domain:weirditaly.com
Botond173
14hr ago
The male perpetrators of "petty" political violence during the '70s were anything but "low status, violent men who have not much to lose".
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
14hr ago
He called for killing his toddlers.
It's implied, but never explicitly proven he did. The people who leaked this were deliberate with what they showed us. If he said that explicitly, wouldn't they have leaked that too?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
14hr ago
No, I was saying that wasn’t contained in any of the screenshots, which made me wonder if I was missing something.
It seems pretty clear that he said something like that in the phone call.
roystgnr
14hr ago
It was mostly immigration; at least in his first campaign "Build The Wall" took priority and "Drain The Swamp" was behind that and "unfair trade deals" were mentioned but definitely a bronze medal campaign issue at best. As late as this spring there was still a vocal contingent of the right wing arguing that his tariffs were really just for negotiating leverage so that we could end up with free trade unencumbered by other countries' restrictions.
But that's just an aside. More critically, and I hate to say this: I think the norm-breaking and the vulgarity were an inseparable part of the immigration issue for Trump. The Republican M.O. at the time was to talk an anti-illegal-immigration game, look for bipartisan support once in office, and then let Lucy yank away the football again. The only way to convince Republican voters that a candidate (especially one with a fairly non-partisan history) wasn't just in the "talk an anti-illegal-immigration game" phase preceding the "the Democrats convinced us to trade yet another amnesty for getting Really Serious This Time" phase was to be so boorish towards Democrats and illegal immigrants that nobody could picture him ever negotiating with the former on behalf of the latter.
There's no shortage of Democrats competing to show that they can "stand up to Trump" by being assholes too, but I'm not sure what it accomplishes from their side. They seem to perceive it as an aesthetic signal of strength they need to adopt too, but for Trump his attitude actually was meaningful as a signal of intransigence. For a Democrat to get the same benefit in a primary election they'd have to also tie it to some issue (anti-capitalism? pro-gun-bans?) where their base is afraid of them selling out, and for that not to backfire in the general election it would have to also be an issue that wouldn't necessarily backfire with independents or backfire too badly across the aisle.
I can't think of any issues like that currently, but perhaps one could be whipped up. The median American wasn't a fan of illegal immigration, but also didn't think of it as a huge issue until Trump himself increased its salience. On the other hand, maybe polarizing the country is a trick that can only be pulled off once. In 2016 it might have been plausible to think that America had too much bipartisan cooperation and not enough bridge-burning heated rhetoric, but in 2028 that will probably be a tougher sell.
Rov_Scam
15hr ago
There's a saying, more of a cliche, about being the change you want to see. Given that Donald Trump basically is the Republican Party at this point, and has been for some time, I don't see any evidence of anyone desiring any change or even indicating that they want a change, provided it isn't just that the other side has to do the changing. Name one instance where someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation. Name one. I'm not interested in which side has more total incidents or who started it or any of that, because it honestly doesn't matter at this point. We can go all the way back to Trump's entry into politics in 2015 and see nothing but excuses, equivocation, or using tragic events as an opportunity to dunk on his political opponents. Let's take a look at some of the biggies that have transpired in that time:
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Dylann Roof: Trump wasn't really in a position where he'd be required to say anything at the time of the incident, as it preceded his entry into politics, but he later criticized the media for not blaming Obama for the shooting. The context of that remark was somewhat complicated, but it's nonetheless impossible to believe any context where Obama could have credibly been blamed for the Roof incident.
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Cesar Sayok: See above. A pro-Trump militant mails pipe bombs to various Democratic leaders. Trump's immediate concern is that the media is unfairly blaming him for inspiring the incident. Whether or not that was fair, there didn't seem to be much concern from Trump or any other Republican that somebody was mailing pipe bombs for political reasons.
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The Whitmer Kidnapping Plot: Immediately following the arrests, Trump's response was to suggest that she should be in jail anyway due to her COVID policies. In the course of the prosecution it would later come to light that the perpetrators had an entrapment defense that wasn't entirely ridiculous, though it was ultimately unsuccessful, and various people on the right latched on to this to make them look like political prisoners. This ignores the fact that Trump made his comments long before anyone knew all the details.
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Paul Pelosi Attack: Trump wasn't in office then, but his response was to make jokes about it on the campaign trail. Then a completely baseless theory developed among conservatives who were sure that the guy was a male prostitute in a relationship with Pelosi. Charlie Kirk said that a true patriot needed to come along and bail the guy out. Even the Republicans who offered support to the Pelosis did nothing to attempt to diffuse the rumors.
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Charlottesville: The most famous of Trump's equivocations, endlessly defended among his supporters. The point wasn't whether he was technically correct when he implied that all sides engage in political violence. It was that unequivocally condemning a white supremacist who committed murder should be the easiest thing a president does. Had he simply disavowed white supremacy and violence that would have been the end of it, but he had to use the tragedy as an opportunity to take a dig at his political opponents.
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Minnesota Lawmaker Shootings: This is probably the most he ever did in that his office issued a written statement condemning the attacks. But when he actually got in front of a microphone he couldn't resist the opportunity to dunk on Tim Walz.
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Shapiro Arson: Probably his best response so far, in that he was completely silent about it, except for a private call with Shapiro several days after the incident.
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January 6: The Biggie. This topic has been litigated to death on here and I'm not about to relitigate it. Hundreds of people break into the Capitol building, threatening the vice president and various other politicians, in order to overturn the results of a presidential election. Even while they're still in the building, Trump can't address the nation without telling them he loves them. Initial Republican condemnation turns to justification and excuse making: Most of them just trespassed, they weren't carrying guns, the Democrats didn't do a good job of stopping the 2020 protests (never mind Trump was president), Clinton pardoned Puerto Rican nationalists 30-years later, the election really was stolen and they were all patriots, etc.
If that's where things ended then I could just lump this in with the above, but it went further. As the years past the plight of the poor insurrectionists became a cause celebre on the right, culminating in the pardons of everyone involve. Doesn't matter if they actually caused property damage. Doesn't matter if they assaulted cops. Doesn't matter if they planned things in advance. It was all a big liberal hoax to take political prisoners. It was at this point that the GOP completely abandoned any pretext of being a law and order party insofar as the law applies equally to everyone. Instead they used the perceived bad behavior of their political opponents as a license to condone violence that supports their own political ends.
All of the above is why I find it hard to take the crocodile tears and phony-baloney moralizing following the Kirk shooting seriously. Even when Fox News tried to give Trump an opportunity to turn down the temperature, he rebuked them, insinuating that the ends justified the means; right-wing extremists were okay because they at least wanted the same things he did, while it's the left that's the real problem. When asked about mending the political divide he said he wasn't interested. He said at Kirk's funeral that he disagreed with Kirk in that he hated his opponents and wanted them destroyed.
So when someone says that Jay Jones's private text messages from three years ago should be politically disqualifying I can agree in an abstract sense that they probably should be. But how many things has Trump said that would have traditionally disqualified a presidential candidate? I'm not even going to list them, because on the one hand it would take forever, but more importantly, I'm sure I'd get a bunch of people arguing how it really isn't that bad. Hell, two thirds of Trump's appeal is that he "tells it like it is" without any regard for political correctness. Let's be honest, if text messages had come out wherein Trump said something similar about a Democratic politician in the weeks preceding the election, approximately five people nationwide would change their votes to Harris on that basis. I don't believe for a second that this is some kind of red line that you simply won't allow any politician to cross.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15hr ago
I wasn’t trying to say his initial texts were acceptable. More that they didn’t reflect a specific belief. Like how “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire” doesn’t actually mean “I wish you’d burn to death.”
His remarks on the call are much closer to the latter, and I’ll edit my comment accordingly.
FistfullOfCrows
15hr ago
Ideally there wouldn't be any.
Agreeing in general.
I just note that these are both sort of outlets for "enjoying" pain inflicted on the outgroup that allow them to conclude the recipient 'deserved' it.
I generally don't think any bystander deserves to be victimized by criminals or that suspects deserve to be excessively brutalized by cops. There is a more straightforward relationship between light-on-crime policies and victimization by criminals, and resisting arrest and being beaten by cops, of course.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
15hr ago
Alternately, young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long
Basically nobody does this outside of persecution fantasies.
Most people are lurkers and not posters to begin with. What exactly is the threat model for a lurker reading some chud website like TheMotte dot org? The site gets hacked an every IP that ever visited is released?
The Internet use patterns that 90% of young men want to keep private involve cooming rather than intellectual heresy.
Even posters have more to fear from revealing too many details about themselves voluntarily than from attackers. And no VPN is going to save you there.
faceh
15hr ago
That and they're in the most radical bubble with the most sophisticated justifications for doing violence.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15hr ago
I find paper puzzles like sudoku or crossword puzzles or word searches pretty good for a “I got a few minutes, not enough for something deep and time consuming, but I don’t want to stare into space” time. You can just get one or two answers, get interrupted and go back again quite easily.
Lizzardspawn
15hr ago
Maybe its merely an artifact. https://research.skeptic.com/support-for-political-violence-agreement-by-educational-attainment/
It is not an artifact. This is the class that is least likely to have been engaged in violence at all during their lifetime. So they have the most romantic and hollywoodic view of it.
Lizzardspawn
15hr ago
Democrats don't want you dead. Their faction with bad case of the TDS probably do though. But in the most un-charitable reading - I don't think that they are more than 20% of their electorate - ultra progressives are 7-8 percent of dems (and TDS cases increase the more you get there), so even if we double them we get to 16 percent. But probably the real percentage is even below 2.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15hr ago
I hesitate to post this because I do think that those comments are the kind of background, "I hate the outgroup" signaling that you can find everywhere every day among every group. This man isn't going to commit violence against anyone. Give him a gun, a bag of candy, and unfettered access to those kids and the worst you'll get are some tummy aches.
Except that such rhetoric is being normalized and people are beginning to act on it. You are even reacting as if “I want to kill him, his wife and his kids” as just normal. I contend that it isn’t normal for people to be constantly saying they want people to die, and making it normal enough to show up in casual conversation is honestly scary. I say this as a fairly centrist democrat— the rhetoric of killing opponents has absolutely no place in a civil and civilized society, and unless it ratchets back, the cold civil war will eventually go hot.
Jiro
15hr ago
With regard to the Kirk quote, this seems splitting hairs.
No, it isn't. There's a reason that it's the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and not the Unfair Trial and Biased Jury and Execution of Charlie Kirk. Assassination is something that members of the public are physically capable of doing, and supporting assassination supports things that can and at some point will actually be done by vigilantes. Nobody's going to vigilante put-on-trial and execute Biden, unless you think that's really a demand that Biden be lynched, which 1) I find unlikely to have been intended and 2) isn't possible anyway.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
15hr ago
The Democrats lost young men to the party of, “hold still for your mugshot before you watch Riley Reid take her clothes off.”
Alternately, young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long, the fact that now VPNs are useful to get around conservative porn blocks is a non-issue. The friction was caused under the far left cancellation hysteria.
Did any young man actually save their professional life by buying a VPN? Unlikely. But lots of the advertising catered to that fear, and thus they were purchased with that in mind.
Jiro
15hr ago
I think that a lone nut assassinating someone is a much more plausible scenario than a lone nut bombing the UN or giving the homeless lethal injections.
The Democrats lost young men to the party of, “hold still for your mugshot before you watch Riley Reid take her clothes off.”
It’s easy to get bogged-down in policy minutia here. Normies don’t care about that stuff, even if they say they do. Democrats lose because they are lame. Voting for Trump is fun. It’s thrilling. It feels like raiding a WOW dungeon with 77 million of your best buds. Voting Democrat feels like going to church, except you know that God isn’t real.
There is no reason to think that this is a permanent or even semipermanent phenomenon. All it takes is for a populist upstart to sweep the 2028 Dem primary by steamrolling the wokescolds and pro-Israel donors.
birb_cromble
15hr ago
A Democrat joked
Respectfully, I think you might be extending so much charity here that it's obscuring the rest of the story.
Allegedly (per the national review), the legislator was so off-put by the texts that she called Jones for clarification. Once on a voice call, Jones doubled down, with a source reporting that Jones "wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views", prompting Coyner to hang up the phone in disgust.
If that's a joke, then I respect the man for his dedication to the bit.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
15hr ago
Are you really splitting hairs on "he only said that he hoped her children would die so she would change her mind on policy, that's different from saying that her children should be murdered"?
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
15hr ago
The 'breeding little fascists' comment is what takes it from merely heated political rhetoric to over the line. Children should be insulated from politics, ideally. Unless you want partisanship to creep down to the elementary schools and kindergardens and have people bully each other over how their parents voted. There is no defense for that comment and he should resign.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15hr ago
I think it’s over-charitable at this point to take “he must take full responsibility” statements as proof of contrition. If you really think this is far beyond the pale, then why beat around the bush with non-statements? “Take responsibility” can mean almost anything. It can mean issuing tge standard non-apology statements often used in politics “if my statements were misunderstood to be meant to cause pain, im sorry,” to stronger apologies to dropping out of the race.
And now that we’re officially getting to the “shooting and terrorism” stage, it’s absolutely not good enough anymore to not say it plainly: calls for and celebration of political violence have no place in the public sphere. If you are doing that, you should resign from public office or be fired from any public media positions you hold. If a political organization cannot forthrightly say: anyone on our side engaging in, promoting, or celebrating violent extremism must apologize and leave. This includes using the accusation of authoritarian regime against the other party. Zero tolerance. That’s what getting serious about political violence and advocacy thereof looks like: no excuses, no weasel worded statements, just actual action.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
15hr ago
For clarification, Brian Kilmeade suggested killing the mentally ill homeless.
JONES: Billions of dollars to mental health and the homeless population. A lot of them don't want to take the programs. A lot of them don't want to get the help that is necessary. You can't give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we're going to give you, or you decide that you're going to be locked up in jail. That's the way it has to be now.
KILMEADE: Or, uh, involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them.
And it is fucked up and he should have been fired, at the very least for being so fucking stupid about it. As for the Watters comment, his 'leave it, bomb it, or gas it' remark clearly falls into the category of non-literal, shock jock hyperbole. It's in the same rhetorical family as 'Eat the rich' and other classic leftist slogans - it uses violent imagery to attack a symbolic institution, but no reasonable person interprets it as a literal plan to commit violence. So there is a major difference between these two statements that you are eliding - and that's before we get to the whataboutism with Jones - Watters expressed the desire to do violence against an institution, whereas Kilmeade expressed the desire to kill millions of people.
But the real kicker is neither of them are politicians. Neither of them are running for attorney general, a position that puts them in charge of determining justice for the millions of people in their jurisdiction, and neither of them expressed an explicit desire to see their direct political opponents dead and then doubled down on it afterwards. I really hope this doesn't count as consensus building when I say that everyone knows internally the difference between wishing for the death of faceless enemies and thinking of a person, a specific person, and wanting them dead.
Also, are the mentally ill homeless and every other country in the world core constituents of the Democrat party? Because I thought that was just a snarky joke.
Jiro
15hr ago
(The righty version of this tends to be ginning up justifications for why someone's behavior warranted police brutality or being victimized by a criminal. "Your policies created this" is a common theme there).
Like "well, the right supports violence when they say Biden should be put on trial", the difference is that these are not types of violence that the audience is being encouraged to do. The audience is not made up of criminals, and most are not police either. Nobody's going to go assassinate someone after hearing that someone's policies created criminals.
Everyone in this thread is acting like that is indeed what he said.
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