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Serious question: at what point is political violence justified? At what point is it defensible to take up arms in defense of one's community? I know we're all ostensibly against violent remedies, but at some point, practical and moral concerns ought to overtake an abstract commitment to the rule of law, yes?
Look at the Catholic just war doctrine, kind of a checklist of criteria violent action must satisfy to be right in the eyes of God: is there a competent authority organizing the armed action? A realistic possibility of success? A just cause for which you're fighting? And is it your last resort?
If so, then one is justified in extraordinary and violent action. The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence. Is there sufficient cause for resisting them on their own terms?
If not, why? So as to not to break the state's monopoly on violence? To reap the civilizational benefits of settling disputes with words not weapons? After exactly how many presses of the "defect" button do you, too, press "defect"?
And after what point does insisting that people who've experienced "defect" after "defect" continue to play "cooperate" become itself a form of evil, of gaslighting, of denying people their fundamental dignity?
I'm not sure about the answers to any of these questions, but as I see parts of the Internet seething and roiling, and as I see other parts of the Internet gloating, and as I see it all spill over to real life --- the DNA lounge in San Francisco has a "neck shot" special tonight --- I have to wonder whether we're at one of those points in history at which it is less moral to follow man's law than to uphold God's law.
Who is 'the left' here? Do you really believe that a majority of say, US Democrat voters think that political assassination of right wingers is justified?
Yes, I do.
In the year 2025, the remaining rank and file registered democrats are amongst the most successfully propagandized people in the history of the world.
I’m not talking about the occasional voter. Imagine the modal democrat primary voter; the habitual democrat who votes down ballot every election. The people that really form the core of the Democratic Party voting bloc.
I genuinely think of you handed that person a button which would explode a bomb underneath Elon Musk’s feet they’d wait about a millisecond before slamming it.
And yet according to a (very) recent survey, only 11% said political violence was justified, while 72% said it wasn't.
You're demonstrating the same outgroup hatred that you accuse Democrats of.
No, I think not.
I’ve seen enough ass covering in the last 48 hours from the same people who had been calling Kirk a Nazi for years to not take these people seriously.
Well we're gonna have to square those two results.
Given that the survey you cited also found that 20% of right-wingers thought the assassination of Donald Trump could be justified, my assumption would be that whatever methodology the NCRI used caused respondents to be much more sympathetic to political assassination (when surveyed) than you would expect from the general opposition to it shown in the Yougov survey.
Looking into the survey itself, that seems to be the case. They gave respondents a scale of one to seven, where only an answer of one is taken to mean that the respondent is opposed to political assassination. I don't think this is an honest way of presenting the question.
An answer of two could easily mean 'Well I'm opposed to political assassination, but Trump sure has pissed off a lot of people' or 'Musk tried to fire hundreds of thousands of people, I wouldn't be shocked if someone took a pop at him'. Presenting seven options rather than three that Yougov did biases the results towards demonstrating far greater support for political assassination than actually exists (which I suspect was the goal).
Taking those results as evidence that 'left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence' isn't reasonable to my mind.
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I'll just say, I have no argument to make against your belief. But from my experience as a blue living in one of the bluest areas of the country where that modal Democrat voter you described is likely a majority (certainly D voters are a supermajority, but whether that specific modal D voter is a majority is questionable) and if not that, a plurality, I don't think many of them would murder Musk if given a chance like that. Most of them go along with the most extreme of the progressive demands, and most of them do have lots of antipathy towards Musk, but straight-up cold-blooded murder is still beyond the pale for most, by my perception. That's probably changing, with the left's reaction to Mangione pushing things somewhat and perhaps its reaction to Kirk's murder pushing things even more.
Now, if you selected for young, college-educated people among those D voters, especially women, among the modal D voters, then yeah, I'd probably take the under on a millisecond.
I'm not convinced that progressive women would be more likely to enact political violence than progressive men. That would just be woefully unintuitive to me.
I think there's simply fewer straight-laced party-line progressives among men, and my experience of liberal/progressive men is that their views are either normie and passive (and thus unlikely to make them feel a desire for violence) or weird in a way that doesn't fit the "habitual democrat" mold even if it were to drive them to extremism.
So you might find the guy who hates racism, but thinks women are stuck up; or the guy who thinks Che Guevara was awesome; or the guy who gets conspicuously upset about school board corruption; or the Soviet Union defender; or the guy who loudly insists people call it the "CPC" and not the "CCP." Not really woke capitalism, IMO. Male leftists have more of a tankie image to me. And the important bit is in the name.
That said, I do remember a few male friends I've had that I'd describe as by-the-book progressive -- but they're all gay. Straight male progressives are just weird.
I'd put Mangione in that category. And the Trump shooter whose name doesn't deserve to be remembered and also I just don't remember it. Pretty unidentifiable motivations, general grievances, not a twitter full of clapbacks. Probably this latest guy will turn out to be a dateless loser who was crushing on a trans girl and wanted to impress her by DEFENDING HER HONOR, or something really stupid like that.
I think it depends on the hypothetical of the button. Men, progressive men included, have more of a stomach for violence, for getting their hands bloody. But women are more inclined to hate.
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I have been thinking about this a lot recently. There's always a discussion that goes like this:
"50% of Group X think Group Y are partially responsible for Group X violence against Group Y. But, only 3% of Group X would be willing to actually commit violence against Group Y."
Group Xer: "See, that proves Group X is 97% peaceful."
Group Yer: "See, that proves that 50% of Group X is violent."
I have always tried to lean toward the former interpretation. Citizens of fascist or communist tyrannies who supported and participated in their regime are AFAIK never seen as completely blameless. And as the violence becomes more egregious, it gets harder and harder to believe it.
The way I see a situation of X and Y there is that a Group Xer has an obligation to think about it the latter way, and a Group Yet has an obligation to think about it the former way, at least if getting at the truth is a priority. Because, as you pointed out, the pattern shows that such people will almost always be biased in the other way, anyone in that situation who trusts his base judgment on this is untrustworthy as a seeker of truth.
A lot of the conversation, I've noticed, has to do with trying to label that 47% that's not peaceful but not violent. Too many people try to cast advocacy for violence as a form of violence when, of course, advocacy for something isn't the same as that thing. But it could be morally just as bad to call for violence as it is to commit violence. Could, but also maybe not. Which is inconvenient if you want to claim half your outgroup are bloodthirsty monsters. So a Group Yer can't afford to show nuance around words and violence and must elide between the two. OTOH, a Group Xer will wiggle and wiggle and wiggle until the wiggle room is a gap that you could pass the Milky Way through. They'll split every hair, pick every nit, look at everything in every possible angle and degree of squinting until they can convince themselves that these people are justified in calling for violence or condoning violence in this particular case (which is every case).
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I appreciate your perspective on this and offer a counterweight, if you will.
There was a joke going around on X, that I’ll paraphrase;
Red state republican: “Democrats have some crazy, stupid ideas and I’m sure glad they aren’t in charge here but I know a few and they’re not all bad.” Blue state republican: “I, personally, am willing to volunteer to pilot the helicopters throwing democrats overboard over the ocean if it means there’s a 1% chance to escape this never ending hell.”
While this is very funny, I also think the opposite is largely true; the hicklib, the blue tribe striver living in red states, is by far the most extreme example of what I’m talking about.
If you’re in a comfortably blue city in an area in a blue state, it’s hard to communicate how rabidly partisan these types can be.
I travel a lot for work, and not just from urban center to urban center, I spend a lot of time in little mountain towns and beach towns, places really just for locals.
The stereotype of the urban blue tribe applies triply to blue tribe people in smaller towns & rural areas as their identity is so tied up with bitter struggles with their own background and family.
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