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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   19382 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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