Gianforte's win is a sea change for US politics; Violence is OK now

[Foucaulf]

As someone who clearly takes one side on this issue but have mostly sat out of this debate, let me tell you what I think every time I see these threads erupt: "8 years."

The rhetorical undercurrent in the right that happened during the Obama administration's 8 years is to view independent political institutions as part of a grand ideological conspiracy. The connection between academia and liberal politics has been pushed for decades (as people here would know), as well as the "mainstream media," but now it's been heightened to include all reporters, all activists, bankers along with all major corporations (who have accepted today's more socially liberal atmosphere as a way to continue growth) and soon enough entire ethnic groups in the U.S. (see taboos around anti-Semitism being broken).

Case in point: right after Trump's election, you would see these made-up stories on social media about how protesters and "antifa" are really funded by George Soros. I think most of us here thought this is ridiculous and only approached it mockingly. But a semi-intended consequence of establishing these stories is so they could be reused as ammunition in debates like these. If not explicitly cited, their presence conditions the mind into a weird thing.

This is the thing - for all that's been said about college activists, even if they are ideologues, getting that education offers them future mobility and the thought that someone eventually grows out of radicalism. I and other people with economic opportunity can see this. This is not true for people lacking economic opportunity; ideology eats them whole. It is the right wing who now subscribe the most to systematic theories of the world, to the point where they'll overanalyze a college student giving them a stare walking across the road.

I just think to myself: "how can I fight back against all of this?" I don't, since if I do I will feed into others' paranoia anyway. Better to let them digest this information by themselves and take up their moral frailty with God.