I think it was Katie Herzog on Blocked and Reported who said the only common throughline for maga is just “own the libs”. They have no principles and barely even push policy discussions, it’s just owning the libs for them.
She’s completely right but with your article it’s really that they want to “hurt the libs”, they get off on the suffering and yeah cruelty is ironically now the only principle maga has left aside from bootlicking Trump.
Like I know so many guys who watch these “when men fight back” compilations of a blue haired woman maybe pushing a man only for the man to lose control and knock her out and meanwhile that guy is watching with this sadistic glee to see a leftist white woman getting punched in the face. (Not saying it’s okay for women to attack men but there is a difference between having that type of content pop up in your feed randomly rather than actively seeking it out because you get this underlying sexist-sadistic satisfaction at seeing a woman get flatlined).
Where did you EVER see MAGA celebrating a woman being punched in the face by a man? I guarantee you haven't. I've personally been horrified many times by the number of comments perfectly ok with this act and they pretty much ALL tend to be under 30 yrs old and Democrat voters.
Firstly, I’ve seen it tons of times. Second, I just looked at your post history and it’s clear you’d be one of those guys with comments you’ve made towards liberal women.
Third and most importantly, it’s clear you’re absorbed into every maga brainrot conspiracy and engaging with you is not serious. The more I read your comments I’m convinced you’re a Russian bot ngl.
Libs have been frothing at the mouth and ecstatic every time a conservative is murdered or canceled or killed. Then you ask for compassion from us? No, we're going to fight back when you animals attack us.
Better late than never imo. His election night talks annoyed the shit out of me too, but he clearly sees the bigger picture and that's all I'm asking for out of our conservative counterparts at this point
What I ask from my “liberal” counterparts (I am a libertarian), is that they do their best to restrain the wokels within their coalition. These folks alienate voters.
I don't particularly care for Trump. But I'll take an incompetent plutocrat over a psychos who want to kill us all and burn our homeland to the ground.
I know Richard is tired of hearing "I told you so" from the left at this point, and it isn't my intention to rehash it...
But as a liberal, the most shocking thing to me about the right's genocidal vibes is how many seemingly decent people just refused to see this in 2024. How many chose to just willfully ignore the obvious. The new right were the same people back then! They were saying all of the same things!
They told us they would do everything they're doing right now. The mass deportations, the Schmittian cruelty, the lies. They never hid or downplayed their intentions, they said it all openly, smirking and laughing as they did! The sadism and cruelty of the new right was always incredibly obvious, on display. They revel in it. Did you not believe them? Did you not think they would try to do what they said?
It's baffling to me, truly incomprehensible even at the time, that a moral person could somehow have convinced themselves of the virtues of this movement. I feel like I'll never understand it. Losing elections can be painful, but Trump 2 was different. Watching the country vote for these people was like watching a loved one walk into the sea, while you're trapped behind glass and scream at them to stop.
I'm generally just glad and grateful for anyone who leaves the right behind. I'm glad you did. But I think I'll live my whole life and never understand how the intelligent, decent people who voted for MAGA didn't see all of this at the time when we could have stopped it.
Trump used much of the same rhetoric in 2016, & then didn't do anything egregious in his policy apart from tariffs (the Zelensky call & Jan. 6 were just attempts to abuse his power for personal political benefit, not ideological). Certainly he was opposed to fair elections & rule of law, & that was enough for me to vote against him, but I don't think it was unreasonable for a voter in 2024 to expect that his immigration policy would be about the same as in his first term, or, if they feared the threat of wokeness to American freedom & meritocracy more than I did, to think he'd likely be better than Harris.
Did you not notice the part where basically everybody sane from his Cabinet in 2016 was no longer w/ him. Even Bob Freakin' Barr had turned against him?
Ya'll lied and used our compassion and principles as weapons against us for the last 20 years and you're suddenly surprised we've had enough of your forked tongues and begun playing the game the way you do? Your goal is obviously to "win" even if that means murdering the man hosting debates and attempting to maintain dialogue between our two tribes. You gladly celebrated the severing of that moderate's voice.
And you're suddenly surprised when we finally recognize that dialogue with bloodthirsty monsters isn't going to work. We have run out of compassion for those who hate us and want to kill us. How is it surprising that an abused population is refusing your rule?
You open your article by saying you’re defending liberals, not communists or critical race theorists, but then you slip into conflating liberalism with the left. The left is very illiberal and you only need to read spats among Democrats and leftists to see this. The better form of your argument is that Democrats are better than Republicans because Democrats try to sometimes resist some of the illiberal evil tendencies of leftists. Notably though, a lot of Democrats readily analogize their party’s position to that of Rs in 2014, and say they feel their own tea party or “alt right” stirring. The Hasan Piker conversation is substantially: “should we elevate this scum as our own Joe Rogan?” The R establishment initially denounced Trump but conformed after he defeated them. If the left defeats Democrats, test of your thesis will be whether we see the same.
I think we're all in agreement on this. It's just common parlance in american politics to use 'the left' and 'liberal' colloquially to refer to the dem side of the electorate
“Leftist” ≠ “on the left.” The basic divide is commonly referred to left/right or liberal/conservative. And no, those on the left do not generally consider it an insult to be called liberal.
It's used intentionally to muddy the distinction. Allowing violent communists to claim to be classical liberals in one breath, then disassociating them in the next, is a classic method of leftists lying and preying on the principles of others in the name of praxis.
I think there is not a sufficient political base of free market leaning voters in almost any country. This is why the vast majority of countries have substantial economic regulation and expansive welfare state programs. Insofar as free market economics is politically viable, the underlying support from that mostly comes from resentment. The resentful base identifies with economic winners, whether they are or not, and then they vote to limit govt spending because it's easy to convince them that the outgroup is the one that is leaching welfare. So we have the largely white male republican base who ostensibly supports more free market policies, but it is not because they understand the pruported benefits of the free market system, it is because they are convinced that illegals and women are the ones who benefit from govt welfare at their expense. The illegals get govt housing and welfare. Women get jobs at the expense of the male working class because of DEI.
I have a hypothesis that the reason the US has a smaller welfare state and less regulation than European countries is because the US always had a somewhat sizable black population. This black population always existed to foment resentment against an expansive welfare state. Other European countries lacked substantial minority populations until the latter part of the 20th century, after the major welfare state programs and regulatory regimes were mostly in place.
While this is a major part, another thing was legitimate opportunity - if you're a factory worker in Munich in 1865, there is really no option other than to organize for a union, etc. There's no new land out there in Germany and no real risks to take even if you wanted too.
OTOH, if you're that same worker's cousin who moved to Iowa, you can try your luck out in the West and get basically free land to try - either farming, mining, or opening a business in a town starting from zero.
It's not a surprise that along w/ a massive depression, that by 1930, the frontier was closed in America so people were more receptive to a welfare state.
And you can observe that this how political support for the free market works by looking at the right's reaction to Vance's proposed 9K per married single earner families. At first, the right's reaction was supportive under the guise that such families should also get govt sponsored relief. Of course, rightists aren't the sharpest tools so it took them like 2 days instead of 30 seconds to figure out that the 9K can only go to relatively low earning single earner households (so most rightist influencer households would not qualify). So then the rightist influencers came back spouting free market principles, saying that singer earner families should not be subject the indignities of govt welfare. I promise you the second that Vance comes back with 9K for all married single earner households with kids, the right will forget that pro free market spiel immediately.
I think you handwave away the Charlie Kirk murder celebrations. Whether or not you think he's a bad person, I don't think it's at all as obvious as you seem to claim that celebrating the deportations of migrants over minor or invented legal issues is morally worse than celebrating a murder of someone who you think spreads bad ideas, especially when the exact same type of person also celebrated the murder of a completely innocent healthcare CEO.
You could argue that there is a scale issue here, but I don't really buy the argument that someone is morally better because they lack the power to act on their deranged fantasies, and I doubt that you do either.
Celebration of Kirk's murder was awful, regardless of whether or not he was a bad person. But I do think it's hypocritical to get up in arms about random X accounts celebrating his death while celebrating the brutal treatment of migrants in your own tweets as many right wing figures have done. It just makes it very obvious that the underlying principle isn't 'celebrating human suffering is bad' but rather 'my people are sacrosanct but yours are fair game'.
You guys get up in arms about random X accounts using the N word.
So I'd argue that (like all leftists) you're misframing the reality of 15 years of cancel culture that was also celebrated alongside Kirk's murder.
It is evident that Leftists have no principles; they are simply a lust for power, a desire to hurt others, and just enough self-awareness to habitually lie to everyone about their goals and nature.
It’s funny how people on both sides with no real theory of mind for their opposition end up describing them in identical terms. Horseshoe theory of lack of political imagination.
It’s the ‘victim’ of these that distinguishes. On one hand you have a leader of a giant political org on college campuses, and a highly paid CEO. Singular, high profile, powerful figures.
On the other hand you have a poor/ordinary person who may as well be you or your neighbor if circumstances were different.
The Left celebrated the murder of the one moderate guy who was trying to maintain a dialogue between the two factions. The left never wanted dialogue. They wanted dissenting voices silenced through violence and bloodshed. Every guy (about 80% of the Right) more extreme than Charlie Kirk is now well aware that the goal of the Left is to kill us all.
The compassion and principles extended to the "other side" have now been exhausted. The Left is evil, not intellectually, but spiritually and ontologically. Every word a leftist says is a lie or a misframing of truth in the name of Praxis. Every action they take is to hurt innocent people, and every argument for principles they make is not a principle they would hold themselves to. I have gone hard looking into leftist psychology, and there is nothing at the bottom, just a well of resentment and hate. Resentful, hateful monsters do not belong in politics, or in our culture at all.
"What couldn’t be justified in a world where these “unhumans” are your imagined opponents?"
The funny thing is, and perhaps this was intentional on your part, is that this very question was central to Schmitt's thinking, and he spends a large portion of "The Concept of the Political" explaining why universalistic dogmas are dangerous. He says that the reason is that, when people believe have universalistic views, anyone opposed to these universalistic views becomes the enemy of all of humanity. "And what means would not be justified in defeating the enemy of all humanity?"
It's hilarious to me that Schmitt has become a rallying figure for so many chuds. He was deeply conservative, and his friend-enemy distinction was not, as many seem to believe, an endorsement of the idea that you should have a lot of enemies, but a warning about the dangers of living in a world defined by conflict between people groups.
Reading "Concept" as an endorsement as the distinction would be like reading "Leviathan" as an endorsement of the state of nature. His entire thing is coming up with ways to mediate the distinction. He grew up as a Catholic in a majority Protestant village. He dedicated "Concept" to a close friend who died in WW1 and, in the essay, declared that war is a fraud. Throughout his professorial career, he was harassed by campus Nazis! This guy wasn't stupid! The problem is his so-called fans.
I will say that Progressives sure do fit the bill for the enemy of all humanity: evil, violent, psychotic, habitual liars that prey on the compassion of others, and absolutely incapable of self-reflection.
The left may have moral safeguards to limit the impulses of its leaders. It is chronically incapable of limiting the impulses of its illiberal base. This analysis seems to confuse a mythical liberal cohort with the lunatic left that is actually dominating the grass on the democrat side. How you can see the whole Charlie Kirk assassination and subsequent glorification by the left as anything but a direct refutation of the thesis of this piece is beyond me.
I think celebrating anyone's death is goulish but it works both ways there were people on the right that took great delight in Paul palosi being attacked and when those dems were killed in Minnesota tbh it makes me feel quite misanthropic tbh
Paul Pelosi was not killed. I have not seen any anniversary celebrations from rightists celebrating the killing of the Minnesota lawmakers. Please share some evidence if you have. This is besides the point though. Hanania is saying liberals are the only group that isn't sadistic and violent.
Has the Minnesota killings been a year yet? I so I've lost track of time. I think Richards using therm liberal in the classic sense as opposed to the progressive. The two groups are vastly different but get lumped into one as classic liberal can cover most political factions from conservatives to libertarianism to social democrats and centerists. The progressive liberal I'd class as Marxist or far left and they do show almost a horseshoe mirror image of the far right or fascist both display traits of violence and opponentism. The problem is the majority of people aren't those two categories and fit somewhere between the 2 on the political scale where different ideas are opponents to be defeated but have ideas you agree or disagree with. Personally I'd chuck the extremes in a pit let them fight to the death and release lions on the winners. As for pepsi you are right he didn't die he was just violently attacked, I should've made that clearer, so it's ok to laugh at him?
Yes, it's been over a year. One could argue that the Minnesota killings didn't have the national exposure that Kirk's murder did. Still, I find it hard to picture conservatives behaving the way progressives have about Kirk. (perhaps they aren't as convinced of the evil of the victim or their moral high ground?)
You are right that Hanania seems to be lumping groups together either haphazardly or because it helps his argument.
The details matter when drawing comparisons or analogizing. It isn't ok to laugh at Pelosi's pain although the situation was a little bizarre as to make it comical. But comparing some jokes by Jesse Waters about the Pelosi incident to students partying with fake blood on their necks and defacing a Kirk statue in celebration of his murder seems frankly off base. The same goes for those saying Trump has done similar things. Trump's good riddance to a political foe that died peacefully of natural causes does not compare to the mob gleefully celebrating the murder of a political enemy. Trump was being honest. This Kirk stuff is depraved and sick... or maybe that is just my bias talking.
Great essay. Have restacked multiple times, with copious excerpts, and have sent it around to friends.
I'm a lifelong liberal. But I'm not afraid to criticize my tribe when it's warranted -- and boy is it ever nowadays -- just as Richard isn't afraid to criticize his. That's what integrity demands. That's what you do if you believe in reason, in logic, in good faith, in the principles of the Enlightenment.
I have been dutifully voting in every election for 50 years. And for the first time in my life, I'm going to withhold my vote entirely in the coming election. (But I live in a blue city in a blue state, so my protest is meaningless anyway. That's the sad reality.) I'm doing this because both political parties are shîtting all over us, especially all over women.
The MAGA party is deranged and cruel and the Transqueer party is deranged and cruel, only in different ways. Richard has made an excellent case here, the kind that I believe I've also made over the years and which has kept me voting. But I'm done. I can't take it anymore. As the famous meme -- a pic of a red-clad Handmaiden with text superimposed -- aptly puts it: “The American Left will put you in a prison cell with a rapist. The American Right will make you have his baby.”
-"They don’t feel bad about treating opponents unfairly or using authoritarian means to achieve their ends, because they project their values onto everyone else and assume that others are similarly unconstrained by moral principles."
As TV Tropes would put it: "Evil cannot comprehend good."
Don't think it's fair to use liberal vs. non-liberal as the fault line. The segment of the right that still has some connection with the base and that's the most critical of the direction you're describing is the religious right, not libertarians who outside of think tanks are gun nuts and sovereign citizens. By religious right I'm referring to those whose conservatism is an outgrowth of their genuine devotion, not to those who use Christian imagery and identity as an aesthetic for their politics. People like Trent Horn, Joel Berry, Ridvan Aydemir, Lila Rose, and so on might still be immigration hawks, but they aren't white nationalists and they also aren't liberals even under your broad definition. They think the Enlightenment had many negative consequences, as seen in its culmination under Robbespierre, and want comprehensive doctrines to be allowed to inform law and policy.
On a side note Schmitt's ideas have been wildly misinterpreted as they've become more popular. Schmitt thought the left-right distinction within a parliamentary democracy didn't qualify for the friend-enemy distinction since both sides are still friends (hence the term loyal opposition). Left-right issues in a liberal democratic context according to him are merely managerial-technical disagreements, not political ones. So when rightists claim it's not Schmittian to have internal dissension, they haven't read Schmitt.
The last part is generally right. A while ago I saw the generational change described along the lines of "conservative intellectuals switched from pretending to have read John Locke to pretending to have read Carl Schmitt."
Your article is so silly. The DEM / LEFT would easily be ruling in America if they hadn't gone for the Open Borders insanity pushed by their ruling class DONORS!
“I used to laugh at liberals who would say the “cruelty is the point.” What a simplistic understanding of one’s opponents! But I think that this view has been fully vindicated by the second Trump administration.”
It is the Occam’s Razor explanation - simple and likely correct.
President Trump absolutely did not "send ICE into Minnesota to harass members of the public" is how I think you put it. Both shootings you mentioned were by ICE officers attempting to perform targeted arrests (I know at least 1 of the 2 was a child predator) and Leftists thought it was a good idea to interfere and assault officers. I'd love to hear your reasoning on why Charlie Kirk was "evil" and can understand why people are celebrating his murder! Please answer then go back to being the morally superior being you claim to be.
I think it was Katie Herzog on Blocked and Reported who said the only common throughline for maga is just “own the libs”. They have no principles and barely even push policy discussions, it’s just owning the libs for them.
She’s completely right but with your article it’s really that they want to “hurt the libs”, they get off on the suffering and yeah cruelty is ironically now the only principle maga has left aside from bootlicking Trump.
Like I know so many guys who watch these “when men fight back” compilations of a blue haired woman maybe pushing a man only for the man to lose control and knock her out and meanwhile that guy is watching with this sadistic glee to see a leftist white woman getting punched in the face. (Not saying it’s okay for women to attack men but there is a difference between having that type of content pop up in your feed randomly rather than actively seeking it out because you get this underlying sexist-sadistic satisfaction at seeing a woman get flatlined).
Where did you EVER see MAGA celebrating a woman being punched in the face by a man? I guarantee you haven't. I've personally been horrified many times by the number of comments perfectly ok with this act and they pretty much ALL tend to be under 30 yrs old and Democrat voters.
Firstly, I’ve seen it tons of times. Second, I just looked at your post history and it’s clear you’d be one of those guys with comments you’ve made towards liberal women.
Third and most importantly, it’s clear you’re absorbed into every maga brainrot conspiracy and engaging with you is not serious. The more I read your comments I’m convinced you’re a Russian bot ngl.
Not exactly "punched" but conservative reactions to Renee Good?
Correct. We don't feel bad. She's a traitor defending the supposed "rights" of criminal illegal aliens and interfering in their deportation.
I could not give a single shit what happened to her. She got what she had coming.
I don't think she was being smart but saying that warranted getting shot is insane. You don't seem like a very good person lmao
Yikes. I bet you’re the same guy to cry whenever a leftist if someone said Charlie Kirk “had it coming”.
Libs have been frothing at the mouth and ecstatic every time a conservative is murdered or canceled or killed. Then you ask for compassion from us? No, we're going to fight back when you animals attack us.
goomba fallacy
Any enjoyment the right gets out of seeing the left suffer is purely a response to the left wanting the right (and specifically whites) to suffer.
Good article, but it might have been better if youd have realised all this before voting for him in 2024. I knew all of this and I'm in the UK.
Better late than never imo. His election night talks annoyed the shit out of me too, but he clearly sees the bigger picture and that's all I'm asking for out of our conservative counterparts at this point
What I ask from my “liberal” counterparts (I am a libertarian), is that they do their best to restrain the wokels within their coalition. These folks alienate voters.
I don't particularly care for Trump. But I'll take an incompetent plutocrat over a psychos who want to kill us all and burn our homeland to the ground.
What are you talking about? This seems like paranoid conspiracy addled nonsense to me.
Some people just really really really hate Muslims/Blacks.
I know Richard is tired of hearing "I told you so" from the left at this point, and it isn't my intention to rehash it...
But as a liberal, the most shocking thing to me about the right's genocidal vibes is how many seemingly decent people just refused to see this in 2024. How many chose to just willfully ignore the obvious. The new right were the same people back then! They were saying all of the same things!
They told us they would do everything they're doing right now. The mass deportations, the Schmittian cruelty, the lies. They never hid or downplayed their intentions, they said it all openly, smirking and laughing as they did! The sadism and cruelty of the new right was always incredibly obvious, on display. They revel in it. Did you not believe them? Did you not think they would try to do what they said?
It's baffling to me, truly incomprehensible even at the time, that a moral person could somehow have convinced themselves of the virtues of this movement. I feel like I'll never understand it. Losing elections can be painful, but Trump 2 was different. Watching the country vote for these people was like watching a loved one walk into the sea, while you're trapped behind glass and scream at them to stop.
I'm generally just glad and grateful for anyone who leaves the right behind. I'm glad you did. But I think I'll live my whole life and never understand how the intelligent, decent people who voted for MAGA didn't see all of this at the time when we could have stopped it.
Trump used much of the same rhetoric in 2016, & then didn't do anything egregious in his policy apart from tariffs (the Zelensky call & Jan. 6 were just attempts to abuse his power for personal political benefit, not ideological). Certainly he was opposed to fair elections & rule of law, & that was enough for me to vote against him, but I don't think it was unreasonable for a voter in 2024 to expect that his immigration policy would be about the same as in his first term, or, if they feared the threat of wokeness to American freedom & meritocracy more than I did, to think he'd likely be better than Harris.
Did you not notice the part where basically everybody sane from his Cabinet in 2016 was no longer w/ him. Even Bob Freakin' Barr had turned against him?
Yeah, 80+ % of voters don't pay attention to that kind of stuff
Ya'll lied and used our compassion and principles as weapons against us for the last 20 years and you're suddenly surprised we've had enough of your forked tongues and begun playing the game the way you do? Your goal is obviously to "win" even if that means murdering the man hosting debates and attempting to maintain dialogue between our two tribes. You gladly celebrated the severing of that moderate's voice.
And you're suddenly surprised when we finally recognize that dialogue with bloodthirsty monsters isn't going to work. We have run out of compassion for those who hate us and want to kill us. How is it surprising that an abused population is refusing your rule?
You open your article by saying you’re defending liberals, not communists or critical race theorists, but then you slip into conflating liberalism with the left. The left is very illiberal and you only need to read spats among Democrats and leftists to see this. The better form of your argument is that Democrats are better than Republicans because Democrats try to sometimes resist some of the illiberal evil tendencies of leftists. Notably though, a lot of Democrats readily analogize their party’s position to that of Rs in 2014, and say they feel their own tea party or “alt right” stirring. The Hasan Piker conversation is substantially: “should we elevate this scum as our own Joe Rogan?” The R establishment initially denounced Trump but conformed after he defeated them. If the left defeats Democrats, test of your thesis will be whether we see the same.
I think we're all in agreement on this. It's just common parlance in american politics to use 'the left' and 'liberal' colloquially to refer to the dem side of the electorate
This is only common parlance among the right and people who aren’t politically engaged, though.. Most leftists consider “liberal” an insult / enemy.
Nah, it’s just common period. If you ever read beltway commentary and news you’ll see it used that way all the time
“Leftist” ≠ “on the left.” The basic divide is commonly referred to left/right or liberal/conservative. And no, those on the left do not generally consider it an insult to be called liberal.
It's used intentionally to muddy the distinction. Allowing violent communists to claim to be classical liberals in one breath, then disassociating them in the next, is a classic method of leftists lying and preying on the principles of others in the name of praxis.
good insight !
I think there is not a sufficient political base of free market leaning voters in almost any country. This is why the vast majority of countries have substantial economic regulation and expansive welfare state programs. Insofar as free market economics is politically viable, the underlying support from that mostly comes from resentment. The resentful base identifies with economic winners, whether they are or not, and then they vote to limit govt spending because it's easy to convince them that the outgroup is the one that is leaching welfare. So we have the largely white male republican base who ostensibly supports more free market policies, but it is not because they understand the pruported benefits of the free market system, it is because they are convinced that illegals and women are the ones who benefit from govt welfare at their expense. The illegals get govt housing and welfare. Women get jobs at the expense of the male working class because of DEI.
I have a hypothesis that the reason the US has a smaller welfare state and less regulation than European countries is because the US always had a somewhat sizable black population. This black population always existed to foment resentment against an expansive welfare state. Other European countries lacked substantial minority populations until the latter part of the 20th century, after the major welfare state programs and regulatory regimes were mostly in place.
That's what Alessina's research work showed. Hanania even wrote an article on it "why diversity is our strength".
While this is a major part, another thing was legitimate opportunity - if you're a factory worker in Munich in 1865, there is really no option other than to organize for a union, etc. There's no new land out there in Germany and no real risks to take even if you wanted too.
OTOH, if you're that same worker's cousin who moved to Iowa, you can try your luck out in the West and get basically free land to try - either farming, mining, or opening a business in a town starting from zero.
It's not a surprise that along w/ a massive depression, that by 1930, the frontier was closed in America so people were more receptive to a welfare state.
How about a laborer in 1922?
And you can observe that this how political support for the free market works by looking at the right's reaction to Vance's proposed 9K per married single earner families. At first, the right's reaction was supportive under the guise that such families should also get govt sponsored relief. Of course, rightists aren't the sharpest tools so it took them like 2 days instead of 30 seconds to figure out that the 9K can only go to relatively low earning single earner households (so most rightist influencer households would not qualify). So then the rightist influencers came back spouting free market principles, saying that singer earner families should not be subject the indignities of govt welfare. I promise you the second that Vance comes back with 9K for all married single earner households with kids, the right will forget that pro free market spiel immediately.
No, it is not just resentment, there is also element cultural familiarity.
Pretty selfish behaviour of everybody's part. Jason Weeden's work on politics is edifying.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-agenda-of-the-political-mind/201501/conservatives-like-welfare-for-traditional
I've never met anyone more petty than a progressive.
We no longer support free market policies. We're going to support pro-nativist policies and anti-DEI policies.
I think you handwave away the Charlie Kirk murder celebrations. Whether or not you think he's a bad person, I don't think it's at all as obvious as you seem to claim that celebrating the deportations of migrants over minor or invented legal issues is morally worse than celebrating a murder of someone who you think spreads bad ideas, especially when the exact same type of person also celebrated the murder of a completely innocent healthcare CEO.
You could argue that there is a scale issue here, but I don't really buy the argument that someone is morally better because they lack the power to act on their deranged fantasies, and I doubt that you do either.
Celebration of Kirk's murder was awful, regardless of whether or not he was a bad person. But I do think it's hypocritical to get up in arms about random X accounts celebrating his death while celebrating the brutal treatment of migrants in your own tweets as many right wing figures have done. It just makes it very obvious that the underlying principle isn't 'celebrating human suffering is bad' but rather 'my people are sacrosanct but yours are fair game'.
You guys get up in arms about random X accounts using the N word.
So I'd argue that (like all leftists) you're misframing the reality of 15 years of cancel culture that was also celebrated alongside Kirk's murder.
It is evident that Leftists have no principles; they are simply a lust for power, a desire to hurt others, and just enough self-awareness to habitually lie to everyone about their goals and nature.
It’s funny how people on both sides with no real theory of mind for their opposition end up describing them in identical terms. Horseshoe theory of lack of political imagination.
It’s the ‘victim’ of these that distinguishes. On one hand you have a leader of a giant political org on college campuses, and a highly paid CEO. Singular, high profile, powerful figures.
On the other hand you have a poor/ordinary person who may as well be you or your neighbor if circumstances were different.
Punching up vs punching down
You could be a poor ordinary person in his own country instead of illegally in mine.
I don't really care which direction we're punching, up or down, it's a fight. Whoever hits hardest wins.
The Left celebrated the murder of the one moderate guy who was trying to maintain a dialogue between the two factions. The left never wanted dialogue. They wanted dissenting voices silenced through violence and bloodshed. Every guy (about 80% of the Right) more extreme than Charlie Kirk is now well aware that the goal of the Left is to kill us all.
The compassion and principles extended to the "other side" have now been exhausted. The Left is evil, not intellectually, but spiritually and ontologically. Every word a leftist says is a lie or a misframing of truth in the name of Praxis. Every action they take is to hurt innocent people, and every argument for principles they make is not a principle they would hold themselves to. I have gone hard looking into leftist psychology, and there is nothing at the bottom, just a well of resentment and hate. Resentful, hateful monsters do not belong in politics, or in our culture at all.
"What couldn’t be justified in a world where these “unhumans” are your imagined opponents?"
The funny thing is, and perhaps this was intentional on your part, is that this very question was central to Schmitt's thinking, and he spends a large portion of "The Concept of the Political" explaining why universalistic dogmas are dangerous. He says that the reason is that, when people believe have universalistic views, anyone opposed to these universalistic views becomes the enemy of all of humanity. "And what means would not be justified in defeating the enemy of all humanity?"
It's hilarious to me that Schmitt has become a rallying figure for so many chuds. He was deeply conservative, and his friend-enemy distinction was not, as many seem to believe, an endorsement of the idea that you should have a lot of enemies, but a warning about the dangers of living in a world defined by conflict between people groups.
Reading "Concept" as an endorsement as the distinction would be like reading "Leviathan" as an endorsement of the state of nature. His entire thing is coming up with ways to mediate the distinction. He grew up as a Catholic in a majority Protestant village. He dedicated "Concept" to a close friend who died in WW1 and, in the essay, declared that war is a fraud. Throughout his professorial career, he was harassed by campus Nazis! This guy wasn't stupid! The problem is his so-called fans.
Problem is that the MAGA far right actually wants to be an enemy of the humanity which is how they reached some of these conclusions
I will say that Progressives sure do fit the bill for the enemy of all humanity: evil, violent, psychotic, habitual liars that prey on the compassion of others, and absolutely incapable of self-reflection.
It's a close match, but not a perfect one.
The left may have moral safeguards to limit the impulses of its leaders. It is chronically incapable of limiting the impulses of its illiberal base. This analysis seems to confuse a mythical liberal cohort with the lunatic left that is actually dominating the grass on the democrat side. How you can see the whole Charlie Kirk assassination and subsequent glorification by the left as anything but a direct refutation of the thesis of this piece is beyond me.
I think celebrating anyone's death is goulish but it works both ways there were people on the right that took great delight in Paul palosi being attacked and when those dems were killed in Minnesota tbh it makes me feel quite misanthropic tbh
Paul Pelosi was not killed. I have not seen any anniversary celebrations from rightists celebrating the killing of the Minnesota lawmakers. Please share some evidence if you have. This is besides the point though. Hanania is saying liberals are the only group that isn't sadistic and violent.
Has the Minnesota killings been a year yet? I so I've lost track of time. I think Richards using therm liberal in the classic sense as opposed to the progressive. The two groups are vastly different but get lumped into one as classic liberal can cover most political factions from conservatives to libertarianism to social democrats and centerists. The progressive liberal I'd class as Marxist or far left and they do show almost a horseshoe mirror image of the far right or fascist both display traits of violence and opponentism. The problem is the majority of people aren't those two categories and fit somewhere between the 2 on the political scale where different ideas are opponents to be defeated but have ideas you agree or disagree with. Personally I'd chuck the extremes in a pit let them fight to the death and release lions on the winners. As for pepsi you are right he didn't die he was just violently attacked, I should've made that clearer, so it's ok to laugh at him?
Yes, it's been over a year. One could argue that the Minnesota killings didn't have the national exposure that Kirk's murder did. Still, I find it hard to picture conservatives behaving the way progressives have about Kirk. (perhaps they aren't as convinced of the evil of the victim or their moral high ground?)
You are right that Hanania seems to be lumping groups together either haphazardly or because it helps his argument.
The details matter when drawing comparisons or analogizing. It isn't ok to laugh at Pelosi's pain although the situation was a little bizarre as to make it comical. But comparing some jokes by Jesse Waters about the Pelosi incident to students partying with fake blood on their necks and defacing a Kirk statue in celebration of his murder seems frankly off base. The same goes for those saying Trump has done similar things. Trump's good riddance to a political foe that died peacefully of natural causes does not compare to the mob gleefully celebrating the murder of a political enemy. Trump was being honest. This Kirk stuff is depraved and sick... or maybe that is just my bias talking.
I don't recall an anniversary celebration. You're intentionally misrepresenting history. Which is a common tactic among the bloodthirsty Left.
The Left has no moral safeguards at all as far as I've seen. Would you please cite them for me?
Great essay. Have restacked multiple times, with copious excerpts, and have sent it around to friends.
I'm a lifelong liberal. But I'm not afraid to criticize my tribe when it's warranted -- and boy is it ever nowadays -- just as Richard isn't afraid to criticize his. That's what integrity demands. That's what you do if you believe in reason, in logic, in good faith, in the principles of the Enlightenment.
I have been dutifully voting in every election for 50 years. And for the first time in my life, I'm going to withhold my vote entirely in the coming election. (But I live in a blue city in a blue state, so my protest is meaningless anyway. That's the sad reality.) I'm doing this because both political parties are shîtting all over us, especially all over women.
The MAGA party is deranged and cruel and the Transqueer party is deranged and cruel, only in different ways. Richard has made an excellent case here, the kind that I believe I've also made over the years and which has kept me voting. But I'm done. I can't take it anymore. As the famous meme -- a pic of a red-clad Handmaiden with text superimposed -- aptly puts it: “The American Left will put you in a prison cell with a rapist. The American Right will make you have his baby.”
-"They don’t feel bad about treating opponents unfairly or using authoritarian means to achieve their ends, because they project their values onto everyone else and assume that others are similarly unconstrained by moral principles."
As TV Tropes would put it: "Evil cannot comprehend good."
That's why the progressive cannot comprehend the conservative.
Don't think it's fair to use liberal vs. non-liberal as the fault line. The segment of the right that still has some connection with the base and that's the most critical of the direction you're describing is the religious right, not libertarians who outside of think tanks are gun nuts and sovereign citizens. By religious right I'm referring to those whose conservatism is an outgrowth of their genuine devotion, not to those who use Christian imagery and identity as an aesthetic for their politics. People like Trent Horn, Joel Berry, Ridvan Aydemir, Lila Rose, and so on might still be immigration hawks, but they aren't white nationalists and they also aren't liberals even under your broad definition. They think the Enlightenment had many negative consequences, as seen in its culmination under Robbespierre, and want comprehensive doctrines to be allowed to inform law and policy.
On a side note Schmitt's ideas have been wildly misinterpreted as they've become more popular. Schmitt thought the left-right distinction within a parliamentary democracy didn't qualify for the friend-enemy distinction since both sides are still friends (hence the term loyal opposition). Left-right issues in a liberal democratic context according to him are merely managerial-technical disagreements, not political ones. So when rightists claim it's not Schmittian to have internal dissension, they haven't read Schmitt.
The last part is generally right. A while ago I saw the generational change described along the lines of "conservative intellectuals switched from pretending to have read John Locke to pretending to have read Carl Schmitt."
Your article is so silly. The DEM / LEFT would easily be ruling in America if they hadn't gone for the Open Borders insanity pushed by their ruling class DONORS!
“I used to laugh at liberals who would say the “cruelty is the point.” What a simplistic understanding of one’s opponents! But I think that this view has been fully vindicated by the second Trump administration.”
It is the Occam’s Razor explanation - simple and likely correct.
President Trump absolutely did not "send ICE into Minnesota to harass members of the public" is how I think you put it. Both shootings you mentioned were by ICE officers attempting to perform targeted arrests (I know at least 1 of the 2 was a child predator) and Leftists thought it was a good idea to interfere and assault officers. I'd love to hear your reasoning on why Charlie Kirk was "evil" and can understand why people are celebrating his murder! Please answer then go back to being the morally superior being you claim to be.
We saw the videos and they were murders
Is this satire?
During the Black Lives Matter protests it is estimated that 9 to 25 Americans were killed in actions related directly to the protests
Wanting the rule of Law in immigration is now somehow considered genocidal. And you accuse other people of extremism.