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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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What are concrete ways to stop this type of behavior?

About 15 years of electoral disasters for the perpetrating ideological coalition, such that a sustained political incumbency on the part of the targets can initiate, prosecute, and carry out sustained prosecutions of malefactors, logistical supporters, and moneyed backers without a partisan flip and abandonment of enforcement. This, in turn, leads to an entire political generation of the legal survivors ingrains in their follow-on generation the importance of both legal and political distance with violent extremists, even as the legal survivors in some respects owe their rise in the opposition- and thus have a personal stake in the status quo- to the willingness of the ruling party to prosecute their inner-party rivals.

Political violence is not good, but it's not exactly new, even in the US. The social media coverage is new, the visceral, overwhelming awareness that there are [many] people who support it is new, but the existence and even implementation of it in democracies across the last two centuries are not. There are reasons that we don't typically remember or bring up the violent extremists movements of yester-century, and that's because they died on the vine. Few people talk about violent labor protests, for example, because the violent labor movements largely had their backs broken in many states.