudddenly realize that the guys on the other side want the same thing and the whole conflict is just an unfortunate mistake. The 20th century has taught us enough, I think, about ideological conflict resolution. The nazis didn't give up after realizing that actually, there was a reasonable compromise to be made with their neighbors. The soviets didn't release their vassal states because of successful arguments in favor of national independence. China didn't moderate its communism until several generations after eradicating all opposition.

I am, as usual, not saying that this is a good or a desirable thing. Instead, doomsaying. Things will either remain bad for a long time until civilization itself changes, or get worse until dramatic and destructive things happen. I don't think the threshold for the latter has been passed by now, or that it will be soon - there's still a lot of endurable bad times between now and then. And maybe if we manage to endure for long enough, we'lll all be dead of old age and hitherto unborn generations can open up entirely new lines of conflict that make them forget about ours.

Or maybe there will be no future ideological conflicts because the current left-right divide really is entirely fundamental and its outcome will conclusively lock in the path of humanity for the rest of time. I wouldn't know.

Tribes pick stories that suite their narrative all the time. This is not particularly insightful commentary. Furthermore, the comparison to the Democratic senators in Minnesota has key differences that need to be considered.

How popular was Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman? You didn't even mention their names. I couldn't recall it either. I had to look it them up. Are they effective targets for assassination to advance your cause? Suppose you're a radical planning to assassinate someone. Why would you target a non name senator over someone more high profile? There is some evidence indicating Vance Boelter's reason was due to a call from Tim Walz which to me sounds like he was just an insane person. Melissa Hortman has 14K followers on Twitter. Also, Hoffman who was the senator survived, Hortman who died was a legislator.

In contrast, Charlie Kirk was extremely popular. He has 5.5 million followers on Twitter. He was popular enough to be parodied on South Park. His appearance on Jubilee "debating 25 liberal college students" has 31 million views, making it one of their most popular videos. I'd argue Charlie Kirk was extremely effective in getting people behind the agenda he supported, and killing him is a huge blow to that movement. The guy was 31 and had decades ahead of him to accomplish whatever he wanted to accomplish in the political space. Even if you think he's just a mouthpiece for a machine pushing an agenda, killing serves the purpose of warning anyone else who wants to spread ideas through popular open dialogue. If you're a political-motivated assassin, he seems like a good target. I bet if some random Republican senator got killed, there also wouldn't as big of an uproar.

Actually, there is a case similar to that of the democratic senator and legislator being attacked. The closest equivalent would be Steve Scalise a Republican politician, who like Hoffman, also survived an assassination attempt in 2017. I'm gonna do some lazy research here so bear with me, but I don't think the Scalise shooting even got half as much traction as the Hortman shooting. Looking at the most viewed videos from a news channel on YouTube, the most popular news channel video on Scalise is around 330k, while John Hoffman is at 771K views.

Where did the assassination attempt take place? Charlie Kirk was shot in a public event with hundreds of university students attending. Hortman and Hoffman were attacked in their homes at night. The context of their assassinations are vastly different. The irony of the situation is that Charlie Kirk was actually discussing mass shootings right before getting shot. Some people are trying to spin this as evidence that the assassination was staged or a psyop, personally I think it was just a coincidence considering how many violent stories this week have gone viral but what a darkly poetic scenario to be killed literally as you are talking about political violence.

How did the "other" side react to their deaths? Are there endless examples of people celebrating their deaths? Even in fairly nonpolitical spaces and discords I'm in, there are people celebrating and making fun of the death of Charlie Kirk. These are people I play games with and outside of politics I would consider fairly normal people. You don't need to search hard on Twitter or TikTok to found people gleefully posting themselves expressing enthusiasm of Charlie Kirk. Who was celebrating the death of Hortman? Do you have friends and know people celebrating the deaths of people on the other side of the political spectrum?

What was the general political and cultural climate where these assassinations took place? People on the extreme left openly call for violence all the time with little chastise and repercussion. I dare you to openly call for the death and killing of all leftists on reddit or X or Facebook and see how long it takes before your post gets deleted and you get banned. One side consistently says speech is violence and that the other side are nazi fascists. Extreme leftism is openly supported or at the very least quietly ignored by the moderate left. The demand to be a victim is so high that time and time again people have to make up fake racist hoaxes to create the supply that simply doesn't exist.

Meanwhile, extreme rightists have little place to call home. Even a place like 4chan, which is considered the cesspool of the internet, has plenty of people on both sides now. Last time I went to pol there were just as many pols supporting extreme left wing views as there were right. Simply holding a moderate right wing view makes you an extreme rightist white Christian nationalist in many circles.

We're at a point where people are afraid to openly state their beliefs. From 2023 to 2025 88% of the 1452 interviewed students pretended to hold more progressive views than they believe to succeed social and academically. 78% said they self censor about gender identity, and 72% of students stated they self censor politics. People are self censoring because they are afraid of the repercussions of stating what was once normal, everyday beliefs. The majority is afraid to speak up because a loud minority keeps attacking and harassing people with little repercussion. And I can speak from experience, because it hasn't even been 10 years since I graduated from university and I too self-censored most of my views and beliefs. I engaged in dialogue with my peers who got angry and passionate about women's rights and trans rights. I doubt they were self censoring. Charlie Kirk was a driving force giving university students a place and a chance to not pretend to be more progressive than they actually are.

I actually think a better comparison is George Floyd, on grounds of what event creates "hysteria" as you call it. Police were defunded, cities burned and looted, statues and murals and paintings created to martyr a guy who could be argued to have died to fentanyl. Floyd was also by no accounts a good person. He had been jailed eight times for numerous crimes including armed robbery. So many modern martyrs of the left consistently happen to be individuals with extreme criminal history. The left also reacted in "hysteria" around the Rittenhouse case, which was decided to have been done in self-defense. And here, again, is an example where the victims are people with a history of child molestation and other criminal behavior. The misinformation was so bad, people thought Rittenhouse killed an unarmed black man. Or what about the shooting of Michael Brown, known for "hands up don't shoot". Except that was a lie. That didn't stop the left from engaging in "hysteria". So far the red tribe "hysteria" is just a lot of words; granted it hasn't been a day so we shall see what the future holds but something tells me we won't be seeing mass riots and burning and looting from the red tribe.

I keep thinking back to idea of a scissor statement, a statement so divisive it tears people apart. But I don't think you can provide example of stories that server as scissor statements that only occur if one side willfully ignores relevant facts in the case. When both sides agree something is bad the story doesn't go viral because there is no anger to fuel the algorithmic machine. You can't keep arguing with someone that agrees with you. But if you're engaging in dialogue with someone that has no intention of good faith discussion, who openly dismisses facts and pushes what you believe are outright lies, your only options are to eventually walk away or get mad. You cannot reason with someone that does not use reasoning. If this was just a debate on the internet then whatever, you can walk away easily. But when these stories are used to push policy changes, make excuses for bad behavior, and make people feel guilty of things they should have no guilt for, it's hard to not be filled with rage.

(As a side note, perhaps I too am blind of the facts of the cases of outrage of events from the right, and maybe trying to use the concept of a scissor statement here is inappropriate. If I had to pick something that could be considered a scissor statement where I might biased or the right is the side that deliberately ignores facts, it might be in the area of gun control and the 2nd amendment, abortion, or climate change.)

Even if one were to think Charlie Kirk as a faggot, nazi facist, (terms I have heard people refer to him very recently) who only debates unprepared college students and an intellectual hack, he wasn't a wife beater, thief, murderer, or a felon. He also wasn't a politician, or a CEO, or a billionaire, anyone in position of real power. He didn't hold any radical extremist ideas that so many on the left think he did. He engaged in open discussion and wanted to pursue change through dialogue. And now he's dead.

You're right that we don't know who the killer is or what the motive is. But you have to deliberately ignorant to not think an assassination at an open political event is not political motivated. This is not a passion killing. This is pre-meditated and cold and deliberate. If it was something like a personal grudge, wouldn't you rather shoot someone in a quiet place, such as at night? Why would you choose to assassinate someone in a place where there are thousands of people that could potentially spot you and stop you, unless there was some kind of goal in making a statement?

This event is tragic because now it serves as yet another example of how trying to engage in open dialogue with people who have no willingness and desire to do so is a bad idea. I'm here in the motte because I want to believe in the pursuit of truth through open dialogue and debate. But what do you do when people refuse to engage in open honest dialogue? Is it even worth holding a principled stance with people that spit all over it and only use it against you? Enough stories like this and you start to get people wondering if they should become the monsters they keep being accused of. We take so many of the concepts that hold up our modern society for granted, ideas about human rights, human decency, free speech, democracy, equality, these are all espoused as univeral truths and moral goods (at least in America)... and in doing so allowed a poison to come into the public consciousness that continues to threaten and erode all of these values.

Also, is there any event or series of event that could convince you we've passed some sort of threshold? We've already had multiple public assassination attempts on the president with one nearly succeeding. Now a public figure who isn't even a politician is assassinated in daylight. Touching grass doesn't change that, and trying to normalize assassinations as things that always just happened that we are only just now noticing due to the algorithm doesn't make things better. It doesn't matter if political assassinations had been a part of human history, or if they are common in other places. They had become rarer in the USA in recent times and we ought to try to keep it that way.

If it was something like a personal grudge, wouldn't you rather shoot someone in a quiet place, such as at night?

Somebody like you or me? Yeah, sure. Rich people who get death threats all the time tend to live in places with better security. Yeah, Boelter pulled it off, but it took some frankly-masterful subterfuge on his part to get through that security.

Don't get me wrong, this murder was almost certainly politically-motivated; there are far more people who'd want him dead for political reasons than personal. But this particular thing isn't really corroborating evidence.

You're right that we don't know who the killer is or what the motive is. But you have to deliberately ignorant to not think an assassination at an open political event is not political motivated. This is not a passion killing. This is pre-meditated and cold and deliberate. If it was something like a personal grudge, wouldn't you rather shoot someone in a quiet place, such as at night? Why would you choose to assassinate someone in a place where there are thousands of people that could potentially spot you and stop you, unless there was some kind of goal in making a statement?

You could have said the same things about the Trump shooting, and many people did. But it turned out that the shooter was a disgruntled Red Triber with no discernable political motive.

You want to believe that "they" are engaged in a pattern of political violence, and you want it enough not to wait for confirmation where there is an obvious alternative theory that turned out to be correct last time. Why do you want to believe this? The world where the people who shoot politicians are crazies is a better, safer, happier one.

The absence of a discernable political motive is not proof of no political motive. I acknowledge it also isn't proof he did have a political motive, nor that such proof currently exists. But you aren't convincing me he didn't have a political motive without a stronger argument. The act of shooting a political figure in a political event is political in and of itself.

My point is about the reaction to the political violence. I don't doubt mental illness played a major role. However, you cannot deny the reaction and behavior of people to these events. One survey finds over 50% of people left of center say murdering Donald Trump or Elon Musk would be justified. Do you think I'm choosing to believe more people are okay with the use of violence for political purposes because I want to?

Who do you think I think "they" are? I stated the left engaged in burning, looting, and rioting after several high profile culture war events. Perhaps you believe this is an unfair assessment of the left, and you might have a point, but they certainly did not condemn such actions or downplayed it. How the right will react to this event, we shall see.

The world where nobody shoots politicians is a better, safe, happier one.

That survey has been linked a number of times, but isn't the research methodology rather sus here? They are not asking a binary question on "Do you think that the murder of [Musk/Trump] is justified", they're asking on agreement on a scale of 1-7 and then counting all the answers that aren't 1 ("Not at all justified") on the "justified" side. One can do that, it tells of something but it's still an odd way to do a survey unless one is specifically intent on getting a sensationalized result. There are people who, when encountering a scale like that, instinctively avoid answers 1 and 7 on account of being "extreme", even though of course in this case that's hardly the correct way to go on about it.

This is a valid criticism of the survey, but I suspect if it had been done the other way one could argue it creates no room for nuance and then try to argue for why the percentage of people that would say it is justified is actually smaller for one reason or another. I don't think the research methodology is sus in as so much as the interpretation of the results, since these are self reported answers. Maybe the collection methodology or their sampling of the population is flawed.

Regardless, if we were to grant anything 4 or under to be on the not justified side, that's still 22% for killing elon and 31% for killing trump of those left of center that believe there is justification for political murder. That's still not an unsubstantial amount, although to be fair it is also far from 50%. The amount of justification for the assassination of a non politician I've seen even in small niche non-political discord servers with people I am friends with, let alone in the wider web certainly does lead me to believe these stats. I'd like to see some surveys giving contrary results.

Agreed. I'm not sure I've heard of him before today, and I read here religiously. I absolutely could not have told you anything about him.

I'm not sure how much to trust themotte's search box, or site:themotte.org google searches, but there's not a lot on either prior to today.

Best comment in this thread. Thanks for injecting some sober clear headedness amongst the angst

Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota?

Where was the celebration of it? Did National Review Online use the opportunity to insult them (the way The Nation did to Kirk)? Did Fox (or the Daily Caller or Breitbart) suggest they brought it on themselves, the way MSNBC did?

ETA: it's not the shooting of Kirk that moves the needle. It's the reaction from the mainstream left (and no, declaring MSNBC and NROs first reactions, plus Reddit, as all atypical extremists is not convincing) that moves the needle. Reacting to the death of Kirk as if he were Osama bin Laden makes it quite clear that the situation is not opposition, it is enmity.

Of course, this is not the first time, though it may be the first for a murder of a right wing figure (I don't count the US Healthcare guy, as health insurance executives are kinda the designated villain now that everyone's forgotten about tobacco company people). What was the response to Margaret Thatcher's (natural) death? "Ding, dong, the witch is dead". How about Antonin Scalia's death? I sure remember open celebration. I remember because I called someone out on it and they said it was OK because he was against gay marriage.

Where was the celebration of it?

A sitting Republican senator initially reacted to it by posting "This is what happens When Marxists don't get their way" and "Nightmare on Waltz street".

That's not a celebration.

You're right, I misread the Marxist comment.

If you keep in eye on the e-influencer sphere, they are all shellshocked. Even those who are political adversaries of Kirk, like Ethan Klein, were brought to tears- obviously not due to love for the man himself but realization that their profession and status as C-list political celebrities makes them the highest ratio of political value / target hardness for anyone who would want to do something like that. And Pandora's box has been opened.

There's definitely a threshold had has been crossed and it wouldn't surprise me if these sort of events completely disappear as a result. Is Crowder going to keep doing his campus debate thing after this?

Ethan Klein

I can not even begin to describe the level of hatred I have for Ethan Klein, why did the fates decide it was Charlie Kirk's time instead of Ethan Klein.

Does Klein even have relevance? I honestly dont know if any eceleb outside of titty streamers would gather enough people to care about even harming them. Hasan kicked out Klein for failing to slob Hamas knob, and Hasans relevance is only within that circle of DSA revolutionary cosplayers who hope for someone else to pull the trigger (like whoever did to kirk) so that the dirty work of clearing the way for the chosen vanguard is done without sullying their hyperallergic hands.

Asking you because you're the poster here I'd trust the most to be aware of this particular issue, but I've seen rumours on social media that Charlie was actually concerned about assassination recently because he'd been pissing off the Israelis. Do you think or have any evidence that this particular aspect is potentially a factor?

The motive doesn't really make sense, despite Kirk's recent mild criticisms he was probably the most pro-Israel Gen-Z influencer. Kirk's audience being set adrift, and it being likely Fuentes will posture to capture some of that market share, doesn't seem to provide a clear benefit in relation to the risks. So my prior is low and there's no evidence. The only evidence I'm aware of is Fox News mentioning foreign Intelligence being somehow related to the manhunt, but that can mean a lot of things.... and apparently some old guy falsely confessed to the crime in police custody which is strange.

Nick Fuentes though has talked pretty soberly recently (even before this) about his life being in danger, if he gets killed the priors are much different. But now political commentators from all sides of the aisle are considering the possibility of this happening to them.

Edit: I didn't really follow Kirk's content, but apparently he got closer to very substantive criticism of Jews than I had realized. Doesn't really change my analysis, and I do think it's significant that Kirk reportedly associated criticism of Israel with personal risk but it remains far more likely to have been some amateur. It's really not hard to accurately shoot a rifle.

I do think it's significant that Kirk reportedly associated criticism of Israel with personal risk

This is exactly why I was curious - after seeing this tweet https://x.com/HarrisonHSmith/status/1955705962964111425 I wanted to know what the anti-semitic right's perspective on it was (forgive me if that's not how you identify yourself), so thank you for the heads up.

and apparently some old guy falsely confessed to the crime in police custody which is strange.

This is the part I've been wondering about today. I saw a video of them taking that old guy into custody and he was yelling "SHOOT ME!" over and over. Maybe he's just a random crazy, but part of me wondered if he wasn't in cahoots with the shooter as a willing patsy designed to take the fall and/or run interference long enough to allow the real shooter to escape.

edit: found this X thread which seems to really flesh out my hypothesis, complete with a getaway plane and everything

Yeah. He'd wandered a little bit off the company line but it's top-tier JOOS posting to suggest that he'd be assassinated for that. The Palestine-Israel nonsense has just broken so many brains in the political discourse sphere.

Someone connected to him claimed that Charlie had personally been worrying about his life being in danger over this specific topic - I agree that it has broken a lot of brains, but there's a difference between someone just arbitrarily blaming the jews for everything and being curious about a murder victim's recent thoughts about who wants to murder him.

Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota?

Because, as bad as that is, we have not seen a closeup video of those people being shot to death, and that means something. That Senator's death could have been gruesome. Being shot to death in your own home is a gruesome enough picture, and it carries weight, but it simply does not have anywhere near the same impact that the imagery today had.

The red tribe does not have the moral high ground, and some sort of grim moral imperative, simply because a red tribe figure was assassinated. Hysteria.

You are not the arbiter of moral high grounds. Even if you were it will fall on deaf ears.

I don't know who the shooter was, or what their motivations were. There's a chance it's another mentally ill person who has no real political affiliations. Maybe it's a far right winger with accelerationist goals. Maybe they had personal beef with Kirk.

None of that changes the sheer giddiness and overt schadenfreude of the anonymous leftist redditor or tiktok'er, or the careful framing our left leaning mainstream outlets will use to report and cover this story. That, while not as disturbing as the violence, will have a larger impact on broader non-left society and discourse down the road. It's been like this for over a decade. People are tired of it and they were looking for a reason to get pissed because they were already pissed off to begin with.

None of that changes the sheer giddiness and overt schadenfreude of the anonymous leftist redditor or tiktok'er

Try being on Tumblr right now.

Yeah, saw several Tumblr reactions today, and while it is perfectly predictable, I'm saddened how many people are celebrating political violence against a non-politician on there. There's a lot of people who don't have any sense of decorum, or respect for people with opposing viewpoints.

None of that changes the sheer giddiness and overt schadenfreude of the anonymous leftist redditor or tiktok'er

Yes. Browsing Reddit today has been eye opening, if not entirely surprising. The open glee upvoted across every subreddit is only really comparable to the Mangione murder. At this point it hardly matters to me who actually did the shooting

Reddit is not representative of the left as a whole, just like X and 4chan are not representative of the right as a whole. All these sites heavily over-represent highly online, highly ideological people.

According to this, an actual majority of Americans (57%) are on Reddit. X is half that, and 4chan is 1/20th.

Given that Reddit is A) left of center, and B) bigger than the entire left wing of the country, are you sure that Reddit isn't representative of the Left?

Very impressive numbers, much more than I expected.

I assume 95% are lurkers which I think is the normal ratio. That gives you 5% of 60% as regularly posting redditors, about 3% of America.

Which broadly passes my sniff test but may not do so for others.

Not sure, but pretty convinced of it, since a large majority of leftists I've met in person have not been like Redditors. Granted, that's just another kind of bias, and some might say "well they were just hiding it around you". Maybe, but by the same token I could say that for some people their Reddit use is just them blowing off steam and it's not really representative of their entire personality. It's hard to say.

I dunno about that. I think the mental frictional cost of using social media purely off the popular page is so high that you either get off the site entirely or create an account to curate out trash. Anyone who uses reddit but doesnt actually see a problem with /r/politics or /r/pics slop is someone to be wary of for either being uncritical of the opinions presented or too dim to be aware that he is being propagandized.

...a large majority of leftists I've met in person have not been like Redditors.

See section III of I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup:

...half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

It's not necessarily that they're hiding it around you. It could be that you aren't dealing with the full range of leftists.

...I could say that for some people their Reddit use is just them blowing off steam and it's not really representative of their entire personality.

You're kind of damning them with faint praise there.

How do we know this? I'm skeptical about taking your word for it.

Reddit is a mainstream, corporate-owned forum. They purged all sorts of subfora and people on the grounds of how offensive they were, how advertisers might pull out, etc. etc. They don't get to pull the "teehee, we're just a bunch of shitposters" card now.

I thought only chapotraphouse on the left got purged. Everything else that was axed were either unmoderated dead subreddits or narrative breakers like /r/gendercritical or hell this very subreddit /r/themotte.

I mean, technically Reddit didn't axe /r/themotte, only siteban some of the witches and threaten to axe the subreddit if Zorba didn't start cracking down on witchcraft. But that's splitting hairs.

They couldn't fire us, we quit!

subfora

Bro, I'm pumped you got to use this word in a sentence.

I'm... happy I could make your day. I suppose it is important to enjoy the small pleasures.

Is national polling representative of the left as a whole?

Probably, although I'd be curious to see the exact questions asked in the poll and to compare the data against what right-of-center people would say about the justifiability of killing equally divisive left-wing figures. Here's some information: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/04/lets-kill-the-republicans.php.

One thought experiment I had was to read the to reddit Mangione (who in my opinion while crazy probably deserves to be executed for his lack of remorse) comments/apologetics and imagine if they were instead written about the Minnesota killings. It was really quite sickening. I really think Reddit allowing those comments and that response for essentially a vigilante lynching, is opening the overton window for copycat behavior of all stripes.

Hard to imagine a Left-wing figure getting shot with this sort of reaction from the Right. There's just not anybody as strongly divisive enough, and being Left Wing is kind of 'inherently sympathetic' in the sense that you may not agree with them, but also it's hard to hate most Left-wing figures since it's a position originating from an excess of empathy.

Obviously the Kirk shooter hasn't been found yet and it's hard to predict where the shooter will land on the political spectrum. But the Minnesota shooter seemed more pro-life/random doomsday Christiany than hugely pro-Trump. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/us/politics/minnesota-shootings-gunman-suspect.html

I'm definitely team "Nothing Ever Happens" most of the time, and I suspect the same will be true of today. This is very unlikely to be the straw that broke any particular camel's back.

But it is different, I think, in important ways that do increase the feeling that this one could lead somewhere.

My only prediction is that this just removed the last bit of sympathy for the 'victims' of any further head-cracking tactics Trump uses.

If they catch the perp and he happens to fall down six flights of stairs on the way to the courthouse, ain't nobody batting an eye.

Nobody will hand wring over the next boat of drug runners Trump blows up.

He drops mustard gas on rioters, approval goes up six points.

The national guard gets sent into Chicago and opens up a M240 on a carful of gangsters, people just nod along.

I think that, historically, this is what happens when you make 'normal' civilians feel like they're subject to being lethally victimized by random violent criminals and/or politically motivated assassinations in otherwise 'safe' spaces.

This and Charlotte has done something to me. I’m not ready to put it into words yet - but my worldview has been solidified in a permanent way over these two incidences.

I think the usual joke goes "And then one day, for no reason at all..."

Yeah, like I've said before, America actually has a very very low level of direct political violence (assassinations, bombings, etc.) considering how much political anger there is in America and how heavily armed Americans are.

If the murder of Charlie Kirk does tip the country over the edge, it will be because of the narratives around it, not because of the event itself. America has almost unbelievably few assassinations for a country that is so politically polarized and heavily armed.

You think you hate TMZ enough, but you don't.

The office at TMZ can be heard loudly clapping and cheering live when the news that Charlie Kirk has died comes through

I'm allowed to say you should hate those people right? That's specific enough? With enough evidence? You can hate the people at TMZ you can hear loudly clapping and cheering the death of a husband, father and Christian? It's not more heat than light to make sure people know that's what TMZ is? That every time you see an article at TMZ, it's important to remember they would cheer your death.

Im usually biased toward Nothing Ever Happening but the lefts genera reaction to this is giving me Spanish civil war vibes. If the shooter turns out to be a leftist (most likely) then I see this possibly escalating

I don't see any evidence other than the timing that the cheering was connected with Kirk's death. However, if it was, that wouldn't surprise me one bit. Plenty of people on both sides of the culture war feel happy when members of the other side die.

I know that you would almost certainly not publicize a video of right-wingers cheering the death of some leftist figure, so I take your comment as being tribalism rather than as an attempt to shed light on things.

I know that you would almost certainly not publicize a video of right-wingers cheering the death of some leftist figure,

Forecasting future behavior of a fellow internet rando is now ... evidence?

@WhiningCoil is definitely dancing with the mod tiger these past few days, but his post of the TMZ video is more than a bare-link and it is important and topical --- half of the replies in this thread are "it's not about the shooting itself, it's about the reactions."

Your comment asserting tribalism is tribalism itself. Or maybe just lower level general antagonism?

Nah, this is actual psycho behavior. If you told me my most hated outgroup influencer or politican got shot my immediate, gut reaction is "Oh, no! They're going to be insufferable after this."

This is because America is still in a talking battle. When we hear that "someone shot up a campaign event", most partisans will hope that their side was the one being attacked. Because that gives them a powerful story, and free reign to attack the outgroup as bad. Most partisans don't want to be in the position of having to explain why the rest of them shouldn't be blamed because one guy went and did something horrible.

You openly cheer for the deaths of people that you are in physical battle with. Where PR and optics are a negligible concern compared to who is left standing to write the history.

So what does it mean if the staff at a mainstream media company like TMZ think that they are in a war to the knife with Charlie Kirk?

They're claiming it was unfortunate timing:

We want to address something that happened during our TMZ Livestream coverage of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

As Harvey and Charles were reporting the developments in our newsroom, there were employees in another part of the building watching a car chase.

The people watching that car chase began laughing and clapping in reaction to what they were seeing, but we want to make it clear ... they were not cheering in response to the assassination.

Nevertheless ... watching a car chase at that moment was tone deaf, and the sounds of laughter at that crucial moment were totally out of line.

We apologize to anyone who heard that as we were in the middle of covering such a tragic story.

I have no idea who or what TMZ is, so I have no opinion one way or the other if this is true, but it's only fair to give them a chance to reply.

The people watching that car chase began laughing and clapping in reaction to what they were seeing

That's either an insultingly implausible lie, or insane enough that it has to be true.

I mean, there are lots of "funniest car chases" and clips from police arrests online, it's not impossible someone was sharing "you gotta see this" and people were laughing and clapping because it was so stupid and entertaining that way. Just really unlucky timing.

Same with Jezebel and their "tee-hee, we got a witch to curse Charlie Kirk!" story. Published 8th September, since taken down. Probably because of stuff like this:

For the "POWERFUL HEX SPELL," I had to provide Kirk's date of birth for "accuracy." The witch performed the hex, but her response was unsettling: "I just completed your spell, and it was successful. You will see the first results within 2–3 weeks."

Same with Jezebel and their "tee-hee, we got a witch to curse Charlie Kirk!" story. Published 8th September, since taken down.

That one was pretty hilarious, and I honestly wish their editorial team had leaned into the "OH GOD THAT'S NOT WHAT WE WERE TRYING TO DO WE SWEAR" angle rather than the sanitized corpo-speak disclaimer they put up. Y'all had horrendously unfortunate timing, own it.

It also is absolutely going to give encouragement to those who are convinced witches are doing genuine harm (I don't believe spells work, but I also think mucking around with the occult like that is not a good idea either).

So congrats, Jezebel, you have now restoked the Satanic Panic.

Nah, this is actual psycho behavior. If you told me my most hated outgroup influencer or politican got shot my immediate, gut reaction is "Oh, no! They're going to be insufferable after this."

Yeah, this is me, in this thread, going "Damn these reactions are insufferable". But Kirk was far from someone who I would describe "most hated outgroup influencer" (I don't think I would ever use those words) - I just found his style extremely grating.

I haven't interacted with anyone in person whose reaction was more extreme than "how ironic".

A friend brought it up in the group Discord. He's, let's say "not as left as he thinks he is". But he raised the topic and immediately started with the "was the video AI manipulated to look worse?" And then when that was dismissed all around, worked in a "I'm sure there will be a lot of talk about politics and culture war before we learn in a week that it was a neighbor angry about the trash cans so we should probably just assume that, haha".

And the thing that struck me was that he came off as very defensive. Which is kind of unnecessary because as I said, he's really not as left as he thinks he is.

The other person who brought it up and had something to say was my mother, who cold opened a conversation with "Oh, I guess a Republican died? Boo hoo, thoughts and prayers." At least she isn't entirely gone; she responded like a human to being called out for it, but Christ.

The social media and it's consequences has been a disaster for the Boomer women.

The social media and it's consequences has been a disaster for the Boomer women.

For a cohort of GenX women too.

TMZ denies this. Their explanation sounds unlikely to me, but at the very least they did eventually become ashamed enough to lie.

I believe this as much as someone caught with porn tabs open saying it was for research.

What if they said they had been going to whitehouse.com?

Porn is far and away the best source for figure drawing references of hot women that exists in the world! I swear!!

I guess I believe them? The cheers sound more like a group of people watching a movie than it does people reacting to news being spread by word of mouth. Is there any collaborating evidence that there was a car chase going on at the time?

Plus, this wasn't the shocking moment where he was shot, it was the moment trump announced he's dead. I doubt they were that excited over this almost-inevitable followup. I'm going to mark that episode as a red hate-fantasy.

I think you have to be actively looking to give them an out to buy this for a second. People don't laugh and clap at car chases.

I gotta be honest this one really concerns me. The assassinations of political influencers seems more likely to escalate than either school shootings or politicians. My worry is that we see some right winger assassinate some high profile left wing influencer in "revenge" for charlie kirk. And then it just spirals from there.

Kash Patel - "The subject in custody has been released after an interrogation by law enforcement. Our investigation continues and we will continue to release information in interest of transparency"

By the way, this isn't old news. This is the second time today this has happened. Things appear to be going swimmingly.

When was the last time a major public terrorist like this got away? Seems like they always end up either killed or captured.

Mangione was arrested five days after he killed Thompson. So far with this incident it's only been a few hours.

Mangione got caught by being extremely retarded. What was it... he went to a busy McDonalds 1 state over in the middle of the day, wearing the same clothing and backpack, removed his mask, and had the murder weapon and a manifesto on him.

I’ve always thought Mangione just gave up on running, and expected to be caught there. Why else would he be carrying the manifesto?

It’s kinda mind-blowing when you think about it. Like this wasn’t some trailer trash nerfed from the womb with teratogens. He was rich, went to a high-tier private school, and was its valedictorian!

And yet he’s just so…. normal 😬

His plan was stupid, his manifesto isn’t even competitive with the median mottepost, and this all went exactly as anyone with an ounce of sense would have predicted.

Yet he’s now an arch-villain/hero.

The world is so, so stupid.

In the moment it was retarded, but I don't think he himself is retarded, although he might be mentally disturbed. He had no prior experience with committing violence or evading police, he was on the run and by himself for days, and probably really pumped full of adrenaline. I think it takes a rare breed of person to be able to think calmly and rationally in such a situation, especially without having done any relevant training.

The important part is he was caught because he (massively) fucked up, not because the police caught him. That is well within the realm of possibility here. Even in 2025, even with whatever Palantir or whatever gets them, the police don't yet seem to have magic powers, and even someone who apparently couldn't think straight enough for "don't hang around in public with your face visible when you're the most wanted man in America" to be an overriding priority, seemed to have otherwise been successfully getting away.

There's another guy in custody now, though just as "person of interest" not "suspect".

Preregistering:

  1. It's this guy
  2. It's this guy
  3. He didn't do it

The main explicitly political violence events in the last few years I remember are

This event now with Charlie Kirk (although undetermined if it's politically motivated yet, it seems likely)

At least one of the attempts on Trump.

The shooting of Minnesota Dems a few months ago.

New Mexico twice, a firebombing of the Republican state headquarters and a Republican mayoral candidate who tried to kill the Dem winner.

That Dem office in Arizona that got shot up.

Pelosi's husband being attacked.

The kidnapping plot against Whitmer.

The antivaxxer shooting at the CDC.

That cop who died during Jan 6th.

That Texas mall shooting

The Jewish museum shooting

That Israeli Molotov attack.

Maybe Luigi Mangione but that was more about hating healthcare companies than politicians/pundits but I guess it's politics adjacent.

There might be others but those are what stand out in my memory.

There doesn't seem to be a throughline here of violence actually begetting more violence, at least not directly of those we know . The only ones I know of explicitly stating any sort of tit for tat violence is the two anti-semitic ones. Even then they tend to be really strange individuals as one would expect tbqh, most people don't do political violence so those who do are strange to begin with. A lot of them seeming to be crazies just looking for fame, conspiracy theorists, informal militias, etc.

Hopefully it means while we have increased baseline of political violence, we won't be spiraling down more and more. Hopefully...

Don't forget about the Pennsylvania governor's mansion getting Molotov-ed.

I don't know all of these for sure, but:

Pelosi's husband being attacked.

I don't think there was any indication the attacker was a conservative who hated them for being liberal. As I recall, it was more like some sort of dispute between friends or possibly lovers.

The kidnapping plot against Whitmer.

You mean the one that was entirely fabricated by FBI informants?

And Luigi Mangione is the only one that deserves an asterisk?

I think this might qualify as the most explicitly political violence yet to happen in this era of political division. Depending on who they turn up as the shooter, presuming that they do eventually.

I don't think there was any indication the attacker was a conservative who hated them for being liberal. As I recall, it was more like some sort of dispute between friends or possibly lovers.

This was a dirty lie spread by Musk on Twitter. De Pape was delusional due to long-term drug use, but he was sane enough to stand trial, and at all times he continued to maintain that his target had been Nancy Pelosi and he had been trying to kidnap her as part of his delusional far-right political project. His other political activity at the time he did it was mostly watching Qanon and 2020-election-conspiracy material on social media. It looks like he had done an RFK-style left-conspiracy-theorist to right-conspiracy-theorist horseshoe turn at some point between 2014 (when he cancelled his Green Party voter registration) and 2020.

He was not affiliated with any Republican or far-right group, which is why I count him under "the school shooters started shooting politicians" category rather than right-wing political violence.

Okay that sounds like a reasonable take, I missed getting an update on that event sufficiently long after it happened for the truth to actually come out.

Though I might quibble a little about whether it was a "dirty lie", or wild speculation very soon after the event before any actual facts came out, which there tends to be an ample amount of after any high-profile event, including the Kirk assassination.

Wild speculation may be where the claim originated from, but I don't think it's how you wound up under the impression that it was the fact of the matter.

I don't think there was any indication the attacker was a conservative who hated them for being liberal.

I think you should go back and reacquaint yourself of the details of this case because there is ample evidence that he was both a right winger and targeted the Pelosis because they were Democrats.

DePape answers, "Absolutely." He grows increasingly angry and emotional, claiming that Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats committed crimes to steal the election from Donald Trump. Then, Depape says, "I was going to hold her hostage and get her to tell the truth. If she didn't tell the truth, I'd break her kneecaps."

I appreciate the update on this. @MadMonzer as well who added additional detail here.

I don't think there was any indication the attacker was a conservative who hated them for being liberal. As I recall, it was more like some sort of dispute between friends or possibly lovers.

Maybe, that's the case with a lot of attacks really they tend to be more personal or for weird reasons

You mean the one that was entirely fabricated by FBI informants?

That wasn't anymore fabricated than a typical sting operation. Maybe you're against police stings in general, but it's common. Happen with drugs, prostitution, money laundering, child pornography honeypots, fake assassination hiring sites etc.

Guy in Kansas once tried to bomb an army base only to realize the bomb was fake.for example https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/kansas-man-sentenced-30-years-plot-explode-car-bomb-fort-riley

In his guilty plea, Booker admitted he intended to kill American soldiers and to assist ISIS’s (Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) fight against the U.S. His plan called for constructing a bomb containing 1,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate. Booker intended to trigger the bomb himself and die in the process, and filmed a video he intended Americans to see after his death.

“You sit in your homes and think this war is just over in Iraq,” Booker said in the video. “Today we will bring the Islamic State straight to your doorstep.”

Unbeknownst to Booker, the bomb that he constructed was made with inert materials, and the two men working with him were undercover informants for the FBI.

Thank god too, that bomb could have killed so many people if he got legitimate material!

And Luigi Mangione is the only one that deserves an asterisk?

Well yeah, it's not a politician or political pundit who was attacked. It was just a random insurance CEO.

I think this might qualify as the most explicitly political violence yet to happen in this era of political division. Depending on who they turn up as the shooter, presuming that they do eventually.

Disagree, look at 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 the start of serial killing sprees like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and many others (around 300 known active serial killers in the 70s!), and the beginning of violent cults like the Manson family.

Disagree, look at the 60s and 70s.

By "this era" I did mean after the 60s and 70s era of political unrest. Not sure of an exact date actually, I guess after the relatively domestically peaceful 80s and 90s. Though I suppose you'd then have to overlook the OKC bombing, which is maybe reasonable, since it was more anti-government than anti either political party or tribal side.

That wasn't anymore fabricated than a typical sting operation. Maybe you're against police stings in general, but it's common. Happen with drugs, prostitution, money laundering, child pornography honeypots, fake assassination hiring sites etc.

I'm not against police stings in general, but there's most definitely a line they have crossed at times where it seems more like they're enabling or encouraging crime that wouldn't otherwise happen instead of thwarting people with serious intent to commit major crimes. I don't know about the case you cited in particular, but they have definitely done this with so-called Islamic terrorists too. In this case they "befriended" some developmentally disabled teenager and eventually cajoled him into sending pitifully small amounts of money to somebody he believed was associated with ISIS, then busted him and patted themselves on the back for "stopping ISIS". Do you think that's an appropriate use of police resources?

Exactly where the line is for this is a bit fuzzy. But I think a good indicator that you're way off on the wrong side of the line is when multiple defendants get acquitted after a successful entrapment defense.

Also the Israeli Molotov attack was political, but it was basically foreign politics (the attacker was an Egyptian with an expired visa) that just happened to take place on US soil.

The kidnapping plot against Whitmer.

Modern day COINTELPRO. An FBI scheme.

That cop who died during Jan 6th.

Come on now. That's not what happened. Poor guy had a blood clot in his brain. He was fine. Feeling good, other than irritation from residual pepper spray and a headache that was getting worse. As confirmed by his text messages to his family. Then dead. Deadly blood clots are not caused by J6.

He died a bit afterwards from an unrelated health issue.

That cop who died during Jan 6th.

It’s amazing how people still believe this. A true testament to the power of the media’s propaganda

Given how many guns there are in private hands in the US, given how politically polarized the US is, given how many people have mental health problems, and given how extremely rare assassinations are, I am surprised that this kind of thing does not happen much more often.

Those who use such incidents to either make calls for revenge against their out-group or to celebrate the success of their in-group, both of which I am seeing a lot of on social media right now, expose themselves as likely having longed for violence to begin with - an impulse which then gets an opportunity to make itself public when something like this happens.

If one genuinely wishes to quell the rise of political violence, one would do well to realize that incidents like this are a statistical inevitability given the current mix of guns + political polarization + mental health issues. The only way to actually reduce the violence, as opposed to increasing it, is to reduce one or more of the three factors: guns, political polarization, and mental health issues.

Unlike with street crime, improved policing cannot significantly affect the issue. People who are willing to attempt assassinations are generally willing to get arrested or die in the process, so are simply not nearly as deterred by the prospect of encountering police as ordinary street criminals are. Would-be assassins are also less likely to have a track record of serious crime than the typical street murderer is, so are less likely to have been put away by policing before they attempt an assassination.

As far as I can tell, there is no other way besides reducing one or more of guns, political polarization, and mental health issues. Neither side of the political divide is powerful enough to suppress the other to the point that the other cannot attempt assassinations basically whenever one of its members finds the will to give it a try. Not without a massive civil war, at least. And a civil war, of course, would increase the violence by a factor of thousands, not reduce it, and would leave the country extremely damaged no matter which side won.

As far as I can tell, there is no other way besides reducing one or more of guns, political polarization, and mental health issues.

If you reduce political polarization, the crazies will just go back to shooting up other targets.

To stop crazies killing people, you need to stop crazies having access to guns. Empirically you can't do this in a society where randos have access to guns - multiple countries have tried, some of them quite hard. This is the fundamental trade-off behind long gun control (handguns are different because they are used in orders of magnitude more homicides). Given how rare psychos shooting people actually is, I think the case for long guns being broadly legal is strong. But if the opponents of gun control are all "Yeah - it's a tradeoff. Thoughts and prayers" when other people's kids are the victims, and "We can't allow 'them' to carry on doing this - when do we start the purges?" when the victim is a sympathetic politician, then I am not going to take them seriously.

If the person who did this turns out to be a sane Democrat or someone with a history of organised far-left activity, then this is very bad news. But right now the way to bet is "psycho with a gun".

If you reduce political polarization, the crazies will just go back to shooting up other targets. ... To stop crazies killing people, you need to stop crazies having access to guns.

This sounds intuitively right to me... but I'm not sure it actually is? There's at least a narrative that shootings (as a form of terrorism directed at the general public) weren't really a thing before Columbine, which was a failed bombing.

(I tried to verify this and was immediately stymied by the fact that, apparently, no one can be bothered to track mass shootings of the public terrorism sort. Both the DOJ and the (anti-gun nonprofit) GVA use definitions that obviously track gang violence, not what most people mean when they say 'mass shooting.' And, anyway, this shooting, while I think similar in intention, wouldn't meet their definition as only one person was shot. Is there better data available anywhere?)

To expand a bit, the narrative is that these sorts of incidents are social contagions of a kind; America before '99 had plenty of guns (more, even, given the Assault Weapons Ban) and plenty of crazies, but the mass shooting meme hadn't yet taken root, so that insanity expressed itself in different, (mostly) less anti-social ways.

Some countries without readily available guns don't have mass killing memes at all, while others (like the UK and I think China?) have much less deadly knife spree memes. On the other hand, truck attacks (France and Germany, primarily) are about as deadly as mass shootings and suicide bombing (much of the Middle East) is substantially worse.

(Bombs are definitely worse than guns, and I understand it's much harder to ban everything that could be used to make a homemade bomb, but actually making a working bomb without blowing yourself up might be beyond most crazies? I understand suicide bombers are rarely lone wolves.)

And so, goes this narrative, there really is a simple solution to these events: stop talking about them. Kill the meme and you kill the behavior. This obviously wouldn't be easy, between press incentives and an open internet, but I'm confident it would be easier than seizing hundreds of millions of guns.

(Separately, I more or less agree that these incidents affect such a small number of people that it's likely not worth taking drastic action to prevent them. But would it work?)

And so, goes this narrative, there really is a simple solution to these events: stop talking about them. Kill the meme and you kill the behavior. This obviously wouldn't be easy, between press incentives and an open internet, but I'm confident it would be easier than seizing hundreds of millions of guns.

I agree that this would work, and won't happen. The US has an unusually strong free speech culture as well as an unusually strong gun culture, so I don't think it is necessary easier than keeping guns away from crazies.

Switzerland and Canada both have broadly available long guns, but they don't seem to have many spree killings. I don't know if that this is because they are not exposed to the same mimetic contagion (unlikely in the case of Canada) or if their gun culture is healthier in some way which means that fewer guns are stored in ways where crazies have access to them. (Most school shooters use Dad's insecurely stored gun).

If the person who did this turns out to be a sane Democrat or someone with a history of organised far-left activity, then this is very bad news. But right now the way to bet hope is "psycho with a gun".

Hope. That's the way to hope. Anyone making that bet without more info is a fool.

Hope, definitely. Bet, too. There is a reference class here - shootings of political figures by crazies with no participation in organised politics is now a several times per year event. As far as I can see, the only time in the internet news era a political figure in the US was shot at by an actual political opponent was Steve Scalise almost a decade ago.

Hypothesis: the Internet (social media more specifically) have made it much easier to become a political partisan with no need to join "organized politics", without which there isn't an IRL grounding and it's easier to find your own personal circle jerk that pushes you extremism. Local political groups are less likely to align with such numbers with such extreme views: the couple dozen most extreme people in your town have nothing on the top hundred in the entire Anglosphere.

I guess one way to check this would be to look at whether it applies equally to small nations with language barriers versus the US. But that's a small dataset and probably pretty noisy.

The people who usually commit violence in society don't have the interest and skillset to engage in organized political violence.

Anti-socials are violent and impulsive but tend refocus to the next person who frustrates them or someone who has wronged them in a personal (and petty way).

Traditional serious mental illness (like schizophrenia) usually involves too much functional decline and disorganization.

Delusional disorder patients (like erotomanic) tend to focus on political causes or more general fears (like paranoia about their neighbors or the FBI).

Malignant narcissists for the last few decades have been focused on school shootings, but they are starting to shift to politics (bad).

General criminals wants to avoid the eyes of the government.

So what really needs to happen for substantive political violence is for more or less normal people to find it necessary. The rhetoric is starting to hit that point.

Once it starts the social contagion will likely lead to some snowballing....

Is it really bad for malignant narcissists to target politicians rather than schools? At least politicians know what they're getting into. If school shootings were genuinely replaced with single assassination attempts on random political figures, I would see that as a big improvement.

While it isn't a 1:1 swap situation, I'm sure given the choice by some kind of philosophical demon Charlie Kirk would have picked Charlie Kirk getting shot over a room full of fifth graders.

I'm sure given the choice by some kind of philosophical demon

An episode for the inevitable reboot of The Good Place?

Is it really bad for malignant narcissists to target politicians rather than schools? At least politicians know what they're getting into. If school shootings were genuinely replaced with single assassination attempts on random political figures, I would see that as a big improvement.

This is a terrible idea. A random school shooting is senseless violence. It passes like a hurricane and perhaps leads to some heated gun control debates. But violence that looks intertribal leads to civil war.

Politicians may have lower value than children, but politicians getting killed is probably more destabilizing for society and has the potential to lead to more death.

Is it really bad for malignant narcissists to target politicians rather than schools?

Yes. No matter how many school shootings happen, there is approximately a 0% chance that a significant number of Americans will conclude that what we need is more of them. Not so with shooting politicians.

You're replying to a filtered comment.

Malignant narcissists for the last few decades have been focused on school shootings, but they are starting to shift to politics (bad)

I recall musing after the Butler, PA incident that "at least politicians are harder targets." Maybe I was wrong and hoping that the modal case would be single-death-to-Secret-Service-countersniper. The broader set of political targets isn't really a "hard target", is it?

The problem is that outside of the big names they really don't have much security. The capital baseball shooting only dodged more death because one of the guys there happened to have actually security (I think it was Scalise?).

Most of these people are only defended by norms.

My guess is that any politician who is below the national level is very easy to kill if you're willing to throw your life away to do it and that many national-level politicians are probably also pretty easy to kill. The President and Vice President are very hard targets. Members of Congress and governors are, I would guess, pretty hard targets but not nearly as much. Supreme Court justices, not sure. Kavanaugh had US Marshals outside his home during the one assassination attempt against him, so Supreme Court justices are probably hard targets. Probably many lower-level national-level politicians are fairly easy targets for a committed individual.

The last question he ever got was:
"Do you know how many mass shootings in the last 10 years there have been in America?"
“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk asked back.
Then he was shot.

I bet the assassin waited for a question about gun control/gun violence.

I bet the assassin waited for a question about gun control/gun violence.

Maybe it was a father whose children were killed in a school shooting. Reminds me of the famous video of the father who was pretending to use a payphone and then killed his child's rapist.

Truly a bizarre person to target for such a grievance. Kirk doesn’t even figure in my top ten of pro gun advocates

Given the distance at which he was shot, I’d be surprised if the shooter could hear anything he was saying.

The report from the university was that he was shot from a building 200 yards away, but I was able to locate the exact spot he was at on google maps and I can't find a building with a line of sight to him that is that far away. Judging by the videos I have seen he was roughly here. Never mind, I got my pavilions mixed up and he was in a different spot in that same courtyard area.

I am quite familiar with UVU. A few pieces of context: UVU has been growing like a weed the last decade especially. It was a vocational/community college for a while and semi-recently became a more full fledged university. There’s still a lot of non-traditional and part time students still, partly by design. They also benefitted from demographics and location - the only other big college is BYU in the area and the general area (not just Provo-Orem metropolitan area but also surrounding sprawl like Lehi’s “Silicon Slopes”) is pretty dense and otherwise you need to go up to Salt Lake City for the U. This means lots of new buildings and lots of new administrators and such. It’s Utah so it’s red, but not overwhelmingly so as you might expect; maybe 60-40 in the district in question.

All of this to say that Utah also doesn’t have much political violence to start with, and given the layout and history of UVU, it doesn’t surprise me that tracking down the shooter will be a little challenging, and it also doesn’t surprise me that security wasn’t super duper tight. They said the older guy wasn’t the shooter - but an older guy in campus isn’t too weird to start with.

I encountered this on X. No idea of its veracity, but maybe that roof looks like one of the buildings from the map? https://x.com/chhardman/status/1965882258902102232?t=QWRPSTTaTYHNGabfh-HW2A&s=09

According to NBC News (link is to live coverage, so will probably break eventually...) he was shot from the Losee Center, which appears to be part of the Browning Administration Building to the south of that location (and only 200 feet away?):

A spokesperson for Utah Valley University said in a statement that Kirk was shot from the university's Losee Center, roughly 200 feet away from where he was sitting.

I realized I had him in the wrong part of the courtyard. I have seen some reports about a potential shooter in/on that building and it would be about 350-400 feet from where he was actually located.

I guess I just find politics tiring nowadays. I vote for a Democrat and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. I vote for a Republican and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup.

This makes so little sense to me. Which outgroup is your ingroup, or are you simply unbothered, moisturized, happy, in your lane, focused, flourishing.

We have real problems. And intense escalations on the part of our political tribes are absolutely in the top five.

The escalations are not the problems, the escalations are in response to the problems, and the problems are that we are not one society but several, and the reason for that is mass immigration and the deliberate destruction of the American project. The escalations are what follows from this, and not inherent to themselves.

Is shooting another tribe's influencer an Escalation or a Problem?

Kirk wasn't just an influencer. He was a major GOTV activist (he basically ran the GOTV effort for Trump 2024), pundit, organizer, and behind-the-scenes staffer/connection-maker.

The response from leftists alone is just staggering. How can you see blood pouring out of a man's neck and celebrate it, for words alone? For mainstream conservative words? Polite, respectful debate. The country is over. I just want to go to sleep and forget this ever happened. I think the non-celebrating leftists don't even understand the magnitude of what just happened...

Not a leftist but I don't see this as a particularly big issue either. Obviously in a country with 300 million people and 300 million guns, things like this will happen. It's the price we pay for freedom, and Charlie said so himself. He was right. We can't do anything about extremists with guns any more than we can change the weather. I think the main takeaway from this is that polemicists should take much better precautions when speaking in public. But I'm really not seeing how this means the "country is over."

  • -10

Most hinged take in this thread. Charlie Kirk was pretty low on the totem pole of the right wing, which includes many people for whom Charlie was basically a mouthpiece.

My bet is that the shooter had a very specific bone to pick with Kirk, and it wasn't just a general lash-out against right wing politics - for which there are significantly more meaningful targets. Kirk was very vocal about some very specific topics, and that might attract attention from particularly crazy people.

Kirk was very vocal about some very specific topics, and that might attract attention from particularly crazy people.

Can you elaborate? I vaguely gather that he was pro-gun but not more so than the median Red Triber; similarly, pro-Israel to the same extent as a replacement-level right-wing pundit. What specific topics was Kirk known for, beyond mainstream conservative media talking points?

I have seen some lefty friends and acquaintances calling him a “notorious transphobe” and similar. I have no idea how true this is, but there seems to be a perception among lefties (highly online ones at least) that he was a particularly virulent anti-trans figure and thus deserving of special hatred.

Honestly I doubt that he was any more anti-trans than any other vaguely right-wing figure, but that’s the perception I guess. Maybe because he was known for talking on college campuses and therefore getting into spaces where even mild pushback to trans talking points is normally forbidden? Or maybe he really did make a point of being aggressively anti-trans, again I don’t really know. But the “unique” accusation I’ve seen leveled at him is transphobia, not being pro-gun or pro-life or a Zionist or whatever.

I will say, if it turns out the shooter is trans, that’s going to be a whole new shitshow.

Definitely strongly anti trans

I mean, depends who. Most all mainstream actual in-power people have said this is bad, Obama and the like. And remember Mike Lee, also of Utah, who had a pretty nasty response to the Democratic lawmaker shootings in Minnesota a few months back. But anyways, that’s all kind of beside the point, I feel like this is the kind of difficult to falsify allegation that does a disservice to the discourse. It’s also hard to distinguish sometimes deliberate celebration vs apathy vs simple exhaustion of outrage. Put simply, even though the left and the right are periodically guilty of playing the indirect blame game (responsible via the tone of their rhetoric and stuff) it’s not very helpful to anyone to bring it up. I opine that we need to maybe limit our criticism to people who outright espouse violence directly because anything else is just too difficult and high effort to parse out.

Grandparent comment is clearly just a reflection of opening whatever ragebait algorithm (like Reddit) and thinking that the content that they see their represents the outgroup's median opinion.

People fail to realize that algorithms don't just generate bubbles for ingroups, but also ragebait to keep outgroups engaged.

  • -16

These people are real and I see those temperaments rising among people I personally know. Internet posters, even today, are generally real people. This is not a fringe minority opinion you have to go out of your way to find unless you live in a fully enclosed right-wing bubble.

I don't think non-moderate lefties get it.

Many righties didn't even like Charlie Kirk that much. He was milquetoast on certain ideas, he supported Israel a little too readily for some people's tastes, he seemed like he was there mainly to keep hard-righty ideas from gaining traction. His twitter game was pretty tame/lame.

But he was in fact a righty, and he represented the compromise position. As long as he was allowed to go around on college campuses and pull his 'gotcha' debate tactics, at least there was lip service paid to the exchange of ideas as the preferred method of resolving differences. The discourse was crappy, but at least it was discourse.

Shooting the guy? Well you've just announced that you do not care for debate of even moderate ideas, and you'll kill someone for disagreeing with you with the most civil manners imaginable. Tapdancing on his grave is advertising that you cannot be reasoned out of your position, and your position entails and accepts killing those you disagree with.

The red tribe sent an emissary to the neighboring tribe, he extended his hand in friendship, and one of the blue tribe (probably) hacked his head off and the rest of the tribe pissed on the corpse? What do you think comes next?

Its not QUITE the equivalent of killing John Wick's dog, but its getting at the same idea. It was one of the few things convincing hard righties that talking was still worthwhile.

This isn't a change in anything. There will always be a certain number of people on either side of the aisle who will celebrate violence against the other side, and the only thing that's different now than 15 years ago is that more of them are on the internet by virtue of fewer of them being too old to go on Reddit. I couldn't tell you the number of crabby old guys in bars who talked openly about the "ten cent solution" during the Obama presidency.

There will always be a certain number of people on either side of the aisle who will celebrate violence against the other side, and the only thing that's different now than 15 years ago is that more of them are on the internet by virtue of fewer of them being too old to go on Reddit.

I don't think this is plausible. Since 2010, the stature and influence of an ideology that explicitly rejects argument in favor of shutting up through force has been ascendant. Ideologues of opposing stripes have taken that as permission to do the same thing. The idea that this has had no influence in the proclivity of people who follow the ideology to celebrating the murder of people they disagree with would require a pretty extraordinary ability for populations to be resistant to memes about political violence that I don't think is reflected in any other topic. Especially since political violence against people someone dislikes is one of the most enticing things in the world, and it's uncommon in time that qualms about using it were nearly as common as it is now.

I'll say, I don't think it's a coincidence that I grew up in a blue area in the 90s and 00s and ended up believing that political violence in response to arguments, no matter how evil the arguments, is unacceptable, which also happened to be the dogma in those areas at the time. I think the ideologies that are hegemonic in your environment do tend to have influence on you such that population rates of adoption of ideas can change if the hegemonic ideology changes.

The red tribe sent an emissary to the neighboring tribe, he extended his hand in friendship, and one of the blue tribe (probably) hacked his head off and the rest of the tribe pissed on the corpse? What do you think comes next?

Nothing. Left-wing influencers are not going to fear for their lives. Antifa is not going to be met with instant lethal violence. NPR stations are not going to be torched. Grievance studies departments are not going to be physically attacked. Meetings of Young Americans for Socialism (not a real org) are not going to broken up by force. For the right, violence is a switch, not a dial, and it rusted in the off position a long time ago.

The big change will probably be the right supporting gun control.

It's not so much the switch that rusted off, more that it is routinely glued stuck to make sure it can not be flipped. This is done by 'conservatives' and the like for various reasons. Be that their own comfortable lives they want to keep safe for themselves, or a complex set of responses to being completely out of control with regards to media and power. So they instinctively know that sticking their neck out in support of anything will lead to it getting chopped off. To that extent the drive people have to glue the switch stuck can be summed up as greed and cowardice.

Agreed. The only thing that will rouse the comfortable Right to civil unrest is if their wallets get light. The stock market, housing market, consumer prices, etc. have hypnotized the Right into a state of indolent satisfaction. Rich white boomers have much more to lose than poor leftists. So the Right will grunt and groan on X for a while until the next news story chugs along.

It's prudent to drive the economy into the ground on purpose, by any means necessary, to raise consciousness

I think that depends on whether the big guy in charge cracks enough heads to make it clear that vigilantes won't be necessary.

If it turns out to be yet another "lone wolf with mixed political leanings and a history of mental illness" I'm going to have a really hard time suspending my disbelief. And I'm probably going to buy some more tin foil.

yet another "lone wolf with mixed political leanings and a history of mental illness" I'm going to have a really hard time suspending my disbelief.

Why? It would seem fairly plausible that schizos with incoherent political beliefs are disproportionately likely to try and shoot a politician.

Actually, let me offer an alternative take: most people have mixed political leanings and a lot of people have mental health issues. It is often desirable to play up mental health issues and downplay coherent ideological motivations. It is generally pro-social to maintain the idea that you'd have to be a deranged nut to resort to assassination, and if an assassin agrees with you it can be embarrassing. (I think my first statement is more correct, but it can be useful to think of alternative explanations).

It is generally pro-social to maintain the idea that you'd have to be a deranged nut to resort to assassination

Not if you're schizophrenic it isn't. And the fact you have offered this alternative take makes it impossible for me to believe you believe your first claim, since you are in effect saying that you will make the first claim whether you believe it or not because it is better for society to throw the mentally ill under a bus than it is to be honest about what got him shot (poisonous ideology).

And the fact you have offered this alternative take makes it impossible for me to believe you believe your first claim

Willingness to consider alternative explanations makes me untrustworthy?

Nice talking to you.

Yeah I would run too. Because it isn't willingness to consider alternative explanations, that is merely a pat justification. You immediately came up with your alternative, in the exact same post as your original, and your alternative is to lie and claim the original explanation. That is what makes you duplicitous. That and your feigned moral outrage while you scramble to throw the mentally ill under the bus.

You are both making shitty arguments, and between @Skibboleth's low-effort dismissiveness, your stooping to personal attacks, and the crappy quality of this thread in general, I am exercising great restraint in not handing out bans even to people who really probably need at least a day or two to go sit in a corner and take deep breaths. So this is your opportunity to back off and take deep breaths voluntarily.

Well it's a good thing I checked my notifications before replying to one of the other lazy attacks on the mentally ill. Why are you bolding voluntarily by the way?

Because the alternative is a ban.

More comments

It would seem fairly plausible that schizos with incoherent political beliefs are disproportionately likely to try and shoot a politician.

I haven't done an extensive meta-analysis, but my gut feeling from assassinations over the last 60 years is that successful schizos tend to operate at closer ranges than this shooting.

What do you mean? Nutjobs are definitionally the most likely people to commit senseless violence, since they’ve taken leave of theirs. They’re also very likely to have spotty political records because their political beliefs are concretely a stand-in for their own unstable emotions. This is largely dog bites man news.

The issue is that the overall environment is heated enough that madmen take assassination as their preferred form of acting out, instead of stripping naked in public and announcing the end times.

Bonus points if it’s unclear whether or not he’s trans.

It is now official, from several major sources including Kirk's spokesman, via the NYT, that he is dead.

Lord, have mercy on him, his family, and all of us.

I haven't a desire to see it. People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead.

I happened to see the video before I knew what I was watching and I would amazed if he survived.

Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.

Unlike Fuentes, Kirk did a lot of public appearances, so even if he's not nearly as provocative a figure he was simply more exposed. I personally never thought of Kirk as anything more a suited buffoon - a borderline caricature of a YR. Not a figure of any real note. The only reason I can think of to go after Kirk is pure availability on the part of a shooter who was determined to shoot somebody.

What is of moderate interest to me is that the report as of now is that a single shot was taken from a rooftop 200 yards away. That is not Zangara stepping out of the crowd. Assuming that detail is correct, that is someone who knew what they were doing.

And intense escalations on the part of our political tribes are absolutely in the top five.

I don't anticipate these cooling because we are talking about fundamental disagreements about the shape of society. There will presumably some reconciliation (in a thesis-antithesis sense, not in a everyone-hugs-it-out sense) eventually, but society can sustain quite a high level of civil violence between now and eventually.

But let me offer at the same time: this is (unfortunately) not that unusual in American politics. We had two state legislators assassinated in Minnesota in July. An attempt on Trump in July of last year. The attack on Paul Pelosi (was targeting Nancy Pelosi). The congressional baseball shooting. Giffords being shot in Arizona. And that's not getting into terrorism/politically motivated murders not targeted at prominent individuals or foiled plots that never got within striking distance. An attempt to present a one-sided narrative of violence is, itself, likely meant to rationalize more violence.

Unlike Fuentes, Kirk did a lot of public appearances, so even if he's not nearly as provocative a figure he was simply more exposed. I personally never thought of Kirk as anything more a suited buffoon - a borderline caricature of a YR. Not a figure of any real note. The only reason I can think of to go after Kirk is pure availability on the part of a shooter who was determined to shoot somebody.

Charlie Kirk hasn't been a buffoon for years. This is an old bias you hold.

Instead he is(was) basically the equivalent of what Democrats would call grassroots movement for most of the last 5 years. In other words, he was normie conservative.

But still he was assassinated because???

I don't anticipate these cooling because we are talking about fundamental disagreements about the shape of society.

Do not all previous high-profile debates in this country involve fundamental disagreements about the shape of society? From free speech to abortion to...

Abortion, in particular, involved a whole pile of murders.

Many of those also resulted in violence, or at least intense conflict, before reaching a measure of reconciliation. But no, it's not just about the existence of disagreement but the gap. This is part of why, e.g. there was so much violence during the Civil Rights Movement. Free speech debates don't become nearly as heated because the scope of disagreement is much narrower.

Meanwhile, right now we have a movement that simultaneously controls every branch of the federal government and thinks it is on the verge of extermination.

before reaching a measure of reconciliation

That's what happened with the abortion debate in your view?

Yes. We've been burning social cohesion to resolve those issues. We are out of social cohesion, so we're burning other things now: norms, laws, institutions, credibility of social movements. At some point we run out of things to burn, and the darkness closes in.

In the past, crazy people targeted celebrities. Today, they target political figures- just one more symptom of politics eating everything.

Define 'today'. If we walk backwards through notable assassinations and attempted assassinations, the assassins usually turn out to be massive weirdos.

What is of moderate interest to me is that the report as of now is that a single shot was taken from a rooftop 200 yards away. That is not Zangara stepping out of the crowd. Assuming that detail is correct, that is someone who knew what they were doing.

200 yards is not a particularly notable distance for a scoped rifle. The level of competence here is someone who bought a scope, mounted it, and then spent 20-30 rounds at a range zeroing it.

That's still pretty damn competent as recent perpetrators of high-profile public shootings go.

For a trained sniper, no, but I doubt the assassin was a trained sniper. For the typical guy with a scoped rifle who hunts deer a few weeks out of the year, anything beyond 100 yards is dicey enough that they'll think twice about taking the shot.

To be clear: I'm not positing the shooter was a professional. I am positing that this is not some crank who bought a gun last week. It is probably (again, assuming the above info is true and not more rumors) someone with significant experience/training shooting. That's not that rare in the US, but it's far from common.

100 yards is dicey enough that they'll think twice about taking the shot.

You're east coast/Pittsburgh right? A 200 yard shot in southwest PA is difficult because of the elevation changes, dense foliage, unpredictable winds, and inversion-effect haze that smears everything in your visual field.

Out west, things are different because the terrain is a lot more open. 200 yards is table stakes just to keep the game from getting spooked. If it's a local assailant, I wouldn't be surprised if he was familiar with shooting at longer ranges.

Not at all. 200m is easily attainable your first time shooting. Accounting for wind, 500m's not hard either.

There's apparently some confusion over the distance. Some outlets are reporting the shot was from only 200 feet away (see this comment).

Agreed. IIRC, 300 meters (more than 300 yards) is part of the standard military marksmanship table in NATO countries, and that can be with iron sights, let alone scopes.

When we saw the most recent amp in Nazi rhetoric with "It's okay to punch a Nazi" I tried explaining to my leftist friends, as this was a point when I still could without risking pattern-matching to wrongthink, that the moral order of politics is specifically on violence not being an acceptable tool. Violence changes the moral equation, when a leftist punches who they call a Nazi in belief of preemptive violence being acceptable, what they are saying is the Nazis weren't wrong because of what they did, but who they did it to. No, the crime of Nazi Germany had nothing to do with who they targeted.

A trans-identified man murdered Catholic schoolchildren because he was conditioned in an environment that treats violence as acceptable. I plea to the trans, the backlash they face for sports, for changing rooms, for grooming children, this was a warning of stepping too far. If the trans phenomenon weren't in schools, if to this day it were restricted solely to 18 year olds, the trans movement would be in a much stronger position. Gays in the 80s and especially the 90s in following the agenda as outlined in After the Ball, knew the success of the movement was wholly dependent on peaceful, quiet coexistence and leaving children alone. When, and I'll happily call this fringe, when fringe members of the trans community advocate violence, when they say "What do you expect?" with their words explicitly conveying "Accept us or we'll kill more of your children" it doesn't end in their tolerance, it ends in the response being "Okay, we won't give any of you the chance."

Because this is might makes right, this is consequentialism, this is the Nazis were bad because they didn't target someone who deserved it.

And now Charlie Kirk has been shot.

Years ago on /pol/ I would go into slide threads with a simple point. I live in a very blue part of a very red city. I'm surrounded by trans flags and yes even BLM signs still and various other displays of leftist conforming. Such neighbors talk to me, they think I'm one of them. This is the story of this country. The leftists, for no fear (truly the greatest display of subconscious awareness of how they are the establishment) signal themselves everywhere, even among mixed company, who they believe agrees with them. Leftists don't understand they are surrounded by their ideological adversaries, leftists don't understand that they can't see their adversaries, but their adversaries see them. Their adversaries know where they work, they know where they shop, they know where they live, they know where they sleep.

If violence, if the American Troubles and Years of Lead happens, it will involve one side who wear their allegiance sometimes literally on their faces, and one side who is invisible and everywhere. I'd end my explanation, in those slide threads, by saying I'm trying to save your life. I am, I don't want violence, I know most people don't want violence, it's why we haven't become violent. We know it is the last resort, and even now we aren't there, but each senseless act convinces people violence is the only option.

Iryna Zarutska moved it some, Charlie Kirk moves it much, much farther.

As I've been composing this, constantly refreshing X, I see now Trump posted that Kirk has died. If the left is to continue existing, now is the time for its pivot. Admit you're wrong, your voters will forget, everyone will forget. Lord knows there's enough to advocate purely on improving conditions for American labor while attacking the abuses of wealth. There is no longer a win condition for the American left as it exists in this moment.

what they are saying is the Nazis weren't wrong because of what they did, but who they did it to.

I recall someone back at college, over 20 years ago now, arguing this explicitly with regards to the Holocaust — that it's not that mass murder and death camps are wrong, it's that the Jews, Romani, gays, etc. were the wrong people to exterminate. As the slogan goes, "no bad tactics, only bad targets."

it ends in the response being "Okay, we won't give any of you the chance."

Except, I've yet to ever see that happen.

Leftists don't understand they are surrounded by their ideological adversaries

No, I think they just don't care (I have an analogy about a vehicle brazenly speeding past a cop I like to use), because they know — instinctively if not consciously — that they are the ruling elite, and that their ideological adversaries, no matter how numerous, are powerless peasants who can and will be crushed into obedience as needed.

Their adversaries know where they work, they know where they shop, they know where they live, they know where they sleep.

Which doesn't matter, because those adversaries are beaten-down, powerless peasants who will never dare strike against their betters.

If violence, if the American Troubles and Years of Lead happens,

It won't.

Iryna Zarutska moved it some, Charlie Kirk moves it much, much farther.

Nothing's moving anywhere.

If the left is to continue existing,

…then they don't have to do anything, or change in any way. Because it's not like anybody on the right is going to do anything, except, as @The_Nybbler notes above, shift towards supporting gun control.

One side has all the power, the other is passive and utterly impotent. The left can do whatever they want to the right, the right is powerless — and often not even willing — to fight back. It's clear who wins, who always wins.

You, as with Nybbler, confuse epistemically always betting on black with wisdom. Your hits don't come from reason, they come from pessimism and the scree "Nothing ever happens." When you are proved wrong you ignore and move on. I don't expect when I open the news tomorrow morning to see mass arrests as having been carried out overnight, but if they were, I know I could go to X and find Nick Fuentes explaining how it's only a win for Israel, actually.

You, as with Nybbler, are ahead of the curve in understanding there is a problem, that's it. You are both otherwise immature and motivated by bloodthirst. We have civilization because men stopped being motivated by bloodthirst, stopped hitting defect, and started hitting cooperate. The reason why the right hits cooperate even now is because on a blood-memory level they understand what it is they will unleash when they start hitting defect. I assure you, a murdered girl on a train, a murdered man at a college, and even several murdered children, are not enough.

This is the best time it has ever been for everybody, from the wealthiest to the poorest, to be alive in civilization. The amount of suffering, violence and death we avoid every minute of every day is a wealth beyond measure. And I'm just tired. I'm tired of the infantilization of leftist rhetoric, where they've so effectively cultivated their little sphere to have no remaining adults in the room to stand up and tell them to sit down and be quiet, and I'm tired of the infantilization of rightist rhetoric, like exactly here, where smugness meets ignorance. They aren't docile, they're the adults who know the stakes.

When it comes, if it comes, it will be exactly the moment it is necessary. And we won't just bounce back. It won't be paradise when only whites are left. We will have gone from a civilization that raised from nothing in this beautiful land, to one reborn wholly in blood. The specter will haunt us forever. You think you want this because you don't know better, and you mock meekness when you should rejoice that men still have hope.

I still have hope, even as this day is the hardest it has ever been. I will still hit cooperate, until the button burns out.

You, as with Nybbler, confuse epistemically always betting on black with wisdom. Your hits don't come from reason, they come from pessimism and the scree "Nothing ever happens." When you are proved wrong you ignore and move on.

Last time we were "proved wrong" about that was January 6. And Capital Room was proved right about the response -- violence from the left is excused or celebrated, violence from the right was cracked down upon without mercy. Even the stuff which didn't happen, like the murder of Brian Sicknick -- who you'll note at least one commenter here is STILL pinning on the right.

And I'm just tired. I'm tired of the infantilization of leftist rhetoric, where they've so effectively cultivated their little sphere to have no remaining adults in the room to stand up and tell them to sit down and be quiet, and I'm tired of the infantilization of rightist rhetoric, like exactly here, where smugness meets ignorance. They aren't docile, they're the adults who know the stakes.

Being tired leads to "nothing ever happens". The "adults" on the right who knew the stakes just kept letting the left getting victory after victory... right up until Trump. And Trump started doing things (not all of which I like, but a lot of which I do), and you know what... the world did NOT end.

You said they wouldn't let Trump run again, then, that they wouldn't let him win. He ran and he won.

Being tired leads to "nothing ever happens". The "adults" on the right who knew the stakes just kept letting the left getting victory after victory... right up until Trump. And Trump started doing things (not all of which I like, but a lot of which I do), and you know what... the world did NOT end.

By tired I mean my patience has been exhausted. I spent yesterday afternoon and evening and now all of today so far explaining to my leftist friends how their political movement is dead. I wasn't doing this over Iryna Zarutska, hard as that was and much as I wanted. In their corner of the world, I am now the adult who has stood up and is telling them to be quiet.

This has plated and delivered 2028 to Vance. 11 more years of this? Between deportation and remigration, every red state that now has mandate to max out their gerrymandering, and all the potential SCOTUS picks where every single one will be someone right of Thomas -- the democrat party as it exists in this moment does not survive another 11 years. That's before we consider the indefinite possibility of more leftist violence. Everyone calling for severe measures are correct essentially to consider this casus belli against leftist organizations, they aren't correct politically. The responses yesterday in the celebrations from the bottom to the top, from the children on TikTok to MSNBC to dems shouting on the house floor, are just cause if any other major figure is assassinated.

If it's even necessary. They've already lost. These are their death throes. Victory does come in their destruction, you do win by winning, but that doesn't have to be fast, brutality doesn't have to be fast. It can be the decade they now face in the slow torture of watching the world as they thought they knew it fall apart.

There is no longer a win condition for the American left as it exists in this moment.

Oof, that's hard to read. One of those things that, despite being true, doesn't emit laughter in me. If the left manages political victory or maintains cultural victory only on the back of assassination of people they've deemed sufficiently disagreeable to constitute danger or violence, then whatever made the left better than the alternatives would have been destroyed completely, not even a shadow of a single speck of ash remaining.

At the end of the day thé two tribes absolutely dominate different fields, so sustained civil conflict should have a tempering factor.

At the end of the day thé two tribes absolutely dominate different fields

You mean one tribe dominates almost every field, while the other…

It's a bit more subtle than that. It's probably easier to say they dominate every field that's currently dominant. Tech is lousy with them and tech rules everything right now, but even the top end of tech is more gray tribe (and occasionally quite furry) than blue. Everything downstream of academia is theirs, but academia is currently cratering.

Energy and logistics tend to be quite red, and have always been important.

Those data centers would melt in a week or so of this scenario…

but academia is currently cratering.

[citation needed]

You also forget pretty much the entire Federal bureaucracy, the commanding heights of the economy (like Larry Fink with ESG, and all the other "woke capital"), the upper ranks of the military, the topmost people in most law enforcement (and the rank-and-file, however Red, will follow whatever orders their Blue bosses give, because "I've got to think about my pension").

Same with "energy and logistics." The rank-and-file grunts might be Red Tribe, but their bosses are Blue, and Red Tribe people obey hierarchy. Plus, trying to "weaponize" those requires organization, and we Reds don't do that. We're proud of not doing organization. We are "the people who, if someone orders us to breathe, suffocate to death." I've heard some say that that anyone who talks of "organizing" is the Enemy, and that if someone shows up at his door with such talk, it doesn't matter if they've been friends for decades, he's shooting them dead on the spot.

I don't think any energy and logistics bosses I know of are openly Blue. Maybe performatively Blue. An increasing majority of them are also non-American or Indian, and those often don't map quickly onto the American Red/Blue tribe political axes.

I think the tribal nature of it comes down to tendencies on a personal level; Blue tribe is dominated by those who wish the world changed for the better/to suit them better. As the world changes for the worse, those who switch to a preservation mentality become ascendant. I don't think it's a coincidence that the fields of energy and logistics are relatively mature and lean Red, they know the difficulty in trying to maintain what already exists instead of trying to tear it all down and build something new.

And again, as mentioned, tech is lousy with Blue because tech tends to be full of people who want to change things. "Move fast and break things" is fundamentally a blue activity even if they do it for reasons other than the liberal project.

The number of college-age Americans is going to start decreasing the next couple of years. If the US restricts the number of foreign college students, colleges are going to have to compete for these students and the bottom 5-10% will shut down. The schools that do not want to shut down will have to start being more attractive to these students and their parents. Meanwhile, conservatives are much more likely to have children than those on the far left. The combination could contribute to a pressure to at least reign in the more luxury beliefs universities have cultivated.

They successfully forced the gray tribe in big tech to convert or submit a decade ago.

I would ask that you think, for about ten minutes, about what those dominated fields will look like in a sustained conflict where a) many of the foot soldiers will have trained themselves to enjoy their 'enemies' pain, b) where the 'management' tier is primarily interested in farming those foot soldiers by making alternatives to violence unimaginable, c) where a man who killed someone in a protest over a year ago is walking the streets on bail, today, d) those 'management' personnel will optimize for the survivability onion.

it will involve one side who wear their allegiance sometimes literally on their faces, and one side who is invisible and everywhere.

I mean, a lot of MAGA are also very visible, if not more so.

I'm gonna admit, I'm feeling some simmering rage.

Years, YEARS of being told that right-wing violence vastly outstripped the amount of left-wing violence. Which was even technically correct if you consider prison gang murders to be ideologically motivated. Which is to say, a perfect motte and bailey. "Right wingers are more violent [in prison], therefore we should crack down on right wingers [outside of prison] because they're more of a threat."

But in real life, especially the past few years, the majority of the stories I actually find is lefties shooting politicians, threatening politicians, engaging in riots, or some rando popping a CEO (I admit that MAY not have been ideologically motivated). Oh, yeah, that recent attack on ICE Agents that many have already probably forgotten. Sometimes the lefties self-immolate instead, which is something you almost never catch righties doing.

J6 was indeed an example of right-wing 'violence' but of course only one person died in that event. Who was in fact a rightie.

I'm old enough to remember:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shooting

So Trump gets shot... and has multiple other attempts on his life. Lefties more or less OPENLY suggest that it'd be morally good to kill him and his associates. Punch Nazis. Where "Nazi" is anybody who believes what the median voter did circa 2007.

And then Charlie Kirk, whose WHOLE FUCKING SHTICK is that he tries to win debates and spread ideas rather than push for fighting, gets popped by what will probably end up being another lefty type. I'm prepared to be wrong on that, but I'll take bets with any comers at this point.

And all of that might not piss me off, if it weren't for lefty media running constant cover, tacitly agreeing that the violence was justifiable and refusing to actually lower the temperature surrounding these events.

I'm tired. But not in the "won't it all stop" sense. More in the "when do we actually fight back and do something about it" sense.

For the time being, stay strapped.

EDIT: oh, I forgot, someone took a run at Nicholas Fuentes, too. I don't even like that dude but its exactly more of my point. Lefty commentators are not in the crosshairs.

As it turns out, the shooter in this case was a Trump supporter at one point (with donations to boot. Edit: Fake claim, it was actually a guy who lived on the same street and had the same name), and was posting groyper or /pol/ or /k/ memes. Preemptively assuming he was probably a lefty seems like a pretty big stretch. You should update your argument and assumptions given this new information, no?

Nice try.

Is "Hey fascist! Catch!" a /pol/ or /k/ meme?

Did he write it on his bullet casing ironically?

Can you provide me a single reason why a Trump Supporter, groyper, /pol/ or /k/ poster would want Charlie Kirk dead?

What about the statements of the family:

Utah Governor Spencer Cox said a family member interviewed by investigators stated that Mr Robinson had become "more political" in recent years.

The relative also said that during a dinner conversation before the attack, Mr Robinson had stated Kirk "was full of hate and spreading hate" and mentioned Kirk's upcoming event at Utah Valley University, according to Cox.

Oh and I haven't seen evidence that HE was a Republican at any point:

Public records reviewed by the BBC suggest Mr Robinson had in the past registered as an unaffiliated, or nonpartisan, voter in Utah. Matthew Carl Robinson, the suspect's father, and Amber Denise Robinson, the suspect's mother, are registered Republicans, according to state records.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8wl2y66p9o

I'm updating against him being trans, but much, MUCH more in favor of him being a brain-poisoned Zoomer with lefty sympathies.

Do you want to register a prediction right now as to which sort of Discord communities he was active in?

I am going to say its mildly ironic that the most competent/effective assassins that the left has are heterosexual young white men. Interesting message that sends.

But, the right has a LOT more of that particular demographic than the left does.

Textual analysis on individual phrasings when it relates to online meme groups is haphazard because of the self-referential, ironic, and (sigh) even post modern nature of the discourse. People often use phrases meant to denigrate them (Think of mocking "Orange Man Bad" phrases used by Trump supporters). The Ciao Bella thing is a good example because it's literally a leftist/communist rally song but has been remixed and featured in Groyper playlists and youtube videos(Or so the reporting goes, it could be wrong like my above political donation claim).

Did he write it on his bullet casing ironically

Probably, yes. If you were arguing the opposite point you'd pick the example of "If you're reading this you're gay LMAO", does that sound like something a leftist would say? Did he write it ironically? Maybe he wrote some ironically and some not ironically.

I would guess that 98% of people who use this website are aware of all of the above annoying ironic quirks and you're probably being a little bit bad faith.

As to his political leanings, we know he dressed up as Trump (without any apparent animus, but as above irony is always possible) for Halloween. Complaints about spreading hate aren't really unique to any side with how gotcha-focused discourse is (especially online). Even in this thread yesterday you can find half a dozen examples of posters here saying this is an example of how leftists are the real violent terrorists not the right.

Pegging someone's exact political views is hard because a) people change over time b) people's politics are inconsistent c) reasoning and motivations can be opaque, but that all being said it seems very likely that he wasn't a garden variety leftist of BLM or Kamala or Joe Biden or I dont know Dennis Kucinich(obviously) or some transgender activist and so on. More details will come forth and I'm happy to be corrected where wrong, but the general tone and attitude of this thread yesterday seems to have been largely disproved.

Edit: I'll even take a more extreme claim and say that guy that got fired from MSNBC for saying that Kirk's own rhetoric about hateful actions leading to this violence ended up seeming more true than most of the upvoted opinions provided in this week's thread.

As it turns out, the shooter in this case was a Trump supporter at one point (with donations to boot)

I thought that was deboonked (they got the wrong guy, and doxxed someone completely different in the process)?

More in the "when do we actually fight back and do something about it" sense.

Never. Because we have no way to fight back. We're hopelessly outmatched and outgunned. We'd be crushed even harder and even faster if we tried.

Lefties more or less OPENLY suggest that it'd be morally good to kill him and his associates.

I'm not much of a lefty, and if I had a button that would make Trump die of a heart attack I would press it on utilitarian grounds. A few QALYs from an old man who's already lived a life of ease and luxury, compared to the political chaos he causes? Easy trade.

Then again, maybe I am a lefty. The Motte is more heretic blue tribe than it is red tribe.

That aside, I think people catastrophize about what would happen if a President were assassinated. The President is like a Jedi - if you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. If President Trump is shot, what do you get? Acting President Vance with emergency powers. If you kill Trump and Vance, what do you get? Acting President Mike Johnson leading a unified (and terrified) House and Senate, declaring martial law and putting tanks in the streets of Washington DC with the overwhelming support of the public.

The US Federal Government is one of the only institutions in history that becomes more powerful when its leader is killed.

I suppose by that line of thinking, assassinating Kennedy got us deeper into Vietnam, memory holed the Bay of Pigs, and to the moon in 1969. At least the last one feels like a win?

I'm gonna admit, I'm feeling some simmering rage.

I have to admit, I feel simmering rage whenever I see right-wingers completely memoryhole every instance of right-wing violence to build a one-sided persecution narrative meant to justify more right-wing violence. Oh, you're old enough to remember Scalise getting shot? Are you old enough to remember two fucking months ago? Or three years ago? Or or or.

Oh, wait, I forgot. When a right-winger does it, it was actually a mental health issue. At this point, I'm genuinely convinced there's a subset of American right-wingers that is dug so far into their siege mentality that they're incapable of grasping this. They crouch in the corner, fantasizing about violence until one of them does something, at which point they act shocked for ten seconds before flushing the whole thing down a mental toilet. The ability to flip between gleeful viciousness and 'have you no decency' pearl-clutching is incredible. Not a shred of self-awareness, just an impenetrable conviction that they are innocent victims.

  • -21

One difference is that it seems to be acceptable among much broader swathes of the left to celebrate violence against the outgroup it is on the right. Look at how many people expressed admiration for Luigi Mangione, for example. It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that the left has far more of a problem with tacitly supporting violence than the right.

Your mileage may definitely vary. I've grown up listening to right-wingers not-as-coyly-as-they-think cheer for all manner of violence against their enemies. There's a lot of stuff I ignored when I was inside the tent that I reflect back on and realize how casual support for violence was. It certainly wasn't everybody, but it was quite common and encountered very little pushback.

And these were normies conservatives and that was before Trump came in the scene and started actively riling them up.

Certainly you can find people like that on the left. IME the biggest difference is that when there's left-wing political violence, normie liberals will usually say "that's terrible" and when there's right-wing political violence, normie conservatives will split into thirds along the lines of "it's good, actually", blaming the left, and just pretending it didn't happen.

I don't know what the situation was like for you growing up, but my sense is that there's currently a clear asymmetry. I believe you if you say that individual right-wingers said those sorts of things around you, but the difference as far as I see is that you have close to entire mainstream platforms like reddit and branches of academia that openly celebrate things like this in a way there's no real right-wing equivalent for.

IME the biggest difference is that when there's left-wing political violence, normie liberals will usually say "that's terrible"

It's meaningless for 80% of liberals to say "that's terrible" when they refuse to disassociate from the 20% who say "that's awesome" and when that latter group has outsize influence in left-wing politics.

and when there's right-wing political violence, normie conservatives will split into thirds along the lines of "it's good, actually", blaming the left, and just pretending it didn't happen.

Do you have evidence of this? I don't live in the US so my exposure to American media is limited, but I can't think of any non-fringe right-wing group that celebrates political violence on the right. You'd have to go to really marginal groups with tiny numbers like white supremacist or incel forums. There are multiple often-violent groups often have the tacit if not explicit support of much of the American left: Antifa, the Punch A Terf crowd, the pro-Hamas people, the Defund the police contingent, BLM etc.

I can't think of any non-fringe right-wing group that celebrates political violence on the right.

You would be correct.

Do you have evidence of this?

Jan 6 will continue to be the premier example. The conservative reaction basically split three ways between "it was a false flag", J6ers are heroes, and it was actually no big deal. Eventually this consolidated on a hybrid of the latter two positions (e.g. the lionization of Ashli Babbitt). You don't have to go dumpster diving for groypers to find this. It will come up relatively frequently on gun/hunting forums or other conservative-dominated space where they feel they are 'in private'. I mean, shit, it comes up here from time to time.

However, to your opening paragraph: half my point in this thread has been that American right-wingers don't process their support for political violence as support for political violence. When Tom Cotton calls for people to beat up pro-Palestinian protestors, or they laugh about a guy nearly beating Paul Pelosi to death, or they cheer for police brutality, they don't think of that as supporting political violence. When someone plows a truck into a crowd of protestors, they shrug and say "shouldn't have been standing there" (while laughing behind their hands). When it becomes unignorable (as in the Minnesota case), they shift the blame to mental health or somehow try to make it the fault of left-wingers.

You mention not disassociating from the 20%, but for American* right-wingers the 20% includes much of their senior leadership.

(I also want to note that this is not a new phenomenon; conservatives have been joking about murdering Democrats for decades)

*I have to specify American right-wingers because I don't think this is some timeless quality of conservatism; Americans in general seem a lot more comfortable with violence than their European counterparts

Jan 6 will continue to be the premier example.

Jan 6th is fair to bring up, although I'm not sure it was any more violent in nature than many of the BLM riots or things like setting up CHAZ.

It will come up relatively frequently on gun/hunting forums or other conservative-dominated space where they feel they are 'in private'. I mean, shit, it comes up here from time to time.

Such forums have far smaller cultural reach than places like Reddit or even Bluesky. They also have essentially no representation among university departments and college campuses, which play a critical role in shaping the attitudes of young, politically-involved people. The point is that if you're a mentally-unstable, violently inclined individual, you know you're going to get far more widespread adulation and praise for killing a right-wing figure than a left-wing one.

When Tom Cotton calls for people to beat up pro-Palestinian protestors,

I googled "Tom Cotton Palestine protests" and what I found was him saying this:

"I’m saying that if people are trying to get to work or pick up their kids from school or take a sick kid to the doctor and you have pro-Hamas vigilantes blocking the streets, they should get out and move those people off the streets," Cotton said. “The police will get there eventually. But a lot of damage will be done in the meantime."

That seems pretty distant for saying they should be beaten up for the positions they hold.

or they laugh about a guy nearly beating Paul Pelosi to death, or they cheer for police brutality,

Do you have examples of prominent right-wingers doing either of this (for cases of unambiguous police brutality)?

When someone plows a truck into a crowd of protestors, they shrug and say "shouldn't have been standing there" (while laughing behind their hands).

Evidence? I'm not trying to be obtuse btw. I don't live in America and I don't particularly follow American news (90% of what I know about it I pick up from this website).

You mention not disassociating from the 20%, but for American* right-wingers the 20% includes much of their senior leadership.

I have the opposite impression. That 20% on the left includes celebrities, writers, academics, politicians and platforms like reddit. I don't see an equivalent on the right.

Jan 6 will continue to be a major point of contention not for the level of violence in itself, but what that violence (along with other aspects) represents: an attempt forcibly subvert election outcomes. This is sui generis in the history of American political violence.

That seems pretty distant for saying they should be beaten up for the positions they hold.

Firstly, physically manhandling someone against their will is assault. But, to rewind, the reason he is 'clarifying' is that he previously said this:

"I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way. It's time to put an end to this nonsense."

If you consistently characterize peaceful protestors as criminals, suggest the police should be deployed against them, suggest people should take matters into their own hands, etc... then I'm not inclined to be charitable to coy walkbacks.

Do you have examples of prominent right-wingers doing either of this (for cases of unambiguous police brutality)?

Off the top of my head: Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. both openly mocked the Pelosi attack. Mike Lee mocked the murder Melissa Hortman and suggested the far-left was to blame. I don't know what 'unambiguous' police brutality means, given how lenient the US is to police violence, efforts of state governments to curtail protest rights, and the tendency of right-wingers to equate any form of protest stronger than standing quietly for an hour or two with rioting, but one of the more notorious incidents to come out of the summer 2020 protests was the dispersal of protests in Lafayette Square in DC at the direction of Donald Trump and with the approval of prominent Republicans. We have Ben Shapiro has advocated that Derek Chauvin be pardoned, as another, later example.

On a policy level, you have things like the Trump administration pulling back on civil rights investigations related to police brutality and refusing to enforce oversight, which I would argue constitutes tacit approval for police brutality (as long as the victims are not the wrong sort of people).

For more grass roots expression, I guess you're just going to have to take my word for it that a lot of conservative voters subscribe to the Tango & Cash theory of criminal justice (and can get pretty damn racist about it to boot). Or not.

Alternatively, if you'll forgive the shitty image macro, I think this succinctly captures why left-wingers are unimpressed by right-wing scolding.

(90% of what I know about it I pick up from this website).

No offense, but the TheMotte is literally a forum for right-wing culture warriors and a handful of contrarian gadflies who like arguing with them. Even for the people who aren't far right, they're almost always people with progressive-critical views. It is in no way representative of American political culture, or even of normie conservative American political culture. It gives you a very one-sided view of the state of affairs, e.g. persistently highlighting RW grievances with academia while ignoring or downplaying influential right-wing media figures and general bad behavior. (If one were to base their impression of US politics purely on Motteposting, one might conclude that the right has virtually no media presence, rather than the reality that there's a massive right-wing media ecosystem).

The left has its big somewhat-public bubbles in which anything can be said so long as it's directionally aligned with the ideology. Reddit, discord, academia, you know the rough map. But that doesn't mean that the right doesn't do the same - it just happens behind closed doors, so to speak, since right-wing spaces are by necessity less public.

When a right-winger does it, they get denounced by everyone. When the left does, not so much.

Do you think you could find even 1/100th the support for your two examples (or any other ones you care to use) compared to crowdfunding for the ICE attackers or a community dedicated to "Free Luigi [Mangione]"? The would-be Trump assassin got lauded for his attempt, though his death put a damper on any attempt to rally support.

To be clear: the threshold I'm looking for is $360 in public fundraising from at least five people, or a 400 member community dedicated to them.

It's the difference between one crazy person (who happened to be right-wing), and a notable fraction of the left wing as a whole (who are rallying around one crazy person who happened to be left-wing).

The President of the United States was involved in fundraising for the people who engaged in political violence on January 6th.

  • -10

Supporting rioters is par for the course for either side, he seems to have been talking about murders.

Well, no, supporting rioters had not been par for the course for the right for many years before January 6. Because the right pretty much didn't riot. And if the Democrats hadn't decided to try to bury the January 6 rioters under the jail, and quite a few non-rioters with them, and use the whole thing to try to disqualify the Republican candidate, I doubt the larger right would have supported them.

When a right-winger does it, they get denounced by everyone.

When a right-winger does it, everyone on the right acts all mystified as to how their constant violent fantasies could have led to violent action. They shift the blame to mental health while half of them snigger behind their hands.

This quote really sums up my experience with the asymmetry here:

My feed is filled with statements from elected democrats condemning the shooting which is obviously good but I have a sneaking suspicion it will all be forgotten when someone named like MyLittleCommunistPony got 100k Likes on TikTok for saying “Good” or whatever

Except that when the tables are turned, instead of MyLittleCommunistPony it's senior Republican leadership. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples would be Trump pardoning J6 insurrectionists. But also Mike Lee claiming the Minnesota assassin was a radical left-winger. Or, uh, Charlie Kirk.

(And all this is leaving aside the reality that right-wingers outsource most of their political violence to law enforcement and cheer from the sidelines)

  • -20

Charlie Kirk was asking for someone to bail out the Pelosi attacker specifically to ask the guy questions about his motives. Not because he supported the attack, but because he wanted to learn more about it. And then compared how easy most violent criminals are let out on bail compared to this attacker.

That is 100% different from thousands of people gleefully saying, "Finally! I hope they do Matt Walsh next." Sure, it's not as bad as Obama saying, "Finally! I hope they do Matt Walsh next!" But it's still pretty bad! If Obama made a similar statement to what Kirk said about the Pelosi attacker, something like, "I hope someone on the left gets the opportunity to talk to the assassin and find out his motives before the corrupt Trump DOJ gets their hands on him!" I don't think you'd see a problem with that statement.

If Barack Hussein Obama, icon of milquetoast respectability, says that, I'd probably drive to three different gun stores to buy ammo.

Fine, not Obama, but some Left wing commentator? That would be a better comparison to Kirk anyways.

I think the predominant reaction would be to write that person off as a crank, but I'm not an MSNBC viewer so I may be wrong about that reaction.

Except that when the tables are turned, instead of MyLittleCommunistPony it's senior Republican leadership. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples would be Trump pardoning J6 insurrectionists. But also Mike Lee claiming the Minnesota assassin was a radical left-winger. Or, uh, Charlie Kirk.

Your examples are about a mostly peaceful group that didn't kill anyone, an inaccurate denunciation, and a (surprisingly apt) lone voice (why hadn't anyone bailed him out)? I'm still not seeing a pattern of the right supporting assassination or any other political violence.

I thought the Minnesota guys' politics/general motivations turned out to be pretty weird and unclear?

Oh, wait, I forgot. When a right-winger does it, it was actually a mental health issue.

  • -36

The sheer obscurity of the Minnesotans plus the weirdness of the shooter's autobiography/having met them occasionally on all accounts create a different picture than trying to blast a Trump or w/e.

When a right-winger does it, it was actually a mental health issue.

I'm talking about the first clause, not the second -- mental health issues are kind of par for the course with multiple murderers, no?

I'm saying that it's not clear at all where this guy sits on the political spectrum and he has mental health issues. Even if he's a left winger!

You misunderstand me. RWers never, ever own their violent extremists, no matter how blatant it is (I mean, seriously, the guy was going down a hit list of democratic legislators). The blame is always shifted onto mental health. This despite how much time the far right spend fantasizing about violence (shit, the most common far-right response I've seen to Kirk's murder is "this is our Reichstag fire, time to break out the jackboots")

I found this remark from Ben Dreyfuss illustrative:

My feed is filled with statements from elected democrats condemning the shooting which is obviously good but I have a sneaking suspicion it will all be forgotten when someone named like MyLittleCommunistPony got 100k Likes on TikTok for saying “Good” or whatever

Except when it's a right-wing extremist, instead of MyLittleCommunistPony saying 'good', it's, like, Mike Lee, and right-wing commentators invent cope about how the guy was really mentally ill and we can't really know what was in his heart.

  • -19

no matter how blatant it is (I mean, seriously, the guy was going down a hit list of democratic legislators).

The guy also had a bunch of "no kings" anti-trump fliers -- as mentioned, rounding him off to "right wing extremist" doesn't even match up with the (normally left-wing slanted) article you linked in wikipedia. Which is kind of rough on your whole premise, mental health issues aside.

(shit, the most common far-right response I've seen to Kirk's murder is "this is our Reichstag fire, time to break out the jackboots")

You may have bubble issues -- the most common response I've seen anywhere is more like "I'm praying for his family".

The guy also had a bunch of "no kings" anti-trump fliers

Which do you think is more likely: that this guy who was specifically targeting Democrats was also carrying fliers for a normie resist-lib protest because after he finished up murdering his way through the MN state legislature he was going to pass out some literature? Or that this guy with a history of right-wing views (pro-life, anti-trans, evangelical, etc...) was trying to throw people off the scent?

Boelter was not just an unhinged guy (he is also an unhinged guy, but that's just table stakes) who intended to pull the trigger and see what happened. Even if he didn't expect to get away with it, he clearly planned to.

  • -14
More comments

condemning the shooting

For the duration of the tweet. Tomorrow they'll be back to explaining how Charlie Kirk rhetoric justifies violence.

I was actually thinking earlier how it's the left-wing version of the "thoughts and prayers" ritual.

My dude, the guy said Tim Walz told him to do it. I was obsessed with that case, but the guy does seem to actually just be untethered to objective reality, like Jared Loughtner. FWIW, I think Mangione is in this category as well.

Relatedly, can you show a single right-winger who approved of Gendron? I feel confident predicting that an overwhelming supermajority of rightwingers support giving him the chair.

That's exactly what the wikipedia article says. But Boelter tracks to right wing and has said he was right wing 20 years ago.

It just reads, to me, like Skibboleth giving up and getting mired in the same guesswork where everything is made up and the points don't matter that he's decrying which undermines the point just a bit.

but he tracks to right wing and is more likely right wing than left.

How, specifically?

I followed this at the time, and my prediction was that it didn't look like a crazy person (obvious premeditation, use of tactics, use of a mask, etc), and seemed more likely to be a right-winger than a left-winger, given the available evidence. But then more evidence came out, and what it showed was that this guy had been fairly apolitical but mental-health-wise marginal, and that recently he had gone cuckoo-bananas based on his public pronouncements, in a way that did not map to the red-blue split.

I was, from the start, prepared to believe that he was motivated by right-wing ideology, and I maintain that the prior for any murder of politicians should be that the act is political. But in this case, he genuinely seemed to believe that (IIRC) he'd figured out how to end world hunger by outlawing food waste at the federal level, and thought the politicians who weren't listening to him were on the side of Big Hunger. That is not right-wing ideology. That is actual craziness.

How, specifically?

from the wiki:

Boelter claimed to have military training and a career in private security

His anti-abortion views are considered a possible motive.

Boelter was registered to vote in Oklahoma as a Republican for the 2004 United States presidential election

Boelter's wife told investigators their family "prepared for major or catastrophic incidents"

He's also a white guy that was wearing a cowboy hat in CCTV footage.

These all track right wing to me. There's a ton of confounders to this, yeah, which is why even his affiliation was muddy. But in situations like these affiliation is being used as an assumed motivation most of the time. I don't think that's true but I was just trying to meet Skibboleth halfway to try to maintain decorum since the post was mostly just pure seething.

All of those are indeed weak evidence that he was Red-aligned, which was why at the time I bet he was actually Red-aligned. But then I actually read what he'd been writing and posting shortly before the attack, and what some of his colleagues reported of his actions, and that gave much, much stronger evidence that he was in fact just insane.

They caught him alive, IIRC, they have all his devices and all his possessions. If someone can point to any actual evidence that his attacks were motivated by anything resembling red-tribe political ideology, I will be happy to count him as a Red-aligned ideological killer.

Over the years, Boelter would reach out with what appeared to be exponentially ambitious endeavors, Kalech said: "What he wanted to take on, I think, might have been bigger." Boelter wanted to end American hunger, according to another project's PowerPoint. And while the idea would require massive changes to current laws and food regulation, it appeared Boelter dismissed that as surmountable if only elected officials could get on board. "American Hunger isn't a food availability problem," the presentation said. "American Hunger is a tool that has been used to manipulate and control a vast number of American's [sic], with the highest percentage being people of color. This tool can and should be broken now, and failure to do so will be seen as intentional criminal negligence by future generations. We should be embarrassed as a nation that we let this happen and have not correctly [sic] this injustice 100 years ago," one slide said. One slide described how his own lived experience informed his idea, referring to him in the third person: "several times in his life Vance Boelter was the first person on the scene of very bad head on car accidents," and that he was able to help "without fear of doing something wrong" because he was "protected" by Good Samaritan law – which could and should be applied to food waste, the slide said....
To keep an eye on which lawmakers supported the necessary legislation, "there needs to be a tracking mechanism," the presentation said, where citizens could "see listed every singe [sic] elected official and where they stand on the Law (Food Providers Good Samaritan Law)." "Those few that come out and try to convince people that it is better to destroy food than to give it away free to people, will be quickly seen for who they are. Food Slavers that have profited off the hunger of people for years," the 18-slide, nearly 2,000-word presentation said.

You tell me how this sounds like a Red Tribe grievance.

@Skibboleth is flaming out because he is a die-hard partisan whose goal is to pretend to be reasonable, and his side is having a very bad week. We actually discussed the Waltz shooting at some length at the time, including considerable speculation about motives. The shooting happened in the middle of the night and IIRC by the next afternoon they caught the guy and had established that he was legitimately crazy, so the conversation died out. The arguments he is presenting above are specious, but he puffs up big, neglects the detail and shouts in outrage, so mostly people don't notice.

What we are seeing now is legitimately way, way worse than the Minnesota shootings. We have video of people in the crowd jumping and screaming for joy within seconds of the bullet's impact. the entire left-wing internet is either openly celebrating his murder or feigning smug disinterest.

Didn't you just say that your side will not accept a crazy guy with a gun explanation?

No one in Red Tribe is going to accept that a famous Conservative activist being sniped on a college campus can be summarized as "crazy guy with a gun".

Why are your enemies required to be so much more rational and forgiving than you are?

the entire left-wing internet is either openly celebrating his murder or feigning smug disinterest.

This is A) not true, and B) "murder and suspected jaywalking".

More comments

I'm not really going to debate the matter by trading anectdotes of individual acts.

The point is that ACCORDING TO THE LEFT its the righties doing most of the violence.

Here.

Here. (who invented the term "stochastic terrorism," anyway?)

Here.

Here. Mr. Donie O'Sullivan, directly says:

"And while America's roots are soaked in bloodshed, violence in the country today is mostly from right-wing extremism. From Oklahoma City to Charlottesville to January 6th. There is simply no equivalent on the left..."

Yes, the consistent message the left/liberals likes to assert is "Those loony right wingers are a threat to us all, there is no real danger from the left!" That's the narrative 'enforced' by the entire mainstream media.

And that is just an abject lie. Those same sources of course downplayed an entire summer of violent and deadly riots in 2020. That's when the 'switch' flipped for me. The level of dishonesty about what I could see with my eyes of course leads me to assume they're lying about stuff that I can't see, too.

If you intend to keep repeating the lie, all you're doing is giving me cause to ignore you. I'm not pretending that e.g. Timothy McVeigh weren't ideologically motivated terrorists.

And certainly not using 'mental health' as an excuse.

But I'm not going to give any more benefit of the doubt to those desperate to convince me that the right, in the U.S., is the greater danger to regular people.

I'm not pretending that e.g. Timothy McVeigh weren't ideologically motivated terrorists.

IMO McVeigh is a terrorist, but it's complicated because I'm not sure what the correct response should be to the government murdering 86 people, including 54 women and children, without much remorse. Koresh wasn't a good guy, but the lack of a government investigation to doing so seems at least parallel to the perceived lack of concern for the Floyd incident. If I squint enough, the responses of "choosing violence against the system" at least rhyme a bit.

Not that I would endorse violence in either of these cases, but the abstract "how to hold one's government accountable?" question in answer to an atrocity maybe does rightfully call for violence at some point: "When in the course of human events..."

because I'm not sure what the correct response should be to the government murdering 86 people, including 54 women and children, without much remorse.

Ideally, you strike out directly at the responsible parties, if you're enacting violence.

My main critique (by no means ONLY) of these sorts of smallish scale rebellion is they're simply not targeted at the people who were actually responsible for the acts you're trying to punish. Sometimes you can't actually hit them, which is often true in asymetric wars. But I genuinely do not think it an excuse for going after unrelated members of their organization, or civilians who are at best tangentially connected.

That's gangland tactics, of course.

That's also why, JUST AS AN EXAMPLE, Israel's repeated successful destruction of the entire leadership structure of their biggest enemies is impressive to me. If every war could be fought such that really only the heads of the respective states/organizations were killed it'd be a vast improvement across the board. Its about the only 'moral' way to prosecute such a conflict.

Ideally, you strike out directly at the responsible parties, if you're enacting violence.

Fun fact: after reading Unintended Consequences McVeigh actually said that he might have gone with sniper attacks rather than the bombing, had he read the book first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_Consequences_(novel)#Timothy_McVeigh_controversy

I would like to subscribe to receive more "McVeigh Facts".

If every war could be fought such that really only the heads of the respective states/organizations were killed it'd be a vast improvement across the board.

Have you seen any pictures out of Gaza recently, or seen any of the stories about what's happening? I don't think you're making the point you think you're making if you've actually seen what the strip looks like now.

That doesn't contradict my point.

Indeed, I would make the same grievance about the Ukraine situation.

My sympathy for Hamas in particular is in short supply since they targeted bystanders/civilians to kick off festivities.

There's ample room for EVERYONE involved to be horrible.

I noticed something rather spooky a while back, reading up on McVeigh's case, which is that the total death count from the OKC bombing, 168, was exactly double the combined death count from Waco (82) and Ruby Ridge (2), excluding the federal agents who themselves died in those incidents.

Outside of the general ethical problem with 'government agents did bad things, these guys are also government agents' -- it's hard to overstate how indiscriminate -- McVeigh specifically evaluated the daycare situation in the building he targeted. That's a good part of the point of the original charcoal briquettes rant.

And all of that might not piss me off, if it weren't for lefty media running constant cover, tacitly agreeing that the violence was justifiable and refusing to actually lower the temperature for these events.

Because people are going to ask for examples, they aren't hard to find.

https://x.com/Banned_Bill/status/1965860260368822399

MSNBC

“[He is] constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech, aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which often then to hateful actions.”

If you've seen the guy they arrested, he looks like he has terminal MSNBC brain. Old white boomer who's brain has probably been soaked in MSM propaganda about Kirk for years.

If you've seen the guy they arrested, he looks like he has terminal MSNBC brain. Old white boomer who's brain has probably been soaked in MSM propaganda about Kirk for years.

Yes, that's accurate. But latest indication is he wasn't the shooter and the shooter is still at large.

I'm not wishing one way or the other, but if the shooter turns out to be an illegal immigrant that'll just be the crap cherry on this shit sandwich.

I'd be interested in a pool, if it weren't so ghoulish, and if I thought at this point that the shooter will ever be conclusively identified. But if they still don't know who it was, idk how they ever will. Might be some really impressive surveillance/detective work here. We'll see.

My money would be on trans-woman, since in my experience they're the majority of extreme leftists who also happen to be competent with long guns.

I emphasize that we do not know yet.

Did the shooter paraglide onto the roof, wipe the gun of all prints, abandon the rifle, rappel down, and walk away with hands in pockets, or something? Otherwise it's very hard to imagine the killer getting away unidentified.

But if they still don't know who it was, idk how they ever will

They found Mangione. It's not impossible.

Since Trump is personally involved and also mad, he’s going to pressure the FBI to step in more, and they will do the thing where they comb through tons of video footage and such. I give it maybe 85% odds they catch him, but that includes taking a few weeks to do so.

But if they still don't know who it was, idk how they ever will.

On a college campus?

Surveillance cameras and eyewitnesses abound.

I can't think of the last time a shooter in the U.S. actually got away with this sort of act.

And uh, the victim in this case was a personal friend of the guy who controls the entire Federal Law Enforcement apparatus.

Trump could walk into NSA headquarters and probably have the Killer's name, face, and full DNA sequence in five minutes.

I can't think of the last time a shooter in the U.S. actually got away with this sort of act.

I don't think they have ever found who placed the pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters on January 6 5th (the night before).

I don't think they have ever found who placed the pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters on January 6 5th (the night before).

That was a false flag. The previous night a cop looking MF places the backpacks, the next day another also cop looking doesn't find them randomly or search for them or whatever, instead they beeline straight for where the backpacks are, pick them up and go talk to a police cruiser.

Gee, what tight little coincidence and nice justification to RICO the lot of the jan 6 protestors.

They also fought tooth and nail not to have the surveillance footage of what happened released.

Well, when you are investigating yourself, it’s easy not to find the culprit

This wasn’t a particularly difficult shot- this could easily be an actual Trotskyite or one of the tens of remaining red tribe leftists, or some kind of apolitical loon. There’s a lot of people who can make that shot.

Oh, yeah, that recent attack on ICE Agents that many have already probably forgotten.

I was talking to my father earlier today (right leaning big business Republican) and he said "you know if this rhetoric keeps up someone is going to take a shot at ICE."

For. Fuck. Sake.

I think there has been at least three?

Something has to be done about the complete failure of the media to keep people informed.

It was a whole fucking organized ambush!

Now, they were incompetent at it, but they were acting precisely like an insurgent military force.

And THAT got less mention in the media than when Trump dropped some ordinance on drug runners in International Waters.

Latest I'm hearing is that the old white guy they had in custody turns out not to be the shooter and a manhunt is on for the real one. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/live-blog/live-updates-shooting-charlie-kirk-event-utah-rcna230437

Throwing my hands up here. This is chaos. I'm gonna take a walk. Any of you is welcome to join me in solidarity.

There's some funny nutpicking, and then there's some not-so-funny nuts someone else picked.

I'm... hard-pressed to comment more, here. I'd like to 24-hour-rule this, because early reporting is so often so bad for these type of incidents, but there's almost zero chance it's some nutty right-winger who thought Kirk Didn't Stalin Hitler Enough, and at most it's a question of whether early reports that it's trans-related-stuff are right, and my gut makes it pretty hard to think they're not or that it'd even matter much if they weren't. It's a little nice to see some lefties or 'centrist' liberal saying this is bad (woo, Kelseytuoc retweeted aghamilton28), but when that's not even close to universal, and when those who don't or who find it worth other forms of comment don't get at least a shush, it's hard to take too much solace from the exceptions.

But it's soon, and maybe in a week there'll be some mirror to the culture war WMDs of the past and I'll eat crow and be very happy about it. Or maybe some manager will steamroll through MSNBC and The View. But I'm not optimistic, and I dunno if we'll even get Home Depot Lady v2, and I don't think anyone on the conservative side of aisle will or can be persuaded to care about that.

I've been trying to write a followup on the Paul Kessler thing (trial: supposedly next month, but also supposedly two months ago, maybe early next year?), a contrast on a lot of other public violence cases in the aftermath of various public protests, and on a bunch of recent gun cases, and there's some increasingly obvious answers for a lot of it. Four years ago I worried about things going hot in a crime-of-passion sense, where plausibly-reasonable decisions run into foreseeable consequences, and the ramifications spiral and reinforce each other as 'our' definitions of reasonable decisions increasingly disagree, with a standard example being where CPS and trans kids and the horrors of the foster system run face-first into each other. The answer seems, increasingly, that those crimes of passion will happen, and the people charged with enforcing the law against them will decide to bring the hammer down or not based on their current wins, and those whims have unsurprisingly kept pots from boiling over, and that's a solution of a sort, but only until you think about what comes next.

There's a lot of discussion around this topic that I just aren't willing to publish publicly, because at some point, someone that isn't a garbage person is going to take ten hours and seriously think about what the results and ramifications and incentives are, and how they can maximize their impact. And it's going to result in hundreds of deaths, if not thousand+, in the first incident, and we won't find them, and people won't even wonder why so much as who they can blame.

There's a lot of discussion around this topic that I just aren't willing to publish publicly

Is this forum too public? Are we to be denied your insights?

Yes. I dropped a PM conversation with FCfromSSC over a tangentally related matter, and there were a portion of discussion around the Baude/Paulsen stuff that I will not post here and did not write down anywhere except in a direct e-mail to Baude.

There are ideas that are dangerous. I will no sooner than write publicly how to kill large numbers of people and probably get away with it than I would inform twelve year olds about the cool cleaning technique of mixing bleach and ammonia.

Please do not use this space to workshop ways to make the world a significantly worse place.

Please do not use this space to darkly hint about ways to make the world a significantly worse place that you've totally though about, and are absolutely so dangerous you can't share them, but hoo boy, are they dangerous.

It just piques my curiosity, like saying you can't tell me about your secret. I didn't even know about your secret until you told me you had one!

It is difficult to properly phrase a cognitohazard warning. I am sorry that I am not better at it. Please consider that I mean this genuinely and in good will, and am not attempting to play some sort of complicated word game.

A lot of people here historically and currently believe that this is all business as usual, that the spiraling escalation of the culture war is more or less a sideshow to the more meaningful features of modern society. They are wrong. The increasing violence, and the increasing support for violence, is very bad, and has a high probability of making everyone's lives much worse.

You’re reacting to his comment as though he asked specifically about ideas for violence, but the way gattsuru worded his original comment I had no clue the specific things he was talking about not speaking on publicly were in that category until he clarified.

It's a one-human to another warning, not a mod warning. I also am attempting to provide clarity. It is difficult to phrase a cognitohazard warning properly.

There's some funny nutpicking

Jezebel at monday: "We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk"

https://www.jezebel.com/we-paid-some-etsy-witches-to-curse-charlie-kirk#

For the “POWERFUL HEX SPELL,” I had to provide Kirk’s date of birth for “accuracy.” The witch performed the hex, but her response was unsettling: “I just completed your spell, and it was successful. You will see the first results within 2–3 weeks. However, I did notice disturbances… negative energy not only from you, but projected at you. Likely from toxic family members, co-workers, or new acquaintances.”

I wonder which way that witch will jump. On the one hand, if she reveals her identity she'll probably get quite a few more customers (and/or be able to raise her rates quite a lot). On the other hand, she would also get quite a few more people looking to burn her as a witch.

I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.

Kirk is (was) far more dangerous to the people who disagree with him than Fuentes is, though, at least by their stated belief of what "danger" constitutes. Fuentes is basically a nobody extremist, while Kirk is (was) a fairly mainstream right-winger who is good at talking to young people. I noticed this back when Jordan Peterson was rising, and there were plenty of comments about how he's basically a Democrat by nature of being a liberal and somewhat right-wing Canadian, making it confusing why he'd be getting so much hate from the left. But that's exactly what makes him so hate-worthy - his ideas and arguments were so close to the liberal left's that he could actually convince some of the less illiberal leftists to defect! Whereas the actual extremist white supremacists or neo-Nazis had zero shot at convincing anyone who was on the left. So why waste ammo on the latter?

Now, I wonder, is Kirk more dangerous to them as a martyr or alive? I suspect there's little enough reverence for martyrs right now that his death won't compel that many people to join his cause. However, I could see his murder as disgusting a lot of people away from the cause that he fights against and is not shy about openly calling for violence against people for their speech. Time will tell, I suppose.

Speaking purely factually, I’m pretty sure killing Kirk a few years ago might have had an impact, but now? Trump 2.0? Turning Point is already established and has infrastructure, it will live fine without Kirk. Like 98% of all assassinations, it will backfire (assuming some kind of liberal did it). Martyrdom is pretty strong and it consistently surprises me that assassins don’t seem to get that (and the more personal-grudge types aren’t that common in recent years)

A 5D chess player might do it in purpose if they wanted political strife. Kirk abused the hell out of the super PAC rules, but I always approved of him in a loose sense (despite strong policy disagreement) because he was definitely a “work within the system” type.

Now he's a martyr. Horst Wessel, or if you prefer, Calvo Sotelo.

Is the mainstream right badge something people actually want except for donors? He was pro warmongering in the middle east, prop wall street and pro the medical industrial complex draining average Americans.

Interestingly enough Fuentes has gained decent traction on tiktok among minorities and leftists because he is fundamentally opposed to elite politics. His coverage of Middle Eastern policies resonate with many in the left.

Kirk is (was) far more dangerous to the people who disagree with him than Fuentes is

No. Charlie Kirk’s value over replacement commentator is essentially zero. He will be replaced tomorrow. Fuentes has actual talent and social capital. Things which the groypers would be hard-pressed to find if Fuentes were to disappear.

  • -15

Fuentes has actual talent and social capital

No he doesn’t. I mean, talent, maybe. But he’s incredibly unpopular.

His twitter engagement is pretty insane. Having many haters does not necessarily mean you're not popular.

Fuentes has actual talent and social capital.

I genuinely don't understand what you mean by this. What is Fuentes' main ideas that differentiates him? What has he done? All I know is his name is associated with an equally odd "Groyper" term, and I think he's anti-Israel while still being on the right. Does he have a blog or youtube or onlyfans? I've Googled his name a couple times and saw nothing that really looked noteworthy except for him being an obvious fed for not being indicted like the rest of the Jan 6ers.

Meanwhile Charlie Kirk has viral debates on college campuses and started a media company whose reporters cover leftist riots on the ground among other things mainstream media ignores. I know who this guy is and what his shtick is just through osmosis. He's the reasonable voice on the ground pointing out hypocrisy and extremism on the left. Can someone else do that role? Sure, but he did it well and didn't deserve a bullet for it.

What is Fuentes' main ideas that differentiates him?

The main thing that differentiates him is that he is fun to watch. He streams on Rumble and search engines throttle his content, so most people only know who he is secondhand instead of having ever watched him themselves.

I um.... I admit that he does seem to rack up half a million views, which is impressive. But I started one of his streams and it's all - jumping around, random cartoons, it's making me queasy. So I jumped forward, and forward, and forward, and at the 2 hour mark he actually shows up on camera. He's just talking to the camera about headlines, like Tim Pool or Viva Frey, but they at least have the sense to show screenshots and videos of what they're discussing. Fuentes is just his face and a camera. His demeanor is honestly not as entertaining as Matt Walsh.

Some of his videos have a ton of views, but his channel has half that in subscribers, and only 5k likes on the video. Don't know what is good for Rumble but the ratio seems weird to me. Comment section also wasn't super supportive of him, which is surprising I assume because most people on Rumble sought out that kind of content. Viva Frey and Tim Pool have many more subscribers but fewer views per video.

All I can say is that he does seem fairly popular and I still have no clue why.

Edit - Three years ago his videos were getting less than 2k views. His first video to break 50k views was this one and I don't know why. Then he goes back to less than 10K for a while. He starts to get consistently 50k views around October 7th, 2023 and it increased rapidly from there. So his shtick seems to be the anti-Israel right.

You thought the week was boring? We had NATO jets shooting down Russian drones last night and you thought it was a boring week?

I'd hate to see what you think is exciting.

But agreed that this feels like a shift to the week. I've seen conservatives in an outrage over the killing of the Ukrainian girl, and now this. I think we're close to some kind of flashpoint but I have no idea what it will look like. If it were the left, I would know - riots, some larceny, eventually everyone will go inside for winter. With the right, I really don't know what's going to happen next. Not larceny. I know everyone's hoping it's going to be like the Ents waking up, but I don't know.

You thought the week was boring? We had NATO jets shooting down Russian drones last night and you thought it was a boring week?

Chill. I was referencing the comment down below about how people were saying the culture war thread was boring.

I've been getting this feeling like the Left is pulling an ISIS, and basically begging the Right to go full violent conquest on them, so they can get the martyrdom they always dreamed of. Everytime Trump raises a finger against leftist violence, the leftwing politicians and talking heads shout "he wants a civil war! Really this time! Tanks! Disappearing grandmas!" Then the Feds conspicuously don't shoot rioters in self defense, even when it's clearly legal due to lethal force being thrown at them.

Trump is very conspicuously holding back, and it feels like the Left is trying to change that. God help us if they succeed.

I think of what future President Vance is learning.

I think of what future President Vance is learning.

The only way we get President Vance is if Trump dies while still in office. We're getting a Dem in the White House in 2029.

I dunno, man. I think it's quite likely, unless the market gods decide it's time for line go down.

SARS-CoV-3, Viral Jubilee.

Would they really try that one so soon?

https://theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036/

More comments

I agree it’s more likely than not, but I wouldn’t yet rule out the Democrats managing to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.

I would put "Dems fumble an easily winnable election through poor candidate choice" and "Team Trump manage to steal the election" at about 20% and 10% respectively. And "The Trump administration gets less incompetent and thus more popular" has non-zero probability.

Yeah still no real indication of who's going to lead the Dems apart from 'probably Newsome but nobody is superduper enthused about it'

I am very skeptical that a flashpoint will happen, but if it does I think the most likely candidate is the centre-right shifting into open racism against blacks prompted by one too many black on white murders or another set of black riots.

That is, the only serious psychological shift I can see as being both plausible and meaningful on the right is if enough centre-rights shifted at the same time from private ‘well, he’s got a point’ or ‘leftists call everyone racist, it doesn’t mean anything any more’ to publicly saying ‘fuck these guys’.

If the taboo against open racism breaks and the Supreme Court comes down softly rather than harshly when people start discriminating against blacks in public, the lay of the land shifts quite dramatically.

(I think this would only happen with the support of Hispanics, so basically limited to black people only in this scenario. I’m also confident that there will be no uprising and no guerilla warfare.)

I'd bet against the murderer here being black. Even aside from Sailerian observations about aim, it's Utah.

I was thinking of the Charlotte murder. I would be surprised to see much resulting from Kirk's murder but to be fair I've never heard of him and he may be much better known in America. Broadly I think that nothing kinetic will ever happen so the only plausible kind of flashpoint is a cultural/psychological one and the above is one that I can imagine a lot of people settling on.

The idea of just sudden death like that because you sat in front of a black man and didn't feel able to move away is visceral to me in a way that the other stuff isn't. I'm in London ATM, I take buses and trains. Thankfully our murder rate is still pretty low but the amount of aggression and fuck-you signals like playing your boombox at full volume and daring anyone to do anything about it isn't. Almost every time I see someone being a dick in public, it's a black or Arabic man.

Blacks also seem underrepresented among the kind of extreme left that might try to do this- black Hebrew Israelites don't care about this guy.

Crem says he was alive in the ambulance on his way to the hospital. That was 27 minutes ago, no further updates atm.

ETA:

Bennett's Phylactery now says dead. DELETED

Lord, have mercy.

Bennett's Phylactery now says dead. DELETED

Kevin Dolan screwed the pooch with this one.

Rule of maintaining credibility: Don't tweet things like that unless you have a 100% clear insider scoop.

I can confirm it was a trustworthy source. Some Utah state representatives are in contact with the chief of police and were sharing updates in gcs. So, trustworthy, but also thirdhand.

Could have been an inside source jumping the gun because Kirk's heart was stopped, but then he was revived so not dead-dead yet.

Kevin's a personal friend and I wouldn't expect him to jump the gun like that. On balance I'm reserving judgment. He may have had a good reason.

Real America's Voice is now confirming he passed.

Kevin is sadly vindicated. He just jumped the gun I guess.

My guess is that his source was good but someone perhaps asked him to hold off on announcing it.

Haven't seen any update yet, but given the political situation they'll probably keep coding him for a long time before giving up and declaring him dead, but from a practical perspective he was dead with the shot (in the sense that repairing the damage would be nearly impossible).

His vascular structures looked torched from the video, supposedly it was a rifle round.

I have no idea how fast the response was/how close he was to a trauma center though, if the wagon had a shit ton of blood and they had advanced trauma options available it's maybe possible he makes it with severe deficits, but that's the kind of wound I wouldn't want to treat if the person was shot in the theater with Anesthesia and like fucking ECMO already standing by.

It didn't matter but there's a Level 1, 45 miles (by ground ambulance on freeway) North in Salt Lake City.

Yeah later finding out that the closest hospital was a level 2.... + looking again it looks like he may have been internally decapitated by the shot.

That was my paramedic friend's immediately assessment as well.

Yeah, that’s a wound a deer wouldn’t have run from- he was dead before he hit the ground.

The number of things we can turn from dead to not dead is shocking but this was unlikely to be one of them.

I wander how many units (of blood) they used on him.

I hope they gave it a try.

Fun excerpt from GURPS Martial Arts:

On any neck hit with a cutting, impaling, piercing, or tight-beam burning attack, roll 1d. On a 1, it hits a vein/artery.

A fighter with a cutting, impaling, piercing, or tight-beam burning weapon can target a major blood vessel in the neck (jugular vein or carotid artery), arm (brachial artery), or leg (femoral artery). The attack has an extra −3: −5 for a limb, −8 for the neck. The sudden blood loss increases the wounding modifier for that hit location by 0.5; e. g., a cutting attack gets ×2 instead of ×1.5 against a limb, or ×2.5 instead of ×2 for the neck. Since the intent is to start bleeding—not to destroy bone and muscle—ignore crippling effects and damage limits for limbs. Realistically, such injuries can cause almost instant unconsciousness, with death coming in seconds. The GM may rule that Mortal Wounds doesn’t apply and that any failed HT roll to avoid death means the victim collapses and bleeds out messily. This is a “special effect” of dying from a vein or artery hit. A miss by 1 hits the neck, arm, or leg, as appropriate.

His vascular structures looked torched from the video, supposedly it was a rifle round.

Police say the shot came from a building 200 yards away, which certainly indicates a rifle.

The injury looked like it caused significant damage to surrounding structures- so you have general exsanguination issues, and the clock on cerebral perfusion but the bigger problem is that repairing the anatomy would be a nightmare, some approximation of tourniqueting a neck wound is already a sign you've hit catastrophe but something this big and scrambled? Unlikely.

Even if everything goes right somehow he's probably had too much down time for any neurological recovery.

It's grim.

Right, idk how you keep a brain alive even with transfusions if the pipe leading to the brain is missing.

Keeping him alive at all would be astonishing but even then it's hard to imagine that he'll ever truly recover.

It's not impossible- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clint_Malarchuk#Neck_injury

But huge difference in the type of damage from a skate and a rifle round.

We have shocking ability to help with blood loss and at this point most hospitals have updated their mass transfusion protocol and all that but again a rifle round has a lot of energy (and may have also shattered his spine).

I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.

Fuentes isn't getting invited to speak at large public events.

Political violence in the US is at heights not seen since the 1970s, from riots in the 2010s and especially 2020 over police-involved shootings, to the capitol riot in 2021, to the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania, to the United Healthcare killing, to finally this murder of a political influencer.

Also, the two Minneapolis lawmakers and their spouses who were targeted back in June.

That wasn’t an example of ideologically-motivated violence, so far as we can tell. The attempted killer was a former professional associate of the victims who seems to have gone nuts.

People who decide to try and shoot a politician tend to be fucking weird. Zangara and Oswald, for example, were bonkers, but they were pretty clearly also politically motivated.

I'm not sure there's a principled way to distinguish between "ideologically motivated" and "seems to have gone nuts." For obvious reasons we tend not to have long case histories of assassins post-act, but I kinda doubt most of them were level headed and doing well.

When we had actual large-scale political violence, like the troubles in Northern Ireland, or medium-scale political violence like the Days of Rage in the US, the people committing the violence looked very different to this lot - not least because they formed part of organised groups with standards. The Black Panthers or the IRA would have kicked out Thomas Crooks or Ryan Routh for being a liability.

I still thinks this looks more like "something memetic is making all the school shooters shoot politicians instead of schools"

Prediction: the man who shot Kirk has no history of political activism as part of the Democratic Party or any organised centre or far-left group.

The Black Panthers or the IRA would have kicked out Thomas Crooks or Ryan Routh for being a liability.

I don't know enough about either the IRA or those particular men to really argue that intelligently, but the Black Panthers leadership was so drug addled, horny, dysfunctional, and idiotic that I'm not very confident they would have kicked guys out for being weird.

My view of things is more that a young man possessed of the kind of death drive that leads to a school shooting can easily be diverted by socially offered outlets for that death drive, like terrorism or gang violence or tribal warfare. This is why we don't really see school shootings in demographics with significant gang problems, or in countries with terrorism problems.

Prediction: the man who shot Kirk has no history of political activism as part of the Democratic Party or any organised centre or far-left group.

To loosely spitball an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while: maybe (some of) what we see as "partisan fraying" is actually happening mostly in cyberspace (it's an old word, but I think it applies here), where it's easy to un-person someone on the other side: "oh, that a troll/bot/foreign psyop, ban them." (see "words are violence") The virtual version (aspect?) of our culture really is fraying at the seams because there never was a notion of "national unity" in the borderless cyberspace. This bleeds over into meatspace mostly from people who can't see the difference: I think you have to be terminally online to accept "X is genocide" to logically precede "so we should kill X supporters" as reality. And political activism still has a huge meatspace component: you go to conventions, protests, volunteer to phone bank or go door-to-door that filters out someone radically, terminally online enough to actually choose violence.

But I could be very wrong.

ETA: Surely there are some limits on legitimate political organizations accepting purely-online contributions. Otherwise it seems a matter of time until "your so-called phone-bank volunteers that you never vetted in-person were actually call center workers in [foreign nation A] getting paid by [foreign nation B]". The JIDF et al already get looked at pretty askance.

I'm pro-2A and own guns myself but there's a certain irony to outspoken 2A defenders being assassinated that's hard not to notice.

"I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe."

I do wonder if his last thoughts were "shit. still worth it, though". You can count on conservatives to be ethically consistent when it comes to gun rights. I don't expect anyone on the right to talk about banning the rifle used to kill him.

There's a bit easier of a way to square the circle: even trivial consideration can give a pretty sizable laundry list of ways to kill someone from a long range, very messily, especially when half of your compatriots agree with you. Some of them are even easier to get away with!

Further information not available here.

He was also a defender of Israel's assassinations so he was pro gun and pro assassination.

The US elite is too protected from the consequences of their actions. The ones who voted for the Iraq war should be sent to the front. The defund the police proponents should be forced to walk the streets of st Louis at night without protection. The elites need to learn that they will be held accountable.

  • -12

He was also a defender of Israel's assassinations so he was pro gun and pro assassination.

This is silly. Being in favour of assassinating terrorists who wantonly murder civilians doesn't mean you're in favour of the general concept of assassination, or in favour of assassinating anyone you don't like.

The most recently highlighted instance of Israeli snipers targeting people was explicitly murdering a civilian - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-family-torn-apart-by-idf-snipers-from-chicago-and-munich

“That was my first elimination,” he says. The video, shot by a drone, lasts just a few seconds. The Palestinian teenager appears to be unarmed when he is shot in the head.

Raab, a former varsity basketball player from a Chicago suburb who became an Israeli sniper, concedes he knew that. He says he shot Salem simply because he tried to retrieve the body of his beloved older brother Mohammed.

“It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that] and it also doesn’t really interest me,” Raab says in a video interview posted on X. “I mean, what was so important about that corpse?”

I don't think it was a good thing that Charlie died but that doesn't mean he wasn't out there advocating for what happened to him to happen to others.

While not defending this soldier's conduct, I would put "snipers in a warzone" and "assassinations" in different categories. According to his testimony his decision to shoot the teenager was an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment one, which by definition means it wasn't an assassination.

He was pro assassination of murderers. What deadly attacks on innocents did Charlie Kirk plot?

I like your vibe in general but what consequences of his actions? Annoying speeches?

You can count on conservatives to be ethically consistent when it comes to gun rights. I don't expect anyone on the right to talk about banning the rifle used to kill him.

I'll admit to having been surprised by this post Butler. I immediately went out and bought an AR, thinking I might not be able to next week.

Now, naturally, I've bought several more for no apparent reason.

I immediately went out and bought an AR, thinking I might not be able to next week.

Does this ever work? If the gun actually was banned as a result, wouldn't you also need to turn in your already purchased ones?

I mean no one knows exactly what the ban would look like prior to it actually occurring. But the federal assault weapons ban of the Clinton era did not involve any confiscation or turn in process, if you owned one purchased a week before the bill passed it was yours. Ditto the NFA in the 1920s, though I believe it did impose the tax stamp process on machine guns.

I was under the impression that this doesn't happen nowadays. I don't think, for instance, that when the bump stock ban was imposed you were allowed to keep your existing bump stocks.

I mean sure it's possible, but the most recent identical ban at the federal level did not feature confiscation. And confiscation would be pretty impractical on balance. There's a chance of confiscation, and a chance of non-confiscation, but considering scenarios, for me the outcomes look something like:

No Ban: I bought a gun I always kind of wanted or intended to buy anyway, maybe for a little more money or with a little less research than I otherwise would have. Not that bad an outcome.

Ban, no confiscation: I have a gun that I wanted and intended to purchase, which I otherwise would not be able to buy.

Ban, confiscation: I lose the gun.

Ban, TSHTF and TEOTWAWKI as a result of trying to confiscate 10,000,000 firearms from unfriendly owners: Boy, sure glad I have this thing today.

No Purchase: I have a few hundred dollars I wouldn't otherwise have.

Leaving aside internet tough-guy memes about boating accidents.

Obviously you can put your own values and probabilities in here and get a lot of outcomes, but the whole thing was pretty marginal to me. I didn't move heaven and earth to do it, I drove up the road a couple miles and I spent a day's earnings.

It did in 33 (and 86) and in 94, that's why it happens so much today. Everything already out there stayed out there and started to appreciate.

Not if they were lost or sold in the meantime...

I think about this sometimes. Whatever else can be said, a large store of dark rifles remaining in the wild would rapidly lose any meaningful import as the people who know how to use them cycle out and the next generation cannot be trained.

as the people who know how to use them cycle out and the next generation cannot be trained.

I feel like if this statement were completely true, Iraq and Afghanistan would have gone a lot differently.

Black rifles are primarily useful as a political rallying and coordination point, not for their (considerable) efficacy in a rebellion against the government. Their absence does not significantly impede such a rebellion.

Black rifles are primarily useful as a political rallying and coordination point

Which is why gun rights will continue to get slowly eroded by salami-slicing instead of mass confiscation, so as to ensure this coordination point — AFAICT the only one the Red Tribe has — never gets tripped. They can oppress us into extinction all they want, just by avoiding that one big, shiny tripwire.

their (considerable) efficacy in a rebellion against the government. Their absence does not significantly impede such a rebellion.

[Citation needed]

I can't buy one, nor can I buy a magazine with 11 or more rounds.

Fuck me, I guess.

Now, naturally, I've bought several more for no apparent reason.

What do you mean no apparent reason? You need one with a short barrel for close quarters defense and another set up for long-range precision with a scope. Also one in camo pattern for hunting. Oh yeah, also a spare, in case a friend is visiting when the social fabric collapses and they need to borrow it. Or in case you have one down for maintenance.

Or if I'm browsing an auction of a firearms collection and there are several cheap ARs sitting at a $5.00 opening bid, and I want to get things going because the auctioneer is an old family friend, so I put in a bid for $150 on all five of them, there's no way they'll go that cheap but I want to get the action started and get the price up, and I'm figuring that there's absolutely no way I'll end up with more than one of them and I don't have time to watch the auction live. And then the auction ends and I wind up with three of them for an average price of $60 each plus vig. I guess that's kind of a reason.

Which auction site? I own many guns, but all bought at stores.

It was a local auction house running operations through hibid, local pickup from our neighborhood gun store only.

Relatable.