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provide[s] Donald Trump with a pretext for crushing dissent.
Donald doesn’t need a pretext. He literally sent the military to Chicago on a whim. Earlier this week. Before Charlie died.
Why are people so afraid of giving him a pretext? He killed ten people on a boat in the Caribbean for no apparent reason. A literal war crime.
It's not exactly about giving him a pretext, but providing a pretext for his actions in the eyes of others. There will be many people who are alarmed or horrified at him sending the military into US cities, but who will find it much easier to accept him sending the military to put down the "lunatic lefties" who go around shooting public figures.
Acts like this erode support and give the opponents cover to further supress disent.
When we don’t even know who the killer is or their motivations?
The only people the “pretext” works on already support fascism.
It’s up to us to stand up to fascism, not avoid angering the abuser.
When we don’t even know who the killer is or their motivations
You're right, we don't, and obviously the right have created a narative saying it's a leftwinger. The point is not to provide them a ready made narative. Killing kirk will do little to nothing to improve matters, much like killing that CEO has done little to nothing. What it does do it make it seem more "reasonable" for there to be crackdowns, after all there are "crazed lefties" on the loose killing innocent people. (Yes, it was hard typing that, which doesn't change the fact it's effective propaganda, even if it was a fase flag)
The only people the “pretext” works on already support fascism.
Fascists will obviouslt support it, but many ow information people, or even just people who are worried about how they'll manage can be easily swayed to accept harsher measures with stories like this. After all, they're not assasinating people, and assassinating people is bad, so if "the left" are doing it, they must be bad, and maybe they should be dealt with like that. As I said, it's propaganda, and making it easier for them by playing into it is probably a mistake.
It’s up to us to stand up to fascism, not avoid angering the abuser.
Go ahead and anger the abuser all you want, all you can, and stick in an extra kick for me. It's not about them though, it's about "hearts and minds", cliched phrase though that is. Individual assasinatons, unless they're of key personnel, whose elimination can actually stop something happening, will achieve little positive, and create a convincing story that it's just evil lefties killing people they can't beat any other way.
Where have you been for the last seven months? They’re abducting legal immigrants and citizens and sending them to torture prisons in El Salvador and concentration camps in Florida.
During Covid the blowback against masking and vaccines was calculated to kill democrats — denizens of dense urban areas where the virus was initially rampant.
Donald’s invasions of only blue cities is a LITERALLY military attack on innocent people.
It’s too late. Fascism is here. If you think you’re going to ride it out by keeping your head down, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.
It's not about riding it out, dealing with it is a separate discussion. The point is that they are (quite successfully) manufacturing consent for that fascism. The easiest way for them to do that is to twist an actual event to show that only they can stop this sort of terrible thing happening, and their opponents must be crushed.
As I said, shooting some "celebrity", while cathartic, will not achieve anything positive (because kirk wasn't essential to any processes), but will make it easier to manufacture consent for suppressing those opposed to the regieme.
To be clear, even if trump shot kirk in front of everyone, they'd claim it was a leftist, but it would be less convincing to many than if it actually turns out to be soneone even slightly left leaning.
In summary, this event will only have negative consequences for those who aren't fascists, and given that, you'd hope it wasn't an anti-fascist who did it.
Explain to me what the last few decades of "well, I disagree with what you're saying but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" has accomplished? It sure hasn't thrown cold water on the rightward turn.
Every time one of these sadistic hatemongers has said things like "kill all leftists" they just tip toe to the line of actual violence, and our silence is sanction.
Their actions haven't had consequences since the civil war.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk threatens to embolden the far right and provide Donald Trump with a pretext for crushing dissent.
Oh no, maybe he will use it as a pretext to declare war on a US city and name it after a WWII battle like Midway!
Or maybe his administration will claim that filming federal enforcement is violence!
Or maybe he will have US citizens detained by immigration enforcement based on racist profiling with the blessing of SCOTUS!
Or maybe they were going to manufacture a crisis and this isn't actually enabling anything they weren't already doing.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk threatens to embolden the far right
Fuck that, they just assassinated two Dems in Minnesota.
Why aren't people saying that and the rights reaction to it caused violence?
Why is the rights use of violence accepted as inevitable, but if anyone else does it, people pearl clutch and say it might make the right do what they're already doing?
And besides all that:
We dont know who fired the shot
Two trump voters have shot at trump, why is it a foregone conclusion a trump supporter wouldn't shoot at Charlie Kirk?
He preached exactly what happened to him.
If you take the articles content — rather than it’s title — as a warning for what comes next, it’s accurate and reasonable. What the article fails to consider is that what comes next was always inevitable. Republicans have spent months trying to create violent backlash. They needed an escalation — any escalation — to justify the greater atrocities they have openly planned. Declaring vulnerable minorities as dangerous and mentally ill, declaring political opponents the same, imprisoning American citizens and enacting an ethnic-ideological Final Solution in the US.
Kirk’s assassination wasn’t the start of this and it’s not the end of it. He was a convenient sacrificial pawn for the Trump administration and the violent, oppressive, bloodthirsty, goose-stepping nazi party behind him. It will get worse. Much worse. And then it will get worse still. As of November 5, 2024, the US was damned to violent, horrific ends.
If you cannot fight for your very life and your loved ones, find a way out now. Time is not on your side.
Remember everyone: in the aftermath of a right wing fuckhead getting what they got coming, EVERYBODY is an establishment Democrat. All the "They go low, we go high" chanting along with "Any form of action is scary because it invites reprisals".
Fuckers, "reprisals" have already been happening. Maybe the marketing will change but the actions won't.
No, it's absolutely not.
Someone said Jacobin is the Happy Meal of socialist publication but I think that's a slight against happy meals.
I wasn't sure if people were only posting it's worst takes, or it's really gotten that bad. But every Jacobin article I've seen on here for months has absolutely missed the mark.
Nah
