Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
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Fairly often I run across the following piece of reasoning:
There must be punishment, including punishment by God, because otherwise who wouldn’t want the fun of being evil?
This occasions some side-eye and sidling away from the person in question. “Uh, if you think evil is fun and are only good because of fear of punishment, something is wrong with you. And you’re dangerous if you ever think you can ‘get away with it.'”
Now this is a difficult topic because it requires us to talk about the fact that doing some types of evil IS fun for some people. Do I have to explain that rapists often enjoy raping someone?
Many years ago, and I can’t find it now, I read an excerpt from a book whose author had been a torturer during the Lebanese civil war. He wrote, quite seriously, that it had destroyed him because torturing someone was the most ecstatic experience, way better than sex, and now that he didn’t torture anymore, the entire world was gray and lacked any pleasure for him.
Power isn’t just an aphrodisiac, it’s an amplifier… Making someone else do what you want them to do is experienced by many people as very pleasurable. That they don’t want to, and force was used, makes people feel powerful and potent. Trickery, convincing people to do something that is against their interest, is likewise experienced as a rush. Con artists (including the really big ones like politicians, Obama, for example) revel in their ability to manipulate people, then betray them.
The human condition is weak. We are at the mercy of fate, luck, our bodies, and other people from the moment we’re born. As children, this is especially the case. Experiencing power, feeling that we aren’t weak, is, for many, the ultimate rush and the ultimate relief from fear.
Hurting people for your own benefit, successfully, is to experience power.
Almost every CEO and executive and almost all politicians experience this repeatedly. And, as many studies have shown, powerful people lose empathy. So they experience the upside of their evil without feeling the suffering of their victims.
It’s not just that he doesn’t care that they die, but that forcing them to die for him is a rush.
Now you don’t have to be super powerful to get this. Find someone weaker, and use your power against them. Weaker is relative: they could be physically weaker (your wife and kids, perhaps?) or they could be stupider (be a con artist) or they could just lack will and you have plenty (see henpecked husbands who are physically stronger and earn more money) or you could have managed to get into a management position and they need their jobs and have to do what you say, or else.
There are millions of variations: no matter how weak you are, there’s someone weaker, and you too can experience the retail version of the wholesale pleasure offered to a CEO or high-ranking politician. You’ll never get the full thrills of torture and murder of a George W. Bush or Netanyahu, but you can taste from the same sweet swill.
Evil is fun. And that leaves aside that the most evil people tend to wind up stinking rich as a side benefit.
I’ve made the case for evil, and I’ve done my best to make the strongest case I can, but I personally think you’re a fool to accept it or choose evil.
The problem with evil is that, as Tolkien pointed out, it consumes itself. You can never trust another person who is evil, not completely. For now, it may be in their self-interest to help you or at least leave you alone, but if you’re ever vulnerable and there’s enough at stake, well, they’ll come for you. You must always be strong, or you must be subordinate to someone stronger than you. That person will only protect you as long as it is in their self-interest. If you need to be sacrificed, so be it.
Safety requires good. The obvious solution is to be a free rider. Be evil, but live among good people. But, eventually, they figure out you’re evil, and the more people try to free ride, the more a society becomes evil, till the good people, even if not a minority, are effectively powerless. (This is arguably where the US is. Probably a majority aren’t evil, but who cares? They have no power. Israel, on the other hand, is a country where something over 90% of the non-Palestinian population is evil. There is no reservoir of evil larger than a muddy puddle.)
But it’s not just safety. Evil people care only about others when it’s in their interest. If you’re good and live with good people, you know that when you’re sick, broken, scared, or down, someone will help.
This is, really, true freedom. The knowledge that someone is there to help when you need help means you can take risks and you can do what you want, so long as it doesn’t harm other people. If you’re in an evil society, you must always be sure to have sufficient power (money is secondary; it means nothing if you can’t protect it). Your effective freedom is vastly restricted.
But perhaps most important, as good as the exercise of power feels, most of the enjoyable emotions in life are oriented towards good. There’s nothing quite like the warm feeling of love. There’s nothing like true friendship, the feeling of safety it gives, and the playfulness it allows. And as for power, the power of a good community is massive. When a group comes together to do something because the members all want to, not out of fear, the feeling of being part of something larger than oneself is wonderful. (Everyone should take part in a barn raising to get a taste of this.)
The price of evil is fear. Of knowing that you’re always in danger. Perhaps you’ll be the alpha predator who “wins”, the Barack Obama or Trump (though he often seems unhappy), or the Bush Jr., but for every winner, for every aspirational evil mastermind, there are millions of predators who are sometimes the victimizer, and other days the victim. People who always have to worry about who’s coming for them next.
Of course, if you live in an evil society, many of the benefits are lost. But even there, good people find each other and create their own small groups, and even if it’s just you, there is a satisfaction in virtue that is very real. There is a peace in being good, and knowing one has red lines and, oddly, in knowing that there are things one will not do to stay alive: that there are depths one will not sink to.
In the end, evil is about wallowing in pleasures that always have sickness to them, that never fully satisfy. The ecstasy of torture or rape or killing the innocent is real enough, but there is a filth to it, which is why such people often wind up with nightmares and PTSD, despite being the powerful ones who did the evil.
Those who want evil, who think it is fun, often wake one day to find the filth they have wallowed in has consumed them.
Evil has its pleasures, but they are not worth what they cost.
(The next article in this series will argue that China has defeated the US in large part because it has been more good, or less evil, than America for quite some time.)
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Chris Hedges, Sep 28, 2025
Trump’s newest presidential memoranda criminalizes critics of empire, capitalism, Christian nationalism, abuses by the state and those who fight racism and gender discrimination.
Fascists, historically, are surprisingly candid about the world they intend to create. Those they target, despite this transparency, are surprisingly obtuse about what is coming.
The most ominous warning to date from our homegrown fascists is the latest Presidential memo, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” It accuses any critic of law enforcement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the American empire, capitalism, the Christian right, the persecution of immigrants and those that decry discrimination based on race and gender, as well as those who question white, male patriarchy, described as “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” of fomenting “violent revolution.”
It is a declaration of war on the so-called “radical left,” those the Trump administration blames for “heinous assassinations and other acts of political violence” from the murder of the right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk to “the 2024 assassination of a senior healthcare executive and the 2022 assassination attempt against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.” ….
The memo brazenly inverts the rule of law. It turns the law into an instrument of injustice. It uses the decorum of federal agencies, the courts and trials to legalize state crimes. It is grounded in magical thinking, bizarre conspiracy theories and a paranoia that sees the most tepid acts of dissent or criticism as treason….
I spent two years with the architects of our emergent fascism when I wrote my book, “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” They do not hide their vision for America. They plan to make the legal system subservient to dogma. They hate the “secular humanist” society based on science and reason. They dream of making the Ten Commandments the basis of the legal system. They plan to teach Creationism or “Intelligent Design” in public schools and make education overtly “Christian.” They brand the LGBTQ community, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals, and those dismissed as “nominal Christians” — meaning Christians who do not embrace the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible — as deviants. These deviants are worthy only of being silenced, imprisoned or killed. They condemn government assistance programs, especially for the poor. The climate crisis is a hoax. They call for the federal government to be reduced to protecting property rights, “homeland” security and waging war. They want church organizations to run social-welfare agencies and schools. They demand the expansion of the death penalty to include “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be treated as murder. They call for a return to white, male patriarchy by mythologizing the past. They demand women be denied contraception, access to abortion and equality under the law. The only legitimate voices in public discourse and the media, to them, are “Christian.” America is sacralized as an agent of God. Those who defy the “Christian” authorities, at home and abroad, are agents of Satan.
These Christian fascists are incapable of dealing in the world of ideas, nuance and complexity. Stunted by emotional numbness and an inchoate rage, they are unable to communicate in any language other than threats and coercion. Diplomacy, scholarship, culture and journalism are an anathema. One’s duty is to obey.
Ken Klippenstein, Sep 27, 2025
…“This is the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left wing terrorism,” Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller said, referring to the issuance….
The Trump administration isn’t only targeting organizations or groups but even individuals and “entities” whom NSPM-7 says can be identified by any of the following “indicia” (indicators) of violence:
- anti-Americanism,
- anti-capitalism,
- anti-Christianity,
- support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
- extremism on migration,
- extremism on race,
- extremism on gender
- hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
- hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
- hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.
“The United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts,” the directive states ….
Trump’s NSPM-7 Alarms Law Firms While Congress Is Silent
Ken Klippenstein [, via Naked Capitalism 10-01-2025]
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death, there is a frenzied competition to replace him as the face of the young American right.
Nick Fuentes, who largely built his following by trolling Charlie Kirk for his support of immigration and Israel, seems to be the biggest immediate beneficiary.
The Bulwark has a good backgrounder on the relationship between Kirk and Fuentes before September 10, 2025. It was called “How the Groypers Won: In the clash between Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes, the Pepe people prevailed” and was published in June:
“I’ve noticed people like Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh are now calling for an immigration moratorium,” Fuentes said, in comments first noted by Media Matters. “That means they want to shut down all immigration. And suffice to say, the groypers have won. It’s just not even a question at this point.”
Fuentes has a point. After nearly a decade of being treated as the skunk at the Grand Old Party (so much so that even Trump had to claim not to know him after the two had dinner with Kanye), some of the Republicans’ leading thinkers have adopted his ideas.
No one better symbolizes the right’s surrender to Fuentes than Kirk.
The day before Kirk’s murder, Fuentes got the classic New York Times soft-focus feature article.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) September 28, 2025
The Times featured some red-hot quotes from Fuentes bashing Trump:
“When I was a teenager, I thought he was a Caesar-like figure who was going to save Western civilization,” Mr. Fuentes, 27, said in an interview. “Now I view him as incompetent, corrupt and compromised.”
Specifically, he has criticized the president for showing solidarity with Israel over the war in Gaza, for refusing to release the Epstein files and for considering extending student visas to Chinese nationals. On Labor Day, Mr. Fuentes posted on social media, “Trump 2.0 has been a disappointment in literally every way but nobody wants to admit it.”
In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s death, as I posted at Naked Capitalism, Fuentes reacted sharply to widespread allegations that Kirk’s accused killer, Tyler Robinson, was one of Fuentes’ groypers:
My followers and I are currently being framed for the murder of Charlie Kirk by the mainstream media based on literally zero evidence.
After the Left gunned him down, they celebrated and justified it. They said I was next. Now they are blaming me.
These people are pure evil. pic.twitter.com/WRQdt7G3Dp
— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) September 13, 2025
He seems to have bounced back, maybe this piece by Graeme Wood of The Atlantic calling the accusations of Kirk’s accused killer being a groyper “outlandish” turned things around.
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And things are on the up for Fuentes, as Wired reports:
In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, Fuentes struck a more conciliatory tone, urging followers not to pick up arms, but also repeated that he believes Kirk was “complicit in the Israeli capture of the right wing for a very long time.”Rather than damaging Fuentes’ popularity, Kirk’s death has accelerated it. His X following has grown by almost 175,000 since Kirk’s death, and he has seen his following on Rumble increase by more than 100,000.His livestream commemorating the death of Kirk was among his most watched by far, with over 2.5 million views. His livestream the following Monday discussing who was responsible for Kirk’s death also saw a higher-than-normal viewership. In the space of less than an hour, Fuentes earned over $5,500 from the top 50 Super Chat donations made by supporters…
Despite being suspended from most major social media platforms, last year Fuentes was reinstated on X by Musk, who wrote that he could stay on the platform “provided he does not violate the law, and let him be crushed by the comments and Community Notes.”
Rather than being crushed, Fuentes has seen his following skyrocket from 168,000 at the time his account was restored in May 2024, to almost 925,000 today.
…Despite his growing influence within the GOP and the Trump administration, as well as his rapidly rising support among young white men in America, Fuentes has repeatedly said that in order for his movement to make an impact, it needs to operate in the shadows.
“No rallies, no protests, we don’t need to show everybody how many of us there are because the second that we do, they will identify, isolate, and destroy us,” Fuentes said on a recent livestream. “We want them to have no clue how many Groypers there are, where they are, who they are. We want them to be completely in the dark.”…
Fuentes’ disdain for many of his supporters appears to have no impact on his popularity, but the 27-year-old is clear that what he refers to as the “grug-level” supporters are not what is needed in order for his movement to take control. Instead, Fuentes speaks about attracting “elite human capital,” supporters who will then become part of an “officer class” of “super intelligent, entrepreneurial” people.
“Once we get 1,000, 5,000 of those guys, those are going to be the party officials, party apparatics as an analogy,” Fuentes said. “I’m kind of interested in inspiring those people, indoctrinating those people. They watch a show, they get the ideas, they get the inspiration, they kind of take a project into their own hands.”
Great.
Fuentes certainly bears watching.
Other things I’m watching/reading:
- An Engineer’s Perspective on the Texas Floods Practical Engineering, YouTube
- Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism “Indicators” Ken Klippenstein IMPORTANT
“Trump has signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views as indicators of radical left violence. Called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, it’s being referred to as “NSPM-7” by administration insiders. - Blair and the Billionaire Lighthouse Reports
“Insiders reveal how Larry Ellison’s money turned Tony Blair’s institute into a tech sales and lobbying operation for Oracle” - Influencers and Multipliers reinforce political Polarization Max Planck Gesellschaft
- Politico Playbook
“Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) has circulated an invitation obtained by Playbook for a “Napa Retreat” for the DSCC on Oct. 13 and 14. Should the government shut down next week, the retreat could fall on what might be day 12 of a shutdown. The itinerary features accommodations at the Hotel Yountville, with a resort and spa that “extends a Tuscan-European vibe,” and a wine tour and dinner at the Staglin Family Vineyards amid its wine caves.”
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 28, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
‘An Egregious Abuse of Power’: Trump Orders Troops to Portland, Ore; OKs ‘Full Force’
Olivia Rosane, Sep 27, 2025 [CommonDreams]
In his latest attempt to turn the US military on an American city, President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he was sending troops to Portland, Oregon and had authorized them to use “Full Force, if necessary.”
“At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote on Truth Social….
Tear gas used on protesters at Chicago-area ICE site as immigration crackdown escalates
[NBC News, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2025]
Stephen Miller Claims Simply Calling Trump Authoritarian ‘Incites Violence and Terrorism’
Stephen Prager, September 25, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Trump Says Critical Coverage of Him Is ‘Really Illegal’
Luke Broadwater, Sept. 19, 2025 [New York Times]
President Trump said Friday that news reporters who cover his administration negatively have broken the law, a significant broadening of his attacks on journalists and their First Amendment right to critique the government.A day after asserting that broadcasters should potentially lose their licenses over negative news coverage of him, Mr. Trump escalated his condemnations of the press, suggesting such reporters were lawbreakers….
We Are All Domestic Terrorists Now — Here comes the iron fist.
Hamilton Nolan, Sep 26, 2025 [How Things Work]
Trump’s new EO is the formal declaration of the rabid fascist war to crush political opposition. It is a statement of the administration’s intention to designate any institutions organizing and funding political opposition as agents of domestic terrorism, and then to use the toolset of “anti-terrorism” to harass, disrupt, and destroy them. The order first lists off some disparate recent events—the killing of Charlie Kirk and United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the pot shots taken at Trump during his campaign, the (half ass, not really) “assassination attempt” on Brett Kavanaugh—along with quasi-imaginary “Riots in Los Angeles and Portland” to paint a picture of a crisis of political violence….
Emma Long [The Conversation. via SCOTUStoday 09-23-2025]
A 1964 Supreme Court ruling looms large in President Donald Trump’s effort to win a libel and defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, two Times journalists, and Penguin Random House, whom he’s accused of trying to damage his reputation and disrupt his 2024 campaign, according to The Conversation. The court’s decision in New York Times v. Sullivan made it clear that public officials have to clear a high bar to win defamation suits, proving not just that there were factual errors, but also that false information was published “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” The ruling “provided the press in the US with one of the most protected spaces in the world in which to operate.”
Joyce Vance, Sep 25, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
This afternoon, a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia returned an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey. The two-count indictment is about a page and a half long. It charges Comey with….
Only one prosecutor signed the indictment, which is unusual. Trump’s newly appointed U.S. Attorney and former criminal defense lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, signed. Typically, the signature of the U.S. Attorney is accompanied by those of the prosecutor or prosecutors who worked on the investigation and will be handling the guilty plea or trial that comes next….
…We have a system of “notice pleading” in our criminal justice system, which means a defendant is entitled to notice of the charges against them so they can prepare a defense. It’s likely Comey’s lawyers will ask for a bill of particulars, which will force the government to specify the precise statements he is charged with making and the factual basis for the charges….
A sharp picture of the personal nature of Trump’s disregard for the rule of law
Chris Geidner, Sep 21, 2025 [LawDork]
The Trump Stablecoin – Building Power and Profits from the Inside
[publicbankinginstitute.org, September 23rd, 2025]
Donald Trump’s latest foray into financial innovation, the proposed USD1 Stablecoin, raises serious concerns about conflicts of interest and the potential looting of the U.S. Treasury. As advocates point out, if Trump were to consolidate control over what could soon become the largest stablecoin exchange, he would gain a private channel to influence and profit from dollar-denominated digital transactions worldwide. While the venture is not yet the dominant player, the combination of presidential authority and business ambition makes its rapid ascendance almost inevitable. What looks like a new tool for global finance could instead become a funnel for enriching Trump and his allies.
The danger becomes clearer when considering Trump’s control over the Treasury itself. The Department is responsible for deciding which stablecoin issuers are permitted to purchase U.S. Treasuries as the “backing” for their digital coins. By blurring the line between state power and personal enterprise, Trump could ensure that his exchange enjoys privileged access to government debt instruments, securing liquidity and legitimacy while starving competitors. This mechanism effectively transforms public debt—paid for by taxpayers—into a private revenue engine. In other words, Trump would wield Treasury policy not for national stability, but for personal enrichment.
“Extremely Disturbing”: What Does Trump’s “Antifa” Executive Order Actually Do?
Schuyler Mitchell, September 26, 2025 [Mother Jones]
…I spoke with Chip Gibbons, policy director at the nonprofit civil liberties advocacy organization Defending Rights & Dissent, about the Trump administration’s playbook for crushing free speech.
Gibbons has spent a decade submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI—including asking for the FBI’s antifa files in 2017—in an attempt to shed light on its domestic surveillance activities….
Trump Declares War on Left With “Domestic Terrorist” Designation
[Ken Klippenstein, via Naked Capitalism 09-23-2025]
ICE Detains Des Moines Public Schools Superintendent
Brad Reed, Sep 26, 2025 [CommonDreams]
The Department of Homeland Security claims that Roberts was taken into custody as part of a “targeted enforcement operation.”
Alligator Alcatraz Is an ‘Extrajudicial Black Site,’ Immigrant Advocates Say as Detainees Disappear
Stephen Prager, Sep 26, 2025 [CommonDreams]
According to the Miami Herald, over 1,000 detainees in Florida’s immigrant internment camp have effectively “disappeared,” with family and attorneys unable to track their whereabouts.
It’s Happened: The United States of America Is No Longer a Democracy
Michael Tomasky, September 22, 2025 [The New Republic]
…We learned of all this the same day that Trump decided it was time to just stop pretending and ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute three specific individuals: New York Attorney General Letitia James, Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, and former FBI Director James Comey. He declared all three “guilty as hell” and wrote on social media: “We cant [sic] delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”….
…The Justice Department is being destroyed—slowly at first, and now all at once. Most of the lawyers in the Civil Rights Division have left or are leaving. Ditto the Federal Programs Branch, the office that’s supposed to defend an administration’s claims in court. Reuters confirmed in July that 69 of 110 lawyers in that branch were skedaddling. The exodus figure for civil rights back in May was a similar 70 percent….
Combine this with what happened last week to Jimmy Kimmel, and I think we can now just say it. The United States of America is no longer a democracy. It’s not a totally authoritarian state. I’m obviously writing these words of dissent, as are hundreds, thousands of others like me. We’re still having elections, so far. Most courts are still functioning normally. At many levels where the White House can’t just do turnkey autocracy, there is ferocious resistance. And there is a defiant public making their voices heard, alongside a not-insignificant faction of Trump voters who are growing disillusioned with what they’re seeing. And as the polls tell us, the mad king is failing to win people over, and public opinion, at least much of the time, still matters too. These facts can reassure us….
Strategic Political Economy
The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it)
Cory Doctorow, 25 Sep 2025 [Pluralistic]
…In McKibben’s telling, everything about solar is going better than anticipated. Solar efficiency is increasing exponentially with prices falling through the floor. The material bill for solar is also in freefall. Everything surrounding solar is going amazing, too. Battery capacity is improving even faster than solar generation, and the best new batteries use the incredibly abundant element sodium (not lithium) to store those useful electrons. Long-haul transmission lines are crisscrossing the world.
Hyper-reliable electric cars keep getting cheaper, and the batteries are lasting much longer than we used to think they would. Some of these vehicles are nigh-miraculous, from the ebikes that get 5 miles to the penny, to the world’s heaviest EV, a dump truck that shuttles to a quarry atop a hill where it is loaded with rocks, then regeneratively brakes its way back down the hill, accumulating enough charge to get back up to the top again (a perpetual motion machine!). Heat pumps and induction tops are actually more efficient than burning natural gas – in other words, it’s cheaper to convert sunshine into electrons and electrons into heat than it is to just burn gas…
Then there’s the capacity. China’s solar capacity growth is insane – the solar equivalent of a new coal plant is coming online every eight hours. But it’s even more intense in poor regions of the global south, like in Pakistan, where a legion of installers have learned their craft from Tiktok videos set to songs from popular musical films, leading to one of the most rapid electrification rollouts in human history. The closer a country is to the equator, the more sense solar makes, of course, so solar is sweeping some of the poorest countries in the world, liberating them from the need to attract foreign currency they can use to buy dollar-denominated barrels of oil….
Fossil fuels are valuable because they are a chokepoint on the entire productive economy. Anyone who’s seen the Mad Max documentaries knows how this goes: even the most mid, paunchy, straw-haired boomer with volcanic bacne and shitty dress-sense can seize power over the whole population if he controls the supply of one of life’s essentials.
The fossil fuel industry is a magnet for people who love a chokepoint. These people are born tollboth operators and they never stop hunting for turnpikes. They are landlords for ancient corpses, charging the whole world rent to keep the lights on. They are chokepoint-trophic.
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
By Nat Wilson Turner
In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I’ve been following the American right especially closely.
I want to share two responses that I initially found surprisingly sensible and reassuring, and one response that is appalling in its shamelessness, vile almost beyond belief.
And even the second response ultimately left me chilled by the end.
The first was a podcast featuring former BlackRock portfolio manager Edward Dowd that I was watching because I’m a financial doomer. The conversation turned to Charlie Kirk:
Edward Dowd: Anecdotally, people are saying they’re leaving the Democrats because they’ve lost. A lot of normal Democrats who aren’t high media consumers who just are watching what’s going on and hearing some of some of the people that they thought were friends saying abhorrent things are running (from the) center to the right.
So that needs to show up in the poll numbers because right now it’s anecdotal.
The worry of course is this Charlie Kirk assassination. Charlie Kirk interviewed me three times. He’s a wonderful human being. I’m 58 and I marveled at his communication skills and his ability to create what he did from such a very young age.
I mean, he was he was a phenom in at 19 and he just built something that, quite frankly, I was in awe of. He was quite an individual and I’m sad that he’s gone.
But when you step back and analyze this, my biggest fear is that this is the beginning of a divide and conquer strategy. I’ve said forever that this is a class issue, not an us versus them, left versus right, black versus white, Hispanic, Muslim.
This is this is a class issue and we are at the end of a grand cycle and we need to focus on who’s really in charge and the divide and conquer strategy has been well used throughout the millennium.
The key to focus on is whatever narrative is coming out. If it’s about dividing, ignore it. And remember, this is a class issue. When I say class, I’m not talking about someone with $10 million. I’m talking about the oligarchs, the super ultra wealthy, the .01% 01% that control the lion share of the wealth of the globe.
I must admit I was not expecting a former BlackRock portfolio manager to come out with a class war angle on Charlie Kirk. I must say I agree.
Which might make me more open to the things he had to say about the COVID pandemic and illegal immigration later in the video, or maybe not.
The second was a video featuring John Robb of Global Guerrillas, a security consultant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and a tech millionaire who was involved in the creation of RSS, among other things). Robb was contacted by a younger self-described Patriot, Brian Keith, in the aftermath of Kirk’s death, and the two streamed their conversation live on X.com.
Keith described the conversation as “part WTF, partly why am I so angry, partly how can I avoid being someone else’s tool, and how to deal with this swirl of current events.”
He goes on to quote some advice from Robb’s writing that inspired the conversation:
Brian Keith: I remember I was out hiking when I heard about (the death of George Floyd), and I remember being tribalized on the side of anti-cop when I was experiencing the empathic triggers that you talk about. And then later upon learning more, you realize, wait a minute, what I was immediately experiencing was quite different from after I had backed away from the empathic trigger or looked at more of the data, I had quite a different conclusion than I had in that first moment.
But that was then. This time’s different. This time, my immediate response is right, because my tribe I’m currently identifying with is completely accurate. So that’s how I feel in the moment. And you’re talking me down in chat.
With George Floyd, it was I didn’t know at the time when I first saw the empathic trigger. It was a black guy in an inner city of some kind. But it was police violence and I’ve experienced police harassing me. So it was sort of like me.
But then there’s Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk’s a lot like me. He’s who I wish I would be in some ways. So can you help us, John? Can you help us not necessarily decouple from the empathic trigger, but contextualize it in a way that helps us be more sane and less tribalized, make better decisions?
John Robb: With Charlie Kirk you feel that the bullet hit the neck it’s an internal transfer it’s a massive amount of information from the head of the victim how they’re seeing the world their fear their their desperation and it comes right into your head and it’s instantly modeled and it’s overwhelming . We don’t have the kind of barriers that we would have in real life when we’re online. When that happens, you feel an intense rage at the perpetrator.
You’re immediately jumping to a conclusion that fits your new framework, your tribalized mentality. That somebody says something, they’re immediately enemy. non-human, absolute evil. And if you get to that point where you’re bouncing around like that, you’re just a redshirt in Star Trek kind of thing. You’re just a fodder.
Keith: You don’t have any agency in this conflict. And what does fodder look like in the digital age? It looks like retweeting things or commenting on things or… acting in a way that if someone was attempting to control you they would want you to act as opposed to treating yourself as an individual that has ability to orient that might be different than someone else who looks sort of like you. Yeah, um fodder.
So far so good, right? Then the conversation took a turn that I wasn’t expecting, which sent a chill down my spine:
Robb: Usually in a civil conflict, the people who get activated, who lose agency, are the first ones to jump on board, the first ones to initiate violence. Those are the people that almost invariably get killed. Those people, those groups are run over by the bigger players that come later. So just for this audience you don’t want to be in that first group.
Keith: This reminds me of Eric Prince’s new phone, where some of the thought when he came out with his new phone was, well, do you want to be aligned with Eric Prince?That may have significant pros or significant cons in the future, depending on what you believe the future holds.
And now all this happens and Prince is on Twitter saying executions, executions, executions. He could easily be the next president right now. I’d vote for him. Trump has a few days before he loses me. I’m like, no, no, we need executions right away.
Because I’m so angry that it’s the whole seeing red thing. It’s seeing red for a guy I’ve never met in a place I’ve never been and yet, I’m ready to say, oh yeah, Eric Prince, President for life. Executions everywhere. No mercy against them.
Robb: But that’s life. You’re connected at a deep level. And that’s one of the major reasons Trump has to act, to designate many of these groups, left activists, as terrorist organizations and act. in order to prevent the kind of upswing and violence where we get those kind of street battles between the right-taking kind of revenge or action against these groups at a level of violence that we haven’t seen so far.
I’d like to see some compelling evidence for this wave of “leftist” violence before the death of Kirk is used to justify a horrifying clampdown in the U.S.
I’m not aware of any actual leftists in the U.S. with any measure of influence, and I’m not aware of any organized “leftist” violence since the Weather Underground disbanded in the early 1980s.
But let’s get to the really bad, totally appalling shit.
Of course, it’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, speaking at the Kirk Memorial in Arizona:
This accurate, near-verbatim translation of key passages from Joseph Goebbels’ speech titled “The Storm is Coming” (original German: “Der Sturm bricht los”), delivered on July 9, 1932, in Berlin.
This was a campaign rally speech in the lead-up to the July 31, 1932, Reichstag… https://t.co/FN8rqsM3p3— Tracey Gallagher (@asmartbrunette1) September 22, 2025
So yeah, this is bad, and things will continue to get worse in the United States.
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