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Back in the Bush years, the slogan they liked to use regarding their race policies was “the bigotry of low expectations.” An army of people no doubt spent months conjuring the slogan and field-testing it with audiences to make sure it hit the mark. They made sure it was completely anodyne while conveying the required adherence to left-wing morality regarding race. The slogan said George Bush cared while also saying the Democrats were the real racists.

In fairness to the civic nationalists, they have a point about the Left when it comes to the issue of race. Despite all the talk about racial justice, they talk about nonwhites as if they are children. For example, they literally argue that black people are incapable of acquiring a picture ID. Even if you want to limit that claim to the population that is dependent on the state, this claim is never made about the whites. You can forgive civic nationalists for being a bit rustled by this.

Putting that aside, there is another element to that old slogan. The underlying claim is not just that the Left treats nonwhites like children but that the Left assumes the nonwhites lack agency and therefore cannot be held accountable. This is not a small thing to say. It goes behind the hoary clichés about racism and speaks to how the Left sees themselves and the world. They see themselves as the puppet masters and the rest of us are just the puppets.

You see another glimpse of this in the Wisconsin massacre following on the heels of the Rittenhouse verdict. The Left was clearly trying to get a riot going. The over-the-top language was intended to inflame the sorts of people who set fire to Kenosha way back when all of this started. When the hip-hop guy ran down women and children at the Christmas parade, the Left was giddy. They thought their rhetoric had triggered the response they thought was appropriate.

Now, it does not really matter if this guy was triggered by the extreme left-wing rhetoric that has flooded our lives for the last few years. It is fair to say he is not watching CNN every night, but his social media activity shows that he is aware of what is going on in the world. It is one of those realities of this age that even the dumbest person cannot escape the media. Unless you live off-grid in the woods, you live suspended in a solution of messages from the mass media.

The causal relationship here is not really important. It is pretty reasonable to conclude that people who do these things are crazy. Whether they are shooting up a school or attacking a Christmas parade, they are not acting rationally. What matters here is what the Left thinks is the causal relationship in these and other events. They clearly think there is one. It is why the less fanatical elements in the media are trying to downplay the Wisconsin massacre. It is bad optics.

This view of the world is behind the censorship regime. The unsophisticated make the error in thinking that the motive behind it is fear of their facts and reason. “They are afraid of our message” is a popular slogan in certain quarters. This is true only in that the Left thinks people lack agency and can easily be manipulated into rebellion or violence. That is what lies behind the claim that language is violence. They assume everyone does what they are told.

In the Charlottesville circus trial this was part of the plaintiff’s case. They brought in the equivalent of tarot card readers to explain the secret messages between members of the alt-right organizers. These so-called experts explained the secret meanings of the jokes and memes and then explained how they are calls to violence. At the heart of this is the assumption that humans lack agency and are so suggestible that they will become savage at the sound of certain words.

Magic word theory can probably be placed alongside magic dirt theory and magic shape theory in the domain of left-wing magic. Magic dirt theory is the claim that the soil upon which one stands controls your actions in some mystical way. People born on bad dirt turn out bad, while people born on magic dirt get all the breaks. Magic shape theory claims that metal and plastic shaped into something scary like certain types of guns makes people violent or suicidal.

This explains the Left’s quest to control all areas of cultural production. When you assume that people are infinitely suggestable, whoever controls the message controls the people, which means whoever controls the message centers, the centers of cultural production, controls the people. From the point of view of the Left, it is not censorship but leadership. They have seized the centers of information production in order to lead the people into the promised land.

At a retail level, this is not important. If the guy smashing you over the head with a skateboard is motivated by a bizarre understanding of humanity or he just hates you because you are white is not doing you much good in the moment. Step back and it is an important insight. That guy smashing people with his skateboard is not operating from mere partisanship. He is not just mad at the victim because they do not agree on tax policy or race policy. He is acting in self-defense.

At the heart of the crisis, at the center of every riot over the last few years, is one side convinced they must use any means necessary to remove the things standing between them and the egalitarian paradise. If that means killing those who do not want to go along, they feel completely justified. After all, their objections are a call for violence to stop progress. The guy swinging the skateboard believes he is acting in self-defense, even when the attack is unprovoked.

The question alongside that central truth is can society go on if some minority of the population is sure they are in a life and death struggle with the majority? The weaponization of the mentally unstable, minorities and fanatics in a war against stability and normalcy is a threat to the very existence of society. If this was coming from a foreign power or organized crime, the answer would be clear. It would me a war of survival against a direct threat.

All human society is an ongoing negotiation around a compromise. Why would anyone seek compromise with those whose opening bid is your death? The middle ground is still horrible. This is why the Left is waging total war on society. The only rational response is to respond accordingly. The compromise is that our commitment to civic nationalism must give way temporarily in order to deal with the threat in the same way chemotherapy is an exception to deal with cancer.

This is not without precedent. In times of war America has suspended the writ of habeas corpus, confined whole populations and commandeered the economy. In times of extreme emergency, free people suspend their distrust of power in order to wield it against the enemy of freedom. At some point, even the most feckless in the ruling class will have to come to this realization. Otherwise, they will be swept away by the same forces being unleashed by their foot soldiers in the media.

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