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Notes -
As many of you are probably aware, there’s this popular theory among normie and normie-adjacent white liberals in the US and the West in general that Charlie Kirk’s assassin is a so-called groyper i.e. dissident rightist, racist etc. follower of Nick Fuentes. I was wondering if the main reason for this belief is that said liberals are fully aware of the level of infighting and factionalism that characterizes the Left and then go on to thoughtlessly assume that the situation must be the same on the Right because they actually have only scarce knowledge about it.
I'd more attribute that meme to three things
If you're extremely online and your only interaction with young men is through NYT and Slate horror articles about how they're all turning right wing, you get the impression that the gender divide between young men and young women is essentially 100% of men are right wing and 100% of women are left wing. Most alt-right accounts on twitter or substack will give you the same impression, right wing is all men and left wing is all women. So you see a young man, in Utah, with a gun, and you see a right wing extremist. Because both left wing and right wing sources tell you that all young men are right wing.
He hit his target. Left wingers, inasmuch as they perceive their side as capable of violence at all, perceive it as woefully inadequate at executing violence. Much of the disjunction and misunderstanding between right and left can be attributed to this: the left perceives the right as uniquely capable of violence, and the right perceives the left as uniquely capable of cultural persuasion; while both perceive themselves as incapable. To the Left, Left wing terrorism is the universe of harmless incompetents, right wing terrorism is horrifying and dangerous. To the Right, Right wing indoctrination is gentle prodding that will be ignored by most kids anyway, Left wing indoctrination is permanent psychological damage. The Left can't imagine a left wing assassin actually shooting straight.
Pure bad faith deflection, you flood the zone with nonsense alternative theories long enough that people mostly forget about Charlie Kirk by the time it's actually settled what happened. Similar to the Paul Pelosi thing, or the Minnesota state senators that got shot, or the Kavanaugh hearings, or the Epstein files etc. If my opponent has me dead to rights, but I can just keep saying "well we'll see what comes out later" and avoid losing the argument; by the time things actually do come out later, no one cares about the argument anymore.
That said, it's not all that insane a theory. It's pretty common for internecine conflicts to end in murder, especially where the intelligence services meddle. The only Israeli prime minister ever assassinated was killed by an Israeli extremist. Malcolm X was killed by the Nation of Islam. It advantages the Groypers for things to get more, rather than less, extreme.
I highly doubt that there's a Groyper High Command who ordered Kirk's death, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out that any online weirdo kid dabbled in some antisemitism in addition to trans-furry whatever leftism.
Antisemitism is now completely fine with the left, and has been for a while. If one is skittish about it, they may use the z-word, but many don't even bother anymore. Not that it ever had been entirely out - Marx had been a rabid antisemite, for example - but there were times when it wasn't much talked about. Those times are completely past us. Now any leftist can embrace hating the Joos, and the peers would only cheer.
Which left are you talking about? In no leftist circle I'm present in are Jews every mentioned negatively qua Jews. If Jews are ever disproportionately lambasted in those circles it is only ever as a function of their disproportionate presence among Israeli and billionaires. Should a leftist go "Jews amirite" there, I have no doubt that they would be promptly expelled, given that it doesn't happen.
In some circles they use the z-word. In some, they don't bother anymore. Both sides though know it means "the Jews", and both sides are ok with it. Now defining precisely may be a bit complicated, but I'd say AWFUL crowd would mostly be like "oh of course I don't have Jews, it's just about Israel policies!" while the Muslim and other "historically oppressed" parts would be much more open about what it is about.
Just as university students who literally denied Jews from entering the campus and physically attacked them were expelled, and so did the organizations supporting them?
lolwut? "Disproportionate" to what? Did you expect Israelis to be Chinese instead?
I think what you're missing is that leftists genuinely do put Jews and Israelis in different mental buckets. And, leftists are also very comfortable with the general idea that regular otherwise-good people can be guilty of very-bad apologia. Thus, Zionists and those gullible enough to defend Zionists, even Zionist public opinion manipulators, can be real and bad people without there ever being a whiff of "and also BTW they control the world". Or at least, the Jews specifically controlling the world. "Billionaires" writ broadly and never defined well are assumed to have large de facto control already, so that idea isn't even too weird. And remember, since good people can be manipulated into apologia, it's very easy to motte and bailey most misspoken utterances - ironically, sometimes quite easy to claim.
As such, you usually need to say something pretty explicitly like "Jews control the world" and not merely two adjacent sentences of "Zionists control a lot of the media" and "Billionaires control the world" or even "A lot of Zionists have a lot of money". It's only "Jews control the world" where they go, wait, that's antisemitic. Even Jews have a lot of money jokes are somewhat diluted in effect because too many (often rich, left-wing) Jews made the jokes about themselves.
Thus: Zionists and Jews and Israelis are indeed different mental buckets. No, it doesn't make a ton of sense, but yes, it's a real and widespread perception.
Also, such leftist groups include Jews and never reject Jews based on their origin. The same cannot be said of unironic Jew haters.
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