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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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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.