killing

This is fascism.

PNRJ current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 1 JDN 2461073

The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

– George Orwell, 1984

As I write this, we haven’t even finished January of 2026, and already there have been not one, but two blatant, public executions of innocent people by federal agents that occurred in broad daylight and on video.

I already thought the video of Renee Good’s shooting was pretty clear, but the videos of Alex Pretti’s just leave no room for doubt at all. He was disarmed and restrained when they shot him; this was an execution.

I have heard liberals mocked by leftists as “people who are okay with the government killing people as long as the right paperwork is filed”. This is sort of true, actually—if by “paperwork” you mean due process of law. You know, the foundation of liberal democracy? That little thing?

Yes, I am actually okay with (some) military actions, police shootings in self-defense, and even executions of convicted murderers (though I should note that actually many liberals aren’t okay with the latter). I think that a world where nobody kills anybody is a pipe dream, and the best we can reasonably hope for is one where there are few killings, most of them are justified, and the ones that aren’t are punished. (And if your problem is specifically with the government killing people… who do you think should have that authority, if not democratically-elected representatives?) I understand that the government needs to kill people sometimes, but I expect those killings to be limited to justifiable wars, imminent threats to life and limb, or the result of a proper conviction by a fair jury trial.

But this was not due process of law. There was no judge, no jury, no trial—there wasn’t even a warrant or an arrest. Nor was it an in-the-moment response to an imminent threat—even a perceived one. The videos are crystal-clear: Alex Pretti was no threat to the border patrol agents who shot him to death.

This is fascism.

It’s not like fascism. It’s not toward fascism. This isn’t how it starts. Masked men executing innocent people in broad daylight is fascism. It’s here. It’s happening.

This does not necessarily mean that our entire country has fallen to fascism; there is still hope that we can stop this from happening again, and also hope that this will not escalate into a full-blown civil war. But shooting an innocent unarmed man without a judge or a jury is an inherently, irredeemably fascist act. If the men responsible are not tried for murder, it will be a grave injustice—and it could very well escalate into much larger-scale violence.

I wish I could say this sort of thing is totally unprecedented; but no, it’s not. The United States government has done a lot of horrible things over the years, from slavery to the Trail of Tears to the Japanese internment. I think that our country has been in a profound state of tension from the very beginning, between the high-minded ideals of “all men are created equal” and the deep-seated tribalism that comes naturally to nearly all human beings. I don’t think America is uniquely evil; in fact, I think we are especially good—it’s just that even a good country often does horrible things.

And there is something different about this. It’s not the first time our government has killed anyone, or even killed anyone for an obviously unjustified reason. But I think it might be the first time the government has publicly and blatantly lied about the circumstances in a way that can be directly refuted by video evidence. They aren’t painting it as a “mistake” or saying it was “a few bad apples”; they are actually trying to claim justification where obviously none exists. They are asking you to believe what they say over what you can see with your own two eyes.

This is what authoritarian states do. They try to undermine your belief in objective reality. They try to gaslight you into believing what they say instead of what you can see. And even in an extremely prosperous, well-educated country, they have been shockingly effective at it.

This is what we warned against when Trump was running for election.

Maybe it’s not productive to say “We told you so”, but, uh, we told you so.

He’s done so many terrible things, and has been enabled so many times by Republicans in Congress and the right-wing justices of the Supreme Court. As a result, it’s hard to draw any bright lines in the sand. But if you really want to draw one, this might be a good one to draw.

Honestly, the best time to turn against Trump was ten years ago; but people are finally turning against him, and better late than never.

Reflections on the Charlie Kirk assassination

PNRJ core principles, current events, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 28 JDN 2460947

No doubt you are well aware that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10. His memorial service was held on September 21, and filled a stadium in Arizona.

There have been a lot of wildly different takes on this event. It’s enough to make you start questioning your own sanity. So while what I have to say may not be that different from what Krugman (or for that matter Jacobin) had to say, I still thought I would try to contribute to the small part of the conversation that’s setting the record straight.

First of all, let me say that this is clearly a political assassination, and as a matter of principle, that kind of thing should not be condoned in a democracy.

The whole point of a democratic system is that we don’t win by killing or silencing our opponents, we win by persuading or out-voting them. As long as someone is not engaging in speech acts that directly command or incite violence (like, say, inciting people to attack the Capitol), they should be allowed to speak in peace; even abhorrent views should be not be met with violence.

Free speech isn’t just about government censorship (though that is also a major problem right now); it’s a moral principle that underlies the foundation of liberal democracy. We don’t resolve conflicts with violence unless absolutely necessary.

So I want to be absolutely clear about this: Killing Charlie Kirk was not acceptable, and the assassin should be tried in a court of law and, if duly convicted, imprisoned for a very long time.

Second of all, we still don’t know the assassin’s motive, so stop speculating until we do.

At first it looked like the killer was left-wing. Then it looked like maybe he was right-wing. Now it looks like maybe he’s left-wing again. Maybe his views aren’t easily categorized that way; maybe he’s an anarcho-capitalist, or an anarcho-communist, or a Scientologist. I won’t say it doesn’t matter; it clearly does matter. But we simply do not know yet.

There is an incredibly common and incredibly harmful thing that people do after any major crime: They start spreading rumors and speculating about things that we actually know next to nothing about. Stop it. Don’t contribute to that.


The whole reason we have a court system is to actually figure out the real truth, which takes a lot of time and effort. The courts are one American institution that’s actually still functioning pretty well in this horrific cyberpunk/Trumpistan era; let them do their job.

It could be months or years before we really fully understand what happened here. Accept that. You don’t need to know the answer right now, and it’s far more dangerous to think you know the answer when you actually don’t.

But finally, I need to point out that Charlie Kirk was an absolutely abhorrent, despicable husk of a human being and no one should be honoring him.

First of all, he himself advocated for political violence against his opponents. I won’t say anyone deserves what happened to him—but if anyone did, it would be him, because he specifically rallied his followers to do exactly this sort of thing to other people.

He was also bigoted in almost every conceivable way: Racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and of course transphobic. He maintained a McCarthy-esque list of college professors that he encouraged people to harass for being too left-wing. He was a covert White supremacist, and only a little bit covert. He was not covert at all about his blatant sexism and misogyny that seems like it came from the 1950s instead of the 2020s.

He encouraged his—predominantly White, male, straight, cisgender, middle-class—audience to hate every marginalized group you can think of: women, people of color, LGBT people, poor people, homeless people, people with disabilities. Not content to merely be an abhorrent psychopath himself, he actively campaigned against the concept of empathy.

Charlie Kirk deserves no honors. The world is better off without him. He made his entire career out of ruining the lives of innocent people and actively making the world a worse place.

It was wrong to kill Charlie Kirk. But if you’re sad he’s gone, what is wrong with you!?