It’s license. The point is power and pleasure.
There are liberals, in an older sense, and they’ve been prevalent in the Substack ecosystem: Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald. You should at least notice what Shellenberger just said about the murder of Charlie Kirk. There are people who locate themselves on the political left and who believe in democratic pluralism and freedom of expression. They reject political violence, and they unambiguously defend your right to disagree with them. There are also people on the left who just recognize a descent into political violence as a threat to their own safety, a thing that comes to hurt everyone.
But there’s also a Cluster B left that we all know in our bones, and they find the presence of people who disagree with them at all about anything — that is, of literal Nazis — to validate their sadistic and vicious behavior. Go swim around in Bluesky for a bit, if you doubt it.
He’s a Nazi, so. “I’m not happy he got shot, but.” Same thread:
Hell to the yeah!
Or X, and of course this account has since been made private:
We’ve created a woke politics that honors and celebrates brutality and degradation, and