You said a lot better my thoughts about that recent ACX piece about fascism and violence. You can't just call something Literal Fascism and then say "that doesn't mean it's time for violence". As Tom Holland has noted, Hitler has replaced literal Satan as the manifestation of evil in the Western mind; fascism has thus become a word for unalloyed evil that cannot be reasoned with or accommodated. To invoke it *should* cause violence, as you say.
I do agree that a lot of this is kayfabe in that most of the people fantasizing about violence a) have never done anything violent, so they have no real concept of it other than movies and b) really don't think through the implications of launching violence (as a fun game, see how long it takes you to find where Nicholas Decker's parent's live. Decker clearly hasn't worked through what happens when someone actually carries out his Substack missives. You can echo this on the right with legendary Gruntpa post from Twitter). The UMC who are very online who love to chat like this don't actually appreciate violence, it's no more real to them than sex is real to virgin watching pr0n. They think it's going to be drone strikes on trailer trash, not 3%er/JBGC groups dragging them out of bed to put a bullet in their head in their own front yard in the middle of the night.
Treaties are for discrete Westphalian state actors (and for non-state actors that choose to act like them, especially those formed of former factions of a state actor). Lots of civil wars throughout history have not involved this kind of actor on at least one side, especially early on. Eventually the pressures of war often crystallise the sides into something resembling a state actor if they want to survive and win. So eventually yes there could be a treaty or something like it with an Antifa successor organisation. (Antifa is already closer to this than many realise.) But the presence of such an entity is not a prerequisite for being in a state of civil war.
No. It's not possible to trust Leftists, as they think they are Right and everyone else has to agree with them. The Right would be fine with a national breakup, but the Left would forever seethe that others existed who didn't believe as they did.
It's kinda fascinating how the right avoids the idea that the left is afraid of them. We know who owns most of the guns. We dealt with the street violence of the proud boys and oath keepers. We watched 1/6. We are very aware of how many counter-protestors come strapped with AR15s. We've heard the right call us communists and traitors and evil for decades.
But for the first year in the last 40 there's more left wing violence than right wing, and all of a sudden the right wing is playing victim and taking about 'hitting back'. Which is scary, since they've been doing almost all the hitting for my entire life.
The animosity is definitely mutual and has been for a long time.
The left has the institutions, the right has the guns. This is an asymmetry: any leftist who wants to get a gun can just buy one, and obviously some do. A rightwinger cannot just get institutional support to make his enemies' lives miserable. We live in remarkably peaceful times, which means that the power of non-violent institutions is a much bigger threat in normal people's minds than actual violence.
The left's institutions are schools, actors/directors (not the guys who own media companies, they are conservative, just the faces), museums, and some of the bureaucracy.
The right's institutions are the cops, the chamber of commerce, most of wall street, and a lot of the media.
The left doesn't really have an advantage in institutions.
I think it aligns with how the left considers the elite to be the ones with money and power, and the right considers elite to be the ones with post-grad degrees and media microphones. Idk.
The Right, defined as being conservative, has no institutions because all those you mention are not necessarily conservative. CoC loves government action when it benefits them, ditto wall street. Both donate a lot of money to non-Right politicians and causes.
The people who really run things run the MSM; CNN et al. and Fox News et al are the bookends of acceptable discourse, not actual ideological foes doing battle to arrive at the Truth somewhere in the middle. It's not a coincidence that every view of CNN, Fox et al. benefit those in power.
Then by your standards, the left doesn't have any institutions either. None of the ones that are traditionally associated with are necessarily left wing, and conservative money usually has hiring and firing power over the left-wing folk who do have careers in those places.
I would note that 'goverment action' supports right wing goals as often or more often than left wing goals, so pointing to government action as a left wing thing is not accurate.
There has almost always been more left wing violence than right. If you dig deep in the "studies" used by the left, a homeless mexican shouting the N-word while stabbing a black guy to death is an instance of right wing violence.
And are you saying they have different standards for identfying left wing violence, and thus unfair bias? Or do you just dispute that racist attacks against black people are almost entirely driven by right-wing beliefs, in defiance of pretty much the entirety of American history?
What racist attacks against black people? Almost all attacks on blacks are from other blacks, or from the police for justified reasons.
Most of American history consists of the entire political system being against black people, either slavery or segregation. It wasn't left or right until post-WW2 when the Left adopted Gramscian tactics to try to push for more power.
Currently both sides of the political spectrum fall all over themselves to help the poor negro.
A virtual treaty! But I think the problem is that many of these violent actors are not really part of organizations. The person who tried to kill Trump was certainly no hard core leftist. The person who killed Charlie Kirk was an Utah resident from a republican family. He was not an antifa guy either. The vast majority of leftists are more in sync with the peaceful protestors at the non violent No Kings rally. And what was the right wing response? Oh a shitty video 😂no violence yet although Steven Miller is spoiling for it. Convince him and maybe we can have a treaty 😎
Kirk's assassin was almost certainly radicalized by leftists on discord and other social media, his friends and family confirm he took a huge lurch to the left the year leading up to the attempt. And we know next to nothing about Trump's assassin.
I dont know if I would say 'war', but I think you either are not in place to see this or just dont. I live in an extremely left wing area of the country. The left people here engage in a steady drip-drip-drip of really what I would call violence. The first time when Trump was president, there were a lot of people around where I live who publically showed support for him. I would estimate probably -all of them- experienced some kind of vandalism or property damage and additionally some kind of verbal threats, including to their kids. It is not to the point of bombings or something like that, but it is very noticeable and personal when your car is keyed or you window is broken and you know it was one of your neighbors or someone right close by doing it to you, and its all because they dont consider that you are entitled to your own views. I dont know if that counts as war, but its a violent, in-your-face confrontation that is going on all the time nowadays.
I think it was Holly who recently said that the right has all the guns but the left has all of the trigger pullers, i.e. people crazy enough to actually commit political violence, and honestly that feels pretty accurate. That being said, I wouldn't want to be a leftist if one of them actually managed to get to Trump or a Justice or something, I could easily see something like that sparking a tit for tat cycle of violence where all of those social media posts come back to haunt them in the worst possible way.
Good points. I've thought for awhile we are one justifying incident (pearl harbor, remember the maine, etc.) from a leader on the right calling for people to do as a group what they've long wanted to do solo.
"War" is obviously just a symbolic rallying cry for the Right, similar to how "oppression" or "hate" functions for the Left. Both signify a rejection of the find-common-ground ethos of our high-social-trust history. That matters and I think it means that political polarization will continue to rise as each regime change brings with it a new mandate for revenge. It raises each sides' tolerance for collateral damage, particularly to institutions. The Left has been ahead of the Right on this for some time now: they shamelessly try to pack institutions with zealots and now that the Right is on a war footing it will shamelessly try to destroy them outright. The political calculus is no longer "what policy maximizes US strength", it's "what policy maximizes damage to the other party with acceptable losses to US strength". Trump's battle with Harvard, for example, is almost certainly bad for the US in the long term but as a conservative I don't care because Universities are the Home Islands of progressivism and so I want them bombed into rubble, consequences be damned.
"We're at war" is another way of saying that social trust has completely unraveled. This is something like a political version of a divorce, where every cultural institution will now be fought over like two rabid dogs fighting over a pork chop. We're gonna spend $10k in lawyer fees over every 20-dollar knickknack. Strap in it's only gonna get nastier.
(Evil) Political Scientist’s whole thing is that we are in exactly the civil war you describe, because of the recurring pattern of insanely violent offenders with dozens of arrests committing horrible crimes and then getting inexplicably released.
His view, afaict, is that these people are the instruments of the Far Left. I don’t know what to make of this, since the political violence in America was, as you point out, far worse in the early 70s. Did we have a Civil War then? And lose? Or win?
Your reference to the violence of the 1970's was informative, but there was a difference from what is currently happening. Then all authority was the target. Today the blue half of the country implicitly supports the violence against the red half. Sanctuary zones where violent protesters of the correct political ilk are allowed to rampage unmolested by police didn't exist in the 70's. What is slowly evolving is a scenario similar to the Spanish Civil War characterized by individual acts of violence against people perceived to be of the opponents ideology. Antifa is a radical far-left gang style organization that is becomming more brazen. So far the more radical elements of the right have been willing to let law enforcement do their job. However, given the continuing attempts on Trump's life that could change in an instant. We are in a dangerous mindset and the left should seriously consider toaning down the rhetoric. Swords cut both ways.
"The breakdown of civility in Spain between 1931 and 1936 is ominously reminiscent of what has been taking place in the West recently. People would benefit from reading this book even if they are not particularly interested in the Spanish Civil War, for it would remind them that, when political disagreement is no longer seen as legitimate and one’s political opponents are constantly pathologized, it usually doesn’t end well."
The kayfabe analogy explains a lot of the vibe . As a left leaning person I hate all these commentators who insist that democracy is dead and there won’t be any more elections. And I despise people who resort to violence especially murder like in the very sad case of Charlie Kirk. I hope this was not a trend but so far the violence is just verbal…so I think it still is kind of kayfabe situation at least for some people.
I find it hard to care about private calls for violence. The more “extreme” the less worrisome. Someone threatening heads on pikes is either wholly uncommitted or greatly hampered by the pike they’re carrying. In either case, they pose little threat.
I’d really like to know more about who commits violence against ICE because we don’t really do Federal police. There’s a certain petty, hassling aspect to immigration enforcement. It’s the kind of thing that seems to precede a peasant’s revolt. Like sending out men to look up women’s skirts for tax purposes, which ended Sudbury’s head on a makeshift pike (and may undermine the pike-based threat assessment above). In any case, “don’t hassle the peasantry” seems up there with “always pay your mercenaries”.
The ICE incident in Broadview from about halfway through the article ("boxed in by 10 cars") was misrepresented in your screenshot - the initial claim was that there were 10 cars and that she was armed, but in the official criminal complaint this was dropped to 2 cars and no mention of a gun. Moreover, the judge ordered that she be released on bail due to the evidence being so weak. According to her lawyer, an ICE officer said "do something, bitch" before opening fire on her.
While the details are still murky and bodycam footage has not been released, it's likely that some or all of ICE's claims about the incident are false. I think you should withhold judgement on this incident until more details are known.
That's a fair caveat about this particular incident. I've seen plenty of first-hand videos of violent resistance against ICE agents carrying out their jobs though.
I think it substantially weakens the point you're making if you uncritically present DHS's view of the incident in your article, since parts of it have already been credibly called into question if not outright debunked. For instance, if it turns out that ICE rammed the woman's car and then shot her, it reverses the evidence against your point and might make you look quite bad. I have no idea what happened, and no member of the public will know either until more information is available.
I'll update if that ends up the case. But the precise details aren't that important; this particular incident is only meant to illustrate the fact of organized, violent resistance to ICE operations, which I'm very comfortable saying is taking place.
In this instance ICE ended up shooting up a US citizen - isn't that pretty much organized violence by ICE itself? I take your broader point, but I really think this example is very suspect and you should choose another one.
FWIW I do read your articles and generally like you as a writer. I'm not trying to nitpick, I think this is a substantial factual error which should be corrected.
Duh. What do you think law enforcement is? Of course it's organized violence to be used against citizens under certain conditions; that's it's purpose.
Look at the full context of the conversation. I'm arguing for prudently withholding judgement until the facts of the case are known, since it is still very plausible that this incident is an example of unjustified violence by ICE. In the face of unknowns, it is unwise to confidently assert that this is an example of the kind of organized violence that Kitten is trying to illustrate.
If a cop deploys a weapon to defend himself during the execution of his duty (arresting somebody, for example), that could technically be organized violence. But would the general public care, assuming the shooting was justified?
We don’t know what happened is the point. If ICE dramatically overreacted and shot her 5 times, that’d be a pretty bad look for them. Knowing that a judge saw the bodycam footage and decided she was not a threat, and that ICE significantly changed their version of events already, and that the officer involved booked it to Maine with the car in question, makes me suspicious of the official story.
Again, I don’t know what happened and neither does Kitten or anyone else here. The prudent choice in times like these is to withhold judgement and not (for instance) use one unproven telling of events to illustrate a political point.
Very good article. I liked that you spelled out how we all know (or at least should know) that the threat of escalating violence is always there, as long as your opponent hates you enough and you are unwilling to simply throw in the towel at the first punch.
I also liked how you fingered the people who have spent the last ten years ramping up the rhetoric, only to come over all shocked when someone actually murders one of the people they have been non-stop vilifying.
Finally, the idea that this can be viewed as one long war, albeit largely a cold one, that has been going on since the 1960's was completely new to me. Yes, I suppose it's a bit of a pathetic war when you can still go about your daily business, oblivious that there is a 'war' going on yet I think it is enlightening to tie in then with now. After all, the people presently attacking conservatives and law enforcement agencies bear a remarkable resemblance to those 1960's revolutionaries who never really went away but instead gravitated to positions of power and influence.
It's surprisingly common in low-intensity civil wars for the average person's life to be relatively undisturbed. I don't agree that there has been one long civil war from the 1960s onwards, but scholars of war are very comfortable saying that given the levels of violence the US has been in a state of low-intensity civil war since the BLM/Antifa uprising of 2020. This is a great taboo controversy in the general public but from what I've seen of the war studies field lately it's a pretty banal assertion at this point.
I don't think it's that outrageous. Didn't we hear that 1/6 was a failed insurrection on the news for months? Didn't Biden give a prominent speech about the threat to democracy posed by MAGA?
You can't do history in real time, people decide years or decades later what really happened and what it meant.
Words have meaning. Insurrection fits because "stop the steal" was violent uprising against established (or establishing) government. People were even charged and convicted of it.
[Civil] War suggests some level of sustained violent conflict between internal groups and (usually) the current government. Historians use 1000 "battlefield related deaths" as a cutoff. Individual, unorganized acts of political violence are just terrorism otherwise.
And because of the sudden drop in RW violence we're actually looking at one of the mildest year for political violence in the US in decades, despite the rise in acts from the left:
"Are Americans ready to start murdering their neighbors as soon as they’re given the green light? At least on the left, they say they are, according to opinion polling."
The poll you cited in support of this statement does not say this.
It is true that people virtue signal in polls. It is also true that when people on the Left say "Hitler", they genuinely, sincerely mean 100 million rank-and-file Americans, as well as Charlie Kirk.
The stochastic terrorism angle is genuine. These online Leftists are far too individually cowardly to handle firearms themselves, but they absolutely do genuinely, seriously hope to motivate others to take real shots, as evidenced by their proud, public, real-name celebrations of Kirk's death.
It’s pretty easy to “square the apocalyptic, end-of-democracy rhetoric in which we are awash with the claim that violence has no place in resolving these problems.” First of all there’s a collective action problem where even if you think violence is justified, it’s not great to be the first to do it. second of all if you think trump is an aspiring autocrat, defeating his movement via election before he consolidates power completely is obviously better than violent revolution against a legitimately (if stupidly) elected government at the head of history’s greatest military.
Meanwhile it’s very possible for every election to be the most important of a lifetime. Gaius gracchus was more disruptive than Tiberius who was himself the biggest radical in a long time. The marius-Sulla battle completely reshaped the republic, Caesar ~ended it, Octavian stuck a fork in it. Sometimes things really do just get more unstable until they end (yes yes there were detentes in between but nobody thought Obama vs Romney was going to end democracy)
IIRC, “stochastic terrorism” is a term and concept made up by a Daily Kos blogger. The part that might be incorrect is that it was Daily Kos (rather than some other). I ran it down years ago and it turns out to just be from a political blog.
ETA: In fact, the more I wake up this morning, the more sure I am it was Daily Kos.
You said a lot better my thoughts about that recent ACX piece about fascism and violence. You can't just call something Literal Fascism and then say "that doesn't mean it's time for violence". As Tom Holland has noted, Hitler has replaced literal Satan as the manifestation of evil in the Western mind; fascism has thus become a word for unalloyed evil that cannot be reasoned with or accommodated. To invoke it *should* cause violence, as you say.
I do agree that a lot of this is kayfabe in that most of the people fantasizing about violence a) have never done anything violent, so they have no real concept of it other than movies and b) really don't think through the implications of launching violence (as a fun game, see how long it takes you to find where Nicholas Decker's parent's live. Decker clearly hasn't worked through what happens when someone actually carries out his Substack missives. You can echo this on the right with legendary Gruntpa post from Twitter). The UMC who are very online who love to chat like this don't actually appreciate violence, it's no more real to them than sex is real to virgin watching pr0n. They think it's going to be drone strikes on trailer trash, not 3%er/JBGC groups dragging them out of bed to put a bullet in their head in their own front yard in the middle of the night.
Thanks for reminding me of the ACX piece, which I had meant to link to in this essay but forgot about. Worth a read.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fascism-cant-mean-both-a-specific
Can we, like, make a treaty with leftists? (Or drugs, or poverty?)
Using the word "war" is a bid for attention.
Treaties are for discrete Westphalian state actors (and for non-state actors that choose to act like them, especially those formed of former factions of a state actor). Lots of civil wars throughout history have not involved this kind of actor on at least one side, especially early on. Eventually the pressures of war often crystallise the sides into something resembling a state actor if they want to survive and win. So eventually yes there could be a treaty or something like it with an Antifa successor organisation. (Antifa is already closer to this than many realise.) But the presence of such an entity is not a prerequisite for being in a state of civil war.
This is true. I guess my point is that war language is favored by people who want escalation.
No. It's not possible to trust Leftists, as they think they are Right and everyone else has to agree with them. The Right would be fine with a national breakup, but the Left would forever seethe that others existed who didn't believe as they did.
It's kinda fascinating how the right avoids the idea that the left is afraid of them. We know who owns most of the guns. We dealt with the street violence of the proud boys and oath keepers. We watched 1/6. We are very aware of how many counter-protestors come strapped with AR15s. We've heard the right call us communists and traitors and evil for decades.
But for the first year in the last 40 there's more left wing violence than right wing, and all of a sudden the right wing is playing victim and taking about 'hitting back'. Which is scary, since they've been doing almost all the hitting for my entire life.
The animosity is definitely mutual and has been for a long time.
The left has the institutions, the right has the guns. This is an asymmetry: any leftist who wants to get a gun can just buy one, and obviously some do. A rightwinger cannot just get institutional support to make his enemies' lives miserable. We live in remarkably peaceful times, which means that the power of non-violent institutions is a much bigger threat in normal people's minds than actual violence.
The left's institutions are schools, actors/directors (not the guys who own media companies, they are conservative, just the faces), museums, and some of the bureaucracy.
The right's institutions are the cops, the chamber of commerce, most of wall street, and a lot of the media.
The left doesn't really have an advantage in institutions.
You seem sincere so I won't say anything mean here except that I struggle to understand this outlook.
I think it aligns with how the left considers the elite to be the ones with money and power, and the right considers elite to be the ones with post-grad degrees and media microphones. Idk.
The Right, defined as being conservative, has no institutions because all those you mention are not necessarily conservative. CoC loves government action when it benefits them, ditto wall street. Both donate a lot of money to non-Right politicians and causes.
The people who really run things run the MSM; CNN et al. and Fox News et al are the bookends of acceptable discourse, not actual ideological foes doing battle to arrive at the Truth somewhere in the middle. It's not a coincidence that every view of CNN, Fox et al. benefit those in power.
Then by your standards, the left doesn't have any institutions either. None of the ones that are traditionally associated with are necessarily left wing, and conservative money usually has hiring and firing power over the left-wing folk who do have careers in those places.
I would note that 'goverment action' supports right wing goals as often or more often than left wing goals, so pointing to government action as a left wing thing is not accurate.
There has almost always been more left wing violence than right. If you dig deep in the "studies" used by the left, a homeless mexican shouting the N-word while stabbing a black guy to death is an instance of right wing violence.
And are you saying they have different standards for identfying left wing violence, and thus unfair bias? Or do you just dispute that racist attacks against black people are almost entirely driven by right-wing beliefs, in defiance of pretty much the entirety of American history?
Intentional unfair bias.
What racist attacks against black people? Almost all attacks on blacks are from other blacks, or from the police for justified reasons.
Most of American history consists of the entire political system being against black people, either slavery or segregation. It wasn't left or right until post-WW2 when the Left adopted Gramscian tactics to try to push for more power.
Currently both sides of the political spectrum fall all over themselves to help the poor negro.
I don't think you realize how much your second paragraph undermines your first.
A virtual treaty! But I think the problem is that many of these violent actors are not really part of organizations. The person who tried to kill Trump was certainly no hard core leftist. The person who killed Charlie Kirk was an Utah resident from a republican family. He was not an antifa guy either. The vast majority of leftists are more in sync with the peaceful protestors at the non violent No Kings rally. And what was the right wing response? Oh a shitty video 😂no violence yet although Steven Miller is spoiling for it. Convince him and maybe we can have a treaty 😎
Kirk's assassin was almost certainly radicalized by leftists on discord and other social media, his friends and family confirm he took a huge lurch to the left the year leading up to the attempt. And we know next to nothing about Trump's assassin.
I dont know if I would say 'war', but I think you either are not in place to see this or just dont. I live in an extremely left wing area of the country. The left people here engage in a steady drip-drip-drip of really what I would call violence. The first time when Trump was president, there were a lot of people around where I live who publically showed support for him. I would estimate probably -all of them- experienced some kind of vandalism or property damage and additionally some kind of verbal threats, including to their kids. It is not to the point of bombings or something like that, but it is very noticeable and personal when your car is keyed or you window is broken and you know it was one of your neighbors or someone right close by doing it to you, and its all because they dont consider that you are entitled to your own views. I dont know if that counts as war, but its a violent, in-your-face confrontation that is going on all the time nowadays.
In my city, the left is free to proudly display their signs. The right just hangs an American flag because of what you wrote.
I think it was Holly who recently said that the right has all the guns but the left has all of the trigger pullers, i.e. people crazy enough to actually commit political violence, and honestly that feels pretty accurate. That being said, I wouldn't want to be a leftist if one of them actually managed to get to Trump or a Justice or something, I could easily see something like that sparking a tit for tat cycle of violence where all of those social media posts come back to haunt them in the worst possible way.
Good points. I've thought for awhile we are one justifying incident (pearl harbor, remember the maine, etc.) from a leader on the right calling for people to do as a group what they've long wanted to do solo.
"War" is obviously just a symbolic rallying cry for the Right, similar to how "oppression" or "hate" functions for the Left. Both signify a rejection of the find-common-ground ethos of our high-social-trust history. That matters and I think it means that political polarization will continue to rise as each regime change brings with it a new mandate for revenge. It raises each sides' tolerance for collateral damage, particularly to institutions. The Left has been ahead of the Right on this for some time now: they shamelessly try to pack institutions with zealots and now that the Right is on a war footing it will shamelessly try to destroy them outright. The political calculus is no longer "what policy maximizes US strength", it's "what policy maximizes damage to the other party with acceptable losses to US strength". Trump's battle with Harvard, for example, is almost certainly bad for the US in the long term but as a conservative I don't care because Universities are the Home Islands of progressivism and so I want them bombed into rubble, consequences be damned.
"We're at war" is another way of saying that social trust has completely unraveled. This is something like a political version of a divorce, where every cultural institution will now be fought over like two rabid dogs fighting over a pork chop. We're gonna spend $10k in lawyer fees over every 20-dollar knickknack. Strap in it's only gonna get nastier.
(Evil) Political Scientist’s whole thing is that we are in exactly the civil war you describe, because of the recurring pattern of insanely violent offenders with dozens of arrests committing horrible crimes and then getting inexplicably released.
His view, afaict, is that these people are the instruments of the Far Left. I don’t know what to make of this, since the political violence in America was, as you point out, far worse in the early 70s. Did we have a Civil War then? And lose? Or win?
Yes, the passage about rural China is lifted from a tweet of his.
I think you would have to say that we won, we were born into the America created by their victory.
Your reference to the violence of the 1970's was informative, but there was a difference from what is currently happening. Then all authority was the target. Today the blue half of the country implicitly supports the violence against the red half. Sanctuary zones where violent protesters of the correct political ilk are allowed to rampage unmolested by police didn't exist in the 70's. What is slowly evolving is a scenario similar to the Spanish Civil War characterized by individual acts of violence against people perceived to be of the opponents ideology. Antifa is a radical far-left gang style organization that is becomming more brazen. So far the more radical elements of the right have been willing to let law enforcement do their job. However, given the continuing attempts on Trump's life that could change in an instant. We are in a dangerous mindset and the left should seriously consider toaning down the rhetoric. Swords cut both ways.
Dick Minnis
removingthecataract.substack.com
Your mention of the Spanish Civil War reminds me of this review of Hugh Thomas's book on it from Philippe Lemoine.
https://necpluribusimpar.net/spanish-civil-war-hugh-thomas/
Relevant section:
"The breakdown of civility in Spain between 1931 and 1936 is ominously reminiscent of what has been taking place in the West recently. People would benefit from reading this book even if they are not particularly interested in the Spanish Civil War, for it would remind them that, when political disagreement is no longer seen as legitimate and one’s political opponents are constantly pathologized, it usually doesn’t end well."
Agree completely, and being a history buff can add anothet book to my list
Political violence is bad, but it is not new.
The kayfabe analogy explains a lot of the vibe . As a left leaning person I hate all these commentators who insist that democracy is dead and there won’t be any more elections. And I despise people who resort to violence especially murder like in the very sad case of Charlie Kirk. I hope this was not a trend but so far the violence is just verbal…so I think it still is kind of kayfabe situation at least for some people.
So….
I find it hard to care about private calls for violence. The more “extreme” the less worrisome. Someone threatening heads on pikes is either wholly uncommitted or greatly hampered by the pike they’re carrying. In either case, they pose little threat.
I’d really like to know more about who commits violence against ICE because we don’t really do Federal police. There’s a certain petty, hassling aspect to immigration enforcement. It’s the kind of thing that seems to precede a peasant’s revolt. Like sending out men to look up women’s skirts for tax purposes, which ended Sudbury’s head on a makeshift pike (and may undermine the pike-based threat assessment above). In any case, “don’t hassle the peasantry” seems up there with “always pay your mercenaries”.
The ICE incident in Broadview from about halfway through the article ("boxed in by 10 cars") was misrepresented in your screenshot - the initial claim was that there were 10 cars and that she was armed, but in the official criminal complaint this was dropped to 2 cars and no mention of a gun. Moreover, the judge ordered that she be released on bail due to the evidence being so weak. According to her lawyer, an ICE officer said "do something, bitch" before opening fire on her.
While the details are still murky and bodycam footage has not been released, it's likely that some or all of ICE's claims about the incident are false. I think you should withhold judgement on this incident until more details are known.
That's a fair caveat about this particular incident. I've seen plenty of first-hand videos of violent resistance against ICE agents carrying out their jobs though.
I think it substantially weakens the point you're making if you uncritically present DHS's view of the incident in your article, since parts of it have already been credibly called into question if not outright debunked. For instance, if it turns out that ICE rammed the woman's car and then shot her, it reverses the evidence against your point and might make you look quite bad. I have no idea what happened, and no member of the public will know either until more information is available.
I'll update if that ends up the case. But the precise details aren't that important; this particular incident is only meant to illustrate the fact of organized, violent resistance to ICE operations, which I'm very comfortable saying is taking place.
In this instance ICE ended up shooting up a US citizen - isn't that pretty much organized violence by ICE itself? I take your broader point, but I really think this example is very suspect and you should choose another one.
FWIW I do read your articles and generally like you as a writer. I'm not trying to nitpick, I think this is a substantial factual error which should be corrected.
If new facts come to light that reverse the narrative laid out here (violent resistance to ICE operations) I will issue a correction.
Duh. What do you think law enforcement is? Of course it's organized violence to be used against citizens under certain conditions; that's it's purpose.
Look at the full context of the conversation. I'm arguing for prudently withholding judgement until the facts of the case are known, since it is still very plausible that this incident is an example of unjustified violence by ICE. In the face of unknowns, it is unwise to confidently assert that this is an example of the kind of organized violence that Kitten is trying to illustrate.
If a cop deploys a weapon to defend himself during the execution of his duty (arresting somebody, for example), that could technically be organized violence. But would the general public care, assuming the shooting was justified?
We don’t know what happened is the point. If ICE dramatically overreacted and shot her 5 times, that’d be a pretty bad look for them. Knowing that a judge saw the bodycam footage and decided she was not a threat, and that ICE significantly changed their version of events already, and that the officer involved booked it to Maine with the car in question, makes me suspicious of the official story.
Again, I don’t know what happened and neither does Kitten or anyone else here. The prudent choice in times like these is to withhold judgement and not (for instance) use one unproven telling of events to illustrate a political point.
Very good article. I liked that you spelled out how we all know (or at least should know) that the threat of escalating violence is always there, as long as your opponent hates you enough and you are unwilling to simply throw in the towel at the first punch.
I also liked how you fingered the people who have spent the last ten years ramping up the rhetoric, only to come over all shocked when someone actually murders one of the people they have been non-stop vilifying.
Finally, the idea that this can be viewed as one long war, albeit largely a cold one, that has been going on since the 1960's was completely new to me. Yes, I suppose it's a bit of a pathetic war when you can still go about your daily business, oblivious that there is a 'war' going on yet I think it is enlightening to tie in then with now. After all, the people presently attacking conservatives and law enforcement agencies bear a remarkable resemblance to those 1960's revolutionaries who never really went away but instead gravitated to positions of power and influence.
It's surprisingly common in low-intensity civil wars for the average person's life to be relatively undisturbed. I don't agree that there has been one long civil war from the 1960s onwards, but scholars of war are very comfortable saying that given the levels of violence the US has been in a state of low-intensity civil war since the BLM/Antifa uprising of 2020. This is a great taboo controversy in the general public but from what I've seen of the war studies field lately it's a pretty banal assertion at this point.
Name one scholar wh says we've been at war since 2020. This is all so stupid.
I don't think it's that outrageous. Didn't we hear that 1/6 was a failed insurrection on the news for months? Didn't Biden give a prominent speech about the threat to democracy posed by MAGA?
You can't do history in real time, people decide years or decades later what really happened and what it meant.
Words have meaning. Insurrection fits because "stop the steal" was violent uprising against established (or establishing) government. People were even charged and convicted of it.
[Civil] War suggests some level of sustained violent conflict between internal groups and (usually) the current government. Historians use 1000 "battlefield related deaths" as a cutoff. Individual, unorganized acts of political violence are just terrorism otherwise.
And because of the sudden drop in RW violence we're actually looking at one of the mildest year for political violence in the US in decades, despite the rise in acts from the left:
See figure 4: https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-wing-terrorism-and-political-violence-united-states-what-data-tells-us
"Are Americans ready to start murdering their neighbors as soon as they’re given the green light? At least on the left, they say they are, according to opinion polling."
The poll you cited in support of this statement does not say this.
No, certainly not. I'm more responding to people making maximalist claims about what it means.
It is true that people virtue signal in polls. It is also true that when people on the Left say "Hitler", they genuinely, sincerely mean 100 million rank-and-file Americans, as well as Charlie Kirk.
The stochastic terrorism angle is genuine. These online Leftists are far too individually cowardly to handle firearms themselves, but they absolutely do genuinely, seriously hope to motivate others to take real shots, as evidenced by their proud, public, real-name celebrations of Kirk's death.
Well, Jen Psaki is already on record with the new dem framing of Vance as worse than Trump, who is worse than Hitler. So yeah, we are at war.
The myth of the acceptable republican.
Anybody who saw what they did to Romney knows better.
It’s pretty easy to “square the apocalyptic, end-of-democracy rhetoric in which we are awash with the claim that violence has no place in resolving these problems.” First of all there’s a collective action problem where even if you think violence is justified, it’s not great to be the first to do it. second of all if you think trump is an aspiring autocrat, defeating his movement via election before he consolidates power completely is obviously better than violent revolution against a legitimately (if stupidly) elected government at the head of history’s greatest military.
Meanwhile it’s very possible for every election to be the most important of a lifetime. Gaius gracchus was more disruptive than Tiberius who was himself the biggest radical in a long time. The marius-Sulla battle completely reshaped the republic, Caesar ~ended it, Octavian stuck a fork in it. Sometimes things really do just get more unstable until they end (yes yes there were detentes in between but nobody thought Obama vs Romney was going to end democracy)
IIRC, “stochastic terrorism” is a term and concept made up by a Daily Kos blogger. The part that might be incorrect is that it was Daily Kos (rather than some other). I ran it down years ago and it turns out to just be from a political blog.
ETA: In fact, the more I wake up this morning, the more sure I am it was Daily Kos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
Nice. Also good to see that I tracked it down before the page was created!