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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?
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.
What do you mean? I answered you pretty clearly, I think. If Freddie is being consistent, his view would match mine, but he’s a bipolar Marxist and I frankly can’t promise anything of him. The essay in question was quite good, though, and I wanted to highlight the central message I found in it.
Your turn. Want to explain yourself?
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