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Yes, Democrats Really Do Want You Dead
Some people have already put the Charlie Kirk assassination into the memory box. For others it still feel terrifyingly relavent. The initial shock at the cheers and jubulant celebration at his gruesome public execution has faded slightly. The public square dominated by Democratic figures and Never Trumpers invoking some fraudulent both sidesism has, like it or not, dulled some of the public backlash. And honestly, the compulsive conspiracy theorist on the right hasn't helped maintain moral clarity in the wake of his murder either.
You may remember, I've talked before about the casual genocidal bloodlust the average Northern VA Democrat has based on the time I lived there. And while Democrats, for now, seem to have enough message discipline to not get on CNN and openly say "Yes, Republicans deserve to be murdered", their line is just shy of that incredibly low bar. Enter Jay Jones.
He's been caught essentially laying out the case that Republicans should be shot and killed, and their children murdered in front of them, so that they change their politics. A DM conversation "leaked" where in he has this conversation with a Republican colleage in the Virginia House I believe. So this wasn't even exactly an "in house" conversation. Just straight up telling the opposition, "Hey, I think you deserve to die" like it would never or could never come back to haunt him.
As of now, no Democrat has pulled their endorsement of him, I saw one single local Democrat say he would stop campaigning with him, several groups have actively reaffirmed his endorsement still saying he's somehow better than your generic Republican. His brazen assertion that you should kill even the children too, because "they are breeding little fascist" is probably a huge hit in Northern VA. Finally someone who openly talks and thinks like they do. I've seen those exact words on the NOVA subreddit every day. He's very likely to have top legal authority over me and my children, whom he believes deserve to die.
I'm gonna be honest, I'm fairly distressed over this. This is how Pogroms work. In the famed Jewish Pogroms of 1881, 40 Jews were killed leading to a mass emigration from Russia. I wonder if we'll hit that number in Virginia the next 4 years. I fully expect my deep red rural county that's been electorally attached through gerrymandering to Fairfax will be aggressively "enriched" as punishment for voting wrong.
If there is one thing I fault Trump for most, more than any specific governing actions, it is erosion of norms. I'm not trying to excuse this latest development of mainstream Democrats on Reddit openly proclaiming their support for murder, but in my estimation this is just the latest in a long series of escalations and norms being discarded.
I didn't really appreciate it at the time, but I think Trump's general style in 2016 was a big part of this, penis size jokes in the primary, comments about imprisoning Hillary, insulting nicknames for his opponents, a general crassness and lack of concern over scandals. I think the Democrats have been a long time learning the lessons from 2016 Trump, that any norm can be discarded if you have popular support to do so. Accusations of sexism are not actually magic spells and can simply be laughed off if enough of the populace is willing to laugh along with you. Trump's quote about shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue seems more and more prescient daily.
Of course you can trace back the norm violations further than Trump, I'm not trying to say he started this, but I believe any fair assessment would regard Trump as a massive demonstration of the powerlessness of norms in the face of voters that no longer care about them. And to be fair, we still haven't really seen a Democrat Trump, meaning a President-level Democrat that absolutely revels in upsetting the other side and breaking norms left and right. It troubles me to think what that would look like, maybe Ilhan Omar if she were the President.
Who is supposed to care about them, if not voters? Why should voters care about norms held by, non-voters? Some subset of extra-special-super-equal voters? Who exactly gets to set norms, then?
A Democrat Trump would have to run roughshod through his own party, goring their oxen, while overwhelming any party resistance.
People still don't recognize the #1 attribute of Trump, and it isn't norms or vulgarity. Trump was the man who had the guts to break with the bipartisan consensus on trade and immigration. That's what Trump is, that's why he won, that's why he's hated, and that's his eigenvalue. That's why you get Bernie-bros voting for Trump. That's why the private sector unions are republican now.
Immigration. Trade. That's Trump. Not norms, not vulgarity, not shooting someone on 5th avenue or grabbing anyone by the pussy. It's trade and immigration.
It was mostly immigration; at least in his first campaign "Build The Wall" took priority and "Drain The Swamp" was behind that and "unfair trade deals" were mentioned but definitely a bronze medal campaign issue at best. As late as this spring there was still a vocal contingent of the right wing arguing that his tariffs were really just for negotiating leverage so that we could end up with free trade unencumbered by other countries' restrictions.
But that's just an aside. More critically, and I hate to say this: I think the norm-breaking and the vulgarity were an inseparable part of the immigration issue for Trump. The Republican M.O. at the time was to talk an anti-illegal-immigration game, look for bipartisan support once in office, and then let Lucy yank away the football again. The only way to convince Republican voters that a candidate (especially one with a fairly non-partisan history) wasn't just in the "talk an anti-illegal-immigration game" phase preceding the "the Democrats convinced us to trade yet another amnesty for getting Really Serious This Time" phase was to be so boorish towards Democrats and illegal immigrants that nobody could picture him ever negotiating with the former on behalf of the latter.
There's no shortage of Democrats competing to show that they can "stand up to Trump" by being assholes too, but I'm not sure what it accomplishes from their side. They seem to perceive it as an aesthetic signal of strength they need to adopt too, but for Trump his attitude actually was meaningful as a signal of intransigence. For a Democrat to get the same benefit in a primary election they'd have to also tie it to some issue (anti-capitalism? pro-gun-bans?) where their base is afraid of them selling out, and for that not to backfire in the general election it would have to also be an issue that wouldn't necessarily backfire with independents or backfire too badly across the aisle.
I can't think of any issues like that currently, but perhaps one could be whipped up. The median American wasn't a fan of illegal immigration, but also didn't think of it as a huge issue until Trump himself increased its salience. On the other hand, maybe polarizing the country is a trick that can only be pulled off once. In 2016 it might have been plausible to think that America had too much bipartisan cooperation and not enough bridge-burning heated rhetoric, but in 2028 that will probably be a tougher sell.
Off the top of my head, medicare for all, releasing the Epstein files, and student loan forgiveness are "traitor" issues to the left. Medicare for all especially, and to this day Jimmy Dore can't let go how much he got smeared by "sell outs" for his force the vote initiative. Epstein files I can't tell how deep or sincere the sentiment goes. Student Loan forgiveness being a traitor issue revolves around this theory that the Biden admin purposely chose the weakest legal theory to argue in favor of it, and lost on purpose in the Supreme Court. Once again, I don't know how widespread or sincere this sentiment is.
Those are pretty good. Really good for being off the top of your head. I could argue about the other two, but Medicare For All at least would be a perfect fit for that sense of self-righteousness in a grand cause thwarted by betrayal. It distills left-pleasing anti-capitalism down to its most popular core in the same way anti-illegal-immigration does for right-pleasing anti-immigration. It might have even worked well a decade ago, and it'd be hard to mount any principled opposition to it today. Trump has really undermined the free marketeer wing of the Republicans, and I don't think I've heard from the fiscal-prudence wing of either party since the Great Recession.
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