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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 note you aren't claiming that they use the word Jews when hating them. It's easy to believe that Muslims do, but then I also don't really count them as leftists.
When you say "they don't bother", do you mean they say "Jews are disgusting" and things to that effect?
In an event that wasn't targeted against specifically Israel, right? Right?
Again, I define antisemitism as the phenomenon of hatred against Jews as the whole group. Not "Israel", not "zionists" and not "the capitalists". It would include Jews who don't live in Israel, don't support Israel, aren't rich, don't practice Judaism etc. I don't know how you define it, but if it's "students who stage anti-Israel protests" then we aren't gonna get anywhere.
The simpler explanation is that most leftists today hate Israel, most leftists today love Muslims and most Muslims today hate Jews (but hold their tongue when in mixed company). This applies in general to broad groups of people such as "The Leftists" - if you find diversity of opinion, what is most likely is that they actually do not agree, not that they all believe the same thing but some hide it.
That's good, because I said it at least twice :)
Why not? They certainly vote for the same candidates and policies other Leftists do, and participate in the same party, so who are they if not?
Exactly. They couldn't care less if a particular Jew ever been to Israel, what opinion they'd have on Israel and what influence on Israel beating up and throwing out of campus of this particular Jew would have (none). They just hated the Jew.
That's a bad definition. If you hate all the Jews but the one, then you aren't antisemite? If you have all the Jews but Naturei Karta, then you aren't antisemite? Nah, you still are. People are always inconsistent, even Nazis allowed some select Jews to serve in the army and governmental functions, at least for a while. If you're looking for a cop out where you can rule-lawyer some definition of "antisemitism" that excludes people that don't hate every single Jew, then you'd need another word to that describes the same phenomenon, because the word "antisemitism" will cease to be useful. This btw is a common leftist failure mode - they imagine if they all agree certain word means something, then it becomes reality - like, they call themselves "liberals" and "progressives" and automatically all the nice things that used to be associated with these words attach to them. Of course, in reality exactly the opposite happens. If you call antisemites by any other name, that name will start to mean "antisemite".
They do, of course. Because there are a lot of very uppity Jews in there, who arrogantly refuse to behave like the leftists would like them to. But now, as you correctly point out, this also aligns with the Left's embrace of Islamic radicalism, which also conveniently hates the Jews. The match made in hell.
Their anti-Israel tendency - more precisely, a tendency against the Israeli right-wing - derives solely from their overall anti-colonialist tendency. I think you already know that. France and Germany, for example, no longer follow a colonialist national policy, which is why you don't see anti-German or anti-French leftist groups of any significance. (We can nitpick about the former but it isn't really important.) The Russian leadership can reasonably be accused of being imperialists, however, which is why anti-Russian leftists are very much a thing.
Not solely. "Anti-colonialism" is part of it, even though the idea that Jews, who lived in that land literally before recorded history became a thing, are somehow "colonizers", and Muslims, who arrived much recently, many - more recently than Europeans arrived to Americas and Africa - are "indigenous", is supremely idiotic and counter-factual. But that has never been an obstacle for the Left. However, Israel and Jews are subject to a special type of vitriol which is not seen towards, say, Belgians or English or French or Dutch. Who actually colonized and subjugated massive amount of people and countries, and some of them continue to keep colonies (same can be said about the US, tbh, I mean Puerto Rico? Hawaii? Samoa?) - and yet you don't see Belgians demonized around the planet because of that they did to Congo. You don't see Japanese vilified because of what happened in China and Korea. I'm not calling for all that to happen - I am just observing, that Israel is definitely being singled out, and any Jew who is not actively working for the Party - and some that do - is subject to attack for it. And the conclusion is unescapable - the "anti-colonialism" is at best a convenient excuse. The reason must be deeper.
The Israel-Palestine conflict has also been inflamed more recently even than Russia-Ukraine.
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