Assassination culture developing on the left. By Mike Solana at Pirate Wires.
Less than two weeks following the attempted assassination of Sam Altman at his San Francisco home, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated Tax Day in front of Ken Griffin’s penthouse, where he promised, in keeping with the core tenets of third-world leftism, to make this random rich guy’s life more miserable on account of he is rich. This is not to say I think, in so publicly blasting Griffin’s address, Zohran is trying to kill the man. But it’s notable that what happened to Altman — perhaps the most famous CEO in the country after Elon Musk — made so little cultural impact that Zohran’s team didn’t even consider slowing down, and nobody in the mainstream press expressed any real reservations with his shocking decision….
American culture, which has grown more deliriously in favor of violence for years, has finally arrived at the point where that word, “violence,” is no longer sufficient. What we’re really talking about, specifically, is assassination, as the figure of the “‘good guy”’ killer is now very much ascendant, and our country, shaped by the psychotic contours of the internet, is now very much inside a new assassination culture. …
Back in June of 2023, when a small handful of men, along with one of their teenaged sons, died in a submersible implosion deep beneath the ocean surface on a voyage to explore the ruins of the Titanic, laughs and cheers erupted across the social internet. …
Then, someone tried to kill the president. Then, someone tried to kill the president again. This, we were told, was actually Trump’s fault….
It wasn’t until Luigi Mangione that I really saw the future. In December 2024, the internet erupted in cheers following the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. …
Ultimately, implicit calls for violence manifested in the United States Senate, when Elizabeth Warren said ‘violence is never the answer… but people can be pushed only so far.’ …
Here was, unthinkably, an implicit justification for the daytime grisly slaying of a man selling health insurance. Naturally, sitting Congresswoman and star Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez escalated further. “This is not to say that an act of violence is justified,” she said, “but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence…”
At the time, I invited readers to consider what this meant. Not only was Ocasio-Cortez implicitly justifying murder, she was doing so with a new definition of self-defense, which was no longer limited to defense against some immediate physical danger, but now included reaction to one’s violent “experiences” of non-violent actions. What, I wondered, did this not include? …
There is some precedent for assassination culture in American history. In the 1960s and 1970s we were very much in the grip of a memetic death loop, as both political assassinations and the assassination of men deemed political, from Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lennon, were an almost regular occurrence. But today, on the internet, news of political killings for causes considered “just” are not only disseminated throughout the media, but celebrated on the internet. I do think this is categorically new, and worse. …
A large and growing segment of the left, I argued, had become deeply, openly violent. I did not just rely on anecdotal evidence, vibes, or even mainstream reporting, though I did cite all of these things. There was data supporting the notion.
Two days later, as the abundance libs just about concluded their mocking condemnation of my piece, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. …
The center-left, including the massively influential ‘abundance lib’ Ezra Klein, has since taken to normalizing the work of Hasan Piker, a socialist who has repeatedly called for the murder of his political enemies. …
Just hours after what appears to have been a second attempt on Sam Altman’s life, the SF Standard, the Chronicle, and the Onion all shared photos of his home. The Chronicle reported its location. Incredibly, they did this not only as lunatics celebrated online, but as popular influencers made actual cases for further political violence. …
For over a year now Elon Musk has spoken of death threats both he and his teams have received. Reactions are generally skeptical — some wonder if the threats were serious, others wonder if there were any threats at all. These are not sane reactions ever, but they are especially not sane reactions in the middle of what is obviously, fully, an assassination culture.
Not only is every single major figure in tech at risk, every single public figure who talks about AI in any manner considered polarizing, especially to leftists, is at risk. But so is every public figure who talks about anything controversial. For now, let’s just call it how we see it: any even remotely public figure who is viewed as right of center is at risk.
Gone are the days when a brutal attack was met with unequivocal condemnation. Tomorrow, if some influencer is killed, sure, there will be a lot of very public, obligatory denunciations of his murder on all of the public news shows. But people will also cheer, and the attacks will continue.
This, not a bi-partisan agreement that violence is wrong, is our new normal.
Any leftist podcaster or celebrity can hold an event at any University in the United States with minimal security and be completely safe.
Conservative speakers can’t hold events on campus without armed guards and a bullet proof vest.
The left increasingly relies on fraud, violence, and third world immigration to keep the taxpayer money flowing.