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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.
I'm confused by the timing. 2015-2020 saw the Pittsburgh synagogue, Charleston church and El Paso walmart shootings despite conservatives being in power and the anti-Trump/nazi rhetoric being significantly more unhinged than it is today. 2020-2024, all I remember is the Tennessee trans school shooter despite the rhetoric against Fauci and plenty of other government officials being absolutely bonkers in right wing spaces (traitors, nooses, trials, you know the drill). 2025 has seen what, a half-dozen left wing events all at once? It doesn't seem to track with who's in power or how violent the rhetoric is.
I'd guess that during Trump I radicals of both stripes thought the majority of the country was on their side, whereas this time around, it certainly feels like the left is losing the normies. Shooting Kirk or ICE agents is retarded on both fronts, you're going to further alienate the normies and obviously not going to stop deportations.
2015-20 was the high-water mark of a particular kind of hard-right white-nationalist politics that gave us those three shootings (and Charlottesville, to some extent). Think of it as a continuation from the kind of subculture that created Breivik. In part because of the internet hard-right meming Trump, and in part from all the anti-nazi rhetoric, they thought that Trump was really their chance, and some of them decided to go killing for it. That movement fell apart for multiple reasons - they realized Trump wasn't in fact Hitler II, many of their groups flamed out, less radical types ended up synthesizing themselves into more normie conservatism, and finally covid distracted a lot of the more radical personality types (I also wonder if 09A and other less political, more nihilistic Nazi-affiliated sects started siphoning off people who would otherwise be Dylan Rooffs to become school shooters). It was a relatively very small memeplex but one disproportionately good at creating spree killers. Libs/leftists didn't feel much of a need to go postal because they could identify with Resistance within the government.
2020-24 I suspect was quite peaceful because normiecons get hopping mad at stuff and post about gitmo trials but don't actually go shoot people (partly out of personal inclination, partly because they're more familiar with actual violence than an internet shut-in, and partly because their demographics don't tend towards violent self-annihilation, you don't see pot-bellied fiftysomethings with Oakleys shooting up synagogues). And, also, who could really bring themselves to destroy their lives and kill their fellow humans over... Joe Biden? To be fair this first changed with Israel/Palestine, where we did have some killings.
In the current moment libs/leftists feel themselves losing harder than they ever have in living memory, even if the rhetoric was sometimes crazier in 2017. The dynamic of violence is different imo from 2015-20, in that hardline white nationalism was a very small movement that was oriented towards and somewhat effective at creating violent lone wolves, whereas the current attackers seem to have beliefs that are not particularly out of the overton window in the movement left, but have individually snapped and decided that those beliefs in the current situation now demand violence. It would also go some distance to explaining why these are coming in a spasm - the heightened emotional tension created by one attack causes others to snap, and in some cases like today's shooter even copycat the method.
This is it. In 2016, leftist freaking out was mostly a performative way of calling for the managers to take care of a problem, according to Victimhood culture rules. Progressives (and indeed, most everyone) saw Trump v1.0 as a passing blip who won due to Hillary Clinton being a uniquely unelectable candidate, and whose administration would be smothered by "institutional checks and balances".
Cultural leftists did not really feel like they might actually be losing grip on the country until recently. Probably the last twelve months.
Nitpick: no, progressives generally weren't that introspective (the Berniebros were, but not the mainstream). They saw Hillary as the rightful winner, and her having being robbed of her victory by Russian interference and the Electoral College system. Hence the hashtag #NotMyPresident, which literally denies that Donald Trump won.
This actually strengthens your argument, but I felt it's important to keep the record straight.
How are you defining "progressive" that people who supported Hillary over Bernie fit into that category?
The SJ set of views on societal norms and the culture war, as opposed to the liberal set (which generally isn't trying to enforce a paradigm) or the conservative set (which is trying to enforce a very different paradigm), and separate from any set of views on economics (you can be a progressive free-market capitalist, and Hillary very much was).
I'm pretty sure Hillary Clinton was a progressive crony capitalist.
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