National Unity

~ Clarissa

I was asked yesterday what unity looks like in a nation-state. It’s strange that one has to explain since we all lived in nation-states until very recently. But I can repeat that national unity is formed by fostering emotional attachment to the symbols of the nation, the shared narrative of its history, and the shared veneration for a list of cultural, political, artistic, and military figures associated with the nation state. The flag, the anthem, the national sports team, the museum, the archive. The language, the literature, the music, the shared narrative of history.

Few things are as algorithmic and have been described as exhaustively as nation-building.

Here’s a popular meme in Ukraine. Stare at the black dot in the picture for 20 seconds and then stare at the ceiling. You’ll see the flag of Ukraine.

That’s national unity. People want to see the flag of their nation on the ceiling. They are flooded with warm, fuzzy feelings in response to seeing the flag.

The way this whole way of life gets dismantled is with the idea that since you haven’t chosen this flag, this story, this anthem, and this place, it’s a limitation on the most important thing which is your freedom. You start going down the road of choosey, consumerist, ego-flattering freedom, and it’s mega enjoyable. There’s no responsibility for anything and to anyone. No ties, no unchosen emotions. You move through, extracting value, gorging yourself on it, and moving on from the consequences.

It’s all great fun. Until you are the roadkill from which value was extracted before leaving you by the side of the road. Most people imagine they’ll be the wrecking crew. Instead, they’ll be roadkill.

I suggest starting in the place where the word “unchosen” feels like something negative when the things we love most in life are usually exactly that.

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Published by Clarissa

89 thoughts on “National Unity”

  1. Thank you. And I agree with you about how it used to be.

    I just find the conservative answers (as I see them, below) to the question “what to do if for whatever reason this recipe is no longer working” both intellectually unsatisfying and practically dangerous.

    a) this should not have been allowed in the firsts place.

    b) there has to be a wholesale acceptance of the whole package (see your post)

    c) we should force it (including both past heroes and newly-made ones) down the throats of those who disagree

    Think of Kirk again – all this flying his body on the Airforce Two, flags at half mast, the statue (planned?), etc, are not just expression of grief or a farewell to a brother in arms, they are an attempt to turn Kirk into a hero/martyr for nation-building purposes. With nation based on the set of values Kirk professed. How well do you think this will go in a deeply divided country?

    As far as I understand, there are things that right and left see the same way (even if they blame each other for them) – opposition to certain business practices and libertarian “everything goes under capitalism” attitude. Concerns about new generation not being able to buy a home and start a family and make a decent living, likely exacerbated by free-for-all introduction of AI; value of low-level communities… That’s where we should be concentrating…

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    1. “we should force it (including both past heroes and newly-made ones) down the throats of those who disagree”

      If a society can’t agree on basic things like “this person was an important voice” (whether or not you like them) then say bye bye civilization and all the reasoned discourse in the world isn’t going to save you from what comes next or soften the process….

      Poland is very deeply divided on many issues but there are also things that everybody agrees on:

      the language is important, really important (no matter what you think of somebody’s usage)

      there’s nowhere else to go and stay Polish (emigration = loss of identity in a way that doesn’t happen for some groups)

      russia is an existential enemy (still waiting for that to not be true)

      the Catholic church has been important historically (no matter what you think of the current church)

      Poland sucks at Eurovision (not everything has to be serious)

      immigrants (in manageable numbers) are welcome if they integrate and don’t make special demands

      Lech Wałęsa is an _extremely_ divisive figure for lots of reasons. Nonetheless, when he dies it will be an major national event and everybody will agree he was a hugely important figure.

      Maintaining a nation state doesn’t mean everybody agrees about everything. It does mean there is some kind of common frame of reference for discussing issues.

      In recent years it’s been the left and not the right that’s been trying to destroy that common framework – attacking basic questions of reality (what is a woman?) and rewriting history (for western countries) as a series of shameful episodes that must be atoned for (like native American graveyards… that don’t seem to exist).

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    2. My friend, you want to concentrate on the economic effects of neoliberalism while keeping in place the way of thinking that creates these economic effects. You want a nation-state economy in a neoliberal society.

      The young generation will not be able to buy a house and start a family because we have ditched the entire model that made that possible. You can’t pick and choose the nice features of the new model. You get the whole package.

      Tyler Robinson, by the way, was not lacking in economic opportunity. He got a great scholarship to go to the university for free. When he dropped out, he was able to rent an expensive, nice townhouse. He was studying for a well paid profession in the trades. If he wanted to get married (to a man or a woman, that doesn’t matter), he could have easily done that. What ailed him was not economic in nature.

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      1. —My friend, you want to concentrate on the economic effects of neoliberalism while keeping in place the way of thinking that creates these economic effects. You want a nation-state economy in a neoliberal society.

        not necessarily, I was just pointing out some areas of common interest where depolarization might be possible. Where one could start.

        I understand why you see all-or-nothing approach as logically consistent. There are millions of logically consistent things in this word that do not work in practice, or at least do not work unless you force them upon people.

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    3. v07

      “…opposition to certain business practices and libertarian ā€œeverything goes under capitalismā€ attitude.”

      Somehow I do not think you mean corrupt businesses hiring many tens of millions of illegal aliens that undermine the wages of working class citizens, while costing those same citizens many additional hundreds of millions in taxation to subsidize the added expenses for housing, schools, and health costs.

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      1. You may be surprised, but no, supporting illegal immigration is not the hill I am willing to die on.

        But let’s identify the problem properly, or we will not be able to solve it. “Corrupt businesses” are not a bug, but a feature of the system. Both Democrats and Republicans were happy with cheap labor until recently (and I am not convinced they are not still secretly happy with it, perhaps they want that cheap labor to be even cheaper because it is scared). Another reason why nothing was ever done about it is that Republicans did not want to create precedents where the feds successfully infringe on “state rights”.

        And I explained once before why I believe that specifically illegals voting is a red herring – if I were a corrupt election official with enough control of the local voting office to let illegals actually cast a vote, why would I break the law in such a roundabout and unpredictable way? I’d just throw in more ballots that are filled to my liking. Without inviting any actual illegals…

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        1. How do you think the vote fraud works? Illegals registering themselves and then driving to the polls on election day and casting a vote of their own choice, of their own free will?

          No.

          The reason the illegal voting *is a thing*, and the reason why it works, is that the illegals don’t know that they are voting. Nobody has to win them over on the campaign trail. Kind volunteers simply add their names to the voter rolls, don’t tell them about it, and fill out ballots on their behalf. That is how it works. This is why mail-in-ballots are such a big deal now. They enable the kind volunteers to cast votes on behalf of illegals, as well as all the traditional groups of fraudulent voters: dead people, people who moved to another state but didn’t get dropped from the rolls, dogs, cats, and pet goldfish, felons, people in dementia wards, homeless people, illiterate people, the mentally handicapped (I literally knew a lady who voted on behalf of her adult retarded son, who had no idea about any of it, and bragged about it– I’m glad she didn’t have access to a residential facility, but you know there are people who do).

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        2. v07

          Population, including those of Illegal aliens, not only affects the distribution of the numbers of seats in the House, it has the same effect on presidential elections because the Electoral College is based on the same calculations as those of Congress. It thus effects political influence both Congress and the Executive branch. And don’t give me any fearing precedent nonsense, Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback is precedent. Further, if you are also a Canuck, you know damn well how poorly the ballot is protected in America.

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    4. “all this flying his body on the Airforce Two, flags at half mast, the statue (planned?), etc, are not just expression of griefĀ “

      I know you’re not in touch with the conservative side of things, so: that was not an expression of national grief. It was the current admin doing a very smart thing, trying to get out ahead of potential retaliatory violence. If you’re mostly hanging out with other liberal people, you might not see it, but Kirk’s death is, starkly, clearly, an inflection point for the right. Not just the assassination itself, but the absolutely psychotic reaction of the left to it, all over MSM, social media, etc. It just became crystal clear to everybody, everybody who didn’t already know: they really want us dead. Whatever happens now, it’s not going in the same direction it was headed last week.

      Normie people like my mom, who has tons of liberal friends at her volunteer work, just logged onto their facebook accounts this week to see people they’ve known for 30 years, people they hang out with socially, people they thought were OK… doing some kind of apeshit savage blood-dance thing over the murder of someone whose political views are basically indistinguishable from hers… because of those political views. We keep her posted on the important news, but she belongs to a generation where it’s impolite to talk politics, so she doesn’t. It’s been a bit of a shock.

      You have no idea how many fence-sitters just fell off of any number of fences. People who aren’t news-junkies. People who thought we’d be OK after we won the election. People who just realized that not only is their kid’s second-grade teacher one of those blood-dance savages, but the local school is stuffed with them. And most importantly, people who thought we could maybe fix this thing without getting into a shooting war.

      The current admin is walking a very fine line right now, of trying to make sure that these people feel heard, that admin is taking their concerns seriously, and that justice is done quickly and publicly. Because there is real potential for Kirk’s death to become a point around which a violent right coalesces. We don’t want that. Nobody actually wants to wake up the rightward potential for violence. We can probably still avoid it as long as the current admin looks like they’re taking care of it, and not continuing to ignore the problem of organized left-extremist violence against them. Millions of people got the news on the 10th and understood this is war. Thank your lucky stars the admin seems to be fighting it, because if they don’t, someone else will.

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      1. Methylethyl is 100% correct on this. My family and I were at my grandfather’s house on Friday to celebrate his 95th birthday. He was hopping mad, and was demanding to know why Trump was not sending the army to arrest the media and the leftist politicians.

        Let me repeat so this sinks in. He is 95 years old and was ready to pick up a rifle to fix the country right that minute.

        I am on the far right. I have no issues stating this publicly. Anyone who has been on this blog for awhile knows my opinions on things.

        So believe me when I say this. President Trump is doing the correct thing. He is attempting to nip this in the bud before it spins out of control and you have over 300 million people trying to kill each other in new and interesting ways.

        I and those like me want justice as well as for our enemies to be removed from their positions of power where they have been destroying and corrupting my nation and my people for decades. I do not however want a civil war. For those who don’t understand nuance, let me clarify. While I do not want a civil war, that is not to say that I and those like me are not willing to fight to defend our families if said war breaks out.

        Right now we are damn well close. I believe the phrase all it takes is a match. That’s how close we are.

        What is astounding to me is how many on the left do not seem to understand just how close to the brink we are, and that if things do go pear shaped. You lot are going to die. Horribly.

        The left are mostly in cities. A city in normal times has 3 days worth of food and water if, if panic does not set in which it always does. Major roads are easy to clog, a handful of bullets, and good luck getting anything through. Which means starvation, canabilism, riots, panic, etc.

        Sure there are a lot of alternative roads, but the odds of getting enough semi trucks with food, water, fuel, etc through is laughable even without anyone trying to stop them. There is a reason the major roads are so bloody wide. They have to be just to keep the cities from starving to death.

        So I repeat. President Trump is doing the correct thing right now. If your on the left. Do yourself a favor and shut up for a few weeks to give the right’s anger time to die down. Starvation is a horrible way to go.

        • – W

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        1. They don’t see it because they don’t talk to anybody outside their bubble, and their algo doesn’t show them anything outside their bubble. They are terrifyingly out of touch.

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        2. …and, you know, thanks. I’m glad somebody gets it.

          We do NOT want or need an armed, active, reactionary right in this country. Nobody sane wants this. But boy, are we close, and this week we got a huge step closer. If people don’t want to know that, or believe it… that’s on their heads, I guess.

          But, you know, I hang around here because I like y’all. If this is not something on your radar, I beg you: broaden your information sources to include the opposition, so you don’t get blindsided by it. Things are dangerous out there right now. You need intel that’ll tell you when to get out of Dodge if things go pear shaped, and you need an evacuation plan with some contingency measures attached.

          We’re all gonna hope and pray that this blows over, but that’s not guaranteed.

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          1. sure, one can always expand one’s range of sources. Believe it or not, but my social media are far from being a typical leftwing bubble. For instance, for some reason Facebook is very keen on showing me pretty bloodthirsty posts of ex-Soviet Russian-speaking Jews. From various countries. Which usually are bloodthirsty about Palestine, and for the last several days they are bloodthirsty about the American Left… Also routinely openly reveling in Jewish superiority… I really could create a lot of hardcore anti-semitic propaganda if I were into making screenshots and translating them into English. My actual Jewish friends may be moderately pro-Israel but they never post such a hardcore stuff. Maybe Facebook is showing me this stuff because I read in Russian… Maybe they are showing me this stuff because they want to agitate me…

            Have you considered a possibility that social media, particularly Musk’s X, are accelerationist?

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            1. Yes social media ARE accelerationist. Engagement farming is the commercial model. That does not mean that:

              • the crazy isn’t real (yes these are real accounts of real people, including people we know)
              • It’s not having a real effect on people.
              • We should ignore it because “it’s just social media”.

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              2. The sticking point seems to be a really intractable difference in how the right and the left see *reality*.

                Everybody is really hung up on this idea that Trump, say, is really actually calling for the murder of innocents, locking libs up in camps, etc. that Kirk is a hate-spewing hate machine calling for the murder of gays, etc.

                I’m not sure this is solvable. The right knows these things are not true, because we’re looking at primary sources. We know what they actually said. We’ve read, seen the video, etc. of the entire speech, the entire interview, the entire comment. And we know it’s a total lie. We’ve spent the last five years trying to educate about this– like hey, look, here’s what they actually said.

                crickets. They don’t want to know.

                The left not only took the excerpt and believed it, they don’t seem to have any interest in checking for themselves, or any concept that their sources might be lying, or even deliberately misleading them.

                The part that’s really galling is that so many of these people are academics, supposedly TRAINED to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources, question their own premises, look for evidence, check references, etc. But they don’t do it. How did this happen?

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              3. Steven King posted that Kirk called to stone gays to death. He apologized and retracted, which is great but that he would initially look at this information and decide that it sounded plausible is very telling. He lives in a reality where it’s plausible that conservatives want to stone gays and bring back slavery. That’s the scary part. The complete lack of filter. The utter divorce from reality.

                Again, it’s wonderful that he apologized. It’s much more than we are getting from others.

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              5. methylethyl

                “The part thatā€™s really galling is that so many of these people are academics, supposedly TRAINED to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources, question their own premises, look for evidence, check references, etc. But they donā€™t do it. How did this happen?“

                DEI efforts are not something new. What result do we imagine that Affirmative Action hiring and promotion coupled with political correct behavior would bring? We have been actively selecting against both reasoning and measuring for three generations?

                And as Kipling warned in the ā€œGods of the Copybook Headingsā€ deliberately disregarding centuries of the knowledge will inevitably result in disaster. Sadly, we are not nearly as wise as we imagine ;-D

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            2. I honestly can’t understand what it matters what Musk wants. The reality doesn’t go away if we are unaware of it. Kirk is still as dead. The home addresses of a bunch of other conservative influencers have been published online. We still have heard from zero personalities on the Left saying that the opinions of these conservative commentators are completely normal and merit no persecution.

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        3. The Left is so used to never being challenged, never having the smallest limit put on its will, never experiencing the tiniest boundary, that they lost all touch with reality. They honestly don’t understand that the smartest thing to do right now is to shut up for a few weeks. Simply shut up.

          Clueless, out of touch. And completely oblivious to how the Trump administration is trying to help them, before anybody else.

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            1. Did you see the one where workers at Office Max refused to print posters for a Charlie Kirk vigil?

              After they were fired, people started claiming this is cancel culture but I don’t understand when it became normal for retail workers to refuse business when they aren’t the owner.

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              1. I’m not sympathetic to the squealing about “cancel culture”.

                It has always been SOP to fire elementary school teachers when it turns out they made some ill-advised pornos at 19, or they have an OF account, or they got arrested for DUI or DV, or popped into the background of some live news broadcast screaming obscenities. We have a very long precedent of firing teachers for things in their private lives that a) become public, and b) make the school look bad. A really shocking proportion of the crazies that’ve generously made themselves public, are school employees. They’re not being fired for their political views. They’re being fired for behaving like psychos in public. I don’t think anybody’s getting a pink slip for saying “I didn’t like the guy, but political violence is always bad”.

                And yeah, the print job people: that is literally their job. Employers don’t look kindly on refusing customers just because you personally don’t like them. That was not a time to self-interpret the employee handbook and refuse “propaganda”– it was a time to call their manager and ask for clarification– if mgmt had agreed, it’d be manager getting fired. Poor OTJ decision.

                I have a niggling suspicion that many of these people, given how unhinged their public internet posts have been, are… also not great employees and coworkers. But in many places the barriers to firing people are formidable. The speed at which some of these people have become unemployed kind of suggests the employer had *already* realized this person was a gigantic liability (as in, likely to result in a lawsuit against the company) and a drag on the workplace, but hadn’t yet found a viable legal excuse to get rid of them. Generous of them to provide it.

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              2. That all these people would so openly express such horrid beliefs demonstrates that they sincerely thought this was the socially acceptable position. People rarely think deeply about such things. They simply reproduce what they see as the acceptable, normal discourse. It’s normal to say “hi, how are you.” It’s equally normal to wish death on conservatives. It’s just a thing you do. Every time they roll out in their defense that “he was homophobic, transphobic, antisemiti, racist, etc”. It somehow follows for them that whoever can be called those things deserves death. And if Charlie can deserve being called antisemitic, then really anybody does. The dude routinely posed in a kippah, meriting endless attacks for his support of Israel.

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              5. methylethyl

                Although Canada has a reputation of being “nice and polite” people, we do have lefty radicals; and although many consider them repugnant, they are seldom punished. Our academics are worse than yours.

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              6. Clarissa

                There were vigils in Calgary, Edmonton, and Red Deer, Alberta. And some in the Canada First march in Toronto, the latter were attacked by the left, masked antifa, Palestinian supporters, and the like.

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        4. The Zuma supporters tried this in SA in 2021 when they were attacking malls and trying to blockade the highway to the capital. Instead they were defeated by local militias and there was a triumphant procession down the highway from the capital to restore order, which I suspect was the model for Putin’s abortive convoy to Kiev the next year.

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      2. I had to go on FB because I’m talking on Messenger about a publication and I needed to see the response. I squinted to avoid seeing my feed and go directly to Messenger because I don’t know how to deal with knowing that people who are in my life are expressing bloodthirsty wishes.

        There are lists of people they want to kill next. This is all being eagerly discussed en masse. People keep comparing the assassination of Kirk with the assassination of the Minnesota House reps. But the comparison doesn’t work because there wasn’t a tsunami wave of conservatives saying, “let’s also murder their children and a bunch of other libs.”

        The venom against not only Kirk but his widow and very small children is scary. There’s nothing equivalent to this on the Right. All the efforts to draw an equivalency here are shattered by reality.

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        1. Right.

          AND it’s like it never occurred to any of them that:

          1. They’re a minority now. More than half the country is closer to Kirk than to them.
          2. Everybody can see what they post.
          3. What they’re posting is *extremely alarming* to normal people.
          4. This is a problem.

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        2. IIRC the conservative reaction in my personal info-silo to the Minnesota shootings was largely: “Wait, what just happened there? And why? Gosh I hope they catch that lunatic.” and “OMG they killed him in front of a family member?” followed by “Was this political, or some weird personal vendetta?” and after they caught the dude, a lot of speculation on where his money was coming from, as he seemed to have expensive travel habits for a deranged lunatic, much like that Routh guy they caught on the golf course in south FL. Was there a connection?

          Lots of people thought maybe there was some shady CIA connection, thought there were a lot of similarities with the attempt on Trump at the golf course. I didn’t see anybody cheering for the deaths, wishing ill on the bereaved families, or enumerating who they wanted the loony to shoot next, before he was apprehended. Maybe it’s hard to comprehend, but conservatives fundamentally want *normal life* to keep going, and there’s no room in that for door-to-door assassinations. That’s not OK, even if it’s opposition politicians. The fact that this very basic concept is so hard for lefties to understand, is itself disturbing. Do they no longer have any mental concept for disagreeing with people, and not ill-wishing them? That seems pretty basic to just… being human?

          After this week’s very public display of complete soulless barbarism, they may still believe themselves to be the Good People, but nobody else is buying it.

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          1. Yes, that’s exactly it. People can speculate, advance different theories. But nobody was filming themselves dancing with joy. Nobody was posting “ok, great, now a couple more” videos.

            As the saying goes, we are not the same.

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      3. thank you for long explanation. This is actually why I repeatedly come here (apart from knowing Clarissa for a long time) and one other conservative site – to learn by myself what is happening and not rely on what the algorithms show me.

        that said, the algorithms do not show me any of my real-life friends or acquaintances (admittedly mostly on the left) being bloodthirsty about Kirk or the right.

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        1. Possibly, you have a good IRL filter for befriending people who aren’t bloodthirsty savages. That’s a rare and wonderful gift, treasure it.

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          1. On the other hand, imagine that girl’s life. Being that age and looking like that is not easy. Charlie had two kids. She’s unlikely to have any, with that weight at such an early age.

            I’m not excusing her behavior but I understand why she’s upset.

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          2. —Hereā€™s a very mild sample of what your algo isnā€™t showing you:

            Oh, boy. People are rightfully angry. Unfortunately, many express their anger in ways that also burn my faith in brotherhood… all those comments about her appearance, alleged singlehood, etc…

            “Ugly women and beta males are civilisational cancer. They will destroy anything out of their bitter need for revenge.”

            “Nasty evil transvestite”

            It is pretty obvious that people are agitating each other, instead of making an effort to deescalate.

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              4. Yeah. For years now:

                left: kill the capitalists! Silence is violence! Words are violence! You’re all Nazis and deserve what’s coming to you! Punch Nazis

                left (attempted assassination of Trump): (expletive) I can’t believe he missed! That fireman deserved to die just for showing up at the rally! I wish more people had been killed!

                left (Kirk killed): I’m glad his wife got to see that. I hope they kill her too so his kids can be raised in foster care by good right-thinking liberals. Here’s my list of people who should be shot next. (shouts of jubilation).

                right (notices): …

                left: Oh, c’mon, we didn’t really MEAN it, we were just feeling a lil’ emotional. It’s time for peace and unity and stuff. Civility, amirite.

                Y’all need to stop assuming that just because all the conservative Christians are part of “the right” that means the entire right is composed of conservative Christians. It ain’t so. They can’t act as a restraining force forever. The term “one-way civility” is trending right now. Alinsky’s rule #4. People are sick of that shite.

                The fact that thousands of people showed up in church this weekend for the first time ever, or the first time in years, is a really, really hopeful sign. But it’s fragile.

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            2. Just to clarify: the left has been escalating this for at least a decade now, with considerable escalation in the last five years, and now, all of a sudden, the left is calling for de-escalation.

              A LOT of people are understandably pissed that “let’s all be civil” is only a rule that comes into play when the right gets angry. Calls for de-escalation and civility at this point are wasted. What we need is the admin to purge the crazies from its employ, crack down on the radical terrorist cells, and investigate the remaining funding sources for these groups and stomp them. Public prosecutions.

              Not: “Oh, hey calm down guys they didn’t mean it” but “Yes this is a big problem and we’re taking care of it right now.”

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            3. I do not expect anything from either side, and it is a problem. But I think I have some moral right to call for deescalation.

              Let me tell you a story. I have been involved, in real-life professional capacity, in an incident where somebody was filmed saying something literally similar to wishing Kirk’s children were dead. As in – wishing some other group of children were dead. (Which by the way disproves that nobody on the Right would ever say something of this caliber.) And the video was placed online. Did not spread widely, fortunately… So I had to endure some calls and e-mails from “concerned citizens” (yes, some literally sign anonymous complaints this way) demanding that I take some position publicly. I ignored them… publicly. Because I wanted to deescalate. By the rules, I could or even had to make an example of him. I had no problem privately telling the person in question that what he said was very much not OK (I did not call him to reprimand him, the **** came to me to complain about how he is going to TA after the incident.)

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              1. I’m very glad you did the right thing. That deserves great admiration.

                What would really help to deescalate on the societal level is for people who have moral weight among liberals (writers, movie stars, politicians) to say that it’s ok to hold the same beliefs as Charlie Kirk. You don’t have to agree but these are normal and acceptable beliefs to have. He was not a bad person for holding them. Saying that would go a very long way towards de-escalation.

                Something like 68% of students confess to having pretended to hold more left-wing views than they actually do in order to feel accepted on campus. We need college presidents, professors start to say openly that it’s fine to hold conservative ideas. It’s not immoral, it’s not bad. I’m not opposed to them saying that it’s fine to hold left-wing ideas but they’ve been saying that forever, so it’s not that big of a deal.

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              2. I think it would work better if we normalized some ideas that are relatively narrowly defined, without any references to Kirk or any other divisive figures, on the left or on the right. Invoking any particular person will create an impression that one is trying to “sell” all their positions wholesale.

                How about an idea that cancel culture is not OK?

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              3. We can easily avoid the need to even mention cancel culture if we go for the umbrella idea that it’s perfectly fine to be conservative and not hold any liberal beliefs.

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              4. Like this:

                https://x.com/Rightanglenews/status/1967633129587478627?t=iDXRmZHxo9MRA9H_va2s6Q&s=19

                This a direct call for violence. We are way past cancel culture.

                On the other end of the aisle, right after the assassination, Nick Fuentes gave a passionate 2-hour call to peace, Christian love, and against violence. You don’t get much farther to the Right than Nick Fuentes and I listened on purpose to see what the Far-far-right had to say. It was “let’s pray and stay calm.”

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              5. All fine and good, but Trump is one of the people they’ve been demonizing most since 2016, so he is not in a position to de-escalate anything. Clarissa is right: the people who ARE in a position to de-escalate are people *on the left*. The left has not been listening to any of the rest of us for a decade. They are deaf to our voices.

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              6. And the fact that exactly zero liberal personalities (at least that I know of and I very much want to be proven wrong) have said these simple words “it’s perfectly fine to hold conservative beliefs” shows us that absolutely nothing has been learned from all this.

                A student comes to my office and asks to close the door because she wants to share that she votes Republican but is afraid that somebody will overhear. That’s not normal. It shouldn’t be this way.

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              7. @Valter: the time to say “cancel culture is not OK” was back when the left was doing it to everybody else. It’s a bit late now.

                It’s like if my kids are fighting, and one of them hits the other 20 times. If I don’t say “stop hitting each other” and enforce that, and then the other kid starts hitting back, it’s too late. I have zero moral authority if I only say “stop hitting” when the 2nd kid does it. Obviously I still need them to stop hitting each other, and I’ll probably have to do some enforcing, but now it’s *much* more difficult, and the first kid is definitely going to do it again because he knows I only enforce when his brother retaliates. They both know this is a situation where the rules are lopsided in favor of one of them.

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      4. Hi methylethyl,

        I slept on it, and I want to clarify if I understood you correctly on all important details?

        a) the majority of the population of the US (of the population of the US, not just the Republican half) identifies with Kirk. This means that they are not merely agreeing with him on some topics occasionally, they agree with him on most topics most of the time, enough to identify with him.
        b) So when he was killed, they were angry, but what impressed them even more was waking up the next day and discovering some of their real-life acquaintances rejoicing in Kirk’s death. This was a mass phenomenon, not some limited number of posts recirculated by social media.

        c) This, more so than Kirk’s death per se, made them realize that the Left was not merely using “fascists” as a swearword, or perhaps as a hyperbole, but that the Left really sees the Right as actual fascists, with all that this entails, including seeing violence against fascists as justified. In other words “I am like Kirk, and they are rejoicing in his death, and they see it as justified, so they wish me death, personally.”
        d) this made them feel threatened, not necessarily by some young bookstore girl from Milwaukee or a county treasurer from Pennsylvania, but seeing it as an “open season” thing, with some random Leftwing nut possibly going after them and their family because it is normalized?
        e) what Trump’s government is doing now is not lionizing Kirk (although in your eyes he definitely deserves lionization), but merely doing a responsible government thing – diffusing the situation by showing that government cares. Because if the government did not do that, the Right would take matters into its own hands.
        f) this clearly would involve violence, as you felt the need to explicitly assure me that you do not want right-wing violence.

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        1. a) No. The majority of the US population does not identify personally with Kirk (outside college students, I don’t think most of us have seen more than a few video clips, but we know who he is), but does agree with him on one or more points: any and every possible combination of: they’re Christian, they felt like they had to hide their real views when they were in college, they’re against abortion, they think it’s OK and good to be American (patriotism!), they think the movement toward gender-muddling has been a net negative for our culture/country, (women) they’d rather be raising their kids than working a crappy job they hate, they (women) *are* raising their kids instead of the crappy job and people look down on them for it, etc… AND they recognize that all of the things Kirk is talking about, Kirk’s viewpoint, are actively suppressed or outright demonized in mass media, social media, uni campuses: these are all really common things, but that we are savagely discouraged from saying out loud, in public, and this has been the case for at least a decade now. Everybody gets to “speak their truth” except Christians, conservatives, young people who want to get married and have a family, people who *like* America and think it’s actually one of the better countries to live in… We don’t have to identify with Kirk personally (I sure didn’t), to understand that he’s one of the few people out there stumping for… that thing we would get jumped by the cancel mob for saying out loud in public.

          b) Yes. For a couple days there it wasn’t clear who shot him. Could’ve been a Chinese spy for all we knew. Always some people who jump to conclusions, but we didn’t know. What was indisputable was that suddenly our newsfeeds– both people we know IRL and people we didn’t– were on fire with hateful jubilation over a grisly public murder of somebody who… hadn’t hurt anybody, and who was publicly representing at least some views that many of us shared. Compare to the assassination of the UHC exec. There were a lot of people even on the right who were not sad about that. We’ve all had to deal with predatory insurance companies. Assassinating people is still bad, but absolutely nobody could be said to identify with the fellow. Everybody understands why a crazy young radical would target that guy, and nobody feels personally endangered by it. Obviously not good, we’re glad the guy was caught, and we hope he stays in jail, because that’s not a good precedent, we don’t actually want our country to become an assassination culture. Even if we didn’t like the vic.

          Also b) I’m happy to report another thing that seems to be a mass phenomenon in the wake of all this: https://x.com/TONYxTWO/status/1967391507033575751

          c) yes. 100%.

          d) yes. 50%. Not necessarily feeling personally targeted, but this has very much been a “tell us how you really feel” moment. We won the election, we have been watching the dismantling of the woke machine that has had everybody scared to even squeak out anything they truly believe for years. It was such a huge relief. And then… they shot him. It’s not that we feel personally targeted: there are too many of us. It’s the revelation that the other side, now that they’re losing their grip on political power, is turning to violence. And that may include people we know, people we work with, people who live on our street and saw our Trump signs etc.

          e) yes. (and while he wasn’t my style, I appreciate what he was doing: even when I was in college, the campus political atmosphere was suffocating).

          f) yes. People who have families, jobs, churches, stability, etc. are, in fact, capable of violence (everybody is!). But they are also very very reluctant to go there, because they have families, jobs, churches, stability, a future, the prospect of playing with their grandkids. It takes LOT to mobilize them, but modern neoliberalism seems hell-bent on exactly that. Indoctrinate their kids to turn against them (yes, schools have been doing this ,explicitly, for years), threaten their jobs, shut down their churches (even temporarily– a lot of meh churchgoers just stopped going), make housing unaffordable for anybody under 40 with a family, suppress wages by importing cheap labor, convince everybody that family isn’t important, that kids are a liability, that sexual freedom is more important than stability… Like, OK you just took a stable population of people who do not normally engage in violence, and spent decades stripping them of all the things that make them stable and nonviolent. WTF did you think would happen to them? This is heaps, masses, of dry tinder waiting for a torch.

          Trump is very wisely engaged in fire-suppression right now.

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        2. I didn’t agree with Kirk much. I was never a follower, as I said before. But I identify with him now because I’ve been scared for a long time. In the eyes of the left, people with conservative opinions are all Goebbels. And if you could kill Goebbels, wouldn’t you? Anybody would.

          I shared the story about the friends who dropped me over one little opinion. They don’t know the extent of my actual conservatism. If they did, I can’t even imagine what they would want to do to me. If you can dehumanize somebody you know, somebody with whom you’ve shared the most intimate feelings, what will you do to a stranger?

          We (conservatives) are all Charlie not because we share his beliefs. I obviously don’t. But because we have seen not only the people but the institutions around us condemn our beliefs as putting us beyond the pale.

          I also shared before how a colleague publicly accused me of wanting to “murder many people” when I decided to teach in person in 2020. I facilitated everybody at my department teaching online but still I was accused of murderous intent by making a different decision for myself. What do you do if you think somebody wants to commit murder? Wouldn’t you want to stop them by any means necessary? Wouldn’t you want to exclude them completely from productive life?

          The conflation between holding certain opinions and representing a mortal threat is what’s scary.

          I have a right-wing friend. She’s a very different flavor of right-wing from me. We have disagreed a lot. We are both passionate people. We have raised our voices, scoffed, argued loudly many, many times. But we still love each other. We are still friends. We aren’t accusing each other of murderous intent.

          It’s not even a left-wing nut I fear. It’s the people I know, people who’ve been to my house, people who shared stories about their divorces and ailing parents. I can’t be honest with them because I’m afraid of them. Not physically but in every other way. And there are so many of us. I have a colleague who is concealing who she’s married to because he’s high up among state Republicans. Nobody who is married to a Dem politician is concealing anything. As they shouldn’t. But we live in fear. And when we see a young dude bleeding out from a neck wound because he was openly conservative, even very differently conservative, that constant fear becomes more acute.

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  2. —If a society canā€™t agree on basic things like ā€œthis person was an important voiceā€ (whether or not you like them) then say bye bye civilization and all the reasoned discourse in the world isnā€™t going to save you from what comes next or soften the processā€¦.

    agreed. But I hope I do not have to explain to you the difference between “important voice” as in somebody who was influencing sufficient number of people and somebody getting treatment bordering with state funeral. There are hundreds of “important voices”, both on the right and on the left that did not get the same treatment.

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    1. “hundreds of ā€œimportant voicesā€, both on the right and on the left that did not get the same treatment”

      How many of them were shot in the neck on stage?

      Had he died in a car accident or something like that then the reaction would be different. The behavior you seem to object to is a direct result of the manner he was killed.

      I never cared much for him either but I don’t begrudge the post mortem treatment pour ne encourager les autres

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      1. It’s like when JFK was assassinated. I don’t particularly like JFK but the assassination was an extremely traumatic moment for the nation. People still feel strongly about that moment not because they agree with JFK. But because it wasn’t all about individuals and their lists of carefully curated consumerist opinions about everything. It was about togetherness and the soul of the nation being wounded by that assassination.

        That you can’t even explain to people anymore that it’s not about whether they agree or disagree with opinions is a sign of how far we traveled in the direction of individualization and away from togetherness.

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          1. Really? That’s so… unexpected. I ran across a “We love Charlie Kirk” demonstration with flag-waving and stuff, in a video yesterday… out of South Korea. I had to sit there a minute trying to decide if it was real or AI. Seems to have been real. It still kind of does not compute. I get why he was so popular in the US with the college crowd: it’s not a congenial time to be a conservative in college here. But Korea? Why?

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            1. LOL, Kid, the border between Saskatchewan and Montana is generally only a couple of strands of rusty barb wire, the accents are even the same. Mind you, our beer is better ;-D

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              1. Not a beer-drinker so I’ll take your word for it. Just didn’t figure the political scene was similar enough for Kirk to be anything but niche outside our borders.

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              2. No, I was talking about JFK’s killing when I was a highschool kid.

                Some of our radicals, mostly academics were arseholes about Charlie, but most of us are horrified. And somewhat worried, as we are currently in our endless perennial arguments between the West’s proverbial gun toting rednecks and our morally superior and much nicer gun control superiors in the East ;-D

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              3. ditto here.

                If they think they’re going to make a good gun-control argument out of “we want you all dead, and we want to take away your guns”…

                Well, you can’t fix stupid.

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        2. Responds to Clarissaā€™s latest: ā€œItā€™s like when JFK was assassinated. I donā€™t particularly like JFK but the assassination was an extremely traumatic moment for the nation. People still feel strongly about that moment not because they agree with JFK. But because it wasnā€™t all about individuals and their lists of carefully curated consumerist opinions about everything. It was about togetherness and the soul of the nation being wounded by that assassination.ā€

          What does Charlie Kirk have in common with JFK, other than being male and dying from a gunshot? Do you not see any difference? Please cite all the quotes in which JFK demonized half of the nation. Has he ever spoken against the separation of church and state?

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          1. Dude, boring. This fake self-righteousness is boring. Scoot along somewhere else for a change. We are all very familiar with your tiny repertoire of teenage rhetorical tricks and we are all very bored. You can’t contribute anything here until you develop intellectually.

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            1. You’re comparing your own feelings about the assassination of an American president in 1963 (without having been there) to real-time reactions to a right-wing activist being assassinated in 2025 with a straight face. I doubt I’ll ever reach those intellectual heights. Maybe if I get diagnosed with dementia.

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      2. –Had he died in a car accident or something like that then the reaction would be different. The behavior you seem to object to is a direct result of the manner he was killed.

        Fair enough. Can you imagine similar treatment by this administration if AOC were assassinated? Or, if we want to exclude elected officials – if, say, Jon Stewart were assassinated?

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        1. Do you think AOC or Stewart have been in any immediate danger of it? Kirk’s been wearing a bulletproof vest to public appearances for years, because nobody was being particularly subtle with the threats. The risk was constant, and he knew it.

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        2. “Can you imagine similar treatment by this administration if AOC… Jon Stewart were (consered word)?”

          I wouldn’t necessarily expect the same treatment but I wouldn’t expect the administration to crow and laugh about it either and I would despise anyone who did.

          Or even Biden… I despise him and his administration but when…. you know…. happens I’ll fully expect the usual state funeral and for politicians, including Trump, to say nice things about him because that’s how civilization works.

          At present (hasn’t always been this way) the left is trying to claim the entire moral high ground and equate any deviation from their party line (as it were) as thoughtcrime. That is the bigger, overriding problem.

          Hysterical overuse of words like racist, fascist, nazi etc have robbed them of real meaning and the left isn’t backing off this very destructive trend at all… if anything they’re doubling down.

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  3. Well, for Afrikaaner nationalists, Anglos were the enemy and for African nationalists whites are the enemy, so I’m pretty sure I’m the roadkill of nationalism.

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  4. @clarissa re:

    “Thatā€™s the scary part. The complete lack of filter. The utter divorce from reality.”

    Exactly. Every day, I see right-identified sources saying crazy-sounding stuff. And if it is a thing of interest to me, that I might possibly repeat to someone else or comment about, I usually go looking for some corroboration, more detail, something to ensure that this crazy-sounding thing I found on the internet is for real, verifiable, not just some bonkers Q shite or conspiracy troll thing. There’s tons of that stuff out there. I don’t just instantly believe it because it looks plausible and aligns with my priors. Why do I verify? Because if it’s wrong, people will call me out on it and I’ll look stupid. I don’t like looking stupid. Really basic human vanity.

    How did the left get to a point where they apparently can’t do this really basic information hygiene?

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      2. Well Kid, I also have hope. The miscreants always try to hide. But if you nail them with both truth and humour, the image sticks, they are well and truely nailed ;-D

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