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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.
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