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Jimmy Kimmel pulled indefinitely by ABC for Charlie Kirk comments.
Late night talk show hosts have waned from their glorious Letterman days, but boomers still care about then enough that they're still a scalp worth scraping off the skull. It's hard to think of a prominent figure on the right that would be equal in stature - Gina Carano? Piers Morgan? Roseanne Barr? nothing like him - if only for the fact that the entertainment industry is so aligned to the left. Indeed, even during the height of the progressive cancel culture era, it was liberal icons like Louis CK and JK Rowling that felt the heat.
If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?
With Colbert going off the air, and with the upcoming FCC hearings on Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and Steam, one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim, but I have no doubt that the powerjanitors of Reddit are quaking in their boots. How many leftist/liberal commentators have made snarky comments on social media, as of late? This is the reddest of the red meat, dripping with blood, raw. The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
It will also be against the wishes of the Kirk, who notably thought South Park making fun of him was hilarious.
Not that the dead necessarily get a vote, but it's quite a strange thing to honor a man by doing the opposite of what he would have wanted.
While yes I generally agree with this, and yes this is all against my principles…
…the opponents of western liberal democracy have resorted to simply executing people. Those not actively involved in the execution have demonstrated that they will happily burn our cities when they don’t get their way.
My sense is that the conservatives don’t WANT any of this.
A few thousand people have resorted to executing people or burning cities, out of a US population of 350 million.
And the police let them do it, because their local, state and federal government wanted them to do it, because Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it. You are failing to appreciate the nature of the problem; it is not that we have riots and murders, it is that we have half the country that sees riots and murders against people they don't like as a good thing, and they don't like the other half of the country.
Has this ever ‘not’ been a thing though? You can literally find this anywhere.
It was not a thing I perceived when I was an Obama voter in 2008.
The mid-2000s were, to be fair, a rather atypical period in the modern American political left of the last half century. Obama came in on the back of the anti-Iraq War protest movement, which was non-violent for multiple reasons of strategy, political co-option by the Democratic party, and the then-Democratic Party leaderships own relationships with left-coded political riots.
The US has a long history of violent political protests and actions. It is by no means exclusive to one side of the political isle or the other, and this is not a claim of the US political violence relative to any other state, but it's also not exactly distant or theoretical history either. Many of the recent and still contemporary political elites had formative experiences in the Vietnam Protests of the 60s and 70s, and while less massive there were major protest movements across the 80s as well. These were largely unassociated with the direct action political violence of the time, such as the Weather Underground, but there has long been a ven diagram overlap between the political-violence American left and the fringe-edges of the Democratic Party.
This included into the 1990s. Go back not even a decade before 2008, and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests aka The Battle of Seattle,, involved tens of thousands of anarchist/anti-capitalist-left-aligned protestors, militant anarchists and unionists, and typical not-entirely-peaceful protesting. Two battalions of national guard were called in, in a Democratic city of a Democratic Mayor under a Democratic Governor under a Democratic President.
This was not even a decade after the 1992 Rodney King riots, which were significant in their own right and had their interplay with the Clinton administration that began in 1993, and which served as a significant part of Bill Clinton's first campaign. Clinton threaded the needle politically, siding more against the law enforcement than for the violent protests, but the 90s were a formative period for the people who were violent protest footsoldiers then, and would become more, and then less, and then more influential again over the next few decades.
While the Rodney King riots were an element in Clinton's rise to power, it's better understood that Bill Clinton co-opted the effects than had major alignment with the radical left. Sister Souljah moments aside, the break developed with the Clinton administration's adoption of post-cold-war globalization/free trade-ism, and the conflict that brought with the traditional militant democrat constituencies. This culminated in the WTO protests towards the tail of the Clinton administration, which were functionally a base rebellion of the union/labor-left base. It was big, loud, embarrassing... and it was part of the background context for the break between the Clinton (and eventually Obama) wing of the Democratic party, of technocratic free-traders, from the traditional blue-collar base (whose protests were a political affront/challenge/nuisance to the Clinton administration).
These 1990s political violence set the stage for the 2000s non-violent Iraq War protests that fueled Obama's rise, because the Democratic Party's embrace/cooption of the anti-war movement turned that protest movement into an evolution/response to the 1990s violent protests.
This was in part because one of the major institutional efforts of the Democratic Party in the 2000s was the efforts to centralize control of all levels of the party influence infrastructure. This was in part a Clinton-wing specific effort to get Hillary Clinton set up for the 2008 election, but also a broader part / consequence of the Democratic Party's centralization of power in the party elites over time. (IE, what led to the visible age issues / lack of younger bench in the last few election cycles, as the centralized power brokers gathering power in the 90's and 2000's never retired.) This was a period where many of the more modern Democratic Party political alliances of the Clinton-Obama-Biden era were being formed and cemented to supplant the Blue Deal coalition, including high-visibility dynamics such as increasing globalism, media-party relationships, and the institutionalism of racial/demographic balancing preferences.
But it was also, going back to your awareness of left political violence during your coming of age period, the period where the Clinton-aligned establishment was co-opting the loosely left-aligned mass protest movement architecture.
The Clintons were notorious for their efforts to factionalize/control the Democratic Party machinery. The protestor-turnout aparatus is often informally a part of that- not necessarily showing on any organization chart- but it was a historical tool of influence for the American labor union movement, for whom turning out people to fight and vote were equal assets.
The uncontrolled protest wing was also a Clinton target / goal. After all, while helpful to getting Clinton elected, the more violent labor-left protestors were a personal afront to the later Clinton administration, which itself was when the Bill-Hillary relationship arguably transitioned to a more explicit quid-pro-quo of future political support for Hillary after she stayed by Bill during the Monika Lewinsky scandal. It wasn't just a challenge to Bill's interests, but Hillary's future ambitions. And the political consequences of unpopular political violence had been a factor in George Bush's election in 2000 on a law-and-order theme, and had been influential in decades prior given the Reagan Revolution. And, of course, the blue-collar versus white-collar split, of which the Democratic elite consensus was already firmly towards the technocratic white collar, and in opposition to the blue collars... who were, via the unions and the militant unionists, both part of the mass-turnout and political violence architecture.
So in the 2000s, deliberately or not, things like 'a willingness/propensity for political violence' was a filtering function for the Clinton/establishment wing during a Democratic Party internal realignment. Violent protests weren't just bad strategy for the anti-Iraq-War movement trying to win over American voters and emerging young voters, but they were an internal conflict point for the establishment-Clinton wing of the Democratic Party as it took over and coopted the Iraq War protest movement, which it would quickly euthanize after the 2008 election. Now, granted, that 2008 democratic party was won by a Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton- surprise upsets do happen- but Obama himself was also not part of, or appealing to, the politically-violent-prone parts of the left, and largely adopted (in)to the Clinton wing even as he seized and further centralized the party machinery around himself. Not surprising, since he was from the Chicago Illinois political machine. Also not surprising in terms of Obama not having any real ties to / relationships with the more militant fringe-wings, given those of the 90s were largely (west) coastal parts of the party geographically and politically far from Chicago.
Of course, Obama's rise was part of, and gave impetus/resourcing to, the progressive ideological evolution of the American left as it turned from the economic-leftism to the racial-leftism as the new deal coalition was abandoned in favor of the Obama-style permanent Democratic (demographic) majority thesis. The racial-alignment support demographics of that didn't pan out, but it was the ideological permutation that corresponded with cultural marxism vis-a-vis classical marxist phases, and the the evolution/growth of progressive-left political violence that grew aparent in the 2010s. Which included, yes, a deliberate return to mass protest organizing not only for responses to police shootings during the Obama years, a topic area he had strong opinions in. The more racial-left protests also led to / evolved into the mass protests as an anti-Trump tool in the later 2010s, ie. the fiery-but-mostly-peaceful protest era and its Fortifying Democracy party architecture of coordinating the people leading protests, the people leading the responses to protests, and the people covering protests.
Or, to put another way: a decade before 2008, the American political left was associated with mass violent protests. A decade after 2008, the American political left was again associated with mass violent protests. In 2008, someone just coming into politics could be forgiven for only associating the Democratic Party with peaceful protests, as the Democratic Party was in the later phase of ditching the older violent protestors and hadn't yet developed a new violent protestor cohort.
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Obama was inaugurated in 2009. And Baltimore and Ferguson weighed heavily on the minds of people at the time.
I’d never heard of Ferguson till the 2014 riots. Was there something else associated with it?
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