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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21854 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Continuing on the all-encompassing topic of Charlie Kirk, everyone's favorite internet socialist Freddie deBoer put out a new article: Constituent Parts of a Theory of Spectacular Acts of Public Violence

For some time now, I’ve been trying to work out how to explain what I take to be a new period of spectacular acts of public violence. (This is the clumsy term that I’ve arrived at, “spectacular acts of public violence,” chosen because existing terms like “mass shooting” are insufficiently expansive.) Some people accused my most recent attempt as overly esoteric, perhaps deliberately obscure. <...> If I’ve been difficult to follow, that difficulty stems from a deeply sincere attempt to use specific intellectual tools to better map a chaotic system of potentially immense violence.

Mass shootings and similar events are now so normalized that it can be difficult to sort out whether we’ve slipped into such an era, but my fear is that recent violence will spread and grow, that in fact each act will serve as an accelerant for the next, as the cascading violence will help the people who commit this violence see their work as part of some broader movement that gives them the meaning they seek.

This is, in fact, my overarching argument: that where we are trained to see public violence as the outcome of ideology - those anarchist assassinations, 9/11, Oklahoma City, Anders Breivik, Yukio Mishima - in the 21st century, a certain potent strain of political violence is not the product of ideology but rather an attempt to will ideology into being through violence itself. To create meaning in a culture steeped in digital meaninglessness by the most destructive means available.

His previous attempt does seem barely comprehensible and borderline schizophrenic to me (besides vaguely raising my AIslop hackles), so this one is definitely more coherent and puts his thesis better.

But with his point stated more directly, the whole writeup reads to me as a very elaborate deflection; it draws interesting parallels with the absolute state of today's internet/social media, and does taste like a new flavor of "gosh darn we may never know the truth" - but the core of it still seems to be cope, a sort of intellectual judo move that takes as input a gruesome public murder of a political speaker (whether it is politically motivated seems to be a scissor statement, though my stance should be obvious) and flips it into "actually, gamers disaffected young men are the real problem":

Clearly he had some sort of ideological urge, some sense that his violence should contain meaning, but his impulses and influences are incoherent; indeed, that urge has been inculcated in online communities that are defined by nothing so much as, well, nothing - the all-consuming lol lol lol of contemporary sad-young-man online culture, forum after forum dominated by an endless race to the bottom of nihilism and self-hatred.

(Snap judgment check: when you read the words "all-consuming lol lol lol of contemporary sad-young-man online culture" or "Disaffected, Internet-Poisoned Young Men", what springs to mind first - Reddit or 4chan? Do you think deBoer, writing for a living as he does, is unaware of this?)

Less charitably, past the first third of the text the post starts reading as a clumsy Eulering attempt: Freddie's logic does broadly hold when applied to e.g school shootings, but it takes a certain rhetorical sleight-of-hand to apply it as he does to Kirk's murder. He spells out the premise at the start -

The 21st century school shooter (for example) does not murder children in an effort to pursue some teleological purpose; the 21st century school shooter exists in a state of deep purposelessness and, at some level and to some degree, seeks to will meaning into being through their actions.

which is trivially true, but then he smoothly segues into the murder in question to present it as difference in mere degree, not kind, eventually laundering it through enough complicated words to spell it out thusly:

The Kirk murder, in this context, is not an act of political terrorism; it is a desperate, violent assertion of personal meaning by a pathetic, immoral agent operating in a system experiencing a collapse of meaning. The assassin is the ultimate product of a society that has become a cacophony of contradictory signals. Unable to process a single, clear purpose, the individual becomes a tragic automaton, compelled by a violent impulse and forced to invent a narrative that can, however briefly, make sense of the carnage. The ideology is not the map to the violence; it is the bewildered commentary on a journey that has already begun.

Sadly, We May Never Know His True Motives. Insert galaxy brain meme here.

Suffice to say I highly doubt this framing; as a fellow very-online chud I can tentatively discount "Bella Ciao" or "ur gay" shit as general very-online memery, but the "catch this fascist" bullet bit alone seems damning enough[1] - and that's before we get into the whole "premeditated killing of a public speaker" business. A school shooter usually has no qualms about collateral (if one even has any specific target in the first place; indeed, often collateral seems to be the point) and, crucially, wants on some level to be seen as the Tough Guy Person dishing out some Due Recompense. In contrast, someone with a rifle, perched at a distance and detached from the "action" as it were, simply wants one specific guy dead, and has prepared a bullet for him. YMMV but when I imagine the last desperate act of blind, powerless fury, a sniper is not what comes to mind first.

Even less charitably - without reading allat, you know you're in for a wild ride when you see a socialist reach for his thesaurus because existing terms are damnably inconvenient insufficiently expansive. To be perfectly blunt, "spectacular acts of public violence" as a concept seems to be invented largely to facilitate Freddie's (otherwise spurious) link of mass shootings to targeted assassinations of public figures while sanewashing away the political aspects, and has little independent value or explanatory power otherwise[2].

Grug no good with many word, so to take a sloppy but more illustrative parallel (better analogies accepted) - let's say I posit that premeditated assassinations can be driven by, say, the same impulse that drives a down-on-his-luck man to rob a bank. To undergird this, I assert that there exists in every man a certain need for "equitable recompense", [something something economics], and thus conclude that if a man cannot get it via procuring actual dosh legally, it should be seen as sad but inevitable that such a man eventually resorts to killing public figures - aimless, purposeless violence, mere Explicit Acts of Equitable Recompense - to satisfy his intrinsic need for "compensation". A man who robs a bank feels the world owes him money, and seizes his due violently; just as such, a man who kills a public speaker feels the world owes him compensation, justice or retribution for some wrong or injustice, and likewise seizes it through violence.

Without reading into it, the above scans like something plausible-sounding - who can doubt the existence of criminals, the reality of bank robberies/assassinations, or the Lived Experience of being denied compensation? - and yet there's something obviously bullshit in there, and once you smell it you can't unsee it.

Lest this is too much dunking, I'll thank Freddie as a handy paddle to bounce off of; reading his take reminded me to watch for "popular consensus" and explanatory narratives that are surely coming once everyone gets past the initial storm of ragebait.

[1] Unless the argument is that calling people fascists is also some layers-of-irony meme, in which case shrug at some point words have to mean things.

[2] All the parallels with physical phenomena taking up over half the post certainly don't help the impression that Freddie goes to great lengths to quietly bury the "switch" under heaps of barely-related Le Science and authoritative-sounding parallels. I may not be a devout enough hatereader but unlike e.g Scott he does not usually do this, maybe except on his education hobbyhorse. Further evidence for Eulering?

I think this is a misreading of a fairly subtle piece. Freddie may be a Marxist, but he ain’t stupid.

The point of this essay is that the so-called political motivations lie beneath the real motivation, which is a self-contained urge towards meaning that has otherwise been thwarted. Being frustrated in an ordinary search for meaning, the young men attempt to summon it through violence. The way they want us to see it is: they believed so strongly in X that they were willing to resort to violence. The real ordering is: they could only believe in belief on the basis of violence. Violence, with its hard reality, supplements the unreal world in which these young men live.

His parallel to anarchists, the propaganda of the deed, is apt. The point there was violence - to prove violence was possible, to encourage others towards violence. The purpose was to harm. Everything other than hurting fell away. It was pretty nasty.

Ideology is a sleight of hand. Look, I’m doing this for a reason, I’m committed… but the only commitment seems to have been to violence. What else did this kid do? It’s like Uncle Ted. Only thing he did was live in a cabin. Then he wanted to mail people bombs, so he wrote a manifesto so he’d have a reason. Why not set up a Thoreauean intentional living community? Make it make sense.

Freddie is saying: take it from me, I know lunatics. They give you reasons and words words words, but the cause was festering inside them the whole time, they just found something to latch onto. Don’t trust them to know why, and don’t trust them to tell you.

EDIT: Adding a little clarity.

Let’s say you ask a paranoid schizo who’s behind everything that happens. He’s gonna tell you: the Jews, duh. But let’s say that same schizo is Chinese. Jews aren’t a big thing over there. He doesn’t have a ready-made ideology to latch onto. So when you ask him who’s behind it all, does he say nobody, it’s a very complex multi-agent system? Non, monsieur. He’s got an answer ready-made. The reason he thinks it’s the Jews specifically would be antisemitism. But the reason he thinks it’s someone is the schizophrenia.

Freddie says that Tyler Robinson is the schizo in this analogy, and that there’s something in the water driving people crazy this way. Stamping out the Jew-hatred isn't gonna unpoison our well.

This is a reasonable steelman, thanks.

I will still disagree with it; disregarding emotive arguments of the "it's only unmoored, disaffacted young men when it's from the [political rhetoric] side" sort, this framework seems very hard to falsify, if not at all impossible, unless the murderer is some kind of shock trooper/mercenary literally paid to kill someone. Someone who takes up arms to kill people in an otherwise entirely peaceful setting must necessarily be fucked in the head. While Freddie has found a relatively novel lens through which to view it, "murderers are mentally ill" is not the novel insight he thinks it is, and treating it as the end-all-be-all instead of merely the required precondition for someone to murder somebody seems suspect to me considering his political affiliation.

But alright. If we back up from this claim, his other claim seems to be that ideology and - more broadly - memetic agents are merely accessories that "decorate" the general drive to violence, instead of the engine that kickstarts and drives it. Freddie (and by extension you) seems to be arguing that outward signs simply don't matter, full stop, that the guy could've just as easily inscribed his bullets with TND, 13/52, any other dank memes from the other side of the proverbial aisle, and not a single thing would change, not even the choice of target. But like, really? It's getting a bit too close to unfettered thought experiments to my liking; does anything physical matter anymore, then? Somehow I highly doubt the usual suspects would be kvetching this hard if the bullet that killed Kirk had, say, 1488 instead of "catch this fascist" on its casing.

I understand that it is legitimately hard to model mentally ill people, but at some base level, words have to mean things. I'm convinced the only reason this entire debacle is still ongoing is because the word "fascist" has been diluted so much that people have legitimate mental blinders against it, they can look directly at it and infer every possible meaning except the most literal - that the murderer does actually on some level consider his victim a fascist, with all that implies. @Skeletor's take downthread is exaggerated for effect, but it does contain a kernel of truth: if literally writing "catch this fascist" on a bullet intended to kill a prominent public speaker is still not considered "enough" to have political implications by a large majority of people, what is? What would it take to falsify this belief? How far can this escalate without consequence?

and not a single thing would change, not even the choice of target.

That’s not the claim. The claim is that the choice of target doesn’t matter.

I think the confusion here is down to thinking about this in terms of sides, like Charlie Kirk dying was a victory for the left against the right, which can be excused given there are a lot of braindead leftists acting like it on social media. Freddie’s point is that the winning side is chaos itself, and that this would be true even if it had been Mr. Based Hyperborean ventilating a Young Democrats outreach lady.

I’ve been using analogies to the Third Republic lately, so I’ll keep on a roll. Leading up to the catastrophe of the Battle of France, the left (commies) and right (crowncucks) were in a state of near war. But every act they took against one another didn’t solidify their control, it tore the country apart. And in the wreckage, neither of them were left in power. That privilege was reserved to Hitler.

I hope that makes the argument clear.

So do you think (or if you are just steel-manning FdB, do you think FdB thinks) in this hypothetical where Mr. Based Hyperborean shoots Taylor Lorenz and there is a bullet casing reading "go woke, go broke" at the scene that you/FdB would be making the same argument?

Dunno 100% for Freddie, but you can have my word for it now, if you’d like.

If a psycho shoots any prominent lefty figure it does not, in itself, reflect poorly on right wingers or Trump. If they celebrate the death, that celebration reflects poorly on them. That’s it. The right wingers are justified in continuing to believe in gun rights and the Great Replacement or whatever else.

That’s pretty easy for me to say, of course, given that I’m not particularly left or right. But if it’s consolation, I really do believe it.

That's not quite my question, I'll clarify.

In the hypothetical where Mr. Based Hyperborean shoots Taylor Lorenz and there is a bullet casing reading "go woke, go broke" left at the scene, do you think FdB writes the same article deemphasizing the politics of the shooter/claiming the choice of target does not matter/claiming he did it just for the chaos/etc.?

No idea. I’m not him.

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The claim is that the choice of target doesn’t matter.

Alright, but my unaddressed point is - does anything matter then, in a concrete sense?

If chaos is the enemy, then if I have my Peterson right, the opposite of chaos is order, and the unfortunate thing about order is that, unlike passive toxoplasmatic entropy, it has to be actively maintained. Yet maintenance of order, or even just decorum, is not only the thing that appears to be missing here, in even the most basic of respects - indeed it seems to be actively resisted by a large not Insignificant subset of the population, cf. all the discussion about "celebration" in the previous CW thread. Even the words "maintenance of order" I wrote above evoke faint sounds of stomping jackboots, if you stop to listen.

This is not a cutesy both-sides argument. Your point is that destabilization is abstract, the work of impersonal chaos and entropy as both sides lash out against each other; my point is "yes, but" that destabilization is consistently made much worse by specific acts, by memetically-compromised agents like our memelord here, and a certain [political rhetoric] is consistently producing much more virulent and destabilizing memes that are super effective against Schizo-type mons (i.e normalization of "fascist" as a label), remains unwilling/unable to regulate its memetic output, and faces no consequences for it. And why would it, if nothing really matters? I would say order/decorum should saith the degen waifutech enthusiast, starting to believe your lying eyes would also be a plus, but bzzt, neuron activation - "order = jackboots" saith the meme. So it goes.

Alright, but my unaddressed point is - does anything matter then, in a concrete sense?

Yes, of course - not killing anyone would matter quite a lot, most of all to the family of the deceased.

Don’t get me wrong. The uncontrolled rhetoric coming out of the left has done a lot to further chaos, and responding to that as chaos to be suppressed is a reasonable choice. But I think Freddie is right that the ideology of violence is not spurred by leftism qua leftism, it’s spurred by a desire for violence. This desire itself creates and justifies the ideology. If you want to quell the ideology, then your real port of call must be to handle the desire for violence.

I’m sure you see it on this forum. There are people whose select purpose is baying for the blood of the other, and I suspect some of them are just interested in blood itself. There are also those who resist the impulse, but! as one can clearly see, the radical and chaotic act spurs their sentiments towards chaos. There is some danger of a “leftist” copycat killer, but do not discount Chadwick Westfallen deciding that this tat needs a tit. And then people on this forum will say: but think of all the people killed in BLM, it’s an isolated demand for rigor… and this is chaos speaking through them. The response is what feeds chaos, the strange attractor. Or, for another example, a black man died in police custody under questionable circumstances, and instead of individual justice and a reform towards order, a lot of people went out burning things. Their response fed chaos. But this time, it looks to be different.

In my humble opinion, the actual response to this event is about as good as you’re gonna get. They caught the killer and he’s got a good chance of frying for it. Some chaos-infected dipshits on Twitter tried to cheer him on and are getting punished for it. Establishment left mouthpieces are having to show message discipline for the first time in years. The system is tamping down on these excesses. It is curbing the feedback loop. There is still the problem of young people without meaning, and this will continue for some time, probably until the demographic collapse starts leveling. But so long as support for this killer remains beyond acceptable public discourse, the worst is held off.

That’s why I think Freddie is overall right about this. There is a cycle feeding chaos, and it is visible, and the specific agents and purposes do not matter as much as whether the act itself incites people to respond in kind. The urges driving the chaos have little to do with sides and are about chaos itself. The correct way to respond to these events is without reference to sides, and to prefer to oppose chaos itself. The killer was wrong. The people supporting him are wrong. The people opposing the killer’s “side” are right insofar as they demand that people should not support chaos, and wrong insofar as they demand vengeance upon people who did not praise the killing. It really is as simple as that.

In my humble opinion, the actual response to this event is about as good as you’re gonna get. They caught the killer and he’s got a good chance of frying for it. Some chaos-infected dipshits on Twitter tried to cheer him on and are getting punished for it. Establishment left mouthpieces are having to show message discipline for the first time in years. The system is tamping down on these excesses.

Yay! To think it only took a fucking bullet to the neck of a public speaker in a peaceful setting to accomplish. This one is totes not gonna get memory-holed in a month.

You don’t even live in the US, right? Or am I forgetting? Why is this element of domestic politics hitting you so hard? I can understand the emotion from people who live here, but I’m a little surprised by your take.

Yeah, no duh it sucks what happened to him. But nobody cares about lock-out-tag-out until some poor Mexican gets filleted. Very often the only way things change is through truly horrifying consequences. I’m not suggesting you shrug about an assassination. It’s normal, human to be rattled by it. But it’s right to control your response, to think about what did and did not happen, what it does and doesn’t mean for you. A lot of people are reading this as “Comradx Queeria is preparing the firing squads.” I don’t think that’s right. I think a lot of malicious idiots on the left were getting excused for their language - sanewashing - for much longer than they had any right to, and finally enough truly insane people are coming out of the woodwork that the normies are shook. I know I am. But this place in particular does not need more doomposting. To my lefty friends and family, I’ve been saying this is important, language matters. Here. I say to take it in stride. The consistency? Lowering the temperature. Even if that might be upsetting.

"Bro why do you even care" is... certainly a response. I guess you got me, I'm actually a Russian shill paid to stir shit on a Congolese fish filleting forum?

I'm not even sure how to respond, I don't feel offended but I'm genuinely baffled. Does not being a US citizen definitionally preclude me from caring about the culture war, whose ramifications reached me across the pond since at least, may Allah forgive me for uttering this word, g*mergate? Does the Kirk killing being "domestic politics" somehow supposed to dampen the visceral impact of seeing a man get interrupted mid-speech by a casual gush of blood from his punctured neck? Am I supposed to not care about the general response to a public, overtly political murder (something almost unthinkable in my home country) being, shall we say, less than enthusiastic condemnation from the usual suspects and galaxy brained mental gymnastics from resident Marxists? I might not be an American but as a straight white male chud with problematic faves, I most definitely make the cut for their outgroup, and since culture > race/nation that's all that matters.

More flippantly but no less seriously, do you have predictions if this will decrease or increase the frequency with which the lunatic political "fringe" of the US shuts down my spaces and shits in my hobbies? I can't believe I actually want Jack Thompson back, that one was at least funny in his retardation.

“Comradx Queeria is preparing the firing squads.”

You joke but for a Very Online chud like me, the proverbial firing squads have been here for quite a while already, that's why I'm on the fucking Motte.

this place in particular does not need more doomposting.

I'm mostly a lurker so rest assured you won't have to deal with my "doomposting" too often. Trying to reduce temperature is a noble endeavor, you do you, but I don't appreciate the sanctimonious call to be the better man. Taking the high road is how we got here.

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And then people on this forum will say: but think of all the people killed in BLM, it’s an isolated demand for rigor… and this is chaos speaking through them.

Behold, the rapid ease with which the descendant of Darwin manages to produce certainty that his enemies will act as conveniently as possible.

and a certain [political rhetoric] is consistently producing much more virulent and destabilizing memes that are super effective against Schizo-type mons (i.e normalization of "fascist" as a label)

I still find this claim… strange. The online Right is constantly making up memes which, taken over-literally, seem just as likely to encourage murder as the "fascist" talk. I'm not even talking about race stuff. Woke is a "mind virus" "destroying America", drug addicts are "Fentanyl zombies", Biden and anyone else implicated in the supposed election fraud is a "traitor"… hell, all kinds of people on X were semi-seriously talking about dubbing the Democratic Party a "terrorist organization" as a reaction to the Kirk shooting.

I'm genuinely not sure why the "punch Nazis" stuff would snag so many more would-be-murderers than those. Are Blue-coded memes simply more widespread? Do right-wing nut-jobs trust the GOP to handle things more than left-wing nut-jobs trust the Dems? Or maybe schizophrenics are just more likely to start out Blue before they go completely off their rocker, because the Blues are more welcoming to the mentally ill? I'm genuinely curious what your theory is, but I don't think the answer can be that left-wing memes encourage violence more than right-wing ones do.

I'm genuinely not sure why the "punch Nazis" stuff would snag so many more would-be-murderers than those.

Maybe because Nazis actually existed, zombies don't, and we firebombed cities to put them down? There's real, actual history of how to react to them, virtually everyone agrees they were evil and there's a lot of guilt-by-association power if you can make it stick?

Are you joking? You honestly can't see the difference between 'woke is a mind virus!' or 'the left is destroying America!' or 'fuck I hate all these fentanyl zombies!' (I actually don't get how that one is supposed to be used to incite violence at all so I'm sorry if I'm misrepresenting it) or 'anyone involved in election fraud is a traitor!' and 'punch nazis!' or 'bash the fash!' which, when you say 'but not actually right? Like this is just rhetoric, you're not literally inciting violence right?' they say 'no I mean it. Fuck nazis, it's cool to punch them. Bash the fash. If you want to get laid beat up a fascist. Your grandfather fought in world war 2 to kill these evil fucks, now you better not let him down.'

That's the difference. One side uses rhetoric 'which, taken over-literally, seem just as likely to encourage murder as the "fascist" talk' while the other side promotes actual violence. The right used to use language like that too - helicopter rides and the like. But 'due to the alarming rise in online hate caused by right wing extremism' (read asymmetric application of censorship) it was largely stamped out, while the left's direct expressions of violent purpose were excused and justified with claims about the language of the oppressed and regurgitated world war 2 propaganda.

'fuck I hate all these fentanyl zombies!' (I actually don't get how that one is supposed to be used to incite violence at all so I'm sorry if I'm misrepresenting it)

It's less about "hate", more that the archetypal thing about zombies is that they're functionally dead already and the only kindness you can do them is put them down. I've always parsed the "fentanyl zombie" term as similarly implying that the drug-addicted homeless are a lost cause who should be regarded more as a walking pestilence than human beings in need of rescue. (Which is halfway-relevant to a certain recent viral scandal.)

I think it's more that they literally shuffle around hunched over like zombies -- have you seen these people? It's pretty bad.

And no, I don't think they should beaten with improvised weapons, or even rounded up and jailed particularly (freedom ain't free!) -- but fent has certainly managed to noticeably degrade the public aesthetics of (checks notes) homeless drug addicts over the past several years, which is quite some feat!

I'm genuinely not sure why the "punch Nazis" stuff would snag so many more would-be-murderers than those.

The public "neutral" megaphones blaring these memes to the normies for years on end may have something to do with it. Something something quantity has a quality of its own.

Are Blue-coded memes simply more widespread?

...The flippant "simply" here is, ahem, quite the understatement. I'm sure near-total control of [American] institutions and mainstream culture is nothing to write home about when it comes to memetic virulence.

I mean, that's all very well, but half the country still manages to be Republican. Millions upon millions. What are the odd that doesn't include any crazies? Why wouldn't those crazies take action vaguely suggested by Red rather than Blue memes?

What are the odd that doesn't include any crazies?

I said "much more", not "all the". You know this, of course.

Why wouldn't those crazies take action vaguely suggested by Red rather than Blue memes?

I dunno, you ask them. I deal with what my lying eyes say I get in the current reality, e.g our memelord here.

"mind virus" = a problem
"destroying America" = a problem
"Fentanyl zombies" = a problem
"traitor" = a problem
"fascist" = a problem
...
"Punch Nazis" = a solution.

One of these is not like the others.

Blue Tribe has been calling for violence against its enemies and then supporting, celebrating, and providing active protection to that violence for many, many years now, and the result has been a massive increase in Blues committing political violence. We can see the polling that shows that a large portion of Blue Tribe supports lawless political violence. We can point to numerous examples of both grassroots and leader blues arguing that political violence is good and necessary. We can point to Blue knowledge production providing an intellectual framework for why violence is good and necessary. We can point to Blues actually committing violence. We can point to grassroots and leader blues providing support and active protection to violence after it has been committed.

All of this is public record.

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