A Very Bad Week for Civilization

Nearly all my smart and reasonable friends are cheering political violence. This is a very bad week for civilization.

I'm actually agitated. I've been handling extreme turmoil (not just health) with calm gratitude. I really don't do agitation. But now I'm agitated. Consider me your canary in this coal mine.

The Left's reaction to Charlie Kirk is a drastic turning point, and they don't realize it. To them, it's just Friday. But for their hated and preferred-dead "enemies", they've just fulfilled the bullshit characterizations ascribed to them all these years by FOX, OANN, Alex Frigging Jones, and the rest of those mendacious goons. If you thought we enjoyed some padding between the current moment and a tipping point to civil war, look around you and behold nothing.

I try to make friends see it, but they rage at me (extremists hate sympathizers worst of all) or else blink hard and struggle to parse what I'm even talking about. We're just doing our thing! Fighting the fight! Manning the garrisons! What are you so freaked out about?

For them, it's all performative playtime—including, now, assassination. That's quite an expansion pack.

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"I don't support political violence, but he brought it on himself" is not good enough. To quote a Facebook friend who prefers anonymity (sharing my feeling that this is a very dangerous moment):

"She said Prohibition was bad and didn't work, so it's pretty ironic and funny that she got killed by an angry drunk swinging around a broken bottle! Serves her right!"

"He thinks cars are a net good, so when someone runs him off the highway with a semi-truck, I guess that's just part of the cost of doing business, no sympathy."

"She told people that plane crashes don't mean we should stop flying planes, so it's actually fine that the missile intercepted her as she flew across the country."

This line of reasoning is not reasoning. It is an attempt to convert a cognitive dissonance into an easy snark that lets you feel smug about your sense of irony instead of being something you *should* have to sit with and think about, something that makes you uneasy with your sense of tribalism.