last night as i was trying to wind down for bed i had a unified theory of what the fuck just happened, and i wrote it down, and filed it under "well, i can't talk about this on main without sounding insane until and unless the perp gets caught and is provably a groyper"
anyways, great news! (1/X)— J. C. Cantwell 🌻 (@segfaultvicta.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:13 PM
People can say (almost) anything on the internet, but this thread has been circulating on the BlueSky circles I see:
the bitch of it for them is charlie kirk WAS a generational talent who was going to become president someday. he was genuinely extremely fucking good at his job and he’s almost certainly the reason Trump won reëlection
one of the big things that happened in the background that a lot of people didn’t see was the Groyper Wars – Fuentes and Kirk were beefing, Fuentes controls a bunch of insane white twinks who were intimidating everyone at conservative events
it was a whole thing I can’t adequately summarise, but Kirk was the one who, at least for a while, had managed to defuse it – this is why he suddenly tacked hard to the right on immigration and racism, that was calculated.
by kneeling to the groypers, Kirk was – successfully – defusing the tension in the Hitlerjugend, conceding ALL the ground on racism and immigration and, like, channer shit, basically, in exchange for being able to position himself as the intellectual heir to Trumpism.
that was his play here. keep up the gadfly act until he could be, like, Vance’s chief of staff or something, G-d only knows, but the point is, he was the man who could unite Turning Point and the groypers by knowing what to concede to Fuentes et al. and how to do so
recently, Kirk kept calling for the release of the Epstein Files, even after Trump called him and asked him to stop, and Fuentes has been FURIOUS about it, and won’t-someone-rid-me-of-this-meddlesome-priest about it: stochastic terrorism wasn’t a “if”, at this point, it was a “when”.
Kirk thought, i am SURE of it, that if HE was able to get out in front of the Epstein files – he KNEW what was in them, obviously. He knew that there’s SOMETHING there that’s genuinely, actually, catastrophically explosive
He wanted the fucking positionality of being the one within the conservative Trumpist movement to expiate its own sins by throwing the old dying man under the bus and claiming the mantle as the one who Purified The Movement
the promised prince of QAnon, the Guy Who Exposed The Pedophiles, it would not be the Democrats, it would be Charlie Kirk, and he’d be able to use it to win the Groyper Wars forever and marginalise them for good.
the next few seasons of the show were supposed to be about him, and everyone knew it, and then nick fuentes, that poor, stupid, loyal twink, fucking beefed it for all of them by killing him. or engaging in stochastic terrorism such that he was killed by one of his followers. the world may never know
and nobody’s going to be able to grab the ring – CERTAINLY not Fuentes – because you need to be able to code-switch between Christian Pastor and also Charm The Grandmas and ALSO gutter-racist antisemite Branch Hitlerian Dialect. and nobody is going to be able to do that like he could.
some people have said “oh the billionaires will just decant another one” or install Tim Pool or Hanania or something like that but, I need you to believe me when I say that that is *not how this works*, and Turning Point was the work of decades, and Charlie Kirk was load-bearing for it.
coda, more than a correction:
bsky.app/profile/did:…— J. C. Cantwell 🌻 (@segfaultvicta.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 2:13 PM
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That's entirely correct, you can't just substitute these people. I mean some you can, but just like Trump himself there was no Kirk but Kirk.
— Cai (@annenotation.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:30 PM
I also got the sense that he kept his nose actually clean; I would have been actually surprised if there were a sexual assault claim against him, etc. He had a long game all planned out, and he kept his eyes on the prize.
— Cai (@annenotation.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:31 PM
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There are a lot of grifters out there, a lot of whom are quite good at it and make a lot of money telling billionaires and the right wing mob exactly what they want to hear.
But there aren't many that can get Ezra Klein to give them a posthumous blowjob in the Times.— Mayor Cardamom (@aangtifa.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 2:52 PM
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As an observation on this *specifically*, does anyone remember Andrew Breitbart? How much clout does Breitbart News carry, now that he’s gone?
I think you’re right about this; part of the issues lies in his insight & flexibility, and part lies in his ability to be personable while being horrid.— fidelioscabinet (@fidelioscabinet.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 4:20 PM
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When Breitbart expired under the newspaper rack Bannon was involved with him but I don't know if this lasted.
— Always Think 1st so U R #WokeAF (@alwaysthinkhow.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 9:14 PM
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Excellent thread. I have two mea culpas:
1. I thought it’d be Vance who shivved Trump once it was perceived he’d outlived his usefulness busy using Epstein against him
2. If the Kirk-Fuentes rift is true/real then I apologize for saying this is not Night of the Long Knives w/ Kirk as Rohm— frostellicus (@maxellxlii.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 1:07 PM
i've said this before, but charlie kirk was who jd vance desperately wishes he were to a point that's physically painful to watch
and, i mean, gosh, maybe he's rethinking that this week! love that for him. love that for all of us.— J. C. Cantwell 🌻 (@segfaultvicta.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 1:12 PM
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Thiel doesn't want to be the leader, he wants the leader to do what he tells him to.
Vance is just woefully brimming with inauthenticity that he can't code switch because nobody believes that he believes any of it. He's a toady.— Padraig2112 (@isomorphism.net) September 12, 2025 at 12:41 PM
JD Vance wants to be Charlie Kirk so bad it is physically painful to watch
— J. C. Cantwell 🌻 (@segfaultvicta.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:46 PM
but he is just so very bad at it which is great!
— First Wordle Problems (@fwordleproblems.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:46 PM
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The ensuing power vacuum is going to make things pretty chaotic for a while. Even if somebody immediately steps in to fill it, there’s no guarantee the Hitler Youth Lite are going to respect/follow the new guy as unquestioningly as the original guy.
— golvio (@golvio.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 5:52 PM
Given that a lot of the younger adherents are nostalgia-poisoned nerds and Gamers™️, “They Changed It So It Sucks” Syndrome will probably factor in here. Their own reactionary tendencies coming back to bite them by making them inflexible toddlers who can’t handle change or put their feelings aside.
— golvio (@golvio.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 5:54 PM
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I wasted my teen years on imageboards and I desperately want people to understand that neo-Nazis and the alt right are actually like 20 personality cults in a trench coat and will absolutely engage in inter-faction violence over sleights nobody on the outside could ever understand.
— Pizzachu 🐑 (@pizzachu.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:53 PM
If you want to see a knife fight, ask whether Slavic people are white, or whether it is Race Science or Cultural Darwinism that separated whites from everyone else. The most seemingly inconsequential deviations from enforced ideology makes you an existential threat to the group.
— Pizzachu 🐑 (@pizzachu.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:56 PM
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What was the substance of the beef between Kirk and Fuentes?
— Adam “Bluesky Says I’m Rude” Sessler 🇺🇦 (@adamsessler.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:18 PM
www.isdglobal.org/digital_disp…
— J. C. Cantwell 🌻 (@segfaultvicta.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:21 PM
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we'll see… the rubes are pretty stupid, the money is fucking insane and the motivation is sky high to find a mediocre white guy who can speak with different, but very similar groups of jizzstains while keeping a small number of whopping lies straight – not hard
— Wizzy Probs (@wizzyprobs.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:17 PM
oh i'm sure there'll be any *number* of tryhards milling about the space in Kirk's wake.
they're not going to be *him*, and everyone's going to know it. this was, like, the RFK getting shot of the right-wing hyper-online neo-nazi clade. he was their future.— J. C. Cantwell 🌻 (@segfaultvicta.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:19 PM
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Dare I hope this might result in the end of actual power for these types of guys? Or is it too soon to know?
Lord, I hope so. I do think they *really* fucked themselves with this, my entire thesis is that this was an unrecoverable unforced error on their part, and I mean, I wanna be right, which means I have to resist motivated reasoning, but I also think I'm right, enough to be hopeful
— J. C. Cantwell 🌻 (@segfaultvicta.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 2:55 PM
Mistakes Were Made!
Jay
Jay
didtrumpgolftoday.com/
eclare
I appreciate the round up, but I don’t even understand some of these posts.
Please do not explain. I don’t care.
Rusty
I did think Vance was the next step of MAGA, maybe now he still will be. The rural white upbringing for the folksyness, the Ivy League education to attract the billionaire funders. He did look to be the one that the white professional class, that still has influence in the press, law, etc that matter for election, would find acceptable while pedaling racism and classism they find acceptable. Unfortunately, the more you get to know Vance, the less you like him. From the posts (the realms of Kirk, Fuentes and thimeir conflicts is well outside my understanding), it looks like Kirk had that likability, a la Reagan, that brought it altogether. In the end, for all their polish and social skills, they are bigots, but bigots who will continue to attract all kinds of society so we need to continue to understand them so we can eke out our wins for the good.
MisterForkbeard
@Jay: This is getting a lot of play today. Maybe we’ll hear more that will validate it, but so far as I can tell:
I really dont know what’s going on here, but it does look like a converted effort to blame this on Transfolk and “the left” without it making any sense at all.
PJ
This is not a blinding insight, but the internet (more specifically, the world wide web and social media) was a huge fucking mistake.
PJ
@MisterForkbeard: Trans people are the edge of the hate wedge. “Fear of trans people” worked well in the last election, and they’ll keep at it as long as it works.
SpaceUnit
Grateful for this.
amazon.com
Odie Hugh Manatee
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. Charlie went to college campuses to plant seeds in young minds and instead became fertilizer for his movement. MAGA is fundraising now that he is dead at the hand of one of their own because one thing the right knows well is how to cash in on death. That’s how sick their movement is.
Who wants to be a part of a movement whose members will kill each other for noncompliance and then cash in on it?
Ohio Mom
@PJ: But then there would be no Balloon Juice!
In some ways you are right. The internet can remind me of the atom bomb or Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to people, as a whole, we humans lack the intelligence and judgement required to harness these technologies safely.
On another note, I did not realize or appreciate how dangerous Kirk was. Then again, I hardly knew who he was until a few days ago. No pun intended, we dodged a bullet with his death.
PJ
@Ohio Mom: I originally wrote that the internet should be phased out gradually, so that Balloon Juice commenters can wean themselves of the addiction.
I had only a vague notion of Kirk as a right wing grifter/influencer. I had no idea he was the face of acceptable bigotry for the media, and that he would be lauded by them for it.
Jay
@MisterForkbeard:
That was based on a Guardian Report that a “friend” from 4 years ago in High School claimed, that the Guardian has since retracted, because the “friend” from High School could not even substantiate that he knew him at all.
The “Gov” also publicly wishcasted that he had hoped the shooter was an immigrant or trans, not a young, white, male Mormon, ReThuglican, like other than Mormon, the majority of political killers in the US are.
The shooter attended one year or less of college, dropped out and went to a trade school to study to be an electrician, and lived at home with his Republican MAGA Mormon parents the whole time. Both schools.
So, no trans room mate.
He lived at home, in his parents basement. No room mate.
We already have 5+ proven examples of both the DOJ, FBI and various so called “Media” making shit up.
Hard to see things that don’t exist.
Ummmm, who under 60 years of age, isn’t.
Discord had to put out a statement, to counter the claims that the shooting was plotted out on Discord, by going through the shooters entire Discord chats and finding nothing but typical FPS trash talk and the casual racism, etc of white male gamers.
“The Zone” is being flooded by BS and a the gullibillies are buying it all, aka, the MSM.
Vatnic Soup has already reported that there are entire Ops rooms and troll factories set up to flood the Dead Bird site and other social media, over this event, from the ruZzians, Chinese and Indians, to Myanmar scam sites and various “engagement” farmers.
counterfactual
I’ve always thought that when it came down to it, the Republicans would all knife each other before they ever got around to us lefties.
I also always thought that when Trump finally goes, there will be more chao than you think. Every cabinet officer, every Senator, half of the House and half of the Republican governors all think that they are the one True Heir and Chosen of God. I’m expecting badly run attempted coups with Hegseth and his DoD groupies, Noem with ICE, Rubio will try to collect enough pre-Trump old guard Republicans.
The subordinates of a personality cult leader can successfully transfer the power to someone if that someone is a clear successor and all the leaderships pushes instantly and very hard for the successor. Even then, the cult will shed schisms badly. Vance has no charisma, stands for nothing, and will not get universal support.
prostratedragon
Got this through Heather Cox Richardson:
Lynn Dee
There’s a book by Talia Lavin called Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy that came out about 5 years ago and covers a lot of the same territory although this J.C.. Cantwell’s tweets are, I assume, more up-to-date than Lavin’s book. OTOH, Lavin is also an excellent reporter and writer, so there’s that.
Cantwell’s observations about the factionalism in MAGA-world are very interesting but I don’t know what to make of his/her apparent belief that some of these people are poised to move into U.S. politics in a significant way. Kind of horrifying. Is that what Trump has ushered in — by trashing the place and creating a giant sucking vacuum? I don’t feel equipped at all to assess that. Heck — I never thought Trump would get elected.
But I do want to push back a little on this notion that Kirk was such a generational talent he had even Ezra Klein bamboozled. (Note: Actually, that was a commenter, not Cantwell.) After all, was Klein really that tough to bamboozle? For anyone who’s interested in another theory on that NYT piece Klein wrote seemingly lauding Kirk, Steve M. of No Mister Nice blog has one that sounds right to me. Excerpt and link follow:
Pretty simple, really, and it makes far more sense in my opinion than the notion that Kirk’s skills are such “even” Klein was fooled. Anywhere, here’s the link:
No More Mister Nice Blog: CHARLIE KIRK AND THE PRESUMPTION OF RIGHT-WING DECENCY
Splitting Image
It seems predetermined that the one who was best at code-switching was the guy who was going to get shot. Reactionaries don’t believe in the idea of saying the same thing in two different ways to two different audiences. If the words you use in two different venues are different, then one of the things you said must be a lie. A narcissist will naturally assume that you are lying to the other person (this is probably most right-wingers) but a paranoid person will naturally assume that you are lying to him. Add some guns and hunting experience and you have an assassination in the making.
I’ll be honest. I never thought Kirk was good at code-switching. To me he seemed to be basically a billionaire-funded weenie. But I hope Cantwell is correct about him being a generational talent, such as he was.
I suppose I wouldn’t be bothered if Kirk’s faction and Fuentes’ faction decide to go at it magazine and clip, as long as no one is caught in between.
JaySinWa
@Jay: Bluesky link to your quoted material bsky.app/profile/cwebbonline.com/post/3lyr5rlrlas2m in comment 1
That last bit about living three doors down is kind of confusing, but listening to the neighbor, she was talking about the shooter living three doors down from her, not from his parents.
Ten Bears
If these creatures put as much effort into doing something productive …
MattF
Agree that Kirk getting killed injects uncertainty into the MAGA future. There is no obvious successor to Kirk, so the ants will be teeming around the nest for a while.
Agree that Klein’s tongue-bath of Kirk is really rather amazing. Is Ezra really that dumb? Maybe!
Fuentes made a statement— he’s worried and may keep quiet for a while, what with actual bullets coming from an unexpected direction.
Jay
@Lynn Dee:
Sadly, it is a trait of much of the MSM that they will opine on a subject they know nothing about, and won’t do even basic research on.
I am Canadian, old, and I have known who Charlie Kirk was, for years.
Jay
@JaySinWa:
If you check his address, against his parents address, same.
Not even a B number to denote a separate basement suite.
cain
@Jay: Pretty sure his family will not stand for that kind of slander.
MattF
@Lynn Dee: Steve M’s post makes a lot of sense to me. But it would mean that Klein is very lazy and very stupid.
danielx
@Rusty:
I don’t know him except by reputation, but his reputation is deplorable.
Ishiyama
One of the features of living in a heavily propagandized society is the inability to distinguish truth from lies, and rumor from fact. The rulers may think that they are in control of the narrative, but assertions like the one about the Fuentes link to the Kirk shooting have a life of their own, true or not true.
Redshift
For what it’s worth, Philip Bump, data journalist formerly of the Washington Post, says that though this is widely believed in pundit circles, there no evidence this is true. His GOTV efforts never amounted to much, and there’s no real evidence he was responsible for much youth turnout for Trump.
Lynn Dee
@MattF: Or very lazy and very fixed in a mindset he’s not inclined to revisit. But yeah. Shocking to think someone writing for a major magazine or newspaper hadn’t heard at least one thing Kirk said that gave him pause.
Ramalama
@MattF: what if it’s now not Vance as successor but Speaker Pastor Johnson, third in line?
I mean technically Vance is next up, but
NotMax
@eclare
Same. I reached maximum Kirk fatigue days ago.
Lynn Dee
@Jay: For some reason your observation about the MSM made me think of Charlie Pierce’s periodic pieces written from the point of view of “Moral Hazard, the Irish setter owned for photo op purposes” by David Brooks. Seems like good times now ..
wjca
It might be useful to look at how the successions for Stalin and for Mao played out.
Any absolute god-king who doesn’t clearly lay out his successor is likely to leave a lot of nasty in-fighting in his wake. Of course, any clear designated successor instantly becomes a threat to lead a coup. About the only way to square that circle (albeit not a foolproif one) is the traditional one: family. See the Kims in North Korea.
Redshift
This also seems extremely dubious to me. Why is it “obvious” Kirk knew what was in the files, and that it would destroy Trump, especially when he’s survived multiple things that would have destroyed the career of any politician who wasn’t completely leaving in shame and willing to endlessly spew obvious lies?
More likely, Kirk was still on the Epstein files for the same reason Trump was when he was out of office – because it’s primo conspiracy material when you don’t know what’s in them, and no one else does either. And it’s what his audience wanted even if Trump didn’t, and he wasn’t beholden to Trump for his future prospects like so many others.
Makes me feel skeptical about the rest of it, especially since I’d like it to be true.
MattF
@Lynn Dee: IMO, neither Vance nor Johnson has the groyper vote. But I’m deeply ignorant about that and intend to stay that way.
Marc
It’s not so shocking when you consider that an upper middle class liberal white male might not consider much of what Kirk and others say all that concerning. They’re still part of the tribe after all.
Ken_L
America has lost its 50th President and all you people can do is argue about trivia. Now y’all will have to make do with another Trump. Eric? Junior? Lara? Well when you’re squirming under the lash, remember you could have had respectful debater President Kirk!
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Tony Jay
So Future Fuhrer got popped because Single, White Incel either didn’t download the latest mod to Groyper Wars: The Thickening, or did and thought it, like, totally didn’t remain true to the ethos of the community?
Okay then. That’s fine.
JaySinWa
@Jay: I didn’t phrase that well, She was not saying that the shooter lived three blocks away from his parents, but that she lived three blocks away from the shooter. That wasn’t clear to me from the cut and paste of the text.
I see the NYPost is going hard with a trans roommate story along with a bunch of claims about previous trans shooters I’ve never heard of other than one. Full on trans panic.
Matt McIrvin
Cantwell spins a really good story. It’s a little too neat.
JaySinWa
@Redshift: Yep, the claim that Kirk had to know stuff that it’s hard to believe he would have had access to, and know that that stuff would do in Trump is a hard sell. There’s a lot of stuff there that I would like to believe, but I don’t think this guy has got more than a theory.
@Matt McIrvin:
Ditto
ETA. This is a somewhat different form of hagiography for Kirk, imagining him as a larger than life figure.
Matt McIrvin
@JaySinWa: as for the trans panic, for all my differences with dsquared, his “don’t give known liars the benefit of the doubt” remains a good benchmark.
I an afraid the sheer volume of this is going to have a cumulative effect on people who should know better.
Matt McIrvin
@PJ: A while back Hank Green said he thought All This was humanity’s reaction to the destabilizing effect of a new communications medium, much as movable type led to the wars of the Protestant Reformation and radio created fascism. Were those mistakes? A lot of people died.
There’s a case to be made that, as Kurt Vonnegut said, humans were not meant to be lords of the universe and would have been better off as smaller-brained creatures like seals, but we don’t have control over that.
mrmoshpotato
@eclare:
LMAO! Right there with ya!
Viva BrisVegas
@Matt McIrvin: Evolution made us smart, but not quite smart enough.
Matt McIrvin
@JaySinWa: The world is just way more jumbled and chaotic than this. I don’t think we can ever see the next big thing that far in advance.
Geminid
I saw a picture of Mike Huckabee, U.S. Ambassador to Israel, welcoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio as he stepped off his plane at David ben Gurion Airport this morning. Rubio will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today.
A friend and and I were discussing Israel and its wars, and how much its behavior is due to systemic forces and how much to leadership. The answer is both, but there is room for what he called the “Miserable Man” theory of history: the idea that this world would be a better place without Trump, Putin and Netanyahu in power.
I had sent him an article by Israeli journalist Noga Tarnopolsky detailing Netanyahu’s sordid political history since the early 1990s, and how he’s been motivated by one over-arching goal: the prevention of a Palestinian state.
Tarnopolsky is best known for her short-form social media posts and interviews by TV sites such as France24 and the BBC, but she wrote a good essay for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. The title is, “Netanyahu’s Never Ending War,” and this is her conclusion:
The article is worth reading in full. This link *might* work:
https://iwpr.net/global-voices/netanyahus-never-ending-wa
Link works.
Daoud bin Daoud
I love seeing this kind of hawt Nazi-on-Nazi action. Go, boys, while we root for injuries!
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: The fact that so many countries (not just those) got their Miserable Men in this moment suggests to me that this isn’t so contingent on a specific personality emerging. The world will provide one.
Black_Onion
This looks like a very timely film coming out in October. I hope a lot of people see this.
ORWELL: 2+2=5
youtu.be/FGMEOdPxpWs
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Agree, although not just the new medium. There’s been rapid changes in a number of areas of life that have had a destabilizing effect. From black presidents to the nature of working to international trade to climate change.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: Good article — thanks for flagging it.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
“And some said even the trees had been a bad move, and no one should ever have left the oceans.” = Douglas Adams
lowtechcyclist
@PJ:
Absent the Web, we’d still have had Fox News plus all the other right-wing media on radio and cable.
Betty Cracker
Axios is echoing the NYP’s “transgender roommate” theory, citing “six sources familiar with the case.” As far as I can tell, that publication exists to peddle ad space to prospective government contractors, but it’s not clear to me how influential it is in DC.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
As always, we need to wait for solid confirmation one way or the other.
Media reporting anonymous sources are not credible.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: We’re a bunch of old fogies here and most of us grew up during the period of cultural dominance of broadcast TV, with regulatory features like the Fairness Doctrine. I think we tend to ignore what an unusual medium that was, and one that had its own worrying characteristics. Because analog TV takes up a lot of bandwidth in the electromagnetic spectrum, channels were a scarce resource (especially the VHF channels that were most desired in the analog days), and it took a fair bit of expensive infrastructure to get a TV station going. There was all this regulatory machinery in the US that was predicated on that for its legal justification. And it could certainly be, and was, used to perpetuate authoritarian government, since you had relatively few channels you needed to control.
When cable TV became widespread, that vastly increased the number of channels available, which weakened the “scarce resource” justification, and there was also a lot of deregulation that happened for purely political reasons. And the landscape changed, became much more chaotic. When you have 200 channels to choose from, there’s a much broader battle for attention.
Mo MacArbie
I hear what you’re saying, but consider that if the guy ever had dinner at Mar-a-Lago, he had access to things he shouldn’t know.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: Regardless of any factual basis for the story (and, as I said, don’t give known liars the benefit of the doubt–even the last “trans shooter” story turned out to be way more nuanced than the capsule summary), it’s despicable to roll it into a “trans murder ideology” narrative, real Der Stürmer stuff, like the way they used to compile long lists of crimes committed by Jews. I’m trying not to give it too much oxygen even in this comment.
I think one thing that helps it along is that most people our age aren’t used to knowing a lot of trans people in our daily lives, since we grew up in a world in which they were closeted–so the fact that someone even associates with a trans person seems like an incredibly signficant fact. Gen Zers are used to it, though.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I’m not drawing any conclusions myself, but it’s interesting (in a car crash looky-loo way) to watch how competing narratives develop in the media.
Not that the two events are in any way comparable in terms of national significance, but my mom was a teenager when JFK was shot. She told me it was shocking to see how the story changed from hour to hour and even more shocking that most people didn’t seem to notice that.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: The “trans shooter” scaremongering on the right is entering blood libel territory, IMO. I agree Gen Z has an entirely different perspective, and there are online subcultures they are familiar with that I find utterly inscrutable. The media framing leads me to believe most MSM reporters and editors are also in the dark about this stuff.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Daoud bin Daoud: I just worry about the fallout, and I’m hopeful that five thousand miles is beyond minimum safe distance.
Suzanne
I have had only an inkling of what goes on Over There, but I think we should all know much more. There is real danger over there and we don’t grok it. We should be aware and prepared. We’re engaged in our own intra-coalitional fights, but our own side is not the existential threat.
As for Ezra Klein, his big crime, in my mind, is that he has not been aware of the nature or the scale of the threats coming from the right. He is unaware and unimaginative. He doesn’t know his enemy. He is underestimating them.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: Yeah, like, I know a lot of gay people, and in fact have for a really long time, whether I knew it or not. Imagine it’s like 1982, Ronald Reagan is on the loose, Anita Bryant is out there doing her gay-hate thing, and I go off my nut and commit some heinous crime and people go poking into my background. “Ooh, he associated with known homosexuals” is probably going to come up even if it’s in no way relevant.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Those two things are not unrelated IMHO.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: “It takes a real genius to bamboozle Ezra Klein” is one of the weakest links in that story.
bjacques
@Tony Jay: so maybe it really is about the ethics of gaming journalism?
Betty Cracker
@Suzanne: You’re probably right that we should know more — forewarned is forearmed, etc., but I have to add I DON’T WANT TO! ;-)
Suzanne
@Baud: Agree. I see it a lot amongst my own people, and I see it here, too. We are focused on our own institutions and our own people. We concentrate on Newsom and Schumer and Jeffries and Mamdani, on what mainstream media is doing and saying, and meanwhile this whole other world is happening and we don’t really know about it. Mainstream media doesn’t know about it, they’re more mostly-nice-but-utterly-feckless people. Unlike many people here, I don’t think Ezra Klein is bad or evil. I think he’s fucken clueless. Most of us need to update our priors. It’s dark out there.
The nature of the media landscape, and especially social media, has broken us into subgroups and we don’t have much visibility into the other subgroups. That’s dangerous.
Princess
I mean, I know nothing but I think Cantwell is smart and I think they have their finger on what’s going on and what’s at stake, at least in the big picture. The way Kirk’s wife put her bid in to be the anointed successor when his body was barely cold is further testimony of everything Cantwell says.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
Actually, that assumption, that cable wouldn’t need the Fairness Doctrine because channels wouldn’t be scarce and a wide range of viewpoints would be represented, was baked in from the get-go.
That seemed to make a lot of sense at the time, but as we’ve found out since, the real problem is that people will tune into a single channel and never hear any contradictory information or viewpoints.
(I got to watch this from a worms-eye view as a paralegal on the FCC beat during the 1979-82 period, something I did for a few years after graduation because I didn’t know what the hell to do with a math degree other than be an actuary, and that sounded boring as shit. It’s probably more interesting that I gave it credit for, but I still wouldn’t want to be one.)
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
It’s probably no fun knowing when you’re going to die.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I thought we were your people. :’(
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker: Yeah, I don’t really want to, either. I know we have kids about the same age, and our kids are good people….. but I will note that even the small amount of visibility I have into their world has convinced me that it is much different from ours.
different-church-lady
What the fuck did I just read?
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Nominated.
Suzanne
@Baud: LOL, I meant my immediate family/friends/neighbors.
But all the Pantsless are my people.
mappy!
@Betty Cracker:
The MSM wasn’t any better when Kennedy was shot. I was in HS and hardly mature enough to sift through the narrative points that were thrown out hourly but I did understand that what was being pushed was mostly bullshit. MSM is attention getting noise, the point is to get your attention and keep it. Social media works the same way. The problem for MSM is that pushing too much BS turns the (immature) audience into perpetually not believing anything, except what they have to deal with in the checkout line maybe…
The grifters (MSM, political candidates, policy platforms etc., etc.) have a certain swarmyness about them, like a stain, a bad smell. It comes through, subtly. It turns.
Princess
@Suzanne: I’ve been talking to my kid about all this and he agrees. He’s about the youngest millennial he could be and Gen Z and the way they’ve been fully socialized on the internet terrified him. He thinks a lot of them — enough to do damage — have become dehumanized. We have to recall that the guy who killed those kids in Colorado was also from that toxic online Gen z white guy background.
I wish Kay were still here. She had some insights to this group from her own kids.
p.a.
The most stupid and vicious will be the most widespread, right? Earlier this week I posted the comparative news audiences of Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS,CNN. CNN was a non-factor. Each of the legacy 3 had bigger audiences than Fox; combined they, well “dwarfed” is too strong, but were much bigger. None of this happens without the legacies’ laziness or complicity. Maybe Fox’s 24/7 puke funnel makes a difference though.
Baud
@p.a.:
Fox is in synergy with Republican leadership. That’s where they get their power these days, combined with the fact that there’s no counter to them (as MSNBC showed with its firing of Dowd).
Betty Cracker
@Princess: I haven’t watched Mrs. Kirk’s video but heard it described in such a way that I will actively attempt to avoid ever hearing a word from her.
Kinda reminded me of Meghan McCain dragging her baby to a cemetery and propping her shitty book (that no one read!) on her father’s tombstone. That was peak tacky, I naively imagined at the time…
@Suzanne: 100%! I remember being impatient with my olds when the internet was a recent development, both marveling at and pitying their cluelessness. Now I envy them!
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: 200 channels and within a few years, 180 of them are running the same reality-TV chum because it’s the cheapest thing to produce.
prostratedragon
“Communication,” Slim Gaillard
Matt McIrvin
@Princess: Like I said before, my daughter’s friend group seem like fine people, but she makes a particular point of avoiding these troglodytes. I’d warned her about them to the point that it became eye-rolling.
(And it’s older folk who are, of course, giving them some directions. Steve Bannon was a fucking Boomer; the idiot tech lords are mostly Gen X. Milo Yiannopoulos is firmly Millennial, Charlie Kirk I guess was a younger Millennial. Fuentes is a little younger, I guess an older Gen Z technically.)
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
The fascists have taken advantage of the power vacuum among non-fascists. I just wonder how long the non-fascists can avoid engaging in the fight.
satby
There is, and I appreciate Anne Laurie’s attempts to inform readers here. Because those are the violent, gun-carrying nihilists that will keep society in chaos until that threat is taken seriously and dealt with. ISIS was just a bunch of Islamist kooks irritating their countries of origin once too.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
I dunno, it would be kinda fun to know what the 95% and 99% confidence intervals for when I was going to die have been at various points in my life.
I’d love to know when I can start going “nyaah, nyaah!” at them.
Another Scott
Interesting thread, AL.
I’m no expert on this stuff, and have no desire to become one.
But I’m reminded of Ralph Reed and how he was the rising star that had wow control and much power. He hasn’t gone away, but his day being future – top – of – the – heap power broker has clearly passed.
There’s too much money and power to be had riling up angry young white guys (and their hangers-on). Someone will replace CK. Will they be as good at the job? Dunno. But the history of US politics in the last 25 or so years shows us that races are often too close, tiny differences in a single election can have big effects for many years. And few people are really that irreplaceable (and the times are always changing) – sometimes good enough is good enough…
We need to do what we can to strengthen our team, push our agenda, build our messaging infrastructure, and push Truth, Justice, and the American Way at least as hard as we push specific policy proposals. Normies need to feel the righteousness of our side and we can’t be seen as mainly Not The Other Guys – otherwise NTOGs will push us out of office again after too short a period of trying to fix things…. [ sigh ]
Thanks again.
Best wishes,
Scott.
hueyplong
If something like a third of this shit turns out to be the case, I’m at a loss at how to imagine happy outcomes. Really difficult to conjure a scenario in which the posited level of malevolence turns only against itself. Dodging 80 years of potential nuclear miscalculation just to end up in this tawdry state is such a mean-ass effort by the screen writers that I’m tempted to walk out of the theater.
Shalimar
@MattF: Klein is friends with Matt and Liz Bruenig, and also Megan McArdle, all people with reprehensible views that he ignores because they socialize together. I assume he is being lazy by assuming Kirk was like his friends, but it is also possible he knew Kirk and liked him. All white guys who knew him seemed to like Charlie Kirk personally.
Another Scott
@Jay: I’m not an Illuminati-believer, but …
This riles up my Truthiness sensors.
(via nycsouthpaw on bsky)
Best wishes,
Scott.
suzanne
@satby: Agree. Anne Laurie is doing us a service.
I fear that we (liberals from moderate to progressive) are missing a lot. We don’t see it and thus are being distracted by smaller-ball stuff and yesterday’s problems.
Princess
I wouldn’t call Ezra Klein a Democrat or even a liberal. As a matter of principle, because he thinks it’s the right thing for a journalist (not) to do, he doesn’t vote. I think he remains very consciously non-aligned as a point of principle. Just because sometimes we might agree with him doesn’t mean he agrees with us. He’s not right wing or libertarian either. You can decide for yourselves whether you think that makes him a better journalist.
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker: Erika Kirk gonna make Megan McCain look like the classy one, by comparison.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
We’ve got at least that level of awareness of the other side – we know about Hegseth and RFK Jr. and Noem and Patel and Bongino and Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, as well as Trump and Vance and the nutcases in Congress.
But I agree that our knowledge has to go deeper. For instance, I’ve known for years who both Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes were, but not in all that much depth, and with next to no awareness about who their followings were and why.
The thing that bugs me is, this is their day job. This isn’t their hobby, avocation, or side hustle. American politics is something they should understand in depth – certainly in more depth than someone like me. Hell, they don’t even cover Trump’s insane tweets, let alone look at what someone like Charlie Kirk had actually been saying.
I mean, I get that their overlords don’t want Ezra and his friends to report on the true state of the American right, but how are they themselves not aware of that there is no ‘respectable right’ in any meaningful sense? That part is what boggles my mind.
suzanne
@Princess: He endorsed Elizabeth Warren in 2020, I believe. He has described himself as a liberal on his podcast. I have no reason to doubt that he’s liberal.
He’s just in a safe, cozy bubble.
Betty Cracker
@Princess: I distrust the studiously nonpartisan. It’s an act. IMO, the proper behavior for a journalist is to be aware of their own biases and keep reporting fact-based and opinions rooted in objective reality, as far as that can be determined. The view from nowhere doesn’t exist.
suzanne
@lowtechcyclist:
Because they only hang out with each other, they go to the same schools, they work for the same institutions, they prepare their work for the same kind of audience. They literally don’t get out much.
That is by no means an excuse, but it is a description, BTW.
lowtechcyclist
@suzanne:
This. I first became aware of Ezra in the mid-aughts, when I published an article titled “The Health of Nations” comparing various nations’ approaches to universal health care, and including our own VA in the comparison. It was pretty obviously taking the position that this was something we could and should have, and there were an array of ways to get there.
So yeah, he’s left of center, but in a cozy media-bubble sort of way.
suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: My argument here at BJ for many months is that the New York Times, NPR, etc. do not matter. It is a bunch of utterly clueless, nice, polite moderates speaking to an audience that is mostly a self-selected group of the same kind of people (who mostly vote for Democrats). They do not drive opinion and they do not accurately reflect the reality of contemporary political life. They are best used at the bottom of your bird’s cage.
Matt McIrvin
@suzanne: Attitudinally, that reminds me of the science-fiction novelist John Scalzi. I like Scalzi; I find his books entertaining if un-profound, a description he would heartily agree with. He’s always claimed to be a political independent, but he’s basically a liberal with liberal preferences and attitudes, which he has expressed in eloquent and moving essays.
But he also gives WAY too much intellectual and emotional respect “across the aisle” to right-wingers, probably because some of them are in his fan base. A lot of his readers were originally funneled to his blog and his work by Instapundit. He’s said nice things about McArdle and once gave a guest column on his blog to Theodore Fucking Beale (and soon came to regret it, because that miserable Nazi troll quickly became one of his most energetic enemies; I forget what the falling-out even was).
It’s a collection of attitudes I recognize from the early Internet. If you were a liberal on 1990s Usenet that kind of ecumenical rhetorical kindness was how you thrived. But I think it’s no longer tenable.
Chief Oshkosh
@MisterForkbeard:
Is lying not a sin in the Mormon church? Or did that one not make it onto their version of the 10 Commandments?
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: +1
If one wanted to construct some over-arching theory of assassins and mass shooters, the obvious place to start is young-ish white guys.
But even then, there are numerous infamous examples where that doesn’t work either.
Virginia Tech
2002 DC Snipers
2022 DC Sniper
and on and on.
Something something the exception proves the rule something something.
:-(
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I think it’s a very normal impulse among those of us who consider ourselves “educated” to want to treat the opposition as if they are arguing in good faith. Intellectual balance! Robust debate in the public square! It’s all very Aaron Sorkin-y!
It’s also naive as fuck.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: I might even disagree with the “young-ish” part. It’s *school* shooters that skew young, but that’s because young people are more likely to specifically shoot up schools. But I recall looking into the ages of the highest-body-count spree killers and realizing that a lot of them were middle-aged or even elderly. Mass shooting in general seems to be an older-skewing crime than murder in general. That may be in part because older people are more likely to have the weapons.
David Collier-Brown
Changing the subject to good news, a Nazi anti-immigration rally was outnumbered 10 to 1 by the counter-protesters yesterday in Christie Pits, Toronto
torontotoday.ca/local/policy/christie-pits-park-anti-immigrant-protest-11208589
In the ramp-up to WWII, Nazis attacked Jewish and Christian baseball players in Christie Pits and got beaten up. It’s only fair that the “Maple MAGA” gets the same.
See also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christie_Pits_riot
mappy!
There are facts. There are opinions. There are beliefs.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: Yeah but, the crazy monsters have always been out there and probably always will be. These days there are lots of people out there in the 6-sigma tails of the distribution. And it still only takes one or a few to change history.
I’m not sure what we can do about it, other than continuing to stress the importance of norms and the fact that, like it or not, we have to find ways to share this wet round rock we call home. And make our systems resilient enough that they don’t crumble when one or a few people try to break them.
The Anarchists. The Business Plot, etc, etc. :-(
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
suzanne
@Chief Oshkosh:
I see you’ve never heard of the LDS practice of “lying for the Lord“.
Matt McIrvin
@suzanne: There’s also a particular type of right-wing intellectual saboteur who specializes in exploiting the desire of liberals to engage in Sorkinesque good-faith debate. A lot of them write for the Atlantic.
suzanne
@Another Scott: All we can do about it is educate ourselves and be aware of the threat, and know the enemy. Ezra Klein isn’t the enemy, he’s just an oblivious idiot. (Many such cases.) Solutions may reveal themselves. They may not.
suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I’ll have to take your word for it. I read something out of the Atlantic maybe once a quarter? They’re another one of those places that has always struck me as nice, clueless moderate liberals writing for other nice, clueless moderate liberals. Not interesting or revealing of anything.
There’s a lot of useful idiots out there.
planetjanet
So I had randomly heard the term “groyper” before, but did not associate it with Nick Fuentes. The factionalism amongst right-wingers is not surprising. There is an arrogance that endemic to the them and they clearly forsake the common good. The irony does seep out that Kirk’s last words were gang violence. That is exactly what it looks like.
Bupalos
@Lynn Dee: This strikes me as a kind of “I don’t like him so he must be stupid” wishcasting. Ezra thinks Kirk was “doing it right” because Kirk was doing what Ezra was doing. These are fellow travelers who are more similar in the freakish lives they lead to each other than to practically anyone else. It takes an inordinate myopic overemphasis on the particular political ideology that sits aside the political entertainment to miss that Kirk and Klein (and for that matter Shapiro and JD Vance etc etc) are in some of the most important ways simply the same.
RevRick
@PJ: The late French philosopher, sociologist, and lay theologian, Jacques Ellul asserted that the idolatry of our time is what he labeled Technique. It stems from the fact that if a technology is possible, we will create it, but never stop to ask if it is good.
He further asserted that if the technology is created, it will inevitably be exploited by the powerful to shape and control the masses.
The internet and social media, in particular, are cases in point. We think that we use them, but in reality, they use us. Without us being fully aware, they shape how we see the world.
As a thoroughgoing Calvinist, Ellul critiqued the Church for falling under the sway of technique. It has manifested itself in the ways that the Church has often become an instrument of the powerful, either by its blessing of such things as slavery or nation states or by its silent acquiescence to such worldly manifestations.
If he were alive today, he would see the pattern repeated in churches’ attempt at branding or in becoming mere entertainment packages. In doing so, the Church has sold out it’s only reason for being: the Gospel of the Cross, which declares that God rejects all technique, instead proclaiming weakness, vulnerability and mutuality as the source of true human flourishing.
lowtechcyclist
@suzanne:
The flaw with that is, most people who pay at least some attention to politics and are outside the right-wing bubble want an overview of the news from somewhere. Even if they don’t get it from the FTFNYT, they’re likely getting it from some news site or whatever that’s influenced by the FTFNYT both in terms of what non-local news they cover, and how they cover it.
Sure, that group mostly votes for Democrats, but it’s also going to include those people who still believe one can be above political affiliation and vote the candidate, not the party.
And they also create a permission structure for persons who lean Democrat who don’t like a particular Dem candidate to not vote in a race: if you believe the GOP is fundamentally sane, well it’s OK to not vote for Kamala Harris if she rubs you the wrong way because they’ll keep a check on Trump even if he wins.
So I very much believe they matter, particularly in their normalization of Trump as well as the GOP in general.
Another Scott
@Lynn Dee: Thanks for the pointer.
There are only so many hours in the day, and stuff that Must Be Done always gets carried over into the next. While I understand Susanne’s argument, and appreciate her different circumstances having little ones while I don’t, Division of Labor is a good thing, and I appreciate it when others do it well.
Hours we spend researching the nuances of the other team is hours that we’re not spending advancing our interests and policies and teams.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
zhena gogolia
@lowtechcyclist: Absolutely.
Uncle Cosmo
IIRC (can’t find it ATM) some wag said of a GOP politician (I think it was 1944/1948 Presidential candidate Tom Dewey) that you had to get to know him really well to really dislike him.
Vance must buy** his Preparation H by the tank car for all the time Peter Thiel’s hand has been jammed so far up his arse its fingers operate all four extremities and the mouth.
** More likely Thiel buys it for him…
Telsiree
The shooter fled the scene and what was his first, burning desire?
He hopped onto Discord to chat with his buddies and share spicy memes about the FBI manhunt for himself.
An entire generation of young men have grown up in this Internet gamer brainrot, and there is not a single legacy media platform that has a reporter on that beat. Instead there’s stupid articles like “What is Discord?” or “What is a Groyper?” when these terms and platforms are at least eight years old, which is forever in Internet-land.
I know nobody feels like they have the time to parse the layers of cosplay irony and epistemological collages that compose peoples’ young minds today. But any future Democratic administration, if there ever is one, is going to have to avoid “cringe” and speak in gamer memes in order to get a single vote from the iPad kid generation.
suzanne
@lowtechcyclist:
This group is, unfortunately, smaller than I think we estimate. From what I observe of even the politically aware people I know who are younger than I am, they do not read any publications or watch any TV news. Everything is podcasts or streamers, very little of it is “journalism” as we would understand it.
Betty Cracker
@Telsiree: Good points.
@suzanne: I think you’re right about collapsing media consumption. What’s not clear to me is how much information (and framing) from legacy outlets inform the livestream/podcast discussions that are breaking through with people who never read the original sources.
suzanne
@Telsiree:
SuzMom, who is, like, Peak Nice Old Liberal Lady, watches and reads a ton of legacy media. MSNBC, CNN, NYT, etc. Like, she probably averages two hours of content per day. I mentioned in the car the other day that Robinson is a Groyper, and she had never heard that term before. I ended up explaining it to her, and she had never heard of 4chan, Discord, or Andrew Tate, either. She had heard of Nick Fuentes but couldn’t describe who he was other than a vague memory that he is terrible. The legacy media is out of touch and not informative. They are circle-jerking amongst themselves and a self-selected readership.
OGliberal
@Suzanne: Ezra has been in this game too long – he knows better. But he knows the crap he wrote is the the exact centrist shit NYT editors and publishers drool over and he wanted it published there because it’s still the NYT. If anybody is evil, it’s the NYT publishers/top editors…but we already knew that.
suzanne
Here’s something I learned on Xhitter, not from any media source:
Snarki, child of Loki
@Mo MacArbie: ” if the guy ever had dinner at Mar-a-Lago, he had access to things he shouldn’t know.”
Especially if Kirk did some “bathroom reading”.
suzanne
@OGliberal: I actually don’t think Ezra knows better, though he absolutely should. I think a lot of centrist-y/moderate liberal types have a lot of denial and delulu.
Bupalos
@OGliberal: I really don’t think Ezra was just writing for acceptance by the times there. I think it’s what he really feels, based on the very deep ways in which he and Kirk are similar people.
Now the kind of intellectual gloss he gives it, that this similarity is primarily embodied in free speech and persuasion and hearing out the other side…. that I think is his own brain twisting himself into knots and squeezing it into the shape of his heart
And also, since this line sounds like an anti-Ezra polemical: Klein also happens to create a lot of very valuable and thoughtful work.
different-church-lady
@suzanne:
Now that’s nominated!
artem1s
The GOP is doomed mostly because all the various factions they’ve been relying on to win elections never really had any loyalty to the brand. What they and the rest of the world wasn’t prepared for was how quickly those factions were willing to shift their loyalty to another brand and turn against their creators. But of course The Federalist Society created and let loose the ‘Tea Party’ so they shouldn’t have been at all surprised. That faction was groomed for the express purpose of killing a health care plan the FS/ GOP created in Mass and intended to implement nationwide under W or his successor. They lost control of the legislation and the brand when the Dems co-opted RMoneyCare as ACA aka Obamacare. They could have embraced ACA once it was law and used it to privatize medicare/medicaid on the down-low like they always intended with RMoneycare. But instead made it a public and violent war against the Democratic Party and what’s left of The New Deal.
I appreciate the nod to history in this Groyper war narrative. But they’ve missed a pretty salient point IMO. Rohm and his Brownshirts were killed not because they were a threat to Hitler, but because the violence was becoming politically inconvenient. Hindenburg was ready to declare martial law. The Night of the Long Knives gave Hitler credibility that he and the Nazi’s could be a legitimate leaders. And not just a gang of street thugs. It was Goebbels who shifted the party’s brand to ‘protecting’ Real Germans and MGGA. The violence was still there but the part of the Nazi party that wielded propaganda machine took over.
In the Stupid Hitler timeline of course Orangemandius and his lackey’s have gotten it all backwards. The GOP doubled down on guns and violence against everyone, everywhere, all the time. Stupid Hitler has let ICE and the NG loose in DC, LA, and CHI. The GOP doubled down on Know Nothing and Do Nothing Congresses. And unlike Hitler rejected any form of infrastructure improvement or scientific research. They had their own failed Beer Hall Putsch and instead of sacrificing the Proud Boys and other violent J6 insurrectionists, they gave them pardons and continued to encourage everyone, everywhere to always resort to 2nd Amendment Solutions to all their problems. Moses Johnson has been desperately trying re-spin the Compassionate Christian Conservative schtick and failing spectacularly. Kirk’s brand was an attempt at using Rational Conservatism (look, my hatred is backed up by science – surely we can all agree that x needs to be dealt with by locking them all up or if there are deaths, that’s sad but a necessity, yes?). Keeping the the Gun Nut lobby vote meant he had to make unfortunate concessions to the ammosexual factions.
Now the Stupid Hitler Youth have assassinated the likely heir apparent to Trump, MAGA and the conservative, white nationalist Christian movement. They’ve had 40-50-60 years to reverse course on the violent rhetoric. But they chosen Rohm over legitimate governing. Again.
frosty
Splitters!
OT: I just got back from an 80-mile offshore pelagic bird cruise. No cell service, no internet access for 24 hours. It was heaven! I may have to unplug like that again.
ETA for any of you twitchers: 10 new lifers: Storm-petrels, Shearwaters, and a Jaeger.
Princess
@suzanne: I don’t think Klein endorsed Warren in 2020. He’s not in her list of endorsers. He did write an article for Voc on the case for Warren’s candidacy, which I can’t read. But Vox published a thing on the best case for each Dem candidates candidacy written by different people. I wouldn’t call that an endorsement.
apocalipstick
@Ramalama: Nope. Speaker Parson Johnson offers zero rizz and entertainment value, and a big part of tRump’s appeal to MAGA is the showbiz of it all.
different-church-lady
So here we are watching the media try to turn this into bizzaro-world MLK, and now it turns out it’s more bizzaro-world Malcom X.
brendancalling
@MattF: I don’t think he’s *stupid*, but I do think he didn’t do his homework. I’ve been calling Ezra “David Brooks Jr” (Bobo Jr for the terminally online). Unfortunately, admitting you got something wrong is verboten (especially at our legacy media, and especially at the FTNYT), so it’s gonna sit there forever, like a grease stain on his favorite tee shirt.
I don’t agree w/Atrios on a lot, but he nailed it when yesterday when he said Charlie Kirk was a dumb thing for Ezra to ruin his cred over.
different-church-lady
@artem1s: I dunno about anyone else, but I could use the pace of the doom to pick up significantly.
Miss Bianca
@different-church-lady: OMG – my favorite take yet!
Another Scott
@artem1s: Interesting.
I think a big part of this current political dynamic is – the GQP is always throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks so that they can find the memes to win the next election. Communists in the State Department? Kinder Gentler? Flag Burning? Contract With America? Ebola? Balanced Budget Amendment? Immigrant Caravans? Tax Cuts? Bush Kept Us Safe? Medicare Part D? Party of the Working Family? We love Billionaires and the Kennedys? Undisclosed foreign and billionaires’ money being dumped into our politics the part is the American Way? Activist Judges are a Good Thing? And on and on…
They have no beliefs that they won’t throw overboard if they think it will let them win the next election.
They hitched their fortunes to 47 not because they actually believe all the stupid stuff he says, but because they think their voters are stupid and because they think they have to support him to win their primaries. That’s it; and that part of representative democracy is an inherent danger. The belief in the stupidity of their voters will remain, until proven otherwise…
Grr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Shalimar
@suzanne: People who consume traditional media and actually recognize Fuentes’ name are probably remembering the one time he had a major spotlight: that 2023 dinner at Mar-a-Lago where he went with Kanye to eat with Trump. The initial media focus was on how awful Fuentes is, before Kanye stole the entire spotlight with antisemitic bullshit.
apocalipstick
@Shalimar: After all, it’s all just a show, it’s all just bidness, innit?
iKropoclast
And what obligations are those? Christ, these people…
apocalipstick
@Princess: And he’s not a journalist, he’s a guy building his own little media empire.
Ramalama
@apocalipstick: Yeah zero rizz for sure. But he got in fairly easy, didn’t he, for Speaker?
Geminid
@Suzanne: One good– and bad- thing about Twitter is that it makes it easy to find about about Groypers. For instance, I just looked up “Nick Fuentes Twitter” and got his account.
I’ve done it before. Fuentes doesn’t Tweet a lot. Typically he just boosts upcoming podcasts, and saves his substantive arguments for them. Today, though, he was vehemently protesting how he was being “framed” as the intellectual author of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Fuentes was also beefing with Candace Owens.
The action is the comments. That’s a talkative bunch, and Twitter makes it easy to follow them to their home accounts where they repost other influencers like Fuentes but not as well known. One rabbit hole leads to another, except it’s more like prairie dog town that extends nationwide.
I don’t think Groypers are that numerous in total. I would describe them as a shallow movement, spread thinly in demographic terms. But a lot of the energy comes from a deep and powerful source. That would be anti-Semitism, or the fear and hatred of Jewish people.
Soapdish
Just a reminder that collaborators *will* turn you in, so be very careful with your online presence.
cnn.com/2025/09/13/business/charlie-kirk-death-fired-comments
Another Scott
ICYMI, I think that Kevin Kruse’s take on this CK meda thing is a good one.
FWIW.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Librettist
Trumpism is down market Reaganism on its way out to entropy. The stochiastic violence arises as ruling coalitions come apart.
suzanne
@Princess: That Vox piece, which you can read if you use archive.ph, closes with this:
It’s not a formal endorsement, perhaps, but it’s by no means something that a right-winger would write.
suzanne
@Geminid: I think social media is driving legacy media at this point. Legacy media thinks it drives social media via retweets and the like, but I don’t think that’s accurate any longer.
Elon Musk is many things, but he isn’t stupid.
lowtechcyclist
@RevRick:
I dunno, to me it seems more basic than that. The Church has for seventeen centuries been where Constantine left it, and only occasionally (and only here and there, even then) remembers its reason for being. Certainly being baptized and confirmed in the Presbyterian church and spending five years attending an Episcopal school never gave me much of a sense of the faith’s reason or purpose – it took something Other for that to happen.
To me, that’s less an idolatry of Technique (I’m not sure I quite grasp the intended meaning though) or of anything else, rather than churches’ floundering around in the absence of a clear sense of purpose. The tools they reach for in that floundering may be contemporary, but the absence and the floundering are ongoing.
George
@Suzanne:
I completely agree with what you and Baud have written. I took a break from this blog weeks ago because I got tired of the frequent complaints about the imperfections of various elected Democrats, as if having a perfect politician in a liberal democracy were even possible. Meanwhile the mainstream media continue to, at best, play the “both sides” game and at worst provide hagiographies for uneducated halfwits like the one who got shot in Orem, and the rightwing continues to descend into a pit of counterfactual hatred.
The rightwing response to the shooting prior to the white, conservative Mormon kid being arrested should provide anyone who believes in liberal democracy with a good idea of where we are headed. Sane people can either choose to prepare for what we will be facing from the rightwing, or can continue to whinge about meaningless differences among allies.
piratedan
as far as GOP factionalism is concerned, Kirk was their Venn Diagram overlap piece…
he actually worked and earned his grift with the building of Turning Point USA. He worked on building an organization from College Campuses, focusing on white youth. So In that respect, he did build that (yes, its a Nazi building, but he went out there found his funding and put in the time).
He stated evil, nasty shit, but he dressed well, presented himself as a more or less RW Mr. Rogers as he garnered power and influence.
So in that respect, he was media palatable. When you consider the wide array of icky that exists on the Right (Miller, Bannon, Fuentes, D’Souza) for people looking for someone to identify with, he fits that bill.
so I can see where the idea that because he was not cooked up in one of the Heritage Foundation ovens may have given him a sense of relatable authenticity for those disaffected type looking for what they hope to believe in.
With that Jenga piece out of the puzzle, it sure looks even more unstable than it was previously.
Kathleen
@MattF: Lazy and stupid are required skills for NYT pundits.
zhena gogolia
@OGliberal: We just had a sermon that centered on Klein’s message. IN A POSITIVE WAY. I am so furious.
ETA: We were being lectured about how we have to settle our differences peacefully, as if a DEMOCRAT OR A LEFTIST KILLED HIM
Ruckus
@Ten Bears:
Ohe problem is, they think they are.
Glidwrith
@Betty Cracker: Two observations:
1) For myself, keep it simple: these assholes ARE assholes and have to signal to each other that they are assholes. So, expressing bigotry, misogyny or homophobia is a safe bet that all three are present and therefore assholery can be assumed.
2) Symbols: I try to keep up with the asshole signals, whether it’s Pepe the Frog, Punisher skulls or black US flags. These people know their ideas are hated, so they always try to code their signals.
There isn’t anything original here. These are hatreds as old as humanity. I look for what marginalized folks have done in the past to fight the assholes and try to learn from them.
Kathleen
@Betty Cracker: Like your mother I, too, was a teenager and agree 100%. My father, who was a history major who kept abreast with current news about radical right including J. Edgar Hoover’s extreme politics was convinced right wing had JFK killed and Hoover was complicit. The constant changes in the story as it unfolded fueled that suspicion and Ruby’s murder of Oswald was the final confirmation for him.
YY_Sima Qian
Still more fallout from the ICE raid primarily targeting South Korean engineers & specialists at the Hyundai/LG factory in Georgia:
Harrison Wesley
It’s horrible that somebody had to be murdered before I found out what a “Groyper” actually was. Prior to last week I thought it was some sort of Dutch codpiece.
Kathleen
@mappy!: Yup. I agree. A lot of the Oswald story line they pushed was proved to be dodgy from the beginning,
Ramalama
@YY_Sima Qian: Jesus.
Bupalos
One thing that is really eye-opening for me and making me think about our media culture here is the following:
Practically every one of dozens and dozens of reports on the bullet shell engravings say, to varying degrees, that two of them at least suggest “anti-fascist” sympathies. In context, these claims are just false. They report that one of engravings said “catch this, fascist.” It actually said “catch this, fascist [series of arrows.] This phrase and arrow controller movement comes from Hell Divers 2, an ironically anti-fascist computer game, and it’s the control for dropping a huge bomb. They report that another referenced an Italian anti-fascist song. But the current meaning of this song in the actual context (the culture of a terminally online 22 year old) has nothing to do with anti-fascism, it currently circulates as a prominent element of another computer game, a Netflix series, and shows up on an official Groyper playlist. Claiming it as an anti-fascist anthem is as silly as claiming the swastika as a primarily a good-luck symbol. The kid isn’t from 1940’s Italy or ancient India. He’s from online. The depth of this confident ignorance from the media is shocking if not surprising.
Kathleen
@lowtechcyclist: Agree 100%
different-church-lady
@suzanne: There’s a major difference between cunning and smart.
Kathleen
@Uncle Cosmo: Alice Roosevelt Longworth also supposedly said he looked like the little man on the wedding cake.
PJ
@RevRick: Thanks for bringing Ellul to my attention. There’s a lot of wisdom in what you wrote.
One thing that has driven me crazy over the last 30 years is that whenever some new tech is introduced, whether it’s a device or an app or blockchain or crypto or whatever, the media always buys into the VC/Silicon Valley hype that this wonderful new technology will change the world for the better, as if the people selling it actually cared about any outcome besides making themselves wealthier and more powerful. Unfortunately, these things too often do change us, and often enough for the worse (or if there is a benefit, there is also a real danger.)
PJ
@OGliberal: Ezra Klein, as has been oft mentioned here, wants to be the David Broder of his age, the guy who hobnobs with the powerful and, whether deliberately, or because he is too stupid to recognize the truth about himself and the actual situation of the world, promotes whatever view will give them more power or, at a minimum, maintain the status quo. I do believe he actually believes he is smarter than everyone else (while his powerful friends know he is an easy mark), and that because Charlie Kirk was cordial to him personally and went about spreading hate and bigotry in a relatively polite manner, he was a decent guy who deserves to be lauded.
Will
@Bupalos: Ummm, Helldivers 2 is ironically anti-fascist, but that joke goes over 90% of the playerbase’s heads. You literally play as authoritarian humans under “managed democracy” that is “liberating” the galaxy from the commie bots and tyrannical bugs.
different-church-lady
@Will: Oh. In other words, a Starship Troopers ripoff.
different-church-lady
@PJ:
That’s because the media has transformed themselves into mere functionaries in a PR machine.
Will
@different-church-lady: Pretty much, except they don’t consider it a rip off so much as an inspiration. The game is filled with gags from the Starship Troopers movie like those crazy news reels of “Would You Like To Know More?”
The game was made by Swedes who I think are probably better equipped educationally to understand the inside joke. For a lot of their American consumers though, I think the joke and the fact the original Starship Troopers was a movie making fun of military jingoism goes over most of their heads.
Citizen Alan
No, he’sjust a kapo.
Citizen Alan
@Viva BrisVegas: I’ve often considered the possibility that intelligence is an adverse evolutionary trait that will probably bring about the extinction of our species eventually.
dnfree
@SpaceUnit: I have bags like that. I carry them in my car “glove compartment” and whenever I fly, because sometimes I need them on short notice. They’re great!
Citizen Alan
Utah’s governor is a conservative, and conservatives don’t consider any loss of human life worth discussing, unless it could be used to slander liberals.
dnfree
@Betty Cracker: Pogo (or someone in the strip) once said something like “He who is forewarned is forearmed, and he who is forearmed is half an octopus.”
dnfree
@Princess: My daughter and granddaughter (late forties and late teens, respectively) showed me the speech by Kirk’s wife because they thought it was chillingly calculated and insincere.
The Unmitigated Gaul
@mappy!: Was this really the case? I remember it as a period of utter confusion, especially when Ruby shot Oswald. Things like Oswald’s defection to the USSR and then his return, and his links to Cuba, were intriguing facts rather than the basis for conspiracies. It was quite a long time – months? years, even? – before the plot theories began to trickle out. Or have I got that wrong?
Paul in KY
@PJ: Agree.
Telsiree
@suzanne:
Someone on Bluesky that I can’t recall, sadly, described the current MSM as “cosplay journalists.” And I was struck by that because I think that sums up where we are.
Anyone you see on TV, Youtube, Tiktok, is just an actor. An actor following a script and going for a certain take. If you get the wrong take, you just edit it out. Its the final culmination of Neil Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves To Death.”
That’s why acting genuine or real or empathetic with the current generation gets you labeled as “cringe.” Cringe is the new cheugy. Anyone honest, idealist, earnest, conciliatory, or just plain nice like Mr. Rogers is now “cringe.”