Chris Bray: "Fighting" "Nazis"--A Zesty Form of Community Theater

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I mean, the right has done something similar for decades. Here I'm thinking of "militias. E.g. the Three Percenters.

Counterpoint: they've generally kept to themselves. Whereas the You're a Nazi and You're a Nazi and YOU'RE A NAZI madness has infected the mainstream blue team.

Countercounterpoint: Timothy McVeigh? Not a militia-member...but same kinda deal. But, y'know, worse...

Anyway.

The American left has, of course, gone insane, as I've often noted. They didn't used'ta' be like this... Some kind of madness just seems to have swept through the blue team. Suddenly they thought / pretended-to-think that women have penises, all whites are racist, cops are genociding blacks in the streets, words are violence, the climate apocalypse is nigh...and...most of all: REEEEEEEE...

Cosplay seems to be part of it. Rich kids cosplaying "anti-fascists," men cosplaying women. Do we get to count "figurative cosplay"...or is that the road to bullshit here? Because there you've got cosplaying victims, cosplaying disableds...I dunno...those seem like pretty short lists... But let's just go with this for right now...

   Of course the right has Trump...which...[throws hands in air] He's like: we called in a fire mission--danger close. Everybody hunker the fuck down and start praying/hoping that he does more harm to the cultists trying to overrun our position than he does to us. At least his positions are (...largely...) sane, even if he's a nut. The cultists are crazy and have crazy positions. After all, there's no real distinction between them and their politics anymore... The personal is political...bigot.

   Hey, don't forget, the fat part of the blue almost-half of the bell curve is mostly sane people who just are used to voting blue, and/or who don't want to be "canceled" by their friends, and/or who think Trump is more dangerous than The Cult... We can't write them off, nor lump them in with the cultists. For one thing, they don't deserve it. For another, we need them in order to win... Of course TRUMP IS HITLER is crazy as hell...but I'm sorry, I cannot vote for that jackass is perfectly sane. I'm yea far [indicates small distance between thumb and forefinger] myself. Perhaps it will turn out to be saner than I'm going to hold my nose and vote for him anyway... Who knows?

   So what's the point?

   I forget.

   Oh yeah: Bray's point: progressive "elites" like Klein sure don't act like they believe that America is slipping into fascism. (I'd add: any more than they act like we're actually facing a climate apocalypse.) Hence the air of (metaphorical) cosplay. Nobody's going to drag them out of bed at 3 a.m. Nobody's going to shoot them in front of their family...

   Turns out that prominent figures on the other side can't be as sure of that last one anymore. Not only are leftists, y'know, shooting conservatives in front of their families, but many, many leftoids are screaming into the internet.com that what they really need is more of this... Reddit, Bluesky, etc. are filled with admonitions to Kill Trump, Kill J. K. Rowling, Kill Matt Walsh, Kill Ben Shapiro, Kill Joe Rogan, Kill Dennis Prager, Kill Chaya Raichik, Kill Andy Ngo...and on and on and on.

   And this is one predictable consequence of calling everybody on the right Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, etc. etc. Those are all people one might be excused for shooting. I used to point this out all the time, but eventually dropped the point. Calling Trump Hitler is yea far [indicates small distance between thumb and forefinger] from saying that it's ok to shoot him. Though "social media" is full of much more direct calls for that. E.g. the pervasive "O.k., who's going to do it?" posts.

   As I used to point out a lot: when the right called Obama the Antichrist, that was the same thing. It's not quite saying shoot him... But...

   Occasionally saying something about your political opponents that could be stretched into a call to violence is not great, but it happens. That's not the problem. The problem is the progressive left's tendency to do such things all the time...especially when combined with outright calls for political killing.

   Dunno what to do here.

   On the one hand, I think our only hope is to heal our political rift.

   On the other hand, I don't know how to do that with a faction that has spun so far out into intellectual and moral outer space...

   Charlie Kirk probably had at least half the answer: go seek them out and talk to them....break into their echo chambers...

   I'm not sure he was always good at the execution. That's the even trickier part. We've got to be firm without being strident. (To see how revolting stridency can be, see...just about anything the left says anymore...) (See also: the less-extensive, less-prominent, but equally revolting RW echo chambers. Like the comment section of Instapundit, for example... But, to their credit, not r/conservative...)

   But...when you've got to argue with people for ten years and you still can't get them to acknowledge that women do not have penises... [throws up hands] I dunno, man. I dunno...