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I experienced a couple of alarming incidents this week that I thought would make a good topic for a diary, so here we go.
In my small town, the Democratic club organizes a weekly protest at the busiest street corner. Our topics are the constant theme of how bad Donald Trump is as president, and whatever the current outrage happens to be. We count honks of passing cars as a measure of general support, but this being a conservative part of the county, we also get a lot of thumbs-down and middle fingers—but that’s usually the worst of it. However, last Wednesday was the day Charlie Kirk was murdered. We got a couple of drive-by cat-callers mentioning the murder, but there was one fellow who approached us on foot, screaming at the top of his lungs how our radical, far-left rhetoric had been the cause of Kirk’s death. He later drove by again and repeated himself.
Then there was yesterday, which was the club’s kickoff to get-out-the-vote for Proposition 50, the plan to redistrict California so as to increase the number of Democrats in California’s House delegation by 5, thus offsetting Texas’ recent redistricting legislation. The participating canvassers met in the parking lot of a local supermarket to get our marching orders, under a tent clearly marking us as Democrats. When I arrived, I realized I had forgotten some things I needed, so went back home, and by the time I got back, only the organizer and I were there. I was picking up the doorhangers and getting ready to set out when a white man pushing a stroller and walking a dog on a leash was passing by. the GOTV organizer and I were smiling, admiring the toddler in the stroller when the man blurted out in a loud, menacing tone “You fucking Democrats! You’ve started a war!” I was stunned, at least partly because this guy would use that sort of language around a toddler, presumably his own child. The GOTV organizer, who was less fazed and more clear-headed than I was, followed the guy, and filmed him with her phone. I was sufficiently shaken that I could not muster the courage to go door-knocking, even though the doors to be knocked were friendly territory.
The guy on Wednesday I could almost forgive, because nobody knew who the shooter was. However, by yesterday, the shooter had been apprehended, and it was clear he wasn’t a leftist or a Democrat. He’s the some of a sheriff, he voted for Trump last year, and his entire family is MAGA. This was MAGA-on-MAGA violence. The guy with the stroller ought to have known that. On the other hand, some right-wing sources saw this murder as a Horst Wessel opportunity (as in Nazi Germany) to unite right-wing forces and use an act of violence presumably perpetrated by the left to crush the left entirely. When it was revealed that the shooter, Tyler Robinson, was a Proud Boy wannabe, that narrative fell apart, though there are still sources trying to rescue it. I see this rumor that Robinson had a transgender romantic partner which looks to me like just another lie—I’ve seen no substantiation from any legitimate news organization.
I realize that a lot of this anger has been ginned up by the right-wing noise machine in their epistemic bubble, but the sheer lack of any ability to analyze the facts continues to puzzle me. Don’t these people have better things to do?
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Top Comments (September 12-14, 2025):
From brillig:
From Capt Mike's diary Really, what does it mean to be a conservative today? comes this excellent definition of conservatism by Madisonian.
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This comment by Eric Nelson in Oliver Willis’ front page post GOP lawmaker who loves using slurs complains about name-calling.
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