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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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That isn't a call for terrorism, it's a call for not turning down the temperature when Trump and many on the right fail to do so. He's not calling for anyone to commit acts of terrorism, he's saying that it's kind of dumb that all the democrats are turning down the temperature when half the republicans are declaring that they're at war with "the left" which sounds pretty similar to punch a nazi type rhetoric. He doesn't want his side to apologize for a shooting that it doesn't own unless the calls for turning down the heat are shared.

edit: found the stream link boy was that a pain in the ass. Here's some pretty relevent context a few minutes earlier:

I don't know what it is that's just so mind broken with the like ...

that like they just have to run to the fed posting. we should disavow violence as soon as the president of the united states does, that's it and then they're like

[weakman voice: "So that means you .. telling me to go kill people?!?!"]

No, listen to what I just fucking said, I don't know why that sentence is so hard for people to understand

Thanks for the link.

You've certainly got me less convinced than I was. I will note that there are two ways to read what you posted - one is that he doesn't like people trying to rip away plausible deniability and extract a straight answer - but earlier than either of these he does shit-talk someone as a terrorist supporter.

The bit that had me convinced was the first sentence:

I need, you need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events, so that they look to their leadership to turn down the temperature.

...because the scenario he's describing is specifically the terrorist wincon and can only be achieved by terrorism. I edited in the request for earlier context because I thought there was a possibility he might be explaining what you actually need for terrorism to succeed (to demonstrate why it's a bad idea; I've made this exact point when people ask me "why aren't you blowing up datacentres?"). The obvious historical example is Yamamoto Isoroku's letter:

Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it is not enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House. I wonder if our politicians, among whom armchair arguments about war are being glibly bandied about in the name of state politics, have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.

...which is very much saying that this is a stupid and unworkable idea.

But there's no context like that; Destiny seems to just have chucked this out out of nowhere in response to a guy who's condemning violence. So I dunno what's going on here. Maybe Destiny went temporarily nuts, said something crazy, and didn't catch it because he was streaming; livestreams do have that hazard. Or maybe he's treating the US political landscape as effectively being a civil war, and is saying he doesn't want to lay down arms unilaterally (that's still crossing the line, though).

Maybe Destiny went temporarily nuts

Like that time he admitted to almost murdering someone (and his family): https://x.com/Anc_Aesthetics/status/1967993916478853354

And he's promoted and defended violence before. This guy is not temporarily nuts, but permanently so, just hiding it most of the time.

He seems to want the whole story to be about blaming trump for the raised temperature. He thinks Trump and his admin are defect bot and will take any attempt by the democrats to lower the temperature as an admission of guilt. The right doesn't claim any of the political violence against democrats and never apologizes for it so he doesn't think the left should.

My understanding from a bit more of the like 29 minutes I watched is that he does live events and worries that with all the rhetoric on the right about being at war he might get killed and wants the right to feel the same way so that they'll stop doing what he believes to be encouraging violence.

and wants the right to feel the same way so that they'll stop doing what he believes to be encouraging violence.

Um, that plan is called terrorism. Or rebellion, I suppose. The whole point of rule of law and the monopoly on force is that nobody except the state gets to control people's behaviour by threatening to shoot them. Promoting this plan is asserting that "now we're all sons of bitches", the social contract is unconscionable or has failed, and let's start fighting the insurgency. And, well, as noted this is very bad.

Pretty standard terrorism justification structure too. Very few advocacies of ideological terrorism are direct calls for terrorism. Part of the advocacy process is to frame it as a necessary response to the other side's obstinance/extremism/oppression, which includes the allegations of the outgroup suppressing the group who is being urged to more radical resistance.

This works even when allegations/belief of suppression outstrip the supply, or even if one's own side is responsible for the overall trend of raising the temperature / starting the defect tit-for-tat defect spiral, and so on. It doesn't actually matter, for example, if Donald Trump actually is to blame for raising the temperature- merely by fighting back, this can be claimed to be defect back behavior and thus [audience being appealed to] should make no apologies for.

Part of how the framing works as a radicalization tool is that it leads the audience towards a desirable conclusion, but without making the argument completely. This keeps it on the legally correct side of 'not a call for action,' even when it shares significant structural overlap. This allows intended/successful audience conversions to reach the conclusion, at which point no explicit call for action is required, while sympathetic-but-not-converted audiences can deflect on grounds of Exact Words rather than addressing leading arguments or the soundness of the foundational assumptions being used to frame the leading argument.

Pretty standard terrorism justification structure too.

When I was drafting that post, I said something about this basically being how being a terrorist feels from the inside. But, well, I didn't feel sufficiently qualified to make that claim.

That's not what I said. He's talking purely about rhetoric. If Trump's response to political violence is to do more violent rhetoric then he wants to play tit for tat with the violent rhetoric. He is saying to do what he claims the republicans do any never apologize for violence committed by crazies and only agree to wide condemnations of violence if the republicans are willing to do the same. If all the "Charlie was the nice one, you won't like what comes next" borderline fed posting on the right isn't terrorism then neither is whatever he's advocating for.

So, what, his plan is for progressives to chuck out a bunch of violent rhetoric and hope none of their own side will act on it but that conservatives will get scared of it and back down, without any more actual conservatives getting shot? Right after an Antifa did, in fact, shoot a conservative?

You'd like to think nobody could be that stupid but... okay, I can kind of see how somebody could twist himself around into 4D chess logic like that.

holds head in hands

I think his idea is that any time someone demands a democrat denounce the shooter they should respond with something to the effect of "I'll call for an end to political violence when the president does" . He describes the denouncing and bending over backwards to denounce violence against republics when the republicans never return the favor, in his opinion, as "cucking". Like charlie brown and the football.