Tag: politics

It’s Not the Technology

By the standards of a dispassionate observer, the American political left has undergone a transformation over the past few decades that is as alarming as it is undeniable. Once it was a coalition of pragmatic reformers, undercover communists, labor advocates, and young idealists. This ensemble can be sold as reality to only the most out of touch American. The Democratic Party and its broader ecosystem have drifted into a fever swamp of ideological radicalism, fueled by a toxic brew of conspiracy theorizing, moral panic, and a deliberate cultivation of fear. Gay race communism and rioting replaced liberation of the individual and mass GOTV drives. This is not a phenomenon driven by the machinations of technology. Tech is the current pitch to explain away what lies at the heart of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Social media and digital platforms are mere tools of coordination, amplifying what is already afoot. The root of this radicalization lies in the left’s intellectual and moral decay, a decades-long indulgence in unhinged narratives and unchecked hysteria, encouraged by a party and its media allies who thrive on a perpetually anxious voter base. The consequences of this trajectory are profound and will be with us for years, threatening not only the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects but the broader health of American political life.

To understand this shift, one must first trash the notion that technology is the primary culprit. The internet, for all its flaws, is a neutral instrument. It is a medium that can amplify both reason and madness. It is a tool. All sides in all nations deal with this. The left’s radicalization predates Twitter’s character limit, Reddit threads and Facebook’s algo. It is not the medium but the message that has poisoned the increasingly fragile minds of the left’s base. The left’s embrace of apocalyptic rhetoric and conspiratorial thinking began in earnest during the George W. Bush era, when the Iraq War and the Patriot Act provided fertile ground for narratives of government malevolence. Anti-Trump messaging is insane, but liberals were going to group therapy to shout at W dolls two decades ago. Those old concerns were not without some basis (civil libertarians had points about government overreach), but the left’s response was not to critique with precision but to spiral into fantasies of dystopian cabals. Bush was always poised to cancel elections. The Bush administration was not merely wrong. It was evil. It was a shadowy regime orchestrating global domination. Such hyperbole became mainstream fodder, seeded by activists & academics and abetted by a media eager for viewers, clicks and outrage. This is why the rehabilitation of W is such a joke to those on the right old enough to remember the ‘00s.

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JB Pritzker Claims He Has Never Called Republicans ‘Nazis’ – Gets Proven Wrong by Videos of His Own Words

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker recently claimed that he has never called Republicans ‘Nazis’ but that is a laughable suggestion.

There is video evidence of Pritzker, repeatedly comparing the Trump administration to Nazi Germany, stoking fear about the idea of losing democracy and trying to make people fear Republicans.

This is the type of rhetoric that led to the assassination of Charlie Kirk and even if the Democrats won’t admit that out loud, they know it.

Breitbart News reports:

Radical left-wing Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D) was hit with an avalanche of fact-checks after he made the false claim that he never called Republicans “Nazis.”

The far-left governor was peppered with questions about his past comments during a press conference Monday, and in response he vehemently refuted claims he ever called Republicans “Nazis.”

“That is completely false. I have never called Republicans ‘Nazis,’” Pritzker exclaimed Monday after going on a tirade claiming that it is Donald Trump, not Democrats, who is “actively fanning the flames of division.”

But the truth is, Pritzker has spent months calling Republicans and Donald Trump Nazis. Indeed, in February he did just that in his official State of the State address where he compared Donald Trump and his administration to Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Pritzker said in that official address:

The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems. If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.

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‘F*ck That Guy. He’s a Fascist:’ John Carroll U. Lab Director Celebrates Assassination of Charlie Kirk

John Carroll University Director of Laboratory Services Jeffrey Your reacted to the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk by sharing a slew of posts mocking and celebrating the murder of the 31-year-old husband and father of two.

Your, who works at the Jesuit Catholic university in Cleveland, Ohio, reacted to Kirk’s assassination by sharing posts declaring “Some men improve the world only by leaving it,” and lamented those who want people “to stop taking pleasure at the idea of somebody else’s death.”

The John Carroll University director also shared messages stating, “Charlie Kirk was shot today. First off — fuck that guy. He’s a fascist,” and “now the headlines want me to clutch my pearls because violence finally touched him? Spare me.”

“I extend absolutely no empathy for people like that,” another post read, smearing Kirk as a “racist, xenophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, sexist, white nationalist mouthpiece” and falsely accusing the late Turning Point USA founder of standing for “nothing but hate.”

Another social media post shared by Your in reference to Kirk stated, “Say stupid things, win stupid prizes” while another bizarrely accused the murdered Turning Point USA founder of “inciting violence” and being the “cause” of violence in the United States.

Another post shared by Your wished for Kirk’s children to “grow up to live in a country that is the total opposite of everything their father envisioned.”

“Another vile human being exposed celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk,” Rep. Michael Rulli (R-OH) reacted in a Wednesday X post, adding, “This is a sickness of the mind. John Carroll should fire Jeffrey Your immediately.”

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American History’s Stark Warning Against Tolerating Political Violence

In the days since Charlie Kirk’s murder, many have expressed incredulity about the condition of the country. Our circumstances may be unique but the movements of political societies follow clear patterns. We have been deeply polarized before and the cause, now and then, is the same. Disagreement about the fundamental type of country we believe that we should be is what divides us.

In May, 1856 Charles Sumner of Massachusetts took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to denounce the use of force and fraud to plant slavery and its inevitable offspring, oligarchy, in the territory of Kansas. Southern statesmen who composed the inter-state oligarchy in the slave states sought to admit Kansas with slavery into the Union, expanding their power.

Since at least 1854 Sumner was among a few who had recognized that the fight over slavery had taken on a new character. Not only did the fate of slavery depend on the outcome of that fight, but also the future form of American government – whether all America would be republican, as the Founders intended and as the northern states were, or whether America would be converted to an oligarchy, the prevalent form of government in the South.

Sumner’s “Crime Against Kansas” speech was long, direct, and forceful. A few days later, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina entered the Senate chamber with his lieutenants, Representatives Laurence Keitt of South Carolina and Henry Edmundson of Virginia, and commenced caning Sumner, who was sitting, his legs locked beneath his desk.

While Sumner could not defend himself from the blows, Keitt (brandishing a pistol) and Edmundson stood by, Antifa-like, and prevented anyone from coming to Sumner’s aid. Brooks beat Sumner over the head nearly to death and left him unconscious in a pool of blood. Southern newspapers, the mainstream media at the time, praised the attack and blamed Sumner’s words for bringing the violence upon himself. Supporters of Brooks feted him in person and mailed him new canes and congratulatory letters.

Ironically, the violence and the approving response to the violence verified exactly what Sumner claimed at the beginning of his speech. Everyone could feel that the country was polarized down to its core. But why? Sumner contrasted ordinary and extraordinary politics, ordinary and extraordinary political disagreements. Statesmen representing the country were not merely debating whether a number on a tariff schedule should be 5 or 10 percent.

Kansas was a flashpoint in a more consequential, extraordinary struggle. Each side was contending for a way of life and form of government abhorrent to the other. The general consensus had broken down; the American political regime was seriously destabilized. The oligarchy of the South rejected the basis of American republicanism, natural equality and fundamental liberties, including freedom of speech. The violence and the approval of violence in reaction to Sumner’s claims had proven Sumner’s claims that the southerners were oligarchic in character.

Both Sumner and Kirk advanced their particular causes in the way of American republicanism. They used words; they exercised their freedom of speech to persuade. On the other hand, the attackers and their supporters showed their contempt for free speech in favor of force, and therefore showed that they actively rejected the principles and general consensus that had underpinned the American political regime.

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DOJ Quietly Deletes Study After Charlie Kirk’s Death That Says Right-Wing Extremists Engage in ‘Far More’ Political Violence

  • A study on the growing frequency of “far-right attacks” was removed from the Department of Justice’s website
  • The removal happened after right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on a college campus in Utah
  • An archived version of the study is still available online, and states that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides” than the left

The U.S. Department of Justice appears to have quietly removed information online regarding right-wing violence following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

As of Friday, Sept. 12, a 2024 study titled “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism” no longer appears on the DOJ website under President Donald Trump‘s administration. However, it is still viewable as an archived post on Wayback Machine.

“Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism,” the first two lines of the study read.

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Weaponized Scoops: New Russiagate Documents Expose Media/Government Collusion

Recently declassified documents indicate that people close to former FBI Director James Comey and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff were connected to leaks of classified information to prominent reporters designed to portray Donald Trump and his allies as being in league with Russia.   

Written in 2017, the FBI documents expose how selected Washington reporters, including Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, scored a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning scoops in 2017 by repeating false and inflammatory leaks during President Trump’s first term.   

Much of their reporting has been debunked – and shown to be part of a smear campaign by high-ranking officials to undermine Trump, but the identities of those leakers have remained hidden because of the government’s apparent unwillingness to expose its own and the refusal of reporters to identify the people who misled them and the nation.    

Although the heavily redacted recent disclosures do not specifically identify the suspected leakers, an RCI analysis of the documents strongly suggests that people close to Comey and Schiff, among others, were feeding the reporters information to advance the Russiagate hoax.   

The documents reveal a cascade of misdeeds and failures. These include the effort of government officials to create and leak misleading classified information to favored reporters and the failure of reporters to scrutinize the information they were given before rushing it into print; and the subsequent failure of federal investigators to hold anyone accountable for the breaches of security.   

The documents also detail the incestuous nature of media-government relationships inside the D.C. Beltway. In some cases, spouses and friends of government officials and reporters were used to spread damaging misinformation about Trump, making it difficult for federal investigators to follow the trail of illegal disclosures.   

“All of these cozy friendships of leakers and leaker recipients, many of whom are married to each other, are precisely why reporters adore hiding their sourcing behind walls of ‘senior administration officials’ or ‘senior U.S. officials’ and associated disguises,” said Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the Media Research Center, a Washington-based journalism watchdog group.    

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Trans pipeline of death and violence takes three shocking new twists…

In case you didn’t realize it, America is under attack from within. What we’re seeing unfold right now is the rise of a dangerous, violent trans network of foot soldiers. These aren’t polished activists or sharp political operatives; these are the rage-filled enforcers, the bottom-of-the-barrel psychos that Antifa and the far-left rely on to do their dirty work. They are unhinged, violent, and not afraid to assassinate anyone who dares to disagree with them.

So, when you hear CNN, MSNBC or Gavin Newsom call Trump a “Nazi,” they’re actually dog-whistling to this group of unhinged, hormone-filled psychopaths.

These gender-confused trans are clearly mentally ill and must be held accountable, but whatever you do, don’t mistake them for the masterminds. They’re pawns in a much bigger game, funded, produced, and directed by smarter and more powerful players at the top of the left’s radical machine. We can see now that for years, these pipelines of extremism lurked in the shadows, festering in fringe online spaces like Reddit and Discord.

At first, Discord denied having any role in the Kirk assassination. But now reports claim Tyler Robinson went on the platform, admitted he was the killer, and thanked his freak friends for the “good times and laughs.”

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Mom of Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin describes radical shift in last year: ‘More pro-gay and trans rights’

Tyler Robinson’s mother told investigators she had watched her son change dramatically in the year leading up to the Utah college shooting of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

Once a college scholarship recipient with a promising future, Robinson had “become more political,” leaning left and supporting “pro-gay and trans rights,” his mother said, according to court documents.

She also recounted heated arguments between Robinson and his father, who held sharply different views and regularly sparred over their competing ideologies.

At one point, she told police, her son dismissed Kirk’s Utah Valley University (UVU) event as a “stupid” venue and claimed Kirk “spreads too much hate.”

Prosecutors now argue that political hatred was at the core of Robinson’s alleged actions.

In court filings, they allege he intentionally targeted Kirk “because of his political expression” — and his parents recognized him from surveillance video after the shooting.

“Robinson’s father reported that when his wife showed him the surveillance image of the suspected shooter in the news, he agreed that it looked like their son,” prosecutors alleged in court filings. 

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Democrat Candidate for Ohio Attorney General Posts ‘F*ck Charlie Kirk’

A Democrat candidate for Ohio Attorney General, Elliot Forhan, celebrated the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on social media.

In a social media post, Forhan — a former state representative, wrote, “Fuck Charlie Kirk.”

He continued, “If you cannot call a bigot a bigot in America, then we do not have the free speech that he pretended to care about.”

Of course, Forhan provided no examples of Kirk displaying bigotry. Nor did the candidate for Ohio’s top law enforcement post express any kind of sympathy for Kirk or his family over the horrific public assassination.

Commenters were not having it.

“You are mean and rude and have no place in public life. Our state is much better without you in elected office. You perpetuate the very things that are ruining the political and civic landscape and that you claim to be opposed to (hate and bullying),” one Facebook commenter responded.

“Not appropriate. Spreading more hatred and division,” another said.

One commented, “Disgusting that people in office think this way. Regardless your stance or political views no one deserves to die for expressing their beliefs. I hope you don’t get voted in because it’s people like you that keep spreading hate and discord very sad in my opinion! God bless America.”

In another post, Forhan shared a New York Times opinion article on his Facebook page with the caption, “Charlie Kirk was a champion of tyranny, not democracy. We should not pretend otherwise.”

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How the Left Programmed Young People to Hate

In the spring of 1975, the Red Army Faction, more popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, stormed the West German Embassy in Stockholm and murdered two of its staff before setting the building ablaze. In its aftermath, a British tabloid printed a headline whose bluntness masked its profundity: ‘So, Who’s Sick?‘

It was less a headline than a rhetorical diagnosis, reflecting the bewilderment at these seemingly senseless acts of terror. Was it the bourgeois world condemned as corrupt by these self-styled revolutionaries, or was it the revolutionaries themselves, who in their righteous fervour appeared possessed by demons?

The question was never one that admitted an easy answer in that moment, and it remains just as piercing in ours. For when, half a century later, Charlie Kirk was struck down in the midst of civic debate, and when voices on the ‘progressive’ Left respond not with horror but with unholy glee, we are forced once again to confront the same ambiguity. Who is diseased? Who is truly sick? The question still hangs in the air, accusing its audience as much as its subjects.

The Eclipse of Compassion

The murder of Charlie Kirk was barbarous enough, but what followed was more chilling still. Social media, that great theatre of contemporary sentiment, resounded with elation rather than grief. Where the natural response should have been mourning and sober reflection, there was instead celebration, applause, even exultation. The old pieties of compassion and human dignity were trampled beneath a chorus of malevolence.

If we return to 1975, we can discern that the spectacle is hardly without precedent. The chronicler of the Red Army Faction’s rise and fall, Stefan Aust, described the psychosis that fuelled its violence as the Baader-Meinhof Complex: a toxic brew of revolutionary ideology, middle-class angst and personality cultism, in which politics fused with pathology. Terror and bloodshed were the logical expression of this worldview.

Jillian Becker, in her study of the same phenomenon published in 1977, placed the emergence of the Baader-Meinhof gang within an extended historical frame, tracing how West Germany’s post-war radicals were the children of those who had lived through the Third Reich — parents whose relationship with Nazism was often ambivalent, sometimes unrepentant. Their children judged them guilty of complicity or cowardice. In turn, they felt they had no tradition to receive let alone uphold, no cultural authority to embrace as their own. Becker memorably described them as Hitler’s Children, who expressed their alienation in violence against the very society that had given them life and often prosperity.

The parallels with today are clear. The obnoxious, jeering, bratty mobs on social media and their elevation of spite into virtue: these too are not simply political stances but symptoms of generational breakdown. Becker’s ‘lost children’ of post-war Germany were orphaned by the silence and ambiguities of their parents’ Nazi past. Today’s youth, though shaped by different conditions, are estranged in an analogous way — heirs to a liberal order that preached emancipation but delivered only deracination.

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