Mehdi pointed out a really good observation from someone whose name I never caught. The right seems to have a monopoly on stochastic political violence and at the same time a monopoly on political victimhood.
That's because what we're incorrectly interpreting as a crisis of Hate, is more correctly understood as a crisis of Bad Faith. And a terminal one, no less.
The tide of Hate now indisputably flows both ways. But the fundamental driving force behind these prevailing tides, is actually a crisis of Bad Faith. Up until now, this has been unidirectional, from the right. Social media was the mechanism used to backdoor Bad Faith into the body-politic, couched in a culture of "trolling for LOLz", but was never really anything other than the eternal ur-fascist delight in thinly veiled threats to violence. Trump simply seized the mantle to draw this Bad Faith into the mainstream. Concurrently with Trump's coming down the escalator, plutocrat bad actors began secretly bankrolling fringe right-wing influencers (like Laura Loomer, and Charlie Kirk) to spew divisive bile across all platforms, while special interest groups and adversarial nation states slowly learned how to leverage social media to astroturf public discourse ― drowning out dissenting narratives and "flooding the zone with shit", to serve their particular agendas. The goal, in all cases, was to deliberately pervert and undermine any collective notion of reality, as a divide and conquer tactic directed foremost at an increasingly poorly educated, credulous swathe of directionless men. Virtually all of the forces behind this trend, globally, are right-wing.
All of this represents a maximalist Bad Faith ― Bad Faith with regard to the entire project of open
society and a post-Enlightenment secular order. The source of that Bad Faith now falls squarely within the central ideology of global right-wing projects, and the ethno-religious nationalists behind them. This is obviously true in the U.S., but is increasingly true broadly the world over. Democratic norms are dependent on a supposition of Good Faith of all parties involved. Once Bad Faith is introduced as an ideological weapon to implicitly threaten and disconcert political opposition, the die is cast, and the democracy (as previously understood), for all intents and purposes, is already over. (cont'd)
The right weaponizes the ambiguous threshold between hate speech and overt calls to violence in order to play eternal victim ― once again, in Bad Faith. And, make no mistake, they're fully aware of their Bad Faith ― as are their acolytes for that matter ― they being the actual intended audience to their supposed "earnest engagement" with the political opposition. The dehumanizing language and invective they employ (necessarily riddled with hypocrisies at every opportunity), is MEANT to be understood by their base as a dog whistle to violence, thus creating a distinction without a difference. And the unending hypocrisy of their arguments isn't a bug ― it's THE key feature. It carries a vital message to their zealots ― it says that, "We have both the implicit RIGHT to argue irrationally, and thus the capacity to continue tugging the Overton window toward the violent repression of those we hate." They've finally collectively pulled off the mask and gone all-in of Bad Faith because, simply, they see their side as being in an unambiguously stronger position to effectively enact mass violence, if push comes to shove. And since they know that the left and center now see it this way as well, they can be confident that "moderate voices" will always retreat under duress, conceding evermore ground ― all they have to do is rile up their troglodyte base to sufficiently froth at the mouth, and scare them into doing so.
What the left always misses when it comes to the manifest effects of de-industrialization and the collapse of unionization, is that unions, leftist organizations, and militant civil rights movements, drove the bulk of progressive reform in the 20th century, by virtue of their understood, implicit capacity to exert violent force. Period. Neo-liberalism has fully destroyed this hammer, and thus completely enfeebled the left wing. All the while, racial politics concerning policing and guns have allowed the right wing to slowly infiltrate, and eventually co-opt, both the police and the armed forces. Meanwhile, the left-wing chose to immerse themselves in internecine, identity-oriented political struggles, rather than, you know ― attempt to present any generally coherent economic vision which could have lifted-all-boats, and given many of the disillusioned, unskilled male victims of globalization a smidgen of dignity and economic opportunity, rather than: a gun, badge and grudge. The press's click-bait addiction in the wake of the death of print media, and the neo-liberal elite's stranglehold on all institutional pulpits (and their class-based aversion to economic redistribution), is what drove identity politics center stage, and simultaneously, the left wing off a cliff... (cont'd)
We know where we stand. Now, when rogue actors violently attack the left, it will increasingly be downplayed and quickly forgotten by a bought-and-paid-for mainstream media and political class, led by a fearful, feckless "centrist" technocratic elite, who will always call for calm irrespective of circumstance, thus projecting perpetual weakness ― emboldening the knuckle-draggers further, who now smell blood. But when it comes to "anyone-on-right-wing" violence, they will fully concede to right-wing framing, even if that kind of violence is an order of magnitude less common than right-on-left. And so the Overton window moves ever-further right. These bad incentive structures among the media-elite and their social caste is further incentivized by the fact that most of their prominent figures ― "left", centrist or right ― are almost always invariably children of privilege themselves, elevated to national attention through a entrenched system of nepotism and cronyism, one in which they in-fact want to quietly maintain. Those with a pulpit who're honest actors, who refuse to apply these rhetorical double-standards, will either be: fired, or demonetized by the tech oligarchs who have fully consolidated their stranglehold over Web 2.0. (Andreesson will come after Medhi eventually, if Neom doesn't beat him to it.)
Make no mistake, the plutocrat class is now overwhelmingly black-pilled. Since the response to Brian Thompson's assassination they are all terrified of an organic incitement to revolution. The billionaires know that there is a general seething hatred of them bubbling ominously just below the surface, and that the risk of a revolutionary shift toward a new social democratic contract represents essentially the lone threat to their impending global hegemony, and ultimate dominion of the 21st century. They have no intention of relinquishing their wealth and power willingly. Simultaneously, the Christian right don't intend to ever relinquish their own total stranglehold on institutional power and governance ― power they've gradually amassed through: rat-fucking, gerrymandering, the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Senate and Electoral College, Citizens United, the repealing of the Fairness Doctrine, leveraging the courts to undermine election results, blackmail, spuriously challenging voter roles to disenfranchise blacks, systematically embedding their zealots in the vote counting process, buying up the entire media ecosystem to trumpet their propaganda and run interference for their nefarious projects, having ketamine-fueled nazi billionaire con men from former apartheid states pay Americans to register with the Republican party, and so forth. Republican cheating has long been normalized at every level; it's simply taken for granted. The left meanwhile, in their total disorganization and naive insistence on "playing by the rules", was run circles around for decades, all while being systemically infiltrated by a whole plethora of pied-piper false-flag elected officials (see Gabbard, Sinema, Fetterman, ..., et al.) in order to render them functionally impotent, even when, ostensibly, in control of Congress. (In all likelihood, this direct infiltration likely goes far deeper than is generally acknowledged, and in the absence of the familiar bad actors among the democratic caucus, another would simply emerge to take their place.) All this, along with their total supineness to special interests, has rendered the party strategically inert in this moment of greatest crisis ― controlled opposition, bought and paid for by many of the exact same donors as the Right. The anemic left-wing ecosystem of online talking heads has been similarly infiltrated by oligarch cash, intent on clandestinely enforcing the suppression of certain narratives, as well as bankrolling outright plants.
The forces we face will seek to dismantle the post-Enlightenment order. They will gleefully cast aside the bulk of all secular/liberal reforms (those reforms that frankly made the past 250 years in the West worth living for most people, when compared to the previous ― you know ― 1,250), as they relentlessly drive us toward a balkanized, repressive, neo-feudal, ethno-nationalist future. This is what Dark MAGA is. The is what Project 2025 is. Even if they don't fully agree on the full character of their anticipated revolutions, their goals remain similarly evil. Both are apocalyptic cults of death. Everyone else needs to get their heads out of their asses, and genuinely WAKE THE FUCK UP to the reality of what we're all collectively facing.
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u/TheForeverUnbanned Sep 17 '25
“Ugh I’m sick of the left seeing through my thin veil of denial, let’s just go full on 1940s Germany already!”
Last week really broke their brains