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Your predictions have been logged long enough to have been proven wrong. Violence has decreased broadly since the pandemic. I imagine you'll point towards the two attempted Trump assassinations and Charlie Kirk, but I'm unconvinced this is out of the ordinary for a particularly controversial political figure.
Are you willing to make any actual falsifiable predictions on any kind of timeline? You all predicted riots and burning and political violence after the Roe V. Wade repeal, after the 2024 elections, after pretty much every red tribe victory. And just like your predictions about the coming 1,000 year Christian Nationalist Reich in the wake of the 2024 election, you've been categorically wrong. What is it you all like to say? The demand for political violence outstrips supply?
I first read you predicting catastrophic political violence and the disintegration of American society 6 years ago on reddit, and I'm still here in 2026 reading it after none of these things have come to pass.
have you made any comments on the fauci diaries, or is that not your beat anymore, part of the pandemic amnesia?
I have not, nor has anyone else to my knowledge. But I also know very little about them.
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I would also point to the popular reaction to the murder of Kirk and the attempts to murder Trump within Blue Tribe, and how these reactions compare to Blue Tribe's previous positions on how speech should be policed. I'll point to the endemic calls for the assassination of Musk, the organized vandalism and arson campaigns against Tesla dealerships and even (IIRC) individuals' personally-owned vehicles, and how major national politicians winked and nodded along rather than taking a stand against their mob. I'll point to Mangione's killing of the United Health CEO, and the obscene public reaction to the killing from grassroots Blues generally. I'll point to the continued Anti-ICE rioting and intimidation campaign, culminating in the shooting deaths of Good and Pretti, and how the discourse rolled out of those two shootings. I'll point to the evident entrenched denial of basic civil rights in Blue strongholds in the Pacific Northwest, where organized gangs of thugs abuse disfavored religious and political minorities while the authorities pointedly refuse to intervene unless it is to protect those thugs from reprisal. I would point to the Kamloops graves scam and the subsequent rash of church arsons. I'd point to church invasions being pushed as a "protest" tactic, and the apparent reluctance to enforce black-letter federal law against such tactics. I'll point to the ascendence of the DSA types within the Democrat Party, and the complicity of their leaders and influencers in all of these problems and many more besides.
I'll also point out that the arguments made in an attempt to keep a lid on these things are deployed when convenient, but cannot be undeployed when desired. We're Wrenching, here: it was very important that we address "right wing extremism" when a campaign ad put a crosshair on a congressperson's district and then she was publicly shot, or when it was obviously necessary to purge Red Tribers from every major social media platform, and we debated those ideas here at length. Now it's very important that we remember that sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me, and the very idea of policing public expressions of murderous pseudo-ethnic hatred is beyond the pale because muh freeze peach. Maybe some people still take these arguments seriously; there's a sucker born every minute, after all. For those who have more memory than a goldfish, though, it seems to me that the ability of these arguments to moderate conflict simply goes away and never comes back. Certainly it ought to.
I am not a plurality, and I'm pretty sure I didn't predict riots and political violence specifically after Roe V. Wade appeal, much less a 1,000 year Christian Reich. I have predicted that the violence is going to get worse, and it seems to me that it is getting worse. You can admit it or not, but there is now a faction inside the Overton window that is explicitly endorsing murder as a viable political tactic, not in some hypothetical, abstract future but specifically in reference to actual murders and attempted murders that have actually happened. You can, as some here do, pretend that this is not a serious problem, right up until it's your champions catching bullets. And when that happens, what will you say when Blues here discuss how grassroots political extremism and popular support for murder as a political solution is a problem, actually, and I reply exclusively with @magicalkittycat quotes?
There's a lot of ruin in a nation, but it appears to me that the trend is consistent, and as noted above, you appear to be ignoring a whole lot of the stuff you argue isn't happening. Conflict resolution mechanisms continue to degrade, conflict continues to escalate. Race relations are much worse now than they were ten years ago, in ways that appear to me strongly resistant to the standard liberal arguments for comity and toleration. Tribal relations are much worse now than they were ten years ago, again in ways that liberalism has no real answer for. The Democratic party is now entering its own political civil war between a corrupt relatively-centrist establishment and grassroots ideological extremists, which will be actualized in the upcoming elections and in the policy consequences of those elections. I do not think that this will result in an increased likelihood of peace and prosperity for all, but I'm ready to stand corrected.
I think my favorite genre of argument is this exact sort of "you're being hypocritical" accusation, without acknowledging whether or not the accuser is themselves being hypocritical.
If you want to use my arguments against "blue tribers" feel free to, I do it all the time on other sites like Reddit. But if you do so without using them against "red tribers" then you are simply a hypocrite as well and are not making an actual point, you are just telling on yourself. You would turn into a Frieren demon who is simply repeating words without meaning, where they are pure weapons and nothing more.
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And I'll point to the mass unrest after Trump was elected in 2016, I'll point to the dozens of harebrained plots to assassinate Obama, I'll point to Sandy Hook and Columbine and Parkland and the Boston marathon bomber and mass protests around Occupy Wall Street and Gabby Giffords and Congressional baseball shooting and Bernie Bro socialists and Tree of life shooting and Arbery shooting and Charleston church shooting and a hundred other shootings and the Malheur ranch and Lavoy Finicum and the Tea Party and MAGA and and and...
The people celebrating the violence were always there. You just have a weaponized social media feed designed to shove outrage porn down your throat 24/7. You should know better! Listen to Mr. Rogers, not twitter.
British Columbia, the 51st state?
From your triumphalism in the wake of Trump taking power and passing a barrage of laws:
Deus vult!
Meanwhile, and I hope you can set aside the partisanship and appreciate the delicious irony in this, your president decided to launch another war in the Middle East. After you swore up and down that Bush was a uniparty Democrat, actually, and Trump was the first genuine Republican. Undoubtedly your arguments around the base reality of low inflation, killer economic growth and glorious victory over pathetic Iranians will resonate with the electorate.
I can also see the seeds of your doomposting for the 2028-2032 cycle in the complaints about the DSA, as if they're somehow a discontinuous break from Bernie Sanders and the Squad.
You're the Shepard scale of predicting worsening violence. When measurable violence (homicides, rioting, general unrest, school shootings) decrease, you turn to cherry-picked singular incidents and say actually they're worse than anything that happened in 2022, which was worse than anything that came before it, which was worse than anything since the 70s. On the contrary, I see a continuous trendline of violence in America that has always been there. Maybe the 90s truly were some magical time as the nation basked in the glory of triumphing over the Soviets; I suppose I wouldn't know. But at least for my experience, it's been more or less the same.
By all means, feel free. Fight on, brave culture warrior.
Deus vult!
Hmm. We had Bernie Sanders v. Clinton and Sanders and Warren v. Biden, we've had a 'civil war' (such drama!) between the extreme and the center in both parties for the last 14 years, and you're trying to rile yourself up into pretending that the DSAs are some new unique communist threat to the Republic to rationalize a vote for jay dee. While I lack most of the virtues of a good Christian, I'll avoid talking about the 'corruption' (an utterly meaningless word at this point, along with communist and fascist) of the current admin.
You aren't, though.
Your bar for being corrected is that a country of 350 million people have no mentally ill whackjobs for the next 4 years. Someone's going to shoot up a school, someone's going to do something stupid like zerg rush the white house security gates or fly a drone grenade into Trump's ballroom or shoot Kamala if it looks like she's going to win. Then you'll crow that violence is getting worse, the country is going to the dogs and liberalism is a failure.
Meanwhile, by your own admission, you and your family live good lives. Me and my family live good lives. Hundreds of millions of people live in peace and prosperity, and they would live in happiness too if they could lay off the outrage porn and touch grass.
If you are looking at violence in general, the 1990's were the tail end of the massive crime wave that began in the 1970's - the US murder rate peaked in 1991. If you are looking at American political violence in particular, there was Ruby Ridge, Waco etc. at the start of the decade and the Oklahoma city bombing in the middle of it. OKC killed 168 people, which on most counts is more than the total number of Americans killed by domestic (i.e. not Islamist) political violence so far in the 21st century in a single incident.
In the UK, the 1990's was the tail end of the Troubles (the IRA ceasefire was in 1996, but the last big bombing was by dissident Republicans in 1998), as well as the tail end of the crime wave. If you grew up in a British city in the 1990's, the present day is safer in a way that most people can feel viscerally.
Modern media dynamics mean that a single incident with zero deaths can be the current thing (particularly in the partisan filter bubble on the victim's side) for weeks.
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I may not be as "Blackpilled" as FacelessCraven but I do think you are being a bit unfair to them here when examples like "the mass unrest after Trump was elected in 2016". "Boston marathon bomber", and "The Congressional Baseball shooting" would seem to support their position rather than refute it.
Recall that Tsarnaev got the teen heart-throb treatment from MSNBC and Rolling Stone, Hodgkinson had a list of the House Freedom Caucus members in his pocket when he died, and that during the "unrest" surrounding Trump's election businesses weren't boarding up their windows because they were worried about Trump voters might do might do but rather their opposition would.
I will set aside the bit where you implied that the mere existence of the Tea-Party and MAGA are affronts to civilization of similar moral weight to a mass shooting. Something about Arson Murder and Jaywalking.
Here is what I think is happening. I think that Democrats and Republicans have a fundamentally different relationship with violence and very different ideas about when/where it is appropriate. The former views violence as a thermostat that can be dialed up an down to suit the situation, where the latter views it more as a switch or circuit breaker. I think this leads a lot of Democrats to mistake reluctance to engage in certain tactics for a lack of capacity, and I think that a lot of the consternation surrounding incidents like Kenosha, Jan 6th, and the ICE raids on Minneapolis, has stemmed from Democrats who had convinced themselves that the right would never "punch back" having that belief falsified.
Here is what I think is likely to happen. I think that if current trends continue, calls for violence against Jews, Christians, Transphobes, suspected Trump voters, and other "undesirables" will become an increasingly normal part of living in a Democrat controlled state or municipality. Actual violence will also become increasingly normal but get dismissed as a nothingburger or simply "the price of doing business". Eventually one of these perfectly ordinary incidents will cross a line or go viral in some way, and all the rhetoric here on theMotte will be about how everyone is overacting the switch will have been flipped, the circuit breaker popped.
I have argued previously that it wasn't the caning of Charles Sumpter that set the United States on the path to civil war but rather the reaction to it, and I see something like that happening here. The threat to the union is not that in a country of 350 million people he have a handful of mentally ill whack-jobs. The true threat to the union is that there seems to be a sizeable portion of those 350 million people who want the whack-jobs to succeed.
Is that what Fc stands for? Is FacelessCraven a phone autocorrect or a boo light?
Their model of the world is that the left and the right have irreconcilable differences, liberalism and tolerance is a failure, and American society is disintegrating as partisanship increases and everyone's goal becomes to hurt the outgroup as much as possible. He started beating this drum especially hard during the Floyd riots, and hasn't stopped beating it as the violence has subsided and in fact argues that violence has increased since then.
My model of the world is that there has always been a basal level of violence and unrest in American society, and that the modern period is not particularly unremarkable. My position is that things are largely good, liberalism is not a failure and the majority of people are not partisan hacks or outgroup harmers. There has been unrest and discontent with spikes here and there more or less from the early 2000s to today. And partisanship and unrest have decreased from the pandemic through today.
You shouldn't. You should look at where FC groups DSA members running competitive primaries with political violence. This fails to support his thesis in two ways - firstly, that strain of leftism struggling against the centrist core has been there at least since 2008 and is not indicative of violence increasing in 2026, and secondly that it perfectly mirrors populist movements on the right like the Tea-Party and MAGA trying to primary the establishment from the extremes. Presenting this as some new, dangerous phenomenon is ludicrous.
And I would argue that if the Floyd riots and clashes in the streets between leftist and rightist agitators didn't trigger a civil war, if the Charlie Kirk assassination didn't trigger a civil war, what do you think would? I wouldn't have wanted to see the reaction on the right to Trump being assassinated on live TV in Butler, but I still believe the backlash would have been the left facing a 2008-tier election loss rather than a shooting war in the streets. When the whack-jobs get their way, the center is repulsed and the pendulum swings the other way.
Is their model necessarily wrong? It seems trivially true to me that the left and right have increasingly divergent views on basic foundational questions like the existence of free will and what constitutes "basic human dignity" or "a legitimate authority". Disagreements on which the Covid lockdowns and "Summer of Love" threw into stark relief by rendering such disagreement immediately relevant to millions of peoples' livelihoods.
I don't think you (or anyone else here on theMotte for that matter) really grasps just how much damage was done to the social fabric in those 3 months between March and June of 2020 and how the memory of those three months is coloring current relations.
You are misunderstanding the concern, the DSA is not the new phenomenon. Violent radicals seeking to install themselves as the heads of an intellectual vanguard class are as old as leftism itself. The worrying new phenomenon is that wishing death on one's political opponents seems to be increasingly inside the Overton Window. Characters like Hakeem Jeffries, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker are not some wacky fringe, they're who both "moderate" democrats and the anti-populist right seem to be rallying behind.
As for potential for Civil War, I think the US literally dodged a bullet in Butler PA.
I don't know if it would have triggered a war on it's own but I'd put the odds at something like 1 in 3 which is far higher than I'd like. A lot would depend on what happens next, knowing what we know now about the US Secret Service's performance on the day I think there would be a broad consensus on the right that the "Deep State" had purposefully allowed the shot to occur. As I recall the democrats did not loose the 2008 election, in such a situation i think it would take a deft hand on the part of President Harris to avoid a serious constitutional crisis and I wouldn't be surprised to see a repeat of OKC or three.
Regarding why Charlie's killing didn't set things off, two big reasons spring to mind. The first is that Charlie wouldn't want that. Second is we had a President and AG who could believably claim that they were committed to bringing his killer to justice.
Yes.
As opposed to the 90s and 2000s when 'what constitutes a human being' (abortion, stem cell research and Terry Schiavo) or the calls for prosecuting every president since Bush for war crimes were not foundational questions? Disagreement on foundational questions has always, and will always, be a part of western society.
The difference is that the anti-abortion rancher living in Wyoming in the 90s and the inner city tankie never would have had a chance to directly talk to each other. Instead, they'd watch a staid 60 minutes episode that studiously engaged in both-sideism and go about their day. Now, professional outrage porn curators and inhuman ML algorithms shove clickbait thumbnails down your throat.
And for all the talk of Chestertonian fences, nobody ever thinks to talk about the fragmentation of media.
It seems to me you're taking two elected democratic politicians and trying to smear them by association with a leftist pundit. I may as well say 'Characters like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and Nick Fuentes...' Have Hakeem Jeffries or Mamdani wished death on their political opponents? For that matter, I don't follow his stream at all, but has Hasan Piker even wished death on his political opponents proactively rather than mocking Kirk after the fact?
Maybe I'll continue my broader point in a new thread.
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I'm somewhat on the fence about Trump (I can't remember any president in my lifetime having actual assassination attempts, however controversial, but presidents have been assassinated before so it's at least not unheard of), but Kirk? No way. It's completely out of the ordinary, hell, completely unheard of as far as I know, for people to go out and murder a political commentator. No matter how reviled that commentator is.
MLK Jr. was murdered.
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Specifically political commentators, no, but traveling pundits/social media influencers like Charlie Kirk are a relatively new phenomenon. If you think of him as "celebrity who appears in public and tends to draw a lot of crazies," celebrities being attacked and/or murdered is not a new phenomenon.
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There was the radio guy murdered by neo Nazis
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Murders have decreased, but political violence has increased.
Nicholas Roske, was arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home in June 2022 carrying a gun, knife, and burglary tools. He later admitted he intended to kill Kavanaugh
Crisis pregnancy centers (anti-abortion counseling centers) were vandalized or firebombed
Nationwide protests occurred after the decision. State police in Arizona had to deploy tear gas to disperse rioters. LA police did same. More pregnancy centers were attacked.
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The left, broadly, killed the most popular young conservative in America that was the head of the movement.
The left, broadly, have come within an inch of killing a sitting President.
Until the day I die, I will read comments like yours and remember not only those two actions but the constant riots over the last several years over police shootings and well whatever, we don’t have to detail the post Covid collapse of civil society.
Yea - the right did Jan 6th … whoopty doo.
I understand society hasn’t collapsed, but if it does, it’ll come from whatever in the hell is happening to the left, here in the US, and abroad, with our European allies.
Maybe Japan and SKorea will be courageous enough to save us this time.
Was Kirk actually that load-bearing? This is one of those bubble things, maybe, but I never thought he was all that influential. Jordan Peterson seemed to have more pull. The big church groups had more sway than anyone. This was in the Midwest.
Bubble or not, I really disagree that “the left, broadly” did either of those things. A leftist murdered Kirk; a random asshole tried to kill Trump. Blaming “the left” is about as solid as hand-wringing about stochastic terrorism. I believe in individual responsibility.
The broad and horrifyingly ghoulish reaction, including in rationalist spaces, is doing a lot of work in establishing the "broadly."
Sure, one individual did it. Millions of cretins cheered for it and seemed to see nothing wrong with that, and seem to have no fear that anyone's going to do the same to Piker (who is a substantial worse person) or anyone else.
If someone offed Piker, I certainly wouldn't mourn him as a person, and I'm not convinced I could even summon much care for the principle. But I wouldn't blare a cheer across social media celebrating an increase in political violence and know that everyone that matters would have my back, either.
It is so, so easy to just... not say things. And so many people failed, horribly.
If Kirk had been struck by lightning, the left would have celebrated in much the same way. Would you then accuse "the left, broadly" of having electrocuted him? Are all right-wingers whose take on George Floyd was a sneering "whatever he died of, good riddance" to be blamed for his murder? I sympathize with the idea that celebrating an assassination should be taboo in a way that celebrating other kinds of death isn't - the possible second-order effects are obvious - but I think speaking in terms of collective guilt is a bridge and a half too far.
I think that's the point. They wanted him to die, and they celebrated when he did.
Nobody would've cared if George Floyd died by lightning. They didn't really care when he died by cop. The right only cared when it became outrage source #1 in 2020 and nobody could escape it.
George Floyd was a convicted criminal, drug user. Charlie Kirk was a conservative who said things the left didn't like, but by most all accounts was a decent man, even to his political enemies.
The distinction here is that the left widely celebrated the death of a decent person that they politically disagreed with, and that this sort of reaction is not just limited to Charlie Kirk. There are entire subreddits dedicated to rejoicing at the deaths of people they politically disagree with. Members of the left will celebrate the death of their own parents if their parents are too politically dissident for their liking.
…I think this is normal? Not great, but normal. Human nature has an irreducible element of spite and Schadenfreude; the fact that most people have people in the world whose guts they hate, news of whose sudden death would bring only elation - this is not some new pathology. It is not exclusive to the Left, it isn't exclusive to the United States, it's not even exclusive to the West. The mark of a civilized society is that we painstakingly sever the instinctive connection, in all those unruly ape minds, between "boy, will I be happy when Gurg finally bites it" and "I should make Gurg snuff it by throwing a big rock at him"; not the excision of the former attitude from the human heart, which no society has ever achieved.
Indeed, you mention "their own parents" as if it were some extreme of depravity, but I think children being relieved when unloved parents who disagreed with them about everything finally shuffle off their mortal coil is a much more universal phenomenon still than people being happy to hear that some minor outgroup celebrity has died. It isn't pretty, and I hasten to add that it's the furthest thing from how I think about my own family, whom I love very much. But it's only human, and the mere presence of this mindstate does not make a murderer.
Schadenfreude? Yes. Both sides experience it. The type of open, widespread celebration we saw from the left for a person like Charlie Kirk? I think not.
Rob Reiner had full blown TDS. When he died, people left, right, and center offered condolences. Stephen King is insufferable right now. When he dies, so will a piece of my childhood. I will mourn the loss of Stephen King. I can see the redeemable qualities in all of these people. I can even see the redeemable qualities of someone like Stephen Colbert on a personal level. Charlie Kirk too had redeemable qualities.
To whatever extent this is true, and it is somewhat, that doesn't offset the fact that the left are the ones who are more likely to define ingroup/outgroup boundaries based on ideological alignment and moral consensus. It's ideology over kinship. The Soviets even mythologized the story of a boy who ratted out his own family and died because of it because they wanted enforce the same kind of ideological boundaries.
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No. But this to me symbolises one of the reasons the Left and the Right seem to talk past each other. The idea that people can see any equivalence between Charlie Kirk the family man & debater, and George Floyd is obscene and incomprehensible to me. George Floyd, the home invader. George Floyd, the man who put a
shotgunpistol to apregnantwoman's belly. George Floyd, the man who spent five years in jail for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, the man who died while being arrested for trying to pass off counterfeit currency, out of his skull on fentanyl.I agree completely that people shouldn't die while being arrested / be murdered by the police, and that investigation and punishment of the police officer was appropriate. I agree that it's unseemly to celebrate people's death no matter who they were and what they'd done. But the fact remains that Charlie Kirk was an innocent man and George Floyd was scum. To me, the fact that the Left considers actively celebrating the death of a man for the crime of being right wing in public to be remotely comparable to not caring that a career criminal is dead demonstrates a vast and hideous chasm of moral divergence.
EDIT:
Oh goodie! Thank you, Politifact. I was worried there for a minute that something bad had happened, you know?
EDIT EDIT: what is known is that the six men with Floyd overpowered a single woman and beat her in the "head and side areas" to make her shut up so they could rob her in peace, Floyd's pistol to her abdomen apparently not having brought the message home: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/meme-spreads-wrong-photo-details-in-floyd-criminal-case/
If you grant this principle, surely this clears the bar of "remotely comparable": both situations are comparable in that they involve people celebrating a perceived enemy's death even though this could be regarded as incentivizing wrongful deaths in the future. They may be very different in other respects, but that comparison still stands. And the fact remains that in neither case does it seem fair to jump from "this celebration is unwise" to "anyone insufficiently condemning the celebration retroactively shares blame for the wrongful death", which was my actual point.
There's more I could say with regards to the Floyd/Kirk comparison and the degree to which left and right talk past each other on these issues - and I can get into that if you'd want me to - but fundamentally they seem to be besides the point I was trying to make, which was simply "the-right-broadly is not responsible for Floyd and the-left-broadly is not responsible for Kirk, assigning blame that way would be crazy in either case", so I'm going to leave this reply at that unless prompted, in order to avoid burying said core point.
Understood. For clarity, to me the statement
with response to a career criminal doesn't seem like celebration, just a statement of the obvious. If I found out that Jimmy Savile had died under suspicious circumstances, I wouldn't go around saying 'how wonderful! the child-rapist is down in hell where he belongs!' but an internal 'good riddance, the world is better without him' would seem completely appropriate.
To me, this response isn't appropriate to the death of a genuine innocent, no matter how much I dislike them. My reaction if Jeremy Corbyn or Diane Abbott (both left-wing politicians I dislike intensely) were to die would not be on the same level as my response to the death of a career criminal. I might find myself feeling some vindication or even pleasure, I'm only human, but I wouldn't say it out loud and I would feel bad about it.
I think there are huge swathes of the left that don't feel the same way. A hugely popular left-wing position - not saying it's yours - seems to broadly be that anyone actively working to advance right-wing positions is effectively on the same level as (or far below) something like George Floyd, and I reject that and find it abhorrent.
I agree, but I think the word "internal" is doing ~all of the work. What I was trying to gesture at with the "whatever he died of" paraphrase wasn't merely the "statement of the obvious" that you interpreted it as, but the line of argument that kicks the can on whether it was murder or not and says, "who cares if he was choked or died of a self-inflicted overdose, he was such a scumbag that Chauvin would have been doing everyone a favor even if it was murder and we should all look the other way". I see a fair bit of this among online rightists, including on the Motte, and I don't think it's unfair to parse it as tantamount to celebrating the alleged murder, even if its proponents carefully avoid endorsing the claim that it was murder, keeping their approval safely tethered to hypotheticals.
My view, therefore, is that expressing that sentiment publicly is unethical for the same consequentialist reason that loudly cheering on a political assassination is unethical. In either case, the problem is that it creates a climate in which potential future murderers are given reason to believe that they'll be hailed as heroes if they commit extrajudicial killings, just so long as the targets are sufficiently bad guys in the eyes of the public. I think this would very much apply to a hypothetical Jimmy Savile murderer. We might shed no tears for Savile as a person, knowing that he really was a child-raping monster; but we do not want to give trigger-happy would-be-heroes the impression that gunning down celebrities that they're totally sure are secretly pedophiles is something society approves of. For, uh, obvious reasons.
Celebrating Kirk's death could still have this effect even if he had been a privately horrible man whose widow was glad to be rid of him; celebrating Floyd's ostensible murder could have this effect whether or not Floyd was a victim of circumstances vs. an unrepentant bastard, and indeed, whether or not Chauvin actually, as a matter of fact, killed him. The only valid moral question to ask about people dancing on their respective graves is whether that celebration might motivate some other guy to take a shot at another politician; might motivate some other cop to finish off some other lowlife whom he feels is definitely irredeemable scum.
(But, as stated, although it's an important question to bear in mind in terms of how individuals choose to act, I don't think it's one whose impact could ever so great or direct as to make the grave-dancers 'as bad as the killers'/culpable for the deaths themselves in any meaningful sense.)
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Yeah, I originally included a sentence about how a leftist murdered Kirk, and the left was way too fucking enthusiastic about it. I absolutely hate the responses that flooded social media. I will stand by the distinction, but it doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.
My wife is one of the most empathetic people I know. I don’t even think she would shoot someone in self-defense. But she will say, with a worried expression, that she wishes Trump had died at that rally. It’s unbelievable. Ingroup, outgroup, fargroup.
A not-Trump GoP candidate would still have beaten Kamala like a drum and, after instituting a state cultus of Trump, would then proceed to enact a much more effective agenda. Trump himself has largely failed to crown himself with laurels; a not-Trump candidate taking up the torch would probably have not only tried but succeeded in doing so.
With Trump gone it's likely Biden would not have dropped out. The hue and cry over his debate performance would be completely overshadowed by the spectacle of such a high-profile assassination, and the debate would be considered moot. I would guess a second debate would be scheduled very late in the cycle to give the GOP time to figure out what to do, at which point Biden probably does much better since he would have recovered from his cold, and the GOP would likely be running a candidate with no experience (doubtful they get Romney to run again.) With the advantage of incumbency, and lacking the sui generis Trump, I think Biden gets the higher probability.
The GOP would nominate Desantis(probably the donor favorite) or Abbott(probably the party insider favorite) or Rubio(a compromise position) very quickly. All of whom would destroy the senile Biden in a debate. The GOP would also benefit from the disgusted by Trump crowd no longer having to grit their teeth over trump. I think the GOP pulls an incredible map in this scenario- thé democrats were just incredibly unpopular.
Yes - I think the core fact about Trump's three elections is that in 2016 and 2024 either party could have won by nominating an empty suit instead of the unpopular candidate they did nominate, and in 2020 the Democrats did win by nominating an empty suit.
Interestingly, even if he had won the popular vote 55-45, DeSantis would only have got 15 more EVs. So many states are deep red or deep blue that 1980-style electoral college blowouts are no longer possible.
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It's the non-Trump GOP that has largely proven ineffective over the past generation; why would they have done better without Trump?
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I don't think "load-bearing" is quite the right word, but at the same time I don't think our resident norms-enjoying Democrats and anti-MAGA Republicans truly appreciate just how popular he was and how badly their reactions to his killing (be that open celebration of it, attempts to downplay it, or Norm McDonald-esque worries about potential blowback) played outside their liberal technocratic bubble.
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AIUI, his ground game among young voters was considered very important, but in a way that wasn't really appreciated openly until after his loss.
As someone who is an active participant in their state GOP I was aware of him as the head of TPUSA and occasional guest on various programs, and a feel a bit sad to confess that I had kind of dismissed him as just another talking head/pac-man to be managed.
I didn't become aware of his popularity and wider body of work, until after his death. Specifically I found out that had been shot via a text message from a family member who has never been particularly political, and was surprised that said family member even knew who he was.
My middle school aged son, who has never shown any interest in politics whatsoever, knew who he was, had seen some of his videos, and thought he was a "pretty cool guy".
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We handwrung about stochastic terrorism for the better part of a decade. Federal and national corporate policies covering vast swathes of our lives were set, and large amounts of meanness coordinated, based on arguments fairly summarized as "handwringing over stochastic terrorism". "Hostile environment" law and policy was and is given force of law based on arguments significantly weaker than "handwringing over stochastic terrorism."
I believe that you believe in individual responsibility. But you could not actually coordinate a consensus around "individual responsibility" before, and to the extent that "individual responsibility" carries the day in the current circumstance, it will be because that is the argument of maximal convenience to Blue Tribe at this moment. This will have consequences, and those consequences will be profoundly degenerate in obviously-foreseeable ways, chief among them that you, personally, are in this moment losing the ability to ever argue the contrary position persuasively ever again, regardless of future circumstances.
I mostly don't write effort posts lately, I've been too busy working on art and raising kiddoes. But one of the ones that languishes in my drafts folder is "Arguments we can have in advance", situations where it is extremely easy to model how the current conversation will evolve given likely future events. This is one of the big conversations we can have in advance. It seems to me that people really ought to give it a try, while there is still the present amount of unburned charity.
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