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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.
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.
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."
Except, I've yet to ever see that happen.
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.
Which doesn't matter, because those adversaries are beaten-down, powerless peasants who will never dare strike against their betters.
It won't.
Nothing's moving anywhere.
…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.
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.
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.
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.
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