Thoughts on the Current Crisis

I do not condone political violence.

Morality aside – because if I have to take the time to make a moral argument that killing someone over politics is a problem then we might as well stop here – it is at best ineffective. Movements and ideologies rarely rest on one individual, and shooting one guy isn’t going to change anything. The Civil Rights Movement didn’t stop when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by some right-wing asshole. Charlie Kirk’s neo-Fascist movement won’t stop because he was assassinated by some right-wing asshole either. All those time-travel stories about going back and assassinating Hitler to stop the Holocaust? Yeah, not worth the paper they’re printed on. It doesn’t work that way.

At worst it is counterproductive. If you’re developmentally stunted enough to try this tactic, whatever your goals are you can rest assured that the people on the other side will be baying for vengeance before the body hits the ground and the iron rule of warfare is that once the bullets start flying nobody has any idea where things will end up except that a whole lot of people are going to get hurt and most of them had nothing to do with the original problem. Congratulations – you played yourself and everyone else and now the rest of us have to clean up the bodies. Fuckwit.

As a tool, political violence is something best left to the stupid, the fanatical, and the morally bankrupt.

But neither do I mourn Fascists.

Let’s be blunt here – Charlie Kirk was an asshole of the first order. He openly hated anyone who wasn’t exactly like him – straight, white, heterosexual, cis-male, right-wing – and flatly declared that gun murders were an acceptable price for other people to pay in order to preserve his access to shiny boom toys. The fact that he didn’t think he would be the one to pay that price doesn’t change the fact that he was willing to sacrifice other people for it. He founded organizations whose main goals were to persecute anyone who disagreed with him or dared to be something he didn’t like, and he actively sought to harm others. He was a misogynist, a white supremacist and the sort of dandified thug who dresses nice and speaks clearly but is all the more brutal and dangerous because of it. He devoted his life to selling bigotry and violence to the stupid and the fact that the culture he helped to create is ultimately the one that took him down is just one of those ironies.

This in no way justifies assassinating the bastard. But it does mean that I’m not going to waste time pretending he was anything other than a blot on the landscape.

And now we have a whole new problem.

The modern American right wing is a violent movement – the vast majority of politically motivated violence in the United States since 2000 has been committed by right-wingers; those are the statistics, and no amount of rhetoric will change that – and as predicted they are now baying for vengeance. They have blamed everyone but themselves for the situation we’re in. As soon as Kirk was killed they started shouting that it was the fault of the radical left (we haven’t had a radical left in this country for half a century and haven’t really had a left at all since the late 1980s), the Democrats, trans people, and any number of their other standard targets of blind hatred, and the fact that the little shit who killed Kirk turned out to be a straight white Christian man and, apparently, a member of a right-wing extremist culture called Groypers or something equally inane hasn’t stopped them.

There will be blood. They will make sure of it.

I’ll give Kirk credit for one thing, though – he was actively calling for the release of the entire unredacted Epstein files, something that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves have been fighting tooth and nail for months now. God alone knows what is in those files if they’re willing to fight that hard, and to be honest if I were a more conspiratorial sort of person I’d wonder if this was a false-flag operation they arranged to shut him up. We don’t need conspiracies to see people shot to death in this country, of course – we do that wholesale as a matter of routine. But it is an interesting thought.

I do not condone political violence. But I have been predicting it for a long time now, and the fact that it is here and I was right isn’t really the most satisfying victory in the world.

Watch your back, folks. It’s already ugly in the US. And the American right wing is going to do everything in its power to make that worse.