It's Kind of Like Guns: At Some Point, It's the Goddamned Motherfucking Supremacism
It's okay, I think several misunderstood my comment, which was more a psychological observation on how people can wear masks on the Web and let out their rage there.
Well, that's the thing. I get it, but it's this thing people do, and the fact of how they do it is significant. It's kind of like the "this is fine" meme; back when some people talked this way, we were wrong to read too much into it, and now that it's actually happening, of course someone's first instinct is to go do that thing that isn't what it looks like but apparently the appearance can't be avoided because maybe somebody has to be the one to stand up for not demonizing the demonizers by making true statements about their behavior.
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Here, two notions of what is described as a suicide pact. That is to say, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact".
What it
actually means is that the nation will depart from the Constitution for the sake of certain fear and favor. Famous applications are Jefferson's latter-day justification of the Purchase, when to silence pacifism, and when who needs what right to tamper with which evidence in order to conceal crime. The underlying idea is that society will collapse under the burden of such exacting application. Like
See (1967), in which the Constitution dies if you don't give employers time to hide evidence of wrongdoing; the Constitution is not a suicide pact, so going to work must be.
What it
does not mean is that the Constitution should not invalidate itself in order to fulfill itself. It's why I ask a certain question about censorship: We must allow certain people an implicitly nonreciprocal empowerment to censor what displeases them or else their free speech is abridged.
In this way,
of course it's time to blame society in order to alleviate some of this particular culpability because that same society will collapse if we don't find some way to shift some portion of the blame to other people.
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And,
of course our consideration must be for those not simply who reject such consideration for others, but also who would reject ongoing societal discourse about increasing peer pressure and the temptations of anonymity. Remember the bleeding hearts, white knights, snowflakes, esjaydubs, pajama boys, &c.,
i.e., the people they've mocked. Yes, I know their parents' generations. Consider, please:
I suspect the most vile comments come from people who are reticent, even cowardly, in real life, and possibly have been abused growing up. The social media give them a place to let out their rage monster and kick whatever vulnerable scapegoats they can locate.
This is an interesting analysis that even has an applicable context, but do please consider that these reticent, even cowardly in real life, potential victims are also the executive tier of the Young Republicans, people who intend to run campaigns and even seek office; the craven joke about Indian women included a twenty-seven year-old state senator.
Again, per
Politico↱:
"The more the political atmosphere is open and liberating — like it has been with the emergence of Trump and a more right wing GOP even before him — it opens up young people and older people to telling racist jokes, making racist commentaries in private and public," said Joe Feagin, a Texas A&M sociology professor who has studied racism for the last 60 years. He's also concerned the words would be applied to public policy. "It's chilling, of course, because they will act on these views."
The dynamic of easy racism and casual cruelty played out in often dark, vivid fashion inside the chats, where campaign talk and party gossip blurred into streams of slurs and violent fantasies ....
.... Liz Huston, a White House spokesperson, rejected the idea that Trump's rhetoric had anything to do with the chat members' language.
"Only an activist, left-wing reporter would desperately try to tie President Trump into a story about a random groupchat he has no affiliation with, while failing to mention the dangerous smears coming from Democrat politicians who have fantasized about murdering their opponent and called Republicans Nazis and Fascists," she said. "No one has been subjected to more vicious rhetoric and violence than President Trump and his supporters" ....
.... Art Jipson, a professor at the University of Dayton who specializes in white racial extremism, surmised the Young Republicans in the chat were influenced by Trump's language, which he said is often hyperbolic and emotionally charged.
"Trump's persistent use of hostile, often inflammatory language that normalizes aggressive discourse in conservative circles can be incredibly influential on young operatives who are still trying to figure out, 'What is that political discourse?'" Jipson said ....
.... Jipson said the Young Republicans' conversations reminded him of online discussions between members of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups.
"You say it once or twice, it's a joke, but you say it 251 times, it's no longer a joke," Jipson said. "The more we repeat certain ideas, the more real they become to us."
It's the sort of discussion about virtue signaling and ingroup colloquy that we could have had, and society has been having—and conservatives disdaining—for
generations. But even as ingroup ritual colloquy and even competitive socialization, at some point we must look past the pressure to mog on one another in order to consider the values of ritual exchange:
Hitler fanboy mogging can be looked at in a couple ways, at least. One looks to the fact of mogging as some manner of mitigator; the other considers the point of Hitler fanboy as the comparative value exchange.
(And this is the point in the discussion where someone steps up to complain about the way liberals force people to adopt conservative values by making people uncomfortable by analyzing the fact of everyone competing for attention, or the virtues and impacts of being outrageous. If the comparative value was actual arson, perhaps the point might seem more apparent. But since they're not trying to one-up each other by burning down buildings, but instead just torch the discourse with malice, well, we need to be careful to not suppress political views. You know, like the political views that would suppress everybody else; shit, we wouldn't want to make those people even slightly uncomfortable by being so judgmental as to suggest their behavior is anything less than admirable, you know, the way the fucking liberals always shut down discussions.)
I get it: They're young and stupid. Please, though, get this: These are the durable values that raised them. And, yes, some of their parents are quite literally my generational cohort. In that way, this ethos is prevalent pretty much my whole life. So, no, I'm sorry, some guy who has a thing for showing his egalitarianism by pointing to excuses for supremacists isn't going to convince me to look away from that danger. We're not going to set the discussion back fifteen years just to supremacists them another fifteen years to work out their feelings and blow off steam. We already know where this goes.
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Notes:
Beeferman, Jason and Emily Ngo. "'I love Hitler': Leaked messages expose Young Republicans' racist chat". Politico. 14 October 2025. Politico.com. 15 October 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-young-gop-club-members-00592146