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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37743 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Idle culture war prediction: "stochastic terrorism" is quietly retired as a term. 95% of people who ever used that unironically have spent the last few months saying Trump is a fascist who is going to end democracy and everyone should be doing their best to make sure he doesn't win.

Or, per recounting by @stolen_brawnze above of NPR's reporting, one can place any attempts by people on the right to draw this connection squarely in the classic "Republicans pounce!" frame.

Edit: also add in comments like this one on Reddit, in keeping with Sailer's "frontlash" model.

And now I see Steve himself on X predicting such a frontlash.

Edit 2: Plus, among the many gems on Reddit — declaring this is a false flag by Trump to distract the public from his felony conviction/project 2025/the Epstein files/whatever; how it's oh-so-convenient that the shooter is dead; that this is just another example of how Trump "just attracts bad news", this is a symptom of "the rage he projects," that Trump "enabled this culture," and he's to blame for 'making politics dangerous in America'; that it's entirely understandable given that "people don't like pedophiles or rapists"; that if elected, Trump's going to use this as an excuse to silence the media 'exactly like Putin does'; how our priority must be stopping Trump from 'take his anger out on opponents'; how this is going to be our Reichstag Fire and we're about to become Nazi Germany 2.0; and so on, and so on, I'll specifically highlight this one in its (brief) entirety:

Amazing, the Republicans, who have developed a list of 350 political opponents that they believe should be incarcerated and/or put to death, and assert they have the right to be violent to achieve their goals of overthrowing our government, have the nerve to complain of political violence tonight. 😡

Edit 3: add in another proposed reason for it to be a "false flag" — so that Trump can drop out of the race without losing face:

He probably faked it so he can call off his campaign for being in fear for his life. Probably because we are coming too close to actually putting his criminal lying as in jail. I wouldn’t hold it past him for one second that he didn’t outright say to go ahead and shoot someone innocent to bring it all home.

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