Pushed To The Edge

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I slept very badly and had strange dreams. I don’t know if one of them was the memory of when Mom saved my life or if it’s just what was in my head this morning, a distillation of our troubles.

That saving my life thing happened when demonstrations against the government were forbidden, and mom and I (of course) were still going to them. You’d get a notice through the phone grapevine (probably why our phone was tapped, tbh) and pass it on, and you’d be there at the right time and place.

That one was not the one where I ended up inadvertently, because I’m too stupid to run, facing machine guns. It was the one that actually makes sure I dive under parked cars if I’m very tense and a car backfires nearby. Imagine a packed plaza — packed, shoulder to shoulder, many more people than you’d expect — The plaza is hemmed in between tall buildings of 19th century vintage. The bottom floor is retail and banks and cafes and the like. The upper floors were usually either offices or really weird hole in the wall shops that couldn’t afford the floor level. Later on, when I was in college, I frequented an art materials store that was in the upper floor of one of those. The further up you went the shabbier the buildings became, and of course unguarded (and often empty.)

So there we are, and speakers are speaking. I don’t remember about what, because I wasn’t listening. I was there to show that people disliked the regime (I don’t remember precisely which, but I think that was the six months the Maoists had hold of power.) And then there were really LOUD pops. Well, NOT pops. I don’t know how to describe it. It was machine gun fire, but to me it sounded like a giant coughing. Or a series of backfires. I’d never heard it before, so I couldn’t place it. Like hearing a foreign language, you can’t transcribe it.

What happened, and I didn’t know: People had fired on the densely packed crowd from the upper floors of the buildings. Six people (random people, probably) went down.

What I knew is that there were screams ahead, and then people were running. In a vast crowd.

The geography of that plaza has changed, at least in how you get out of it. Though there are now subway stairs roughly where this was. So, the plaza’s bottom (literally as the landscape is hilly and you climbed up to the top of the plaza) was a crossing of four VERY busy streets. At some point probably early 20th century it was decided crossing those streets there was dangerous, and an underground tunnel going four ways underneath was created. It was forbidden crossing up top. (Yes, I did it sometimes, later, when I was in college, because the underground passage became dangerous after dark. More dangerous than the traffic. But that’s different.) So everyone had the trained in reflex of heading for the stairs.

I was young and stupid and also — this is important so mind me — not thinking at all. I was in fact part of a panicking herd. Mom wasn’t. She had seen some stuff, probably well before I was born.

I found myself running in the crowd. I was wearing flip flops, a mistake I never made again, in that kind of expedition. Someone stepped on one, and I was trying to pull my foot free against the press of the crowd. This is when mom reached in, grabbed me, and pulled me to standing flat against the wall of a bank. (With one bare foot.) The crowd ran past us. (Here I want to consider mom was almost a head shorter than I, so pulling me by force was a feat.) She was speaking at me, but I only remember “NEVER run with a panicked crowd.” Weirdly for mom she wasn’t shouting, and she wasn’t mad. It was kind of a monotone, to be honest.

Six people were shot that day. But dozens (I want to say over thirty) were trampled and either died or were seriously injured, particularly on the stairs to the underground passage.

Why I told you this long and involved story. Because it was in my mind. Because it’s what’s happening…. well, mostly to the left. They’re running in a panicked, unthinking herd.

And the reason it’s happening mostly to the left is not a reflection on THEM. Yes, many of them lack morals (and I don’t mean sexual morals. Give yourself a bonk on the head for that.) They were never taught that hurting others is never licit unless it’s in defense or…. well, the concept of just war. Yesterday I read a whole article on why stealing was bad that never said “because it is wrong.” They were NEVER TAUGHT. A lot of them try to be good people anyway, stumbling and blind as they are left. And they are no more stupid than you and I.

It’s just that the personality types that gravitate right or left are DIFFERENT. Because the schools, the media and even entertainment have pushed the leftist/Marxist line for … well, since my parents were little. (Though they weren’t here. That was worldwide.) Most of the West tried to “fight communism” by going halfway there philosophically. It didn’t work. DUH.)

This means that the leftists tend to be “the good boys and girls.” OR if you prefer, those who go along with authority, with group opinion, with the perceived “good” people. (And perceived is the point.) They either can’t or won’t stand out and say “this is wrong.” On top of it, for four generations now, their leaders have been selected by “parrots the party line” which means even those at the nominal top are very susceptible to social pressure.

They’re highly social and agreeable people.

Because of the conditions growing up, the right by and large (neither side is absolute, because we’re human and humans are complicated) chose for “disagreeable” and “Stubborn” and “Doesn’t go along.” Which, btw, is why America is the only country just about with a “more freedom” right in ANY numbers, and probably a vast majority, because I suspect genetically we were chosen from the stubborn cusses. Either ourselves or out ancestors.

So we tend to examine everything, and sometimes be against what the herd is doing because “you and what army?” and not rationally at all.

Why this matters? Because the left is under a barrage of the MOST evil propaganda known to men. The sort of propaganda — EXACTLY THE SAME — that Nazis and Soviets used. Or North Korea, if you prefer.

We in the west were told — or at least I was — that propaganda was evil in war. We don’t any longer have propaganda against even our enemies. Heck, we’re so desperate to be fair, we’re practically giving hagiographical treatment to the mad Mullahs just to avoid propaganda.

But the first time I went through the KC WWI museum, in 2019, reading the exhibits on propaganda and how nasty and bad it was, I thought “It sounds like what the left says about us.”

That was 2019. It’s gotten markedly worse. As the media-industrial complex loses their grip, they amp up the propaganda and fear mongering and screaming and inventing COMPLETELY UNTRUE THINGS REPEATED AT MAX VOLUME about their ideological enemies, aka the right, aka you and me and any poor sod to the right of Lenin.

Yes, I read the would be shooter’s manifesto and it’s crazy crap. The sort of thing foreign trolls post on twitter. Stuff about Trump being a pedo (completely not just unsubstantiated, but provably, demonstrably wrong. For one, if he were, the left would have found it in 16 and screamed it from the roof tops) and stuff about him being a rapist (again insanity.) All of it stuff we laugh at on Twitter, and which runs rampant on Bluesky (Which I will forever pronounce Blooskee, because when I first saw it I thought “soviet.”)

The thing to understand is that this is designed. By whom I don’t know, though I have guesses, and some of the guesses are the experts: Russia and China. (Some are more… local. Those who eat their bread and take their salt, some of them in positions where this makes them traitors, yes.)

This is highly sophisticated propaganda and is hitting hard with a segment of the public. A SMALL segment. I’d estimate no more than 10%. Probably no more than 1/4 of which will be moved to any sort of action.

The people this is hitting hardest are mostly seniors. The same ones that lost their minds on COVID and might still be wearing masks. (And G-d forgive them for having made a substantial part of my mom’s last years a panic driven fear time, where she called me crying because I wouldn’t take the vaccine. G-d forgive them because I’m having trouble doing it.) The seniors are susceptible because a lot of them are lonely and live in front of the TV or, like my parents, the same people who had no TV until I was 8, have a tv on in every room for noise and company. Forget that TV news and entertainment was always left-slanted and often totally insanely so. They don’t know that. And it’s hard to convince them, because they trusted these sources all their lives. To them these are still the respectable sources.

The other day while having dinner we were exposed to a senior ranting about how evil Trump was, rounding up and shooting random dark skinned people, and how we had extermination camps, and… I finally snapped, and in my highly accented voice started talking at Dan very loudly. I won’t go there for a while, because it was DISGRACEFUL, but in my defense he started it. When he hit the thing about Butler being “Trump hired the shooter” I lost my frigging mind, and started screaming about ballistics, which finally caused Dan to stop cringing in embarrassment and laugh out loud and say something about it not being people’s fault if they were dumber than dirt, and “calm down honey.” Eventually the people at the man’s table shut him up.

He’s not a big danger, though G-d knows, some seniors are spry enough. But he didn’t look it, and maybe I should have shut up. Except I couldn’t. Because it was THAT insane.

The other people heavily affected are this would-be-shooter’s demographic. They might be infected by mass media, but mostly they’re being infected by “influencers”, you tubers, social media, and yes, Blooskee where they amplify the fear mongering to hell and back.

Forget that there is a married gay guy in the administration, or that the VP’s wife tans much darker than I. Their echo chamber tells them that Trump is “just like Hitler” which in the bastardized version of reality they LEARNED IN SCHOOL makes perfect sense. Because Hitler’s sins didn’t come from putting the state in charge of everything and plundering a minority to feed his state-beast that eventually went ravening, because socialism always does. His sin was not propaganda convincing normal and NICE Germans that Jews were naturally intrinsically evil and must be destroyed. No, in the version they learned, Hitler just disliked people who tanned. (Nothing about the alliance with Arabs, for instance.) And was for law and order and “militaristic.” These maleducated victims of propaganda therefore see everything through that lens.

And because Hitler disliked (some) gays (Not the SS, of course, in lust with each other and their mommies.) they have decided that Trump is coming for them. This is old. They expected Bush to come and round up gays. IT NEVER MADE A WHIT OF SENSE. But it’s repeated and drummed up in the fever swamps of their hang outs and their thought bubble.

Now they honestly think the round up of gay and trans people has started. WITH NO ONE TO POINT AT. Just rumors and “a friend of a friend.” IOW expert propaganda.

Ginna Carrano was absolutely right. The same type of Hitler-esque propaganda is being deployed against a majority of the country that the Nazis deployed against the Jews. The kind of propaganda that makes otherwise quiet and sane people hate a minority so much they want to kill them all like animals.

Now, it won’t work here, because WE’RE NOT THE MINORITY. Even if the left thinks we are. But that just means it will keep ratcheting up.

Trump is either the luckiest son of a bitch to ever stand in front of a microphone, or G-d has His hand over him. Which is weird, because no, he’s not a saint. But G-d chooses the weirdest instruments. (Read up on King David, if you haven’t.)

But not only have there been three attempts now, you can expect there will be more. And if you are a praying kind, you should pray, and pray very constantly that THEY DON’T SUCCEED. Because if they do, the backlash will be like the nightmares that they’re whispering about now. And a lot of people under the onslaught of propaganda and believing it are not bad people. In fact, my friends, they ARE the good boys and girls, salt of the Earth, just workaday people, whatever their quirks.

Other than praying, I’m going to ask you to do something very difficult. I’m going to ask you to tactfully (as much as possible) talk to your friends under the onslaught and buying into it about the real situation. About the fact that they’re being manipulated, that the people manipulating them are NOT their friends. They’re not the friends of anyone decent. They are in fact our enemies and want us all dead.

Which brings me to another point: Seeing the onslaught of propaganda has made it clear to me how scared the grifters and bloodsuckers who’ve been feeding off the enormous amount of money sloshing around our government are. Which means USAID and SPLC and all that rare a drop in the bucket. I wouldn’t be surprised if all of our deficit is fraud. Which is what the fraudsters are fighting to clear.

If you want to go at your deluded friends with Marxism, point out they’re being manipulated by fat cats who don’t ACTUALLY give a damn about the supposed cause and are growing rich from our tax money. That’s why the war on poverty only generates more poverty. (Yes, there’s other reasons, but feel free to attack it that way. Also that the war machine is rich for skimming, which is why Trump stopping the endless boots on the ground outrages them.) This is known “using a devil to drive out a devil.” They’ve been trained to hate “greedy” people. Show them where the greed is.

This is our fight. We’re actually fighting to keep the good boys and girls alive and bring them to sanity.

Is it possible? I don’t know.

But I hope it is, because if they achieve their goal of killing a significant number of the other side, the resulting backlash will turn our country into something none of us will recognize, nor wish to live with.

Do what you can. And if you’re the praying kind, pray very constantly.

Because we’re walking on the razor edge of the abyss, and propaganda is trying to drive us over the edge.


75 thoughts on “Pushed To The Edge”

  2. This is the 4th attempt at Trump assasination. Remember there was one where the guy tried MarALago but it does not get remember because Trump was not there. Stupidity does not negate the intent.

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  3. I don’t like “hating”.

    But it’s getting hard to “not hate” the Democrats who parrot the anti-Trump nonsense AND NOW ARE TALKING ABOUT HOW VIOLENCE SHOULDN’T BE PART OF POLITICS.

    Yep, if we were talking all this BS about a Democratic President, it would be “called hateful and provoking violence” especially if a Democratic President was targeted for assassination.

    But those Idiot Democrats claim that they aren’t attempting to provoke violence against Trump.

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      1. Somewhere on the ‘net, I ran across a story of a Dem candidate who wants to try everybody who voted for Trump for treason. Ooh boy.

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  4. The King is on the throne
    And nothing Him dismays;
    Though devils hone their every blade
    And turn the truth to haze.
    His eyes ne’er dim, nor ever blur,
    His sovereign will holds sway.
    A thread pulled here, a breath of wind—
    He trips the gollums’ feet.
    Their plots all come to naught.
    Their memories fade into the deep—
    Within the fiery vault.

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  5. I found myself running in the crowd. I was wearing flip flops, a mistake I never made again, in that kind of expedition. Someone stepped on one, and I was trying to pull my foot free against the press of the crowd. This is when mom reached in, grabbed me, and pulled me to standing flat against the wall of a bank. (With one bare foot.) The crowd ran past us. (Here I want to consider mom was almost a head shorter than I, so pulling me by force was a feat.) She was speaking at me, but I only remember “NEVER run with a panicked crowd.” Weirdly for mom she wasn’t shouting, and she wasn’t mad. It was kind of a monotone, to be honest.

    My brain “voices” this with the Last Unicorn from the movie of the same name, where she’s saying “never run from the supernatural.”

    It’s good advice, too.

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  6. I discovered Bluesky after the Kirk assassination. Reading some of the comments there, I was haunted by the inescapable idea that the next left-wing assassin was probably posting there at that exact moment.

    And I was right.

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    1. I used to read ACOUP until I ran out of interest in Things Roman and older, along with his TDS. The fact that he’s on Blooskee was a tell. (Love that word.)

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  7. It cracks my heart just a bit, to know how many of my family – who I love very much – are marinated in prog-think. Even my mother, who was a Nixon fan-girl and who loathed the Kennedy clan with a white-hot passion … has succumbed in her twilight years to the establishment media siren song. Too much of a habit, listening to NPR and the BBC for decades. Dad was a Rush fan and Tea Party-sympathetic, but he has been gone since 2010. My younger sister and youngest brother have quaffed the full cup of proggie propaganda. We (my daughter and I) do not talk politics with them, although we have reason to believe that my brother-in-law is a closet conservative.

    It will get very ugly, if the assassination attemps continue, and guaranteed if any are successful. Someone on Insty has recommended a study of the lead-up to the Spanish Civil War …

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    1. My family is in Europe. Even my dad has guzzled the koolaid. EVEN MOM who was my comrade in arms against the commies back when had fallen for it.
      My favorite remembered exchange was her saying Trump was subnormal, you could tell by his language. And my going “So, you now speak fluent idiomatic English?” Silence. “Mom, you’re being sold a bill of goods.” It lasted about a day, but after that she stopped trying to berate me.

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      1. Youngest sister drinks the liberal Kool-Aid. Not sure about her husband. The nieces & nephew, have drank out of the Kool-Aid cup, but funny how as they reach 30 and realize it is their m o n e y that PTB are after, they start “um, wait a second”. Currently, this is everyone except the youngest three. Our son has never taken the liberal Kool-Aid.

        Rule on political talks at family gatherings is “don’t make *mom/grandma/great-grandma cry”. About the only criteria hubby and middle-sister’s hubby will work with. But, the other side says anything (i.e. starts it), they do not hold back. (No screaming battles there were during the Nixon days. So family division is not new. Still talking. So win. I guess. Note, some of the anti-Nixons, are the most stanch Trump fans. People do get a clue, even if it takes a metaphorical 2×4.)

        (*) Same 91-year-old

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    2. Dad and Mom were Republicans until they retired to Hawaii and were forcefully drowned in the Flavor-Ade of Mazie Hirono, et al. They haven’t figured out why they were forced financially to LEAVE Hawaii and come back to CO. Dad reminds me of Boxer. Sister WAS an “educator”, then a teacher’s union exec, and now a SEIU exec. So we really, really don’t talk at all, though I am thankful she’s caring for our parents.

      They’re all woo-woo New Agers, probably culturally only, as well. The times we do see them, they are visibly disturbed when wife and I cross ourselves and say Grace. But I pray for them, since I can’t talk to them.

      The Spanish Civil War parallels are disturbingly numerous. I decided to learn about the subject about 4 years ago, and read through Antony Beevor’s fine and very accessible book on the subject. It’s written at not-a-graduate level, and can be understood contextually by a curious public school grad with some life experience. I’ve been forced to decide that, if the decision is between Fascism and Socialism with no other options, that the Fascists are the sane ones who will probably kill less, by orders of magnitude. *Shudder*.

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    3. My sympathies. I also have many loved relatives who have fully drunk the left’s Kool-Aid. It’s depressing to the point where sometimes I don’t even want to spend time with them if they truly think I’m that evil for voting for Trump.

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    1. No, but he had the worst (best?) timing of anyone in history I can think of. And a story that only The Author could get away with.

      The Archduke’s driver literally being the only guy to not get the message, then stopping in front of the very place where the failed assassin was drowning his sorrows? Seriously? I’d blue-pencil that in a heartbeat. Too forced. But no, no, The Author can do things like that. (See also: Battle of Leipzig, 1813)

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  9. there are so many Thomas Sowell quotes that would be appropriate, but perhaps this one is best

    ”There are 3 questions that would destroy most of the arguments of the Left. The first is – compared to what? The second is – at what cost? And the third is – what hard evidence do you have?”

    what gets to me though is that they’re just lying now. There’s nothing else. They’re not even trying to hide it. I suspect it’s a combination of panic as their older sources of funds — NGO money — dries up and that their other source of funds — China — is not known for subtelty and punishes defectors harshly. You know that China won in Venezuela and is winning in Iran. Whatever happens America loses and China wins. Even Iran burning off the oil wells because of the blockade and the collapse of petrochemical manufacturing I. China because of the price of oil is China win 8th.

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      1. The trumpeted shining victories move inexorably closer to the FurherBunker.

        Ultimate Victory! is proclaimed with the unexpected bark of a pocket pistol.

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      2. Never Quit.

        Everything the Enemy does, now, is intended to sow defeatism in our ranks. It is the only play they have left. Even their hard-core realize that general violence doesn’t enable them so much as it frees -us- from any restraint.

        They still make demonstrations, meant to demoralize. Spoiling attacks.

        Recognize their mistake and their futility. Be ready to stand firm when it may -feel- bad, -seem- bad, but just outside their smokescreen lies real Victory. Their frantic flailing shows the truth: they smell defeat – theirs.

        Never Quit.

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    2. The ones I know simply do not value truth or reason. They value being part of the consensus. And any attempt to challenge their part of the consensus through appeals to truth or reason is a threat to everything they care about.

      They will change only when they believe the consensus has changed.

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      1. “The greater a persons knowledge of political and economic facts, the more sensitive and vulnerable is his judgment. Intellectuals are most easily reached by propaganda, particularly if it employs ambiguity. The reader of a number ol newspapers expressing diverse attitude — just because he is better informed – is more subjected than anyone else to a propaganda that he cannot perceive, even though he claims to retain free choice in the mastery of all this information. Actually, he is being conditioned to absorb all the propaganda that coordinates and explains the facts he believes himself to be mastering. Thus, information not only provides the basis for propaganda but gives propaganda the means to operate; for information actually generates the problems that propaganda exploits and for which it
        pretends to offer solutions.

        In fact, no propaganda can work until the moment when a set of facts has become a problem in the eyes of those who constitute public opinion. At the moment such problems begin to confront public opinion, propaganda on the part of a government, a party, or a man can begin to develop fully by magnifying that problem on the one hand and promising solutions for it on the other. But propaganda cannot easily create a political or economic problem out of nothing. There must be some reason in reality. The problem need not actually exist, but there must be a reason why it might exist.”

        ― Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes

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          1. China is well known for its openness to criticism, 😜which is why the news about protests by toy factory workers in China after their employer collapsed because of increased petro chemical costs and lower US demand was prominently printed in the NY Times. It was actually was, I was shocked. Still, all this is taken as evidence of China stronk and I was relieved to see that Bloomberg didn’t cover any of it.

            As bad as the Times is, Bloomberg is worse. Their business model is under significantly more stress than the Times’s is and China is a big revenue driver for them. Add to that Mike Bloomberg’s blazing hatred of Trump and it all makes sense.

            It’s all about the money, always was. Trump has interfered with the rice bowl by cutting NGO funding and China is the next biggest payer. The single most important thing any of us can do is being like datarepublican, using what skills we have to expose all this and not let it die. Take away the funding and the rest will follow. They are formidable, but they’re also very highly leveraged and even the billionaires are more vulnerable than you might imagine.

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  10. Just 3 days before the latest assassination attempt, Democratic Party House Minority leader Jeffires called for “maximum warfare, all the time” against the Democratic Party’s political opponents. At the same time, the NY Times and Democratic Party bigwigs were embracing a podcaster who has openly called for mass murder of Jews, said the USA deserved 9/11, proclaimed violence and murder of those the left dislikes is justified and to be encouraged, Another Democratic Party leader was campaigning with and embracing a Senate candidate with a literal Nazi deaths-head tattoo, while that candidate called for pervasive, i.e. totalitarian, socialism.

    The Democratic Party has made it clear that their official policy and their game plan is to incite outright violence and outright mass murder of political opponents, and indeed anyone they dislike, while blaming those opponents and claiming to be “misunderstood”. Their can be no doubt that they seek to impose single party totalitarian rule, and will persecute and outright assault and kill as many people as they need to in order to achieve that goal, and will act as political protection for their footsoldiers committing the violence.

    Democrats have already declared war, and there own words are quite explicit about it

    Senate Republicans need to end the filibuster asap to pass full funding for DHS and ICE, and to pass the SAVE act, because we know that the minute Democrats are able to seize control of Congress and the Presidency, they will do so as their first order of business, and their second will be to pack the Supreme Court with lunatic leftists who will allow the Democrats to eviscerate the Constitution and all of its constitutional protections of individual rights. Frankly given their clear hatred of Jews, I am expecting them to try to replicate 20th Century Germany.

    While I hope their effort to destroy the republic can be stopped without bloodshed, every day it looks more and more likely that we are going to face 1930s Spain, and other widespread civil strife, or rather uncivil strife, because internecine fights are never civil.

    Be and stay prepared for whatever may come.

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    1. Just to clarify, the tattoo in question isn’t so much a Nazi tattoo. It was the divisional symbol of the 3rd SS Totenkopf (“Death’s Head”) Division. Doesn’t mean you can’t use it to link him with the Nazis. Every member of that unit was a Nazi, so by definition only Nazis used it. But Nazis in general wouldn’t have used it, as it was only linked to the one military unit.

      To put it another way, it would be more accurate to refer to it as an SS symbol.

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  11. His sin was not propaganda convincing normal and NICE Germans that Jews were naturally intrinsically evil and must be destroyed. 

    In fairness, there’s the additional issue that they also ripped off the limiters on those who opposed them.

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    1. I would argue further that he didn’t create the divisions. He exploited the envy and fear and resentment that was already there. Had been there for generations.

      We’ve already seen this happening here and now, too. The relentless rhetoric that argues that inequality and poverty, rather than being a natural consequence of people pursuing their own desires and priorities, is deliberately created and directed. The arguments that require there to be a Big Evil Bad Guy (or guys) *behind* everything.

      It isn’t necessarily ethnically based, but it’s the same idea. SOMEBODY is making all these bad things happen, and if we can just remove the BAD GUYS, we’ll have utopia!

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      1. A relatively low heat one– the “useless eaters” thing.

        Where they killed off the disabled, even those maimed by the prior war.

        And did it in such a way that folks could reasonably just… not look close enough. Even after the first several rounds.

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  12. I’m optimistic about where the culture is going. MAGA 2.0 is mainstream, not counterculture, which is exactly what you want to see. And the diehard Leftists are irrelevant for this process. It continues whether they keep fighting in the jungles of BlueSky or stagger out into the sun to hand over their swords.

    Except for violence. It only takes one lucky nutjob to do a lot of damage, and the nutjobs are getting nuttier. That’s the part that worries me. It’s an insane, pernicious bubble that’s only becoming more insular. We’re snatching people from the edges of the whirlpool while the center spirals deeper.

    I’m not sure what can be done about it. Ten years of crazy is a lot to undo, especially when it’s building on a century of crazy before that. The suggestions in this post are as good as any I’ve seen.

    If I had to pick an angle, I’d try to get them to admit something good about Trump. Pick an innocuous accomplishment that they’d cheer on in a Democrat administration: cleaning the fountains in DC, the new ballroom, pushing nuclear energy, revitalizing NASA, cutting drug prices, capping (IIRC) law school student loans, etc.

    One little admission that he’s not Hitler. Then praise them for being fair-minded. Then one more accomplishment. Then unmask a media hoax. Convince them (1) “Trump isn’t all bad.” and (2) “I’m mature enough to judge him fairly, without getting angry or relying on lies.”

    Of course, that’s easier said than done. I suppose that’s how we got here in the first place.

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  13. I found the shooter’s reasoning disturbing.

    One is that I find the stupidity or incorrectness annoying. Another is that I find that I experience issues when I immerse myself too deeply in the thinking of one particular crazy person, or a group of similar crazies.

    Fundamentally, his reasoning was collectivist, and also leader theory. The magical thinking of the theory of the magic leader.

    Anyway, I’m not sure where I am mentally today.

    I do think that getting some internet detox has been good.

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    1. I think the left truly believes that if they kill Trump, all of their opposition will dry up. As if people wouldn’t hate the left if Trump had never run for office. They’re hoping the Republican party returns to “honesty and decency” and at the very least if we don’t come to agree with them we at least “stop voting”.

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      1. They never understood the TEA Party movement. Never.

        For one thing, it was truly organic and grassroots. (Before it got coopted by the professional grifters who eventually killed it — at least in its original form).

        For another thing, they listen to (and believe) CNN.

        The one TEA Party rally I ever attended, on April 15th (I think 2010 but I could be wrong about the year), I remember two things about in particular. One was the interracial couple (white man, black woman) holding hands behind a sign that said “Hey CNN, we dare you to report this” (or it might have been “Hey MSM”). The other was when later, I was talking to someone about that couple and I said something about being surprised how many black people were in the audience. And from behind me I heard, “I know! According to the media, I’m not supposed to exist!” I turn around and there was a young (20’s), quite attractive black woman. Who then talked with me and the rest of the conversational group for a few minutes. I never caught her name, but she was solidly conservative (i.e., nothing like Candace Owens).

        But if you believe CNN, the TEA Party was indistinguishable from the Patriot Front. (Oh, and the PF was real and totally not SPLC-funded cosplayers).

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        1. Bingo to Arwen, and bingo to Robin.

          Decades and academic generations of accumulated modeling error, errors that came with tactically and strategically useful then results, that are screwing them now.

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    2. Yeah, dude was a CalTech Mechanical Engineering grad. Physics and materials science and manufacturing do not care about your fee-fees, and as someone whose career was on that technical side of the great edumacation divide, I would have liked to continue deluding myself that a completed engineering education could at least to some extent counter some of the nut jobbery evident in that skree.

      But evidently not.

      Either that or it was his computer science MS that sent him over the edge.

      Hmmm.

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      1. Kaczynski

        It can be functional to study mathematics getting high on the beauty of mathematical theory, but once you take behavioral sciences claims seriously it tends to make one homicidally insane.

        Some of the claims are designed to cause insanity, but mostly it is methodology and that the claims shouldn’t be combined in mathematical ways.

        Bright applied maths people are in fact extremely vulnerable.

        Some of it is teaching failures, but the thing is if I can teach tertiary mathematics, that does not equip me to teach skepticism of the soft sciences.

        And you are underestimating how badly damaged some of the people in the forty and younger cohorts were by primary and secondary school.

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        1. Yeah. I did acknowledge I was deluding myself. Sometimes one has to admit one’s views are just as vulnerable to silly parochialism as others can be.

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  14. Not to be a Debbie Downer here, but it seems like the Spanish Civil War might be the best case scenario.

    Read up on the Rwandan Genocide. What’s happening now seems to track very well with what survivors have said about that dark stain on humanity’s history.

    See also: The Great Leap Forwad and the Cultural Revolution.

    In times like these, it is not possible to pray too much.

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        1. I don’t know that much about Rwanda pre-genocide, but I do know there was lots and lots of preexisting hatred between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups.

          The hatred that exists in America is one-sided, and the side that doesn’t hate the other is the side with most of the weapons. Kind of hard to start a genocide that way. (Yes, you will find individuals among the right who hate the entire left. But the right as a whole, no. Also, most of those who hate the left hate the movement, not the deluded individuals who have bought into the lies. Which means that even if they did go out and start acts of violence, it would be directed against the most prominent representatives of the left, not their leftist neighbors. There might be a few individual exceptions, but you need more than a few individual nutters to start a genocide, you need an entire group of people who hate the Other and are willing to kill. Which the right, the side with most of the weapons, doesn’t have).

          Doesn’t mean there couldn’t be quite a lot of unpleasantness, and many murders… but not the kind of wholesale slaughter that happened in Rwanda. We don’t have the preexisting conditions necessary for that to happen.

          (I’m sure Foxfier knows of some other things that I didn’t think of, that’s just what I thought of off the top of my head).

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          1. For one, we don’t have a colonial power (the French) favoring one side over the other, leaving huge amounts of resentment on both sides, but for different reasons.

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        2. So, fren, there are a ton of potential differences between now and a successful mass murder scenario.

          First, we are post 1960s culmination of agricultural revolution.

          We probably cannot comprehend how much the famines and hunger influenced populations that were growing up that way.

          Two, oral history as a memory of populations being different.

          We don’t have anywhere near that split between ‘educated’ and not, pseudo-intellectuals and normal people. Which means that even if Christianity were on board with dehumanizing the atheists, ‘we’ would be starting from zero or negative, and would have trouble getting anywhere fast.

          Charlie Kirk was murdered, and martyred, and Christians more or less shrugged and went ‘prey harder, witness harder, and the enemy fears Christ’s church. We win, they lose.’

          Love, and not hate.

          Third is arms.

          So mass murder involves having a force of armed men going around and killing the targets. Which is actually risky work, because adult men at least can still be dangerous. So, who ever has the big brain idea has to pay their armed men somehow.

          Now, it costs less money if you can pay your armed men also in ideas, but again, we are a long way from having dehumanized the left to anywhere near a degree that would make that practical.

          But, the core problem is that Americans are pretty armed, and that we don’t have the left cut out of the herd.

          Hunting season on the left is risky, because too many people would guess that it is wrong, and try to stop it. If you have the left cut out of the herd in the eyes of thirty percent, still dangerous and expensive. On the other hand, if 98% of the population thinks that the only good leftist is a dead leftist, it is probably possible to just arrest or deport the leftists.

          You can find people crazy enough to try to kill the left, but a lot of them are unskilled, and not functional in their own lives.

          The center right, and the moderates are still in spark damping mode. A murderer kills someone, they say ‘murder is wrong’, and stop the murderer.

          The core ‘problem’ can basically be thought of as horseshoe theory, or as ‘the right now is everyone who has been driven away by the hard left’ or as neurodiversity. There’s a silent majority who are not murderers, and who are sane by American cultural standards. And right/Christian ideas and sentimental practices are stabilizing for some of the ill.

          The mix of crazy, despair, and ‘shoot our way out’ political values is valued by the left for symbolic power.

          Everyone else doesn’t have the IFF to classify acts of murder as useful, and so they try to stop people.

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      2. This. At minimum, in the land of “behind every blade of grass” it would be tough to start machete-parties when partygoers cannot count on victims hiding unarmed.

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  15. I’ve tried having tactful, calm conversations about this, to the extent that I can, and it’s not going to work. Not for me, anyway.

    The people I know who have fallen for it already resent me for disagreeing with them, and we already had screaming fights about it in the months after the election last year. Arguments…but mean enough to be called fights. I did my best to stay calm while the other party screamed at me in spittle-flecked rage. Not a metaphor, either; spit literally flying, eyes bulging, veins popping. But we have to live with each other, so eventually calm was restored, and we don’t talk about it. A couple of tentative forays recently have confirmed that there’s no way past it without unlocking the rage/threat response. The TDS is too strong; they’ll believe anything and everything because they so deeply WANT all the bad things to be true.

    I’m not saying don’t try. I’m just saying I hope it works better for you if you do try.

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    1. Wtf do they have to be angry about? They don’t work a day in their lies, yet they have cradle to grave pleasure and ease and win on almost every issue.

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      1. What they’re angry about is that we think we’re just as good as they are, with as much right to be persons in control of our own destiny. Instead of the cowering peons they know we must be, because they’re the ones in charge, all the Right People said so!

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  16. Just posted on X from That Hideous Strength:

    “Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything. “

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  17. What you hear is the dying scream of a class of people waking up to the fact they have been hoodwinked for decades and everything they know is wrong. As they face the choice of what to do next, many of them cannot accept the truth and reject it for their comfortable lies. And the schism forms in their mind that renders them insane. The others turn away from everything and retreat into the shadows in shame as the purveyors of the lies scream louder and louder and reach fewer and fewer. Stand your ground, hold the line, light a beacon, for tomorrow will be a better day.

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      1. I saw this once in the initial reactions and was unsuccessfully searching for it subsequently. Thanks for posting it so I can steal… er, archive for posterity.

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  19. A lot of people on the other side seem to think it will be one thing that happens, done by one side. Donald Trump will be assassinated, they will gloat and celebrate and get their free beer in Wisconsin, their political enemies will slink away in defeat, and they will ascend to power to conduct however many pogroms they feel like carrying out.

    They have forgotten history, though in this case most people have.

    When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, we imagine that the country (at least the North) came together in unanimous shared horror and grief. No such thing happened. A lot of Northerners who had hated Lincoln all along rejoiced publicly that he had been murdered. What happened next is that a lot of the grief-stricken attacked a lot of the celebrants. Fatalities were reported in the high dozens; the number was probably in the hundreds. Once history’s verdict on Lincoln came in, we drew a veil over that spasm of vindictiveness and forgot it.

    If somebody assassinates Donald Trump a week from next Friday, by mere proportion of a much larger population the death toll from vengeance taken against the gloaters will be in the thousands. With the much greater visibility and amplification of those people, it could easily be higher still. And it would not be the end of things, the way it had been in April 1865, with a war effectively over and won to discourage the Lincoln-haters from keeping it up. It would be at best insurrection (real insurrection), but more likely outright civil war. If he had been killed in Butler, it would have been the same way (only the Autopen Politburo would have crushed it for lack of organization, and liberty in America would be a dead letter today). Sarah, you have talked about The Switch before. This would be The Switch.

    We have been lucky, maybe luckier than we deserve. It is most disquieting that the question of whether we dissolve into fratricide is almost entirely in the hands of our adversaries, and that we have been spared almost entirely by their incapability.

    Since that’s quite a downer of an ending, let me offer this instead. How lucky we’ve been so far is not a formal proof of divine intervention on our behalf that Thomas Aquinas would approve of, but there is a certain persuasive force.

    Republica restituendae.

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