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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34466 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Something that's getting frustrating to me around the discussion of Charlie Kirk's assassination (man it feels weird to say that) is that conservatives are being told to eat the Paul Pelosi attack as a right wing thing.

But the attacker (David Depape), was, if he was even capable of holding any sort of political position at all, not even remotely right wing, at least not in any way that any right winger would identify as a bedfellow.

The guy lived in a bus in Berkley, CA doing drugs in a polyamorous sex cult. He clearly went completely insane, then attacked Paul Pelosi. This is the type of thing that conservatives are trying to stop. This event is neutral at best, and more realistically just left-wing cities eating themselves. The opening paragraph from a sfchronicle article about his daughter is one of the craziest I've ever seen:

Last year, as her father was making national news for allegedly bludgeoning then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer, Inti Gonzalez was sleeping in a drafty garage. Her mother, a prominent Bay Area nudism activist, was in prison for attempted child abduction.

I'm also getting sick of hearing that the right wing is supposed to eat January 6th. We've had every single right wing politician "disavowing" this for the last 5 years, despite the fact that the only person killed on this day was a right wing woman.

January 6th was one day of protesting which followed months of protesting by left wingers.

Generally my frustration is this idea that right wing and left wing politics and expressions of those politics are equals, or just different poles of an ideology. They're not. One of my favorite articles: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/ expands on what I mean.

(No the woke won't debate you, here's why - required reading around here imo)

These two ideologies, western liberal democracy, which the conservatives are still, maybe stupidly, trying to work inside of, and some bastard form of revolutionary marxism, are not two sides fighting over territory. There's no compromise where we meet in the middle. It's winner take all - either we remain a western liberal democracy, or we don't.

I think people are waking up to this, which is good. Sam Hyde's video today about this was pretty good: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_czBvLB-DwY (watch the first 5 minutes at least, please. It's good.)

JD's video was also really good (a slightly normie version of the same message): https://youtube.com/watch?v=ngofqx9EfcM

eat the Paul Pelosi attack as a right wing thing

I've seen this with the Minnesota shooter and now the Charlie Kirk assassination. Some online types VERY VEHEMENT about "No! This person was not left/trans/on my side at all! He was a radicalised far-right nutjob!"

Re: the Minnesota shooter, funny how "you're trans if you say you're trans" and any critique of self-identification is violence and transphobia, up until the point the trans person does something that would reflect badly on the rah-rah LGBTQIA++ left side, then they're right-wingers and No True Scotsman all along.

Ditto with the Kirk shooter: no, he's not a lefty at all! He's pure white nationalist right-wing! Uh, he's ex-Mormon, living with a boyfriend, said boyfriend is trans and in the process of transitioning? Nope, up-and-down right-wing!

But the attacker (David Depape), was, if he was even capable of holding any sort of political position at all, not even remotely right wing, at least not in any way that any right winger would identify as a bedfellow.

He was a Blue Triber who was radicalised by right-wing content online (but had no involvement with the GOP or any organised right-wing group) and went on to attack a left-wing politician. I think that counts as right-wing political violence, although not a particularly worrying kind, and definitely not something that right-wingers should be collectively punished for. If Tyler Robinson turns out to be a Red Triber who was radicalised into killing a right-wing politician by left-wing content online (but had no involvement with the Dems or any organised left-wing group), then the right are reasonably going to consider this left-wing political violence. The President has already called for collective punishment of left-wingers, as have several Motteposters. We don't know much about Robinson's motives or sanity yet, but the scenario where the only morally relevant difference between Depape and Robinson is that Robinson could shoot straight is currently very plausible.

Heck, we have right-wingers trying to claim the Crooks shooting of Trump as left-wing political violence. There is far more evidence that Depape had a right-wing political motive than there is that Crooks had any political motive at all.

Depape (who was delusional, but clearly not severely enough to be legally insane) was saner than Routh (who fired his lawyers after they suggested running an insanity defence), and Routh is getting counted as left-wing political violence.

We've had every single right wing politician "disavowing" this (i.e. January 6th) for the last 5 years,

No you haven't. You had Donald Trump doubling down on this for the last 5 years, and you made him President while drumming the right-wing politicians who disavowed it out of the GOP and calling for them to be prosecuted (which I agree hasn't happened yet)

One relevant difference between Tyler Robinson and David depape(who granted does seem to have been motivated by right wing prolefeed conspiracy theories, although not of a kind that are necessarily uniquely right wing) is that Robinson was immersed in living a lefty lifestyle with the trans partner. Depape was still a hippie.

That seems immaterial to me.

Actually seems very relevant. One's right wing beliefs were basically words, and could be molded to a general worldview which was not terribly right wing. The other's left wing beliefs were part of how he lived his life.

What even is there to disavow with January 6? For a brief shining moment some dogs caught the car and an unarmed woman was gunned down in cold blood. The latter of whom would be a national martyr with 50 biopics if it had happened in Seattle.

This is the type of thing that conservatives are trying to stop.

To be fair, leftists are trying to stop people from obtaining guns, too.

This is the type of thing that conservatives are trying to stop

I thought that was referring to the "lived in a bus in Berkeley, CA doing drugs in a polyamorous sex cult" part.

Yes. I phrased that poorly. I meant to state that "Political side means to put a stop to undesirable and radicalizing behavior engaged in by partisans of the other side" is an observation that can me made both ways.

Except the gun in recent question was an old hunting rifle and hammers are, well, hammers

I'm sure the leftists already thought of that and that while their widespread motte may be "ban scary black military-style assault rifles with shoulder thing that goes up", there are many whose bailey does include "ban all civilian gun ownership including grandpa's deer rifle".

In the US? Not really, no. There are a tiny handful of radical gun control activists that want some kind of east Asia tier scheme where hunters can apply for permission to own bolt action rifles kept at the local police station when not in the hunting field. But they’re about as fringe as animal rights activists(not that they necessarily overlap but the same level of hardcore nut).

It’s very plausible that if the DNC could abolish the second amendment and rewrite US gun control from scratch, many kinds of guns would be banned. It’s very plausible that purchasing the ones that are not, such as the one in this attack, would require some kind of waiting period/weekend class/whatever that serves no purpose except being annoying. But an actual ban-or near enough ban- on grandpas deer rifle is about as plausible as mandatory nude exercise or giving dogs standing to sue- yeah, you can find someone advocating for it, but you know…

What I'm seeing is not that the attack was rightwing, but that the Right was very crass about it.

It was a very strange situation tbh some guy in his underwear broke into pelosis home and hit him with a hammer? It didn’t sound like targeted political violence (because it wasn’t) and there have been rumours about Paul’s sexuality for awhile now

What I saw was mostly random gotchas of 'HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THIS ALSO HAPPENED' and then a bare link without really engaging much with what really happened.

Something that's getting frustrating to me around the discussion of Charlie Kirk's assassination (man it feels weird to say that) is that conservatives are being told to eat the Paul Pelosi attack as a right wing thing.

But the attacker (David Depape), was, if he was even capable of holding any sort of political position at all, not even remotely right wing, at least not in any way that any right winger would identify as a bedfellow.

His own defence attorney literally said it was because he passionately believed in far right theories. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67372363

During opening arguments on Thursday, Mr DePape's defence conceded that their client attacked Mr Pelosi in his quest to find the California congresswoman.

But they said his interest in Mrs Pelosi was not due to her political status.

"The reason he acted had nothing to do with Nancy Pelosi [and her] official duties as a member of Congress," defence attorney Jodi Linker told the court.

Instead, Ms Linker said he was driven by right-wing conspiracies that blame the country's demise on corrupt elites who use their status to spread lies, including facilitating the sexual abuse of children.

"Members of the jury, many of us do not believe any of that," Ms Linker said. "But the evidence in this trial will show that Mr DePape believes all these things… with every ounce of his being."

They said this to fight charges against kidnapping a federal official (which requires it to be directly because of her official duties as a member of Congress and not outside motivations such as those far right theories). The goal was to present him as a crazy nutjob who took Qanon, 2020 being stolen, and other far right ideas spread online seriously rather than a targeted attack triggered by any official action.

He himself testified to this

The man on trial for the bludgeoning of Paul Pelosi admitted in testimony Tuesday that he struck him with a hammer during a botched attempt to kidnap his wife, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for “lying about Russia-gate.”

David DePape, 43, told a jury that he planned to dress up in a unicorn costume and record a video of the top Democrat in Congress as he interrogated her about what he saw as her false statements about ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

What better evidence could there be than him and his defense literally saying it?

I'm also getting sick of hearing that the right wing is supposed to eat January 6th. We've had every single right wing politician "disavowing" this for the last 5 years, despite the fact that the only person killed on this day was a right wing woman.

If it was disavowed, why did people who stabbed, tasered, threw bombs at, or otherwise attacked cops get pardoned? The idea that only murder is violence (and she herself was shot at by a cop as she refused to listen to a lawful order and continued illegal behavior so I guess you're saying police brutality is more of an issue than violence against police is) seems weak. All of those things are violence!

In fact here's something interesting, I asked chatgpt to run some numbers. "Per participant, was Jan 6th or BLM more violent towards cops?"

Police injuries on Jan 6th, 2021 About 2,000–2,500 rioters entered the Capitol complex.

140+ police officers (Capitol Police + D.C. Metro Police) reported physical injuries (sprains, burns, concussions, eye damage, broken bones, etc.).

That means 5–7% of participants injured an officer, or 1 injury for every 15–20 rioters.

Police injuries during 2020 BLM-related unrest Over the course of summer 2020 protests, an estimated 15–26 million Americans participated.

Nationwide, various agencies reported 2,000 law enforcement officers injured during the protests/riots (mostly in the first two weeks after George Floyd’s killing).

That’s 0.01% of participants injuring an officer, or 1 injury for every 7,500–13,000 protesters.

Comparison (per participant) Jan 6th: 1 in 20 participants caused a police injury.

BLM protests: 1 in several thousand participants caused a police injury.

👉 Conclusion: On a per-participant basis, Jan 6th was vastly more violent toward police officers — by orders of magnitude.

Of course it doesn't matter, at the end of the day everyone is an individual and should be judged as an individual. Whether you attended BLM or Jan 6th, if you didn't assault a cop then you don't deserve blame for it. But it is quite interesting to see. Even if we change it to say, 40,000 (a medium estimate of the total Jan 6th protestors and not just those who entered the capitol), it's still about 1 in 400 or so.

Edit: You know there's also an interesting thing to consider in right vs left violence discussions. The gender gap!

Men make up 80% of violent crimes (and some specific ones like mass shootings like 97%). Thus statistically a group composed of men should have more violent people than an equal sized group of women. And violence is typically a thing done most by youth, so the group with younger men should presumably have more than the group with younger women.

Combine this with

Americans under the age of 30 voted for Harris by 4 points (50 percent Harris – 46 percent Trump), though young men and women diverged dramatically, with men under 30 voting for Trump by 16 points (41 percent Harris – 57 percent Trump), and women under 30 voting for Harris by 24 points (59 percent Harris – 35 percent Trump).

And it would make sense if right wing violence was a bit more common, just because it has more men.

  • -12

In fact here's something interesting, I asked chatgpt to run some numbers. "Per participant, was Jan 6th or BLM more violent towards cops?"

Suppose I hate cops.

I hold a protest, 100 people attend, and in the chaos one cop gets shot. That is a protesters-to-cops-shot ratio of .01.

I hold a protest the next day. Thanks to the news coverage, a thousand cop-hating people show up, and five cops get shot. that is a PTCS ratio of .005.

I hold a protest the next day. Again thanks to the news coverage, ten thousand cop-hating people show up, and 25 cops get shot. That is a PTCS ratio of .0025.

Your explicit argument is that these three protests are getting less violent over time. Normally I would phrase this as a question, but you are the one who made this into a math problem; it doesn't seem to me that there is much room for ambiguity here. It is true, in the most disingenuous, dishonest way possible, that the more townspeople attend a lynching, the "less violent" the lynching becomes. It does not follow that we should be less concerned by a lynching attended by a thousand people than one attended by ten. Such an argument, I argue, is isomorphic to what you have stated above. If you disagree, I would be fascinated to see where I've got it wrong.

This is by no means the only problem with your various recent defenses of the organized left-wing violence Americans have lately suffered; your data is garbage and your arguments are obviously constructed for maximum partisan convenience with what appears to be intentional amnesia of previous context, but it's a reasonable place to start.

your arguments are obviously constructed for maximum partisan convenience with what appears to be intentional amnesia of previous context

Huh, a user with an account from June who consistently presents arguments constructed for maximum partisan convenience. I'm sure that couldn't be a former user known for that kind of argumentation back under a new name.

Do you hint vaguely towards the idea that all people who advance convenient partisan arguments are actually infamous disgruntled ban evaders, or only the liberal/left leaning ones?

Edit: as someone who was also accused of being this individual previously, it is quite annoying that any liberal dissent from the mainstream here immediately garners accusations that we must be This One Person. I suppose it is a rare thing on this forum, but it only becomes rarer with this sort of selective hyper analysis.

I have hinted vaguely exactly once. You are free to review comment histories just as I did. The shift in a month from "I'm a classical liberal 20something who wants to engage with ideas" to "presenting arguments constructed for maximum partisan convenience" is the kind of thing that gets detectors pinging.

I had the same thought.

I'm not sure what you're insinuating. Personally, I've seen so many commenters who are following darwin2500's standard playbook of deflection, obfuscation, non-central fallacy that I'm convinced that there are many of his acolytes out there that will be indistinguishable from darwin2500 himself in text form.

What better evidence could there be than him and his defense literally saying it?

He also said he was going to dress up as a unicorn. I think "not playing with a full deck" is the best approach to take here.

👉 Conclusion: On a per-participant basis, Jan 6th was vastly more violent toward police officers — by orders of magnitude.

No, it's not that simple. This is comparing apples to oranges. I'll try my best to make a more appropriate comparison.

Here is an article from the New York Times with the 140 number for police office injured on Jan 6th.

Here is a report from the US Government Accountability Office indicating at least 174 police officers were assaulted. Note that assaults and injuries are not the same, which could explain the different numbers.

A better comparison would be this statistic from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley.

During the 2020 riots, more than 900 law enforcement officers were injured, including 277 officer injuries while defending the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, and 60 Secret Service officers defending the White House.

This source clarifies it's 277 injuries amongst 140 officers.

Here are some numbers from the DHS indicating that the crowd sizes were approximately 1000 around the federal courthouse in Portland.

This seems like a more appropriate comparison than using the entirety of the 15-26 million Americans protesting during 2020 BLM riots to the 2000-2500 on January 6th.

That being said, there are several reasons as for why even this cannot be a direct comparison:

  • The 277 injury count is the total number sustained over a period of time and not on a singular day.
  • The source indicating crowd sizes for 1000 in Portland show that only 7 arrests were made on one specific day.
  • Different tactics were used to disperse the crowds. More effective dispersal will likely decrease officer injury rates. For example, it seems there were restrictions of using crowd dispersal tools by the capital police. I couldn't find anything about a similar restriction for police in Portland, and they were able to use pepper balls and tear gas to disperse protestors.
  • Injuries per protestor participant count is not a good metric. A single person can injure multiple police officers. Multiple protestors can work together to injure 1 police officer.

If we were to have millions of right-leaning Americans protest on a level similar to that of the BLM riots, how much more violence would we see? I acknowledge the number of police injuries would go up just due to statistics. But I think the current right-wing response to Kirk's assassination is pretty telling. We aren't seeing cities being burned and looted to anything remotely close to the BLM riots after Floyd's death.

If we were to have millions of right-leaning Americans protest on a level similar to that of the BLM riots, how much more violence would we see? I acknowledge the number of police injuries would go up just due to statistics.

If we went up at the same rate at roughly 140 cops injured per 40k participants, we would have about 56,000 cop injuries at a 16 million participant Jan 6th. You're correct they aren't perfect comparisons, but real world data hardly is.

  • But I think the current right-wing response to Kirk's assassination is pretty telling. We aren't seeing cities being burned and looted to anything remotely close to the BLM riots after Floyd's death.

The relatively high rates of violence of Jan 6th and BLM, and low rates of any protest nowadays both left (no kings march) and right (now) suggest that the violence was more a product of its time than anything else. A lot of things were weird during 2020 and 2021 from the lockdowns and spastic economy of the time.

Decent chance like a lot of datasets, the 2020-2022 data is just a distortion.

  • -12

no kings march

Interesting choice of protest to bring up since the Salt Lake City No Kings protest involved the official event security opening fire at a protester who was open carrying (but not brandishing), killing a bystander because they're shit shots, and then lying about what happened and trying to blame it on the open carrier they tried to murder until video footage came out showing otherwise.

no kings march

At least locally this has been an almost entirely boomer thing. Not sure how that generalizes.

Yes, lockdowns provoked most of the violent delights of 2020, but there may be other factors re: age, race, culture, motivation.

You should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 40K participants to 16 million for the same reason you should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 2.5k participant to 40K participants to get 2240 cop injuries.

I can do bad math too. Hey, we were able to add 37.5k to the total number of participants in a protest without needing to adjust the number of cops being injured, so let's use the rate of 0 cops injured per 37.5k added to scale to 0 cops injured per 16 million to get a final result of 140 cops injured per 16 million participants.

The reason why my bad math is wrong is the same reason why your math is wrong.

I agree that data needs to be taken a look at more closely to get a more accurate picture of the truth, and that outliers happen in data all the time. But you're the one that introduced shoddy analysis of data. I gave a good effort to give the most reasonable comparison, and I even gave criticism of that comparison.

You should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 40K participants to 16 million for the same reason you should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 2.5k participant to 40K participants to get 2240 cop injuries.

"If we went up at the same rate" of 1:400 then yes it would equal that.

I agree with you that a larger crowd is likely to have less violence overall though, since size is likely to correlate hard with how many normies are joining in.

We can't compare apples to applies with real world events, because the real world is messy. But it doesn't need to be perfect to have some amount of usable information.

  • -10

"If we went up at the same rate" of 1:400 then yes it would equal that.

The numbers should be self-evident why that assumption should not hold.

I don't understand what you're disputing here.

1/400 is the same rate as 2/800 and 3/1200 and the same as 10/4,000 and 100/40,000 and so on.

If your argument did not have any major flaws, we should've been able to extrapolate 140 cops injured per 2.5K participants (the most generous assumption that supports your argument) to 40,000K to get 2240 cop injuries.

We didn't get 2240 cop injuries for the 40,000 protestors. Nowhere even close. So we now have real world data that demonstrate how assuming going up at the same rate is an absurdly ignorant assumption to make for this particular scenario, and you should not do that to try to make your point.

Just saying you agree with me that a larger crowd is likely to have less violence overall does not excuse the extremely poor logic you have used to make your argument.

What better evidence could there be than him and his defense literally saying it?

Do you think the defendant in a criminal trial and his attorney are honest and forthright neutral truthseekers? I don't, so I don't rate that evidence very highly.

In fact here's something interesting, I asked chatgpt to run some numbers. "Per participant, was Jan 6th or BLM more violent towards cops?"

That reminds me of Contra Grant on Exaggerated differences:

Suppose I wanted to convince you that men and women had physically identical bodies. I run studies on things like number of arms, number of kidneys, size of the pancreas, caliber of the aorta, whether the brain is in the head or the chest, et cetera. 90% of these come back identical – in fact, the only ones that don’t are a few outliers like “breast size” or “number of penises”. I conclude that men and women are mostly physically similar. I can even make a statistic like “men and women are physically the same in 78% of traits”.

Add a ton of noise that overwhelms a valid signal, then declare that the noise is meaningful. I simply don't care about the BLM protests that were (actually, not "mostly") peaceful, so I wouldn't add them to the denominator.

If it was disavowed, why did people who stabbed, tasered, threw bombs at, or otherwise attacked cops get pardoned?

Because what they were subjected was a kangaroo court that was an affront to justice.

He was not forced to do a blanket clemency that covered violent crimes. The campaign even said before election that violent criminals would not be released.

“If you protested peacefully on Jan. 6 and you’ve had [Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” Vance told “Fox News Sunday.”

He added, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

Even Vance agreed it's obvious that violent criminals should not be sent into the general public. Yet what happened? Cop beaters with long rap sheets were freed.

Some of them have been rearrested for other charges like plotting an assassination against the FBI as revenge, existing charges of soliciting a minor, child pornography, etc.

As one would expect, cop beaters are not good people. Pardoning minor crimes like trespassing makes sense, in the chaos maybe many people didn't hear or notice the warnings. But why pardon cop beaters? They have made it known they are violent individuals, else they wouldn't have attacked a cop.

He was not forced to do a blanket clemency that covered violent crimes.

The time for making such distinctions was when doing the prosecution in the first place. It is not reasonable to expect the President, having seen a great injustice done, to relitigate every case several years later to ensure only the correct amount of injustice is alleviated and not one bit of true justice undone.

The time for making such distinctions was when doing the prosecution in the first place.

They did! Do you have any evidence that someone was falsely charged and convicted of assaulting police that didn't assault police?

It is not reasonable to expect the President, having seen a great injustice done, to relitigate every case several years later to ensure only the correct amount of injustice is alleviated and not one bit of true justice undone.

Historically a lot of work is put into determining who does and doesn't get pardoned. This is an article detauling it in the 1980s with way less easy access to information and they still managed it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/10/27/pardon-rules-cloaked-in-mystery/c369cf43-55b2-4201-a5b4-5d92f4775fef/

If they could do it then, they could do it now. Or is the Trump admin, even with modern technology, still incapable of doing what presidents used to be able to do?

Historically a lot of work is put into determining who does and doesn't get pardoned.

How do you feel about Biden's various preemptive and retroactive pardons before he left office?

From what I've heard there was quite a few scandals regarding some of them. His administration didn't seem to do a good job either at being properly selective.

It is a shame that we have apparently elected multiple presidents in a row unable to match the general quality and care of prior admins, despite better technology and availability of information.

ou know there's also an interesting thing to consider in right vs left violence discussions. The gender gap!

Or you could just poll people.

https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll

Very liberal more likely to say its acceptable to be happy about public figures deaths and more likely to agree that political violence can be justified.

Polling people immediately after just reveals signaling, it doesn't reveal beliefs. And as always, wording matters.

For example if you say

“true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country”,

It's 30% of Republicans and only about 12% of Democrats. https://prri.org/research/threats-to-american-democracy-ahead-of-an-unprecedented-presidential-election/

This also changes over time

In our latest survey, Republicans (18%) are more likely to agree that political violence may be necessary to save our country than independents (13%) and Democrats (11%). Independents’ views on this measure have been consistent since March 2021. Support for political violence among Republicans peaked at a high of 35% in August 2021, though most recently, since Trump’s election, their support has been at its lowest (18%). Democrats’ support for political violence has remained consistently lower during this period, ranging from a low of 7% to a high of 13%.

Now of course as always, beware the man of one study, beware the man of the polls (especially online polls) too.

Timing, wording, polling sample biases, all of these can lead to drastic differences. Polling is signaling, it's obvious that 35% of Republicans didn't actually support political violence during 2021 (given not even a fraction of a fraction did any violence), they just said it to signal "I'm really upset right now!".

“true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country”,

This is a truly terrible survey question.

(The entire statement, which is a little better with the context, is "because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country")

This plainly includes e.g. fighting off a Chinese invasion. There might not be a Chinese invasion -- there almost certainly won't, at least of the mainland US -- but the question says 'may.' And if there were, it would likely be 'because things have gotten so far off track' in terms of foreign policy, military readiness, etc. It also includes joining the FBI to fight domestic terrorists, or the secret service to protect leaders from assassination, and a dozen other anodyne activities. I'd go so far to say that answering 'no' implies only a profoundly lacking imagination. (Or perhaps the belief that individuals resorting to violence to save our country aren't necessarily true American patriots?)

But, as you say, the actual answers are probably all signaling. Still, I'm forced to question the motives of whoever wrote that question -- did they really not think at all about what they were asking?

@remzem's YouGov poll is... slightly better?

"Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to resort to violence in order to achieve political goals?"

I'd still say war counts -- it is, after all, the continuation of politics with other means -- but I'd feel like a pedant doing it. It's obvious what this one means where on the other I think I would just go down that line of thought and click 'yes.'

Still, the answer to this one is also obviously 'yes.' '[E]ver justified' is doing a lot of work. Do 83% of conservative believe the American Revolution wasn't justified? Do 55% of the very liberal think the July 20 plot to kill Hitler wasn't justified?

A far, far more useful question would be whether political violence is currently justified in America. Certainly, the numbers would be smaller, but how much smaller? Certainly not zero. Actually, it might be decent measure of how much of this is just signaling, given how much more extreme a position it is.

Wording matters, but "true American patriots" is putting such a heavy thumb on the scale that I'm somewhere between disappointed and impressed by PRRI, and that's knowing some of their other hijinks.

Sure, so let's just look at your own Yougov link (which presumably you trust as a fair source since you used it) which says

But YouGov has asked this question multiple times since 2022, and found some noticeable changes in opinion. For one thing, while Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say political violence is a very big problem in September 2025, in the wake of Kirk's shooting, the reverse has been true when YouGov has asked this question after attacks on Democratic political figures. How concerned Americans are about political violence is related to some degree to whether someone from their side or from the other side is the most recent to be attacked

Yeah this seems to support that it's mostly signaling "I support my side!" or "I'm upset!" rather than consistent views.

(which presumably you trust as a fair source since you used it)

remzem

gattsuru

?

I've got an icon on my posts for a reason! And on that specific matter, I specifically and try to caveat YouGov almost anytime I do reference them.

EDIT: I'm also extremely skeptical of YouGov's specific poll question here given the combined use of the Likert scale and literally never showing its breakdown.

Woops sorry I didn't notice the usernames but same logic applies anyway.

If we trust Yougov for Poll 1, we should trust it for Poll 2. If we don't trust Poll 2, we shouldn't trust it for Poll 1.

His own defence attorney literally said it was because he passionately believed in far right theories. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67372363

Sure, such as, per your article - "Instead, Ms Linker said he was driven by right-wing conspiracies that blame the country's demise on corrupt elites who use their status to spread lies, including facilitating the sexual abuse of children."

I think more detail would be needed to conclude it is far right instead of the identical far left conspiracy theories.

Currently the left is the one banging the drum about government connection to sexual abuse of children.

think more detail would be needed to conclude it is far right instead of the identical far left conspiracy theories.

Pizzagate, Qanon, 2020 election, Russiagate, those are all pretty right wing.

Currently the left is the one banging the drum about government connection to sexual abuse of children.

Even Epstein was a right wing leaning thing (at least bipartisan) and still is decently bipartisan. The only reason it's become a "left" thing now is the Trump admin's sudden pivot away from releasing the files as promised multiple times during campaign.

It only stopped being a right thing because they haven't released the list they said they would.

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Is vaccine hesitancy a right or left wing conspiracy theory? Has that changed recently?

I think that's a good sniff test here.

Covid vaccine reluctance is hard coded right.

That isn't what I asked.

Historically it was more equal with a bit of left leaning, but since Covid it has shifted hard right, especially with the rise of RFK and states like Florida reconsidering vaccine mandates.

To my knowledge, vaccines are a horseshoe issue and you'll find it on the left and right.

I asked because I find that more partisan types struggle to admit that both the left and the right have issues with vaccines (both COVID and otherwise) with it being historically focused on hippy types and inner city blacks but now having more red tribers.

It's a situation where if you can't admit it's an issue with bipartisan elements I'm not not sure we have much to talk about.

I'm not magicalkittycat.

Though you did get me wondering about how much of historical resistance was lead by hippies (though they're certainly among them!). Some of this was interesting but didn't really get too much into which groups particularly opposed it. The vaccine-autism link started in 1998 but was popularized by lefty celebrities. The furthest back hard data I can find shows that Democrats and Republicans were pretty equal on vaccines from 2002-2015, with Democrats being slightly more trusting.

I'm not magicalkittycat.

Yes I know, over the last few days I've become suspicious that MKC is a sock puppet for someone I would prefer not to discuss with and wanted to assess.

I can tell you that in my Pre-COVID clinical practice I occasionally ran into a vaccines cause Autism soccer-mom/hippie/"natural" nut. They'd be impossible to convince.

More often (likely because of my location) I'd run into blacks who were skeptical of the government and so on -if you were kind and patient you could usually convince these.

I'll note the specific poll in your link "how important is it that parents get their children vaccinated" won't really capture this well because "meh" and "fuck off whitey" end up being the same answer.

There are right-wing conspiracy theories about paedophiles and left-wing conspiracy theories about paedophiles. Depape was radicalised by Qanon, which is a right-wing conspiracy theory about paedophiles, as Ms Linker correctly stated.

So I looked for details instead of just articles that say "qanon" and found -

"An Aug. 24 entry titled “Q,” displayed a scatological collection of memes that included photos of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and made reference to QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that espouses the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and baby-eating cannibals."

Isn't that rather close to what the left is claiming right now?

No, not really. The left only cares about Epstein to the extent that it's a weapon to use against Trump.

I'd still like to see what the "references" were. There's a world of difference between "Q really opened my eyes, and now I see that leftwingers like Nancy Pelosi are the adrenochrome eaters" and "Rightwingers are fascists, but this Q guy seems legit. Nancy Pelosi is basically a Republikkan."

The wording there leaves open the possibility that there's some framing gaming happening by the defense, like the Matthew Shepherd case.

"Epstein didn't kill himself" was a meme in left spaces during the Biden times. Turns out "lots of our politicians were having sex with underaged girls at this guy's island, then the guy appears to have been suicided before he could provide details implicating specific politicians" is unpopular with pretty much everyone.

The right was more vocal about it pre Trump, and post-Trump some of the left does see this as an opportunity to go on the attack, but the left cared about Epstein before Trump too.

And you can easily add a more conspiratorial angle that goes something like "this guy is clearly mentally ill but if you frame his defense in a way that is politically advantageous to us we'll help him out."

I would not usually pretend that is the slightest bit likely but given the time and jurisdiction who knows.

In any case the guy is clearly mentally ill adjacent with unclear etiology (maybe just drug brain rot?) which is relevant in the same way that the recent stabbing is, but doesn't seem to be a clear eyed assassination as the Kirk murder seemingly is.

I'd still like to see what the "references" were. There's a world of difference between "Q really opened my eyes, and now I see that leftwingers like Nancy Pelosi are the adrenochrome eaters" and "Rightwingers are fascists, but this Q guy seems legit. Nancy Pelosi is basically a Republikkan."

I haven't seen even one case of the latter example anywhere ever.

The thing that separates QAnon from previous theories about the elites being child rapists (and there have been left-wing variants - Dave McGowan, who did an yeoman's labor in getting the general theory known among conspiracy circles, was a left-winger) is not the elite child rapist thing but the particular idea that Trump is a savior figure who will overthrow, jail and execute the (leftist) child rapist elites. QAnon rhetoric specifically places DePape on the right.

I think everyone who took Q seriously (and this guy in particular) is an idiot with a mostly incoherent view of the world. And I don't mean that in a way that exonerates them by blaming it on some nebulous mental health problem. I mean that their attempts to assemble facts and details into a viable understanding of reality is just appallingly bad. They are stupid people, or at least they crit-failed important, load-bearing sense-making operations in a way that caused catastrophic downstream effects.

So, given that this dude was at least culturally enmeshed in a very leftist environment, I would expect his adoption of Q to be particularly asinine, because there's more inferential distance to cover with flimsy bullshit. Going all the way to being a QMAGA type is possible, but there's a lot of room for weird, idiotic shortcuts like "Pelosi is a traitor to the left".

My greater point is more that I don't think the framing by his legal defense should be taken at face value. There are multiple plausible reasons they might stress some things and downplay others as a strategy to play the judge and jury.

I think more detail would be needed to conclude it is far right instead of the identical far left conspiracy theories.

Currently the left is the one banging the drum about government connection to sexual abuse of children.

Evidence that the Left actually cares for such connections and theories, rather than just pulling a "your rules, applied fairly" on the Right after Trump weaselled himself out of releasing the Epstein files? (Surely if it's the latter they wouldn't be so committed to the bit that their members would attempt murder-suicide for it.)

Besides what you've already mentioned, Kirk was assassinated publicly in the middle of a livestreamed debate. I have a hard time thinking of any comparable examples besides the JFK assassination and even that's a stretch.

The online left seems incredibly frustrated right now. They are trying to link Paul Pelosi and those two MN “lawmakers” deaths to the right. I don’t think it’s working at all. Normies are not buying it. They’ve got very weak arguments and you can tell they’re losing the messaging fight and trying to throw whatever they can at the wall. Nothing is sticking.

P.S. has anyone else noticed this new “lawmaker” noun? I just picked up on it in the last few weeks but it’s absolutely everywhere. Has this been the case for a while? This is such a strange euphemism. Google says it’s because it’s gender neutral, but I don’t recall this from the time when we were changing all the other gendered words. It seems like there’s some other objective here with this change than gender.

Has this been the case for a while? This is such a strange euphemism.

It’s been a stock journalistic phrase for as long as I can remember and doesn’t seem strange or euphemistic to me at all. You never heard on the nightly news in the 2000s, “Lawmakers on capital hill are proposing a new bill to…”?

Democrats would like to distance themselves from this lunatic. Republicans successfully distanced themselves from those lunatics. Is it any more complicated than that?

And now you’ve got me confused about the “lawmaker” thing. I’m normally pretty darn skeptical of Google trends, but it’s not subtle. Wikipedia starts with legislators, though the Responses section prefers lawmakers. CBS, CNN and NPR appear to favor lawmakers, as does Fox. The Guardian was the only one I found that uses both terms, and I suspect they wouldn’t have bothered if there weren’t two uses in one sentence. Even OANN gets in on it!

This is definitely some sort of fad, and I have no idea why.

I mean zoom out the graph and the baseline rate sees a very small gradual rise. Part of the issue is that the AP News wording is more viral than you’d think and more news outlets than you’d expect outright copy headlines in some form. (Or plagiarize)

It’s definitely Jan 6, 2021 that is when it starts going. Again, copy and paste I strongly suggest is the issue! This is non representative but contains some front pages on Jan 7: I stopped counting at 30 front pages, but exactly 20 of them mention “lawmakers” in bold headings. Phrases repeat suspiciously: “lawmakers duck for cover” dominates, and variants like “lawmakers hunker down” and even “lawmakers duck to find cover”, “lawmakers are forced into hiding”, etc. and sure enough, AP News article from the evening of J6 (I assume the date is wrong, shows J5 on the website which is clearly impossible) has “forced lawmakers into hiding” in the first paragraph. AP is a news wire service, by the way, deliberately designed for this purpose; and yes, I think it’s harmful to press freedom and true expression because the coordination effect is too large (popular however because it saves $$ since local papers are encouraged to basically paraphrase rather than write fresh copy, meaning fewer man hours and even more so the case when on a time crunch).

To me it’s a somewhat memetic natural process from there among the smallish club of news headline writers, with spikes on particular popular topics or articles. That’s why you see weird patterns, I actually expect such, precisely because of the AP (Reuters also has a similar effect but smaller).

Our unmight has beteemed Norman sway over the English tongue for scores of years, but this is forestalled at last! Do not let "lawmaker" afear you! It betokens our folkright eft wending to the better, and the begetting of the Anglish uprising!

(yeah, I've got no idea ken either; I just find it amusing mirthful that "lawmaker" is the word for "legislator" in the Anglish dictionary wordbook)

Have you read uncleftish beholding?

Long ago; I loved it! It really was the epitome of "Modern" Anglish, where words with no non-Romance-descended English equivalents get rederived from old Germanic-English roots, as opposed to texts which merely use existing but antiquated non-Romance English words.

To be clear, though, I love this stuff in a for-entertainment-purposes-only way; one of the best things about English is how, after it "has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary", we've ended up in a state where every concept has three times as many ways to express it, each subtly different in meanings, connotations, formality, rhythm and rhyme, etc. Adding new Anglish formations to English would be fun (though if I was the Emperor of English I'd prioritize it way below things like universally-phonetic spelling), but actually replacing and removing non-Anglish words would be silly.

For that matter, I'm happy to have new Anglish formations remain reminiscent of but not actually part of English. I bookmarked that Anglish dictionary for use as an RPG game master, to draw words from when players roll a Linguistics check that's almost but not quite successful at translating a dead language their characters only partially understand.

This is definitely some sort of fad, and I have no idea why.

Maybe they decided most people were too stupid to know what a legislator was. Probably not wrong.

It is really interesting to see different Political Weirdo Forums' assessment of public mood re: the Current Moment. Because they're... all over the place.

has anyone else noticed this new “lawmaker” noun?

It picked up like a while ago as a catchall for elected officials (especially sub-Federal). It's suitably generic so you don't embarrass yourself by accidentally calling a county councilor a county boardmember, plus it sounds more impressive to quote a "lawmaker" instead of county board member from Tumbleweed County.

P.S. has anyone else noticed this new “lawmaker” noun?

See Google Trends. I hadn't noticed this month's spike, so I'll say no.

I've seen it used as a generic term for Senator, Member of Parliament, Member of the Legislative Assembly, City Councillor, and various foreign equivalents for at least a few years now, and didn't notice anything odd about it.

Isn't "legislator" already gender neutral?

has anyone else noticed this new “lawmaker” noun? I just picked up on it in the last few weeks but it’s absolutely everywhere

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&geo=US&q=lawmaker&hl=en

It really does seem abrupt. My personal assumption is somebody sent out talking points, though I couldn't predict who.

I commented above, but it’s nothing so nefarious (probably) - the AP’s influence on news headlines does a lot of heavy lifting. Idiosyncratic phrases and rare synonyms can easily become popular in bursts.

Not long ago there was a document put out by some dem affiliated think tank that discouraged the use of offputting (pregnant person) or technical/academic language (overton window) so i'm guessing using lawmaker over legislator is an part of a broader attempt to avoid appearing out of touch/highfalutin.

What's wrong with "overton window"? Someone saying they want to shift the overton window is a very strong signal of their goals, and if they're using the term it's because they want other people to know what their goals are and how they intend to achieve them.

They considered it to be too obscure for the average voter I believe.

Good ole Anglo-Saxon words over Latinisms.

P.S. has anyone else noticed this new “lawmaker” noun?

I actually like it. All 50 states have different legislative structures. Most use the typical terms "senator" and "representative" for members, but some don't. It's a lot easier to just use the generic term "lawmaker" for every state legislative body member. They could use the fancy term "legislator", but that means the same thing while being less understandable for those citizens who couldn't pass government class.

This hits on both things I dislike. The academic/liberal/PMC power move to suddenly change words and pronunciation to signal in group status. And dumbing down language even further. Really, legislator is too fancy? Though again it’s also some sort of radical egalitarianism that where people can virtue signal that they’re considering the uneducated in the country.

I feel like you may be projecting a lot of meaning into it. To some extent all groups do this. I work in data science and boy let me tell you, buzzwords come into vogue so fast it makes your head spin. Famously kids often invent new vocab or participate in language trends on purpose to signal ingroup status and awareness, but adults do it too, and not exclusively politically. It’s not usually deliberate, it’s life.

It’s also inconsistent that you think that re-introducing a previously more rare word dumbs down language. Isn’t an expanded vocabulary usually a sign of higher level language, not lower? It’s not as if “legislator” or “senator” or what have you are less popular or obsolete, much less low status to say.

Don’t get me wrong: focus group messaging firms do impact political word choice. I can even name drop one (though a Republican): Frank Luntz. But they don’t always work, and don’t always show up. He pushed for energy exploration instead of oil drilling in a 2003 memo, and climate change instead of global warming in a 2002 memo, but as far as I can see, neither actually wholly replaced the other and although the choice might signal something, it’s not so obvious. In fact climate change actually got adopted by the left!

A sort-of peer of his on the left, the don’t think about an elephant guy George Lakoff, pushed stuff like climate crisis/emergency instead, and public option vs government healthcare, and stuff like that. Not all were so enduring. Yes, the 2016-2023 era had a decent amount of leftist word policing of “bad” words, but that’s not related or analogous to this objection at all. Your radar is misfiring.

These two ideologies, western liberal democracy, which the conservatives are still, maybe stupidly, trying to work inside of, and some bastard form of revolutionary marxism, are not two sides fighting over territory. There's no compromise where we meet in the middle. It's winner take all - either we remain a western liberal democracy, or we don't.

Marxism had already infused itself into the Western world by the early 20th century. Anarchism dates even further back. America has long had strains of socialism, communism, anarchim, Marxism in certain respects of academia and labor unions, yet this hasn't stopped 'free market capitalism' and 'liberal democracy' from thriving. The compromise is the far-left remains marginalized despite having some popularity online and campus, as it has been the past 60-100+ years in the US.

A similar pattern is seen around the world. Every country which has elections will have at least one fringe socialist or Marxist party, which never secures many votes or seats but exists nevertheless.

This is complacency. Mass college education and the trend towards more extreme university politicization changes the game. There's a big difference between 0.5% of your population being sympathetic to revolutionary Marxism (still dangerous!) and 20% of your population being sympathetic to revolutionary Marxism. A difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.

No, it’s the marketplace of ideas (TM). As long as the socialists keep failing to deliver cheap goods and/or national prestige, their market share is going to remain low.

I’m not sure why you think colleges are so threatening. Have you been to one, recently? Nobody even gets shot by the national guard.

Our institutions were a lot better at creating revolutionaries in the 60s and 70s, back when we still had a draft. And volume alone can’t be enough, or the labor unions would have toppled the government back when America was predominantly blue-collar.

but the majority don't stay that way as adults though; they go on to have careers and join the fold of liberal democracy

Rather than January 6th or Paul Pelosi or even the Minnesota legislators, Patrick Crusius and Payton Gendron are the proper right-wing analogues to Tyler Robinson.

I don't generally like using emotive language but I'm going to in this to try to make some points.

This gets into the almost impossible "measuring contest" of who commits the most violence. The recent shooting directly challenges the narrative. How many Republicans, conservatives, or right-wingers support killing Black or Latino people just for being Black or Latino? Or, to make a fairer comparison, how many would say anything close to, "I'm against killing Blacks in a grocery store, but..."? The left has branded Charlie Kirk a "Nazi white supremacist" for citing crime statistics. As far as I know, he's never hinted at genetic causes; he uses standard boomer-con it's about culture, claiming intact families would reduce crime and that affirmative action places some Black women in roles they're not qualified for. That's why you can't make the right eat Crusius and Gendron. @Stellula. Any right-winger who said, "...but despite making up 13% of the population, Blacks commit 50% of violent crimes," would be shit-canned before they could take their next shit.

What making the left eat this is after a man with a young, beautiful family had his throat blown open, with so much blood gushing out that if it wasn't real people would have thought it was slasher-horror film excess - not just random nuts, but professors and teachers - said, "...but."

How many Republicans, conservatives, or right-wingers support killing Black or Latino people just for being Black or Latino?

One can go on Twitter, search for "TND" and find examples of rando accounts doing just that, particularly after the Iryna Zaretska murder. Who knows how many (presumably some of them are sockpuppets), but there are at least some.

They don't tend to associate their real identities though. Especially if they are teachers or doctors.

The left has branded Charlie Kirk a "Nazi white supremacist" for citing crime statistics.

Referring to illegal immigration as an "invasion" is totally mainstream on the right. What do you do to invaders?

The state removes them from the country under threat of violence. Are you a pacifist? I'm sure you know this: Political action is about desires we want enforced with violence. The debate is over the bounds of legitimate violence, in this case what "normies" see as justified. They don’t think in those terms, so they’re wildly inconsistent, driven by vibes. That’s why horror-movie levels of blood hits hard. Few normies think it’s okay to start stacking bodies over calling illegal immigrants “invaders.”

Referring to illegal immigration as an "invasion" is totally mainstream on the right. What do you do to invaders?

Repel them. It's literally in the Constitution.

Repel them.

With what? Rifles?

Is there something you're asking here which I'm missing? Trump has been pretty explicit that he wants to deport them back to their home countries.

Invasions are violent, and you generally repel them by killing invaders. If referring to Charlie Kirk as a Nazi is encouragement to kill him, then referring to illegal immigrants as invaders is encouragement to kill them

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You do kill invaders if necessary, but you don't have to. Invaders often retreat, or they're captured as prisoners. I grant you that "invasion" is somewhat hyperoblic, since it conjures up images of organized armies massing on the border, but it's well within normal political rhetoric.

The problem is that, for the left, fascists and Nazis are the worst thing they can think of--secular counterparts to demons and devils. There is nothing redeemable about Nazis, and they shall be given no quarter. They are like orcs and goblins, enemies you can kill without moral qualms. They are not to be humanized, sympathized with, or shown in any way to be reasonable. Nazis are the villains of your story when you just need someone for the good guy to punch and shoot. Violence against Nazis is always righteous. This is the only culture I have ever known, and this messaging about Nazis has been drummed into me and everyone else by decades of movies, books, TV shows, videogames, and whatever else.

People may call illegal immigrants invaders, but they know they're not literally an invading army in the same way that the Russian army is invading Ukraine. Most left-wingers who throw around the accusation of "Nazi" know that people like Charlie Kirk are not actual Nazis, but unfortunately they done it so much and for so long that a significant chunk of lefties, especially the young, actually believe it. Moreover, their version of a Nazi is likely worse than the real Nazis were. You don't debate or tolerate Nazis, you shoot them and celebrate their death.

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Surely the closest analogue is Anders Behring Breivik, even down to focusing on killing the youth leaders of the enemy party. Not American, though.

Citing non-Americans seems unfair, though with the Americanization of global politics, maybe less and less so

Not American, though.

That's a big deal in this context.

While I don't think it would matter to many (arguably hasn't mattered) inversing the ideologies, it probably should be noted that Crusius is full on crazy (schizoaffective disorder). Decarlos Brown Jr probably is similar I have seen it asserted that he was poisoned by anti-white rhetoric but the main thrust is that progressive policies kept him on the street.

Those should be the examples of right wing violence that the left makes the right eat.

I wonder why these aren’t more commonly talked about?

Do you remember if any prominent right wing figures said that the victims deserved it? There are obviously the people saying that about Kirk, and there have also been semi notable people saying that about Ashley Babbitt, and the victims of the attempted Trump assassination.

The Free Helicopter rides memes were about as close as I can recall.

It’s been wall to wall condemnation of the Kirk assassination by Democratic Party figures and media spokespeople. And saying “I hate Charlie Kirk, but he shouldn’t have been assassinated” isn’t justification any more than “we need to close the border and deport illegals, but you shouldn’t shoot up a Wal Mart”

It’s been wall to wall condemnation of the Kirk assassination by Democratic Party figures and media spokespeople.

We don't need them to condemn the assassination, we need them to condemn the shockingly large portion of their base who are ecstatic about it.

For various reasons the left and mainstream institutions have manufactured a sizable minority that among other things, believes that assassination of American political figures is justified (check out the polling).

These people need to be told by everybody that they are dangerous and their beliefs need to be evicted from education and employment and mainstream thought.

Democrat politicians have been complicit in creating a generation that has norms that are completely incompatible with liberal democracy. This includes democrat strategists and consultants as well as staffers (I know some of them).

It doesn't matter if AOC publicly criticizes assassinations if her supporters love them (and potentially much of her staff).

These people need to be told by everybody that they are dangerous and their beliefs need to be evicted from education and employment and mainstream thought.

Now where have I heard this line before? I feel like I heard it a lot about 5 years ago, but I just can't seem to remember who was saying it.

Probably some fine upstanding people pushing a culture we want to see more of in this country.

Speak plainly.

At my job you can wear a pride pin or a BLM badge and at one point it was quite nearly required. If you wore MAGA gear you'd be fired.

I don't see polling showing that the right has a great deal of interest in murdering people who disagree with them.

The left and the right and the demands on either are not the same.

You're not wrong about how things are, but faul_sname isn't wrong about the situation you're advocating for. The villain speech applies; you and they are the same, just with opposite political valence.

As I said in one of my earlier comments, we can all (well mostly) agree that some things are unacceptable to say publicly associated with your identity. A teacher advocating for child sexual abuse publicly is not something you are going to see support from all but the most ardent gadflies.

You have to pick where to draw the line. Critiques and complaints about cancel culture were often about this - the line was drawn in an unacceptable location and critically was politically unipolar.

I think you'd find that most on the right, even the ones who are like "bahahaha taste your own medicine bahaha" would be wiling to say - yes people on both sides should be fired for supporting domestic terrorism. You'd probably even find some people who might say something like "yeah you wanna advocate for terrorism in another country like Gaza? Sure! Just keep it out of the U.S."

Might it eventually get taken too far? Sure.

But for now the gap in equivalency is comically vast.

If you spend years complaining about people getting fired for cat calling on the street and then you start saying that rapists should be fired...that isn't inconsistent, even if one side tries to claim that cat calling is rape.

Speak plainly.

My claim: cancel culture was bad when the left did it and is bad when the right does it. Our norms are fragile, and are worth protecting. Allowing people to speak freely means that there will be some people who say horrible things. Some of those horrible things will be false. Some of those people who say those horrible false things will even mean it.

And yet, the societies that try to silence the people who say horrible false things seem to invariably also start trying to silence the people who say inconvenient-to-power true things. As we witnessed just a couple of years ago.

At that time, many on the right seemed to understand the value of free speech, actual free speech and not "you're free to speak and I'm free to blackmail your employer into firing you with threats of a media shitstorm". And last year, there was a shift, and people started to recognize (out loud) the excesses of the "woke" era. Norms turned against people trying to "cancel" each other for insufficient wokeness.

I don't see polling showing that the right has a great deal of interest in murdering people who disagree with them.

I mean go look at the discourse about "alligator alcatraz", the people saying "I voted for this, self-deport" whenever there's a report of ICE illegally detaining legal US residents in atrocious conditions or trying to sidestep court orders, this very forum with the dark hinting about how the left has made the right angry and you wouldn't like us when we're angry.

To be clear, I support the right of people on the right to say these things. I oppose any attempts to try to be cute and get their employers to go after them.

But I notice that the right seems to be trying to bring back the worst parts of 2021 era cancel culture. And so, in opposition to that, I claim: cancel culture was bad when the left did it and is bad when the right does it

Cancel Culture: I said the word faggot on Facebook in 2006.

Not Cancel Culture: I a person in trusted authority (such as a doctor) publicly celebrated the death of someone who represents half of America.

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But I notice that the right seems to be trying to bring back the worst parts of 2021 era cancel culture

These aren't the worst parts, it's some of the mildest ones, and it's not bringing them back, they never left. I have sympathy for principled free speech advocates, but the way they act these things are perfectly symmetrical detracts from their point.

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Al Green, a black Texas Dem that surely screams "woke," said kind things about Kirk. Said they have the same creator up above and that Kirk "had a right to be where he was, and a right to life." But he's old school black religious, likes MLK Jr. The newer school of James Baldwin and post-colonial lefties, not a sentiment you see much.

I saw a smart comment elsewhere that suggested that it’s the rank and file dem voters that are cheering on and celebrating the assassination. And that it’s actually worse than if it were dem leaders. You can change leaders. You can’t change the voters.

https://x.com/jackunheard/status/1967667070344237517

Are Ilhan Omar or Medhi Hasan prominent members of the democratic party? What about Destiny? Hasan Piker? Are they not prominent left wing thought leaders? Destiny was just on Piers Morgan, for instance.

Neither Omar nor Hasan said Kirk deserved it. They basically said they thought he was an asshole with abhorrent beliefs, and then Hasan called the killing "horrific" and "inexcusable" and Omar said "my heart breaks" for his family. Whether they're really all that broken up about it, probably not, but they're going through the expected motions, and right-wingers would not be all that sad if somebody shot some left-winger of Kirk's stature either.

Piker does not represent the Democratic Party, either its leadership or its base. He's a self-proclaimed socialist who supports the Houthis, which puts him far out of step with both. He's certainly not comparable with people like Tucker Carlson or Kirk himself, who was a personal friend of Trump's and close to the heart of the GOP. He has about a fifth as many twitter followers as Kirk. Destiny has a fraction of that following.

And all that said, neither of them said Kirk deserved it either. Piker told his fans to stop laughing on stream, and called it "horrific." Destiny refused to "disavow" on the grounds it would be an admission of guilt.

What seems to be happening is right-wingers taking examples of people saying "Kirk was an asshole, but he shouldn't have been killed" and pretending like they're saying "Fuck yeah, more of this, give that guy a medal." It's not enough to condemn the Kirk assassination, you have to be sad about it and talk about what a great guy he was too.

Omar effectively said no one really gives a shit about Kirk and everyone is just pretending to be afraid and outraged. Her stance is pretty abhorrent. The rest of what she said was a deflectionary attempt at reframing the conversation around why right-wing politics are bad.

It was a terrible comment she gave.

Would you extend this grace to anybody murdering people who look Mexican for being Mexican?

"Well yeah of course, of course we condemn murder...but what did these Mexicans expect? They maybe have been here illegally. Even if they weren't they kindof looked like some people who are!"

The things Destiny, Ilhan, etc. are saying are reprehensible.

Didn't some of the testimony for the DC sniper case suggest they were targeting white people for being white people?

Robinson shot Charlie Kirk for being Charlie Kirk specifically, rather than as a randomly selected conservative (otherwise he might have shot any one of the people in the crowd). Crusius shot his victims for being non-white immigrants generally, since he didn't know who any of them were personally. So the equivalent to leftists badmouthing Kirk as a man after his murder would be right-wingers badmouthing non-white immigrants as a group after several of them are murdered, which they absolutely do

  • -11

I wonder if there's a deeper interaction with left-wing ideology here. Leftists have to believe that the masses would totally want social democracy/communism if only they were educated and knew what was good for themselves. In this framework the individual propagandists are themselves the ones responsible for reactionary sentiment amongst the population at large. Right-wingers see the core problem as the undesirable demographics directly, so cheering targeted assassinations doesn't really fit.

Okay, I looked into why people think the Paul Pelosi attack was done by a right winger, and it took me five minutes to find the audio tape of his interrogation the day he was taken into custody. He starts by bringing up Hillary Clinton and the DNC spying on Trump, and how Nancy Pelosi was always lying on television. You can hear him break down when he talks about, "the record-breaking crime spree the Democrats have been on for the last four years." Then he says he wanted to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage to make her finally tell the truth.

All that stuff Schellenberger brings up sounds nice and convenient, and maybe back when he wrote the piece (the day after the attack) that was all the information the public had, but we have more information now. This isn't really a mystery anymore.

If it's possible for a guy with right wing views to also live in a van in Berkeley doing drugs while part of a polyamorous sex cult. Than shouldn't it also be possible for a left wing guy to be against political corruption, spying on political opponents, lying, etc.?

A ton of weird hippies went rightwards after Covid, arguably the most prominent one (who is also not known for living a particularly conventional lifestyle) now being the Secretary of HHS. I'd hardly expect all of them to immediately join a church, get a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, become monogamous and/or drop their drug habits.

RFK Jr. didn't "go rightward". He remained where he was, in the same kooky fringe, while the left pulled up stakes. His alliance with Trump was pure alliance-of-convenience (and a damned good deal for him), not ideological alignment.

I don’t think this is entirely true. There is leaked audio of Trump and RFK talking on the phone and Trump is expressing skepticism and concern over how babies get so many vaccines so early. That’s a subject that also comes up periodically in Trump’s pre-political career tweets, including his much memed “...AUTISM! Many such cases!” Tweet. It’s partially a marriage of convenience, but it’s only possible because both Trump and Trump’s base are casually but broadly sympathetic to a lot of RFK’s causes.

Nevertheless, RFK Jr. has been consistent. He didn't move.

Whatever his views, he's now on the Team Trump, a clinching factor in itself.

Clinching what? It doesn't make him a right-winger. He's the same kook he's always been. And in any case, it's specific to him; he didn't accept the deal on behalf of the "association of hippies with kooky views".

Yes. What's considered "the right" is a very big tent. The evangelical Christian white guys who love NASCAR, pickups and guns and have strong opinions about the rebranding of Cracker Barrel are just a subset of a very diverse whole.

If you want to define your political categories in a way that allows you to avoid labeling as a right-winger a guy who commits a home invasion against Nancy Pelosi in order to get her to admit to the lies that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Convention have been using to undermine Donald Trump, then go ahead. You do you man.

Yea people oscillate between hanging you for who you are/what you do and what you say. Progressives claiming Robinson's upbringing and demographic profile make him actually right-wing e.g.

He made statements to police indicating that he attacked the pelosis because they were Democrats and he believed they stole the election from trump.

told to eat the Paul Pelosi attack as a right wing thing.

I have not seen anyone in my real life bubble claim that Depape was right wing. I have heard, incessantly, that "right wing hate" radicalized and activated Depape like some kind of MKULTRA program.

Conceptually, it's an interesting mix of stochastic terrorism and magickal law.

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