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A gunman has opened fire on an unmarked government vehicle carrying detainees to an ICE facility in Dallas, Texas. Initial reports are two detainees killed, one injured, no casualties among the officers. The gunman committed suicide, but left behind bullets with the phrase "ANTI ICE" written on them.
The online left has been openly calling for and encouraging violence against ICE agents for some time now, as well as attempting to facilitate that violence through doxing of agents and their families. These efforts have lead to a massive increase on assaults on ICE agents and threats to their families. Democratic leadership has refused to address these calls for and encouragement to violence from their base, and instead has joined in with calls for all agents to be unmasked and identified, as well as efforts to compel such identification through law.
This pattern of the blue grassroots engaging in lawless violence while the leadership offers encouragements of varying levels of plausible deniability, has been the norm for some time now. When the Blue Tribe grassroots engaged in a sustained vandalism and arson campaign against Tesla owners and dealers, recent Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz mocked the company's declining stock price and reassured Tesla owners that "we're not blaming you, you can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off". His subsequent non-apology is likewise a notable example of the form. Nor did it start there; as Blues unanimously maintain, Antifa is just an idea, not anything resembling an organization.
In any case, the ICE shooting in Dallas follows Sinclair Broadcasting abruptly reversing their plans to air Charlie Kirk's memorial service, after their local affiliates received numerous violent threats, and a teacher's union lawyer actually shot up the lobby of his local channel's offices.
Jimmy Kimmel is now back on the air, having been briefly suspended for blamed the murder of one of the most prominent right-wing activists in the nation on the right, an accusation repeated enthusiastically by numerous Blue Tribe influencers, activists and leaders. Polling shows that only 10% of Democrats believe Kirk's killer was left-wing. A third of Democrats believing that the man who wrote "catch this, fascist" on his bullets was right-wing, and a further 57% believe the motive for the shooting was either unknowable or apolitical.
Investigators are still looking into motive for what is being reported as a targeted killing at a country club in New Hampshire, where a gunman shouting "Free Palestine" and "The children are safe" killed one man and wounded two others. Likewise for the attempted bombing of a FOX news affiliate's van on the 14th.
We've had a fair amount of discussion over the last week about whether the left has a violence problem. It seems to me that not only does the left have a very serious violence problem, but that there is no one on the left capable of engaging with that problem in anything approaching a constructive way. Simply put, the American left has invested too much and too broadly into creating this problem to ever seriously attempt to resolve it. There is no way for them to disengage from the one-two punch of "The right are all Nazis/Nazis should be gotten rid of by any means necessary"; too much of what they have built over the last decade is predicated on this syllogism for their movement to survive even attempting to walk it back. The vast majority on the left cannot even bring themselves to admit the nature of the problem. But at the same time, at least some of them do seem to recognize that this is getting out of hand in a way that may not be survivable. Destiny's recent comments seem indicative of the mentality at play:
He appeared to elaborate on this train of thought in a recent stream:
...and the core point behind his somewhat incoherent further elaboration seems to be that the left must lean on the right to "lower the temperature", because otherwise the left itself will be forced to accept considerable losses.
The problem, of course, is that he is fundamentally correct. The Right is not particularly scared at the moment. We have had a long time to acclimate to the idea of leftist violence targeting us, and wile we are very angry about our political champions being murdered by leftist scum, with their actions cheered on by the grassroots left as a whole, many of us have long accepted the idea that this was going to come down to an actual fight in the end. We do not believe we created this situation; certainly, we did not bend the entire journalism, academia, and entertainment classes to normalizing the idea that our political opponents were isomorphic to subhuman monsters sneakily concealing themselves among the general population, whose violent deaths should always be enthusiastically celebrated. I've contemplated a post on simply cataloguing the number of TV shows and movies dedicated to one or both of the "The right are all Nazis/Nazis should be gotten rid of by any means necessary" paired statements. Suffice to say, we are quite aware that most of the left holds us in absolute contempt, and a large plurality wishes for our violent death. We are aware that any pushback on these sentiments will be framed as an offensive act on our part. We told the left this was a bad idea. We told them why it was a bad idea. They did it anyway. And now: consequences.
In parting, I've written and then deleted several posts about "conversations we can have in advance." This is, yet again, a conversation we can have in advance. At some point, someone on the left is going to get shot by someone on the right, and not in a legally justifiable way but as an actual ideological murder. And when that happens, all the people mocking the idea of online violent radicalization, after screaming about the dangers of online violent radicalization for the last decade, are going to flop back to being performatively worried about online violent radicalization. When this happens, they will be met with stone-faced negation from Red Tribe, and will then weep and moan about how the extremists of the right just refuse to engage with this obvious problem. This will not deliver the results they hope for, but they'll do it anyway, and we'll move another step closer to chaos.
Hey, I thought the point of ice bullets was that they didn’t leave evidence!
Maybe I shouldn’t joke about this. It’s tragic, and disturbing, and speaks to an increased temperature in the lunatic fringe. Nothing good can come of it. As such, I’m not going to make excuses for the fucker.
Instead, I want to ask y’all what “the left” should be doing. What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation? Does it involve public disavowals by the leadership? Cancelling any streamer stupid enough to say something edgy? The DNC taking responsibility for a terrorist act like it’s al-Qaeda? Maybe some time in the stockades, or a few televised executions? What would it take for you to feel like “the left” was making a good-faith effort?
Because this isn’t it. Whatever detente you have in mind, I cannot imagine that it involves writing bitter essays about the inhumanity of conservative scum, their unwillingness to admit that there is a problem, the inevitability of consequences when they continue to overstep. That wouldn’t be healthy. It wouldn’t feel like you were winning at all.
You are eager to treat “the left” as one organism, one will, a mouth speaking platitudes while its hand fumbles for the knife. How dare they create this situation? How could they normalize the idea that their political opponents were isomorphic to subhuman monsters?
Don’t you see the symmetry?
You recognize that “the right” is barely a coherent category, but you fail to apply that knowledge to the outgroup. How does this double standard possibly improve the situation? How can you equivocate between the normies who disagree with you and the psychopath who pulls a trigger?
If—when—the roles are reversed, “the left” is going to write pieces just like yours. They’ll try to hold you responsible for whatever fuckwit decided to bomb a clinic or shoot a Democrat. You’ll rightly protest that you never had any control over the kind of person who would snap like that. And we’ll move one step closer to chaos.
I think what the left should be doing is taking full-throated ownership of these murders pre-emptively, in a way that shocks the right with how quickly we're jumping to conclusions that we caused this murder, sans evidence of such. This sends a costly signal that we take the potential for violence to be caused by our violent rhetoric seriously, that we consider it more important than our reputation or pride.
And then take steps to implement policies that are supported by the attacked or rejected by the attacker. I've said similarly before; we need to send a signal to the other side that we take political violence as seriously as they do, that we consider it unacceptable to engage in it, irrespective of the political beliefs involved. So the signal must be costly for our political preferences, in favor of liberal democracy. Committing to an incentive gradient that discourages political murder, even if it means some of our political preferences don't get met seems like one of the most obvious costly signals for something like this.
EDIT: It also occurred to me later that a presentation of a certain attitude to actively seek out costly and effective signals I think would also be almost necessary. Most CW arguments involve someone nitpicking some suggested fix, finding problems here and there for why it wouldn't work, and such. And any specific fix can be nitpicked to death by someone who's motivated to appear as if they're goodwilled - this is the grain of truth in the whole "tone policing" complaints that became en vogue in SocJus spaces around 15 years ago. A full rejection of that attitude and embracing the attitude that, "If this particular costly action wouldn't properly send the signals in a way as to accomplish our goals, then we'll spend twice as much, work twice as hard and long to find some other costly action that would signal what we want in such a way as to accomplish our goals." I consider it a sort of "first derivative" commitment. We're not committing to a particular action, we're committing to a particular way of choosing our action, based on a commitment to do what it takes to figure out a way to reduce political violence, in a way that is costly to our political desires.
This is a hard sell when the right doesn't do this.
"The left" has quite clearly thought of them as The Good People for a long time. Doing things the right doesn't is a big part of that.
I know you can't get everywhere with arguments from hypocrisy and need to stand on your own values. But the level of indignation everywhere in this thread is kind of breathtaking. People are in the same breath declaring that they've been prepared for things to turn to violence and really the whole OP here could have a couple of nouns swapped and read like the leftists calling for oppressed trans women and bipocs to rise to violence that some here seem to fear.
There's a reason the cancel mobs here are going after relatives nobodies and their standard for cancelation is like a school teacher who said Charlie was a bad guy but didn't deserve to die. Kimmel, as unfunny as he was, didn't try to justify kirk's death, only did the same thing that happens on this forum every time there is an act of political violence and try to imply the shooter was on the other side. It's frankly really pathetic. It seems somehow even more hysterical than the awokening.
When talking with a lefty about how they were annoyed that the right fought hard to disown the pelosi hammer guy I pointed out that disowning is a kind of disavowal. It's saying "we don't own this guy, we so don't endorse his actions that we think he couldn't actually be one of us". The fact that "the left" don't want to own the dirtbag that killed Charlie is a pretty normal reaction. They don't think an honest understanding of their beliefs or speech could have led someone to do what he did. You might argue that their fiery rhetoric was indeed too hot and could have led to this but then what leg do the people in this thread have to stand on? You think it's hard to justify rightwing violence from the borderline fed posting going on here?
On further reflection I think what I have in my craw about this is isn't really the hypocrisy in the demands across the aisle. It's a kind of disgust at the feigned femininity of the whining while also trying to play all big dog masculine revolutionary warrior. If the right was all Mrs. Kirk about forgiving their enemies this whole time and then complained about needing the left to turn down the temperature then fine, that's fair. But then they can't do the whole "I hate my enemies" and "you're going to be sorry because you killed the one of us who was trying to do politics peacefully" bit. Pick a lane, are you the feminine aggrieved martyr, an extremely powerful role especially in our liberal framework, or the brave warrior because you can't be both. It's unseemly. The big bad truth telling warriors parsing the words of a school teacher and arguing over whether what she said was sufficiently deferent to not hurt their fragile little emotions. In a sense a knew many right wingers weren't properly my allies in free speech, that the time might come when I would find myself defending a different class of scoundrels, but I never expected it to be this hysterical this fast.
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