State of the Discussion

I'm pretty pissed about it. I'm also pissed about the years long shredding of credibility that's made it impossible to stand up against this kind of thing without having a debate over why it is millions of people were encouraged to enter illegally (including this dude) under the faulty belief they'd be allowed to stay indefinitely, pending some political settlement that may or may not occur. These people, including Garcia have not been served well by any of this and while Trump owns his authoritarianism and the constitutional disaster this is shaping up to be, I still think anyone who has been arguing in favor unchecked illegal entry and/or sham asylum has their own ownership stake in this mess. I hope they're happy with it.

Jan 6th was more than 4 years ago and proved conclusively that Trump was unfit for office. At that point ideology doesn't really matter.

The flaws in "wokeness" are an issue but that's a different conversation.

The claim is this was inspired by the far right. That he's consuming far right media and is a member. Checking his political views seems a good way to judge that.

If you're going to claim that all violence stems from the far right no matter what the guilty individual thinks then imho you're just drawing a line between something you don't like and something else you don't like.

If you're claiming something else then I don't understand what you're saying.

Phil: Lone wolves don’t act just because.

Jan 6th was clearly caused by Trump and company, but that's a group with well defined sources, motivations, and we can draw clear lines.

With lone wolves, especially dysfunctional mentally ill lone wolves, it's a lot harder. The claim is they're inspired by the ideology but the counter argument is people who want to commit violence are attracted to violent ideologies.

For example the various school shooters are inspired by the previous school shooters.

Lone wolves don’t act just because. And differentiating a lone wolf from a pack based on underlying politics sounds an awful lot like differentiating people based on skin color. And then concluding that those with more melanin are less intelligent or more crime prone or the like.

thanks for reading. not aware of that geopolitical theory.

recall clearly the signal scandal. showed indifferent execution with the enthusiasm of picking one’s fantasy football team. the houthis should be insulted.

thanks for reading. they seemed very happy about the arrangement. what could possibly compel them to want anyone else to control it? they can rewrite a reasonable lease, have reasonable tolls for legal movement and send all their kids to college for free for generations. why would they become a chip when they already have a great relationship with a superpower?

consistency is also a soft power.

DavidTC: The ‘lone wolves’ are a logical and deliberate result of that environment.

This is the sort of thing we hear just before we find out his politics are wrong.

The way to bet is he's mentally ill and has no sane politics.

Looking him up... he's a bipolar schizophrenic who hates Trump (and to be fair, Biden. Apparently all politicians).

Trump asks Bukele to build prisons for American citizens. Don't pretend Trump is just joking. He means this literally and seriously. El Salvador will be a gulag for American dissidents:

https://www.rawstory.com/will-trump-deport-american-citizens/

I would be surprised if he even managed to get $150B.

I think we have a pretty serious problem in how media in this country functions: It just repeats things that people on the right say while doing absolutely no verification at all.

(For the record, doing the same thing with people on the left would also be a problem, but doesn't seem to happen.)

This is all government stuff. When it became clear that DOGE was actually an incompetent mess that had no idea what they were doing, the media should have just stopped repeating things they said. Just, period, stopped.

If the government want to show evidence of something, they are the government. None of these agreements are secret, the budget itself is not secret (Which is something that should have been pointed out by the media also when these idiots started talking about fraud.) It is entirely reasonable to say 'Show me the exact details of what you did'.

Instead, the media reported on a website, and then they think it is their job to track down stuff on that website and _disprove_ it.

NO! They are the government, and they are pretty well-shown to be liars at this point. They should be providing actual documentation! Do not report how much you have disproven, do not accept _any_ of it. The headlines should be 'DOGE claims giant savings, refuses to document a single dime of it, huge parts of the vague information they did provide are demonstrably false'.

This lone wolf stuff has been a problem for decades.

Calling "far-right fanatics that were feed a steady diet of far-right nonsense that constantly plays of violence and 'second amendment remedies' to fix imaginary harms, who _do_ slip over the very thin line into actual violence' a term like 'lone wolves' is pretty much the entirety of the problem.

There is an entire infrastructure, with media, celebrities, organized groups, etc,of bubbling anger at extremely vague things, including 'white people not being in charge'. They talk, near constantly, about how violence will eventually be the solution. And they are treated as normal and essentially embraced by the Republicans. Sometimes they get a little _too_ antisemitic or neoNa.zi and the right used to have slightly distant itself from one person or another, but that has stopped recently, which had made things get much, much worse.

The 'lone wolves' are a logical and deliberate result of that environment. Fascism actually loving having violent actors like this running around threatening people who step out of line or who are not the 'right sort of people', it means it doesn't have to openly do it itself and it can distance itself from it. Until violence against them is so normalized it can do it themselves.

Or just read: https://www.csis.org/analysis/pushed-extremes-domestic-terrorism-amid-polarization-and-protest

Which points out another interesting thing. While left-wing domestic terrorism is increasing (Although it is still pretty far from the right-wing), people really should scroll to Figure 7 to realize what left-wing domestic terrorism means there.

The reliance by violent far-right perpetrators on weapons such as guns, explosives, and incendiaries is consistent with their larger share of fatal attacks in 2021. These attacks often targeted people directly, particularly government personnel and private individuals. Meanwhile, violent far-left perpetrators primarily used melee weapons and incendiaries to cause property damage, particularly against government and police buildings and businesses. These data indicate that while both violent far-right and violent far-left actors committed a historically large number of terrorist attacks in 2021, violent far-right actors were more likely to pursue their motives with lethal intent.

It's weird, when you think about it, how we never call some rando in a BLM crowd that hurled a Molotov at an brick Federal building, causing no real damage, a 'lone wolf'. That's the BLM movement itself being violent.

Yet somehow a right-wing guy who threw one at a occupied residence with the obvious intent of murdering the people inside is. There's nothing behind that, no siree, he just decided to do that entirely by himself!

Not for nothing but trade policy that ramps up the instability, coupled to foreign policy that denies the effectiveness of soft power is probably not a good idea either. And yet here we are.

He *looks* like he's probably neo-Republican... but as you note, the sentence "Balmer said his public grievances with the Democratic Party were primarily related to financial issues" has a little bit of 'car ran over some pedestrians at a Christmas fair' kinda feel to it.

Could be anti-elf, could be anti-Christian, could be a cry-for help, could be a principled opposition to the commercialization of a high holy day. Hard to tell where cars stand, really.

He's certainly not as charismatic as Luigi... so I expect his facebook will confirm neo-Republican.

He's going out of his way to not mention his party affiliation.

Republicans would *NEVER* vote for a Democrat and Dems would *NEVER* vote red.

Independent? Hell, everybody would vote for an independent!

When you normalize political violence by pardoning those who attacked the capitol you should expect t more of this. What’s even worse is a lot of vaguely online right type people want to paint this guy as a Democrat so they can talk about liberal on liberal violence and thus deflect.