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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Yes. RIP.

On a different note I’d argue that this was probably not politically motivated on grounds that people generally comprehend that women, especially young and pretty ones, make very poor targets of publicized political assassinations from a PR perspective.

My read on that is that - if it was in fact an activist, and based off the person of interest's physical profile as a fat schlub who walks funny - we shouldn't necessarily assume some cold-blooded, calculating assassin. Think about spiteful mutant theory, and why Eliot Roger wanted to kill blonde sorority girls.

On a different note I’d argue that this was probably not politically motivated on grounds that people generally comprehend that women, especially young and pretty ones, make very poor targets of publicized political assassinations from a PR perspective.

Anyway, if this was a targeted killing I think it's more likely that it was over romantic/sexual rejection than something political.

‘People generally comprehend’ /= ‘people who kill people comprehend’.

Has there ever been a politically motivated assassination of a young pretty white woman in the US?

Sharon Tate?

I'd argue he was trying to have a political aim even if it was a crazy mirror version of politics.

I don't know enough about the whole affair to comment on that.

Tate wasn't specifically targeted, though; they just wanted to kill the people in the house.

There's also reason to think the Helter Skelter scenario wasn't what actually happened. Maybe I should do an effort/schizo post on the Manson murders sometime.

Are you referring to the theory that the Manson family were actually hired assassins?

The Official Account (Bugliosi) is that Manson was trying to trigger a race war.

The full schizo account is that he was a subject of MKULTRA and CHAOS, and the CIA nurtured him to discredit the hippie/anti-war movement.

What's interesting is that if you dig into his time in San Francisco, you do find some pretty weird stuff related to his parole officer (a grad student at Berkeley, studying drugs and collective violence, who had a single parolee he was supervising and who managed to keep Manson out of prison for violations as diverse as grand theft, drug dealing, and rape) and the clinic Manson and his followers went to.

In all likelihood, Manson wasn't some kind of intentional project, but a series of irresponsible fuck ups by government. And his killings weren't an attempt to start a race war, but some combination of an attempt to distract from a prior crime and a drug deal gone bad.

The theory was that Manson was convinced that the US was on the verge of a race war that the blacks would win, but they wouldn't be able to effectively govern afterwards and would look to him as the new leader of America. The murders were a way of initiating the race war because the police would blame them on blacks and racial tension would ensue, both from whites who were outraged and blacks who were falsely accused. That's at least the theory that Bugliosi ran with to get a conviction.

Please do the effort post.

Young women are very underrepresented among politically relevant targets and the US doesn’t have a lot of political assassinations, so that doesn’t mean much even if there hasn’t been.