Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 08:34 on 12 September 2025
Figured I should type this since the news cycle is moving fast right now and there is sure to be more to comment on in the coming days. Regardless, I won’t be commenting on it. I will be away from my computer and out of Internet range.
Published at 08:21 on 12 September 2025
Note: I typed most of this last night, before this morning’s news conference. Since then:
All of the above are consistent with a credible accusation and a political motive.
Yesterday I wrote:
Given the current state of American politics, we may never know who did it or what their motives are. Utah is a ruby-red state. Yes, it is one with an LDS-inspired version of conservatism that differs substantially from Trump fascism, but it is still a right of centre state that is willingly going along with Trump fascism, whose governor has already labelled this a “political assassination.” Moreover, Trump is certain that the Left is to blame. Therefore, there is pressure to find a leftist to blame. The already-politicized FBI is assisting the State of Utah and local authorities in attempting to locate a suspect. Finally, it is well-known that police lean to the Right politically.
Some elaboration is in order.
First, nothing in the above should be taken as implying that there will be a false accusation, only that there might be. It is merely uncertain if the State’s accusation will be accurate and in good faith. It is not certain the State’s accusation will be inaccurate and/or in bad faith.
As such, some guidelines for judging the quality of an accusation seem in order.
If the accused is captured alive, guilt is more likely. A living man and his attorney can cross-examine the prosecution and blow apart a flimsy, Trumped-up case. A dead man tells no tales. Effectively, a suspect that is shot and killed is a suspect that has been summarily executed. Now, sometimes suspects, particularly murder suspects, get shot and killed for a good reason: they know they are going to be locked up for the rest of their lives or executed, they want to avoid this fate, and as such are willing to take extremely desperate measures to avoid capture. So being shot and killed does not prove a frame-up. It merely fails to provide strong evidence against a frame-up. The part about summary execution brings us to our next point.
If the accused is denied due process, actual guilt is vastly less likely. If, for reasons of “national security” we suddenly can’t give the accused a full, fair jury trial for the crimes he is accused of, this is without doubt the most suspicious thing possible. So suspicious, in fact, that it becomes quite safe to assume he or she is in all likelihood the victim of a frame-up. It is hard to lie convincingly in a persistent and detailed fashion. This is one of the things that makes the trial process work: if the prosecutors are trying to frame the accused, or the accused is lying about his or her guilt, the liar’s story is extremely likely to collapse due to internal contradictions.
Pay particular attention to the jury part. The conviction must come from a fairly-selected, disinterested, impartial jury of the accused’s peers. Utah may be a red state, but Kamala Harris won 37.81% of the vote there. 12 citizens sit on a jury, all 12 must reach a unanimous verdict, and it is highly unlikely that all 12 will be Trump fascists. Also, while Utah is a red state it is also a heavily Mormon state. The LDS church places a high emphasis on honesty; it is going to be difficult to get a jury with many Mormons on it to go along with a flimsy frame-up. We must have a fair selection of jurors; any verdict is thus much more likely to rest on the merits of the case, and not political bias on part of the jury. If the Trump regime somehow starts arguing we for some reason can’t trust this matter to a jury trial, or that the normal standards for juries cannot be followed, that is an absolutely deafening alarm klaxon going off.
The more stereotypical the accused is, the more likely s/he is being framed. By this, I mean stereotypical to your average Trump fascist. If they trot out, for example, a genderqueer women’s studies major with purple hair, a septum ring, and a history of being a loud woke activist interested in cultural issues, particularly if they have no prior interest in guns or politically-motivated violence, this is a huge red flag. It is just too convenient, too easy for Trump’s base to hate. Note that if this card is played, it probably won’t be as exaggeratedly stereotypical as my hypothetical example.
Pay attention to what the killer’s friends and family say. Most killers are known to be violence-prone or unstable before they kill. Pay attention whether friends and family say “he’s been worrying me for a while” or if they say “we had no idea,” or if it is “this just doesn’t make sense to me.”
If a political motive is alleged, a manifesto makes it much more likely the accused is guilty. Killing another human being is an extreme measure. Most who do it for political motives feel compelled to explain those motives. Being an extreme measure, it tends to be something that people do only if they feel very strongly about a cause. Such individuals are almost never quiet about their political beliefs. Friends and family should easily be able to vouch for such outspokenness. The absence of both a manifesto and political outspokenness mean the motive was probably not political.
Lack of shooting experience makes guilt less likely. The killer shot Kirk dead at a range of about 200 yards. Now, while this does not require elite sniper skills, it does require some experience as a shooter. My guess is that the guilty party is probably a hunter. Hunting is very popular in Utah, so this is probably the most plausible way for him to have acquired such skills. But however he acquired his shooting skills, he has to have acquired them. If we are asked to believe he walked into Wal-Mart, walked out with a rifle, and got off a lucky shot, that sounds fishy.
As I type this, it appears that the murder weapon has been found. It is a .30-06 bolt action rifle, a very common deer-hunting firearm. This adds credibility.
Dissent makes guilt less likely. It is very unusual for those involved in law enforcement and criminal justice to dissent about the process. In fact, I cannot readily think of any examples of such. If we start seeing police or prosecutors publicly not going along with something, particularly if they allege political interference, pay close attention to what they have to say.
Participation by political appointees makes the process less credible. The more things are done by career law enforcement officers and prosecuting attorneys, the better. The less, the worse.
As I type this, FBI director Kash Patel has announced his intention to participate directly in the investigation. Given that Patel is a political appointee who has been widely criticized for his lack of relevant experience, this undermines credibility in the process.
Note that none of the above guideposts are strictly definitive. The real answer as to the plausibility of the government’s case will have to be a judgement call based on multiple factors. But my guess is it should be pretty easy.
Published at 12:54 on 11 September 2025
First, what I wrote yesterday still stands. I normally just link to my past posts, but this one was so concise and so important it bears repeating:
Everyone seems to be assuming this is a politically-motivated killing. This is not necessarily so. Until we learn who the perpetrator is, and what their motives were, we simply do not know.
Of course, hardly anyone on the Right is saying that. Of course not. When your country’s governing Right is a fascist Right, things operate according to fascist principles. Dissent always exists to be demonized and crushed. So instead, it is (according to them) certain that the Left (not just a leftist, or a violent leftist group, the entire Left is collectively guilty) did it, even though we still have no idea who did it and why they did it. And of course the remedy must be repression against the Left.
There is already no small amount of speculation that the assassination being a success despite the distance the shot was fired from, that it took only a single shot, and that the killer got away all “prove” the assassin must have been a trained professional. Not so. As I wrote after the almost-successful attempt on Donald Trump’s life in July 2024:
Assuming that it simply “couldn’t” have happened the way currently it appears, that the Secret Service “couldn’t” neglect to properly secure a rooftop, and some random loser “couldn’t” almost prematurely end an ex-president’s life as a result, is assuming into existence, due to indoctrination into authoritarian values, attributes which humans do not in fact possess. It is the authoritarian mindset at work.
I recommend reading the whole essay. And in this case, we already know more particulars which cast further doubt on this theory:
Given the current state of American politics, we may never know who did it or what their motives are. Utah is a ruby-red state. Yes, it is one with an LDS-inspired version of conservatism that differs substantially from Trump fascism, but it is still a right of centre state that is willingly going along with Trump fascism, whose governor has already labelled this a “political assassination.” Moreover, Trump is certain that the Left is to blame. Therefore, there is pressure to find a leftist to blame. The already-politicized FBI is assisting the State of Utah and local authorities in attempting to locate a suspect. Finally, it is well-known that police lean to the Right politically.
People are to this very day arguing over whether or not Marinus van der Lubbe really lit the Reichstag on fire, and if he did, whether or not he did it on his own or if he was put up to it by Nazi agents provocateurs. It may well be similar for whomever ends up being blamed for shooting Kirk.
As with the Reichstag fire, some sort of attempt at an Enabling Act seems likely. Because of course such a thing was bound to happen.
After the events of 6 January 2021, there was a historical imperative to deal Trump fascism a death blow. The Biden Administration was not up to this historical imperative. Therefore, instead of the old democratic order dealing a cautious and measured death blow to fascism, we are probably now going to have fascism attempting a vigorous and sweeping death blow on the old democratic order.
The choice was always such, and was precisely the reason I found the complacency of the Biden Administration so upsetting.
Finally, even if it was a leftist that did it, this in no way proves the Left is exceptionally or unusually violent, and in no way justifies any sort of Enabling Act.
There has been plenty of right-wing political terrorism in recent years. The assassination of one Minnesota state senator and the attempted assassination of many more. The attempted kidnapping of the governor of Michigan. The 6 January coup attempt. And so on. And that is just non-state terrorism. We also have the latter: masked secret police kidnapping people, filthy concentration camps holding them, and a premeditated strike on 11 Venezuelan civilians. Any left-wing political terrorism in the USA must be seen in this context.
Something like what just happened in Utah was bound to happen sooner or later in a country as large, polarized, and heavily-armed as the USA. It was only a matter of time.
As I wrote last April:
To sum up: If fascists try to take freedom away, some people will attempt to resist it. The resistance will not be 100% coordinated and optimized. Some elements of it might choose tactics you (or I) disagree with and/or regard as unstrategic. The root problem is, however, not the resistance. It is the fascism.
I don’t know what to do about this other than to point it out. To fall for the whole “the Left provoked fascism” garbage is basically the same thing as a battered wife falling for her abusive husband’s lie that she is forcing him to hit her, and that she needs to try to be a better wife.
Hopefully, this one blows over and the fast-moving news cycle quickly buries it. But I have a feeling that this time it might not. And even if it does blow over, there is always more where that came from.
Published at 14:27 on 10 September 2025
Everyone seems to be assuming this is a politically-motivated killing. This is not necessarily so. Until we learn who the perpetrator is, and what their motives were, we simply do not know.
Published at 08:43 on 10 September 2025
Russia probably did not deliberately attack Poland. This is clear once one looks at a map. Russia directly borders Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, yet no Russian drones violated those NATO members’ air spaces. If it was a deliberate and calculated test of NATO, one would expect at least some attacks there. The above claim is also clear when one considers Ukraine. Russia has greatly escalated attacks against Ukraine in recent days. Thus, the most logical explanation is that some of those attacks went wide and happened to collaterally damage Poland. Now, this is still a serious matter, and still an escalation of tensions, but it does not appear to be the sort of deliberate attack some are painting it as.
It is difficult to sanction Russia more. This is simply because Russia is already quite comprehensively sanctioned. Moreover, sanctions are not as effective as many seem to believe they are. Iraq survived a punishing sanctions regime for years until Saddam Hussein was overthrown (and the overthrow happened via invasion and occupation, not sanctions). Apartheid-era South Africa also survived sanctions for years, as did Rhodesia. Sure, it would be nice if it were possible to exert significant additional pressure on Russia simply by tightening sanctions, but this is unlikely to be the case.
Israel certainly attacked Qatar deliberately. There really can be no debate about this; even Israel itself has admitted the attack was deliberate. Case closed.
It is trivially easy to sanction Israel more. This is simply because Israel is currently being sanctioned very little. Oh, sure, Israel has its diehard enemies who have been sanctioning it for decades, but those sanctions are inconsequential, being as they are the policies of economic pipsqueaks. Economically important partners like the EU currently do a lot of open trade and cultural exchange with Israel. There is ample room to impose significant additional pain on Israel via sanctions.
Published at 01:22 on 7 September 2025
To be considered rational and reality-based, any theory or proposal must at minimum satisfy all of the above the above three rules.
I am not saying that any of these things is impossible to change, only that spontaneous change is extremely unlikely. Consider them laws of political inertia: things will not change their current trajectories unless work is done on them.
For example, Chuck Schumer’s strategy of waiting for the Republicans to come ’round violates Rule No. 1, and that he persists in the Democratic Party leadership proves Rule No. 2.
Published at 09:56 on 5 September 2025
And yes, I think an armed incursion into another nation, in which some of its civilians are shot and killed, definitely qualifies as an “attack.” If a North Korean commando team did likewise to the USA, you had damn well better believe the a-word would be getting a lot of use in the Western media.
Published at 13:26 on 2 September 2025
What will J.D. (Vance) do?
I think that is the main question to now ask about the U.S.A. There is a lot of speculation out there about how much time The Donald has left on this Earth, and Trump is not exactly young, so this is a reasonable question to ask.
There are, I think, two almost certainly true general principles that should guide this analysis:
Let’s discuss these in order.
Trump’s understanding of economic principles, particularly foreign trade, is just bizarre.
He apparently thinks any trade deficit anywhere implies that someone is getting the better of the U.S.A., and must be stopped. Well, what about essential natural resources that the U.S.A. has an insufficient amount of within its own border to satisfy the demands of its own economy? What if such a resource dominates the economy of a nation or two? Then of course the U.S.A. will run a deficit with those nations. It just has to be that way, that nation has a lot of what the U.S.A. wants, and the U.S.A. does not have so much of what that nation wants. How could it? That other nation is probably one heck of a lot smaller than the U.S.A. Just not enough consumers to buy very much.
The thing is, the U.S.A. still gets whatever resource it is in amounts greater than it otherwise would have, absent foreign trade. This allows the U.S. economy to grow more than it otherwise would have. The U.S.A. ends up better off, even with a trade deficit with Country X.
One of the key insights of economic theory is that transactions can be positive-sum; both parties can emerge better off post-transaction. Transactions don’t have to come with winners and losers. This insight is utterly absent from Trump’s beliefs about international trade.
I don’t grow my own food. Living in a big, expensive city, I can’t. Don’t have the required land. Not particularly interested in being a subsistence farmer, anyhow. So I buy food from my neighbourhood grocery store. I give them money, they give me food. They never give me money for anything. If me and the grocery store were countries, I would be running a trade deficit with them. Does this mean I’m worse off than if I had no access to food?
Trump has even gone so far as to claim “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Literally no economist, whatever their political biases, believes such a thing. They, almost down to a last one, believe precisely the opposite.
Even the economists that believe in managed trade draw a distinction between an orderly and cautious set of tariffs to drive industrial policy versus the chaotic retaliation and counterretaliation that entails a trade war. Trade wars are bad things that often prompt avoidable economic downturns.
Trump’s trade beliefs are just so out-there bizarre that I think it highly unlikely that J.D. Vance is that out there and bizarre. No, Vance has not criticized Trump’s trade policies, but this is most likely because Vance is just keeping his yap shut until he inherits the throne. A Vance administration will have a more sane and rational trade policy.
As such, a Vance administration is likely to exhibit improved economic performance over the alternate timeline of continued Trump trade policies.
Trump is unique. There is hardly anyone else so well-suited to appeal to the moral shortcomings that have been indoctrinated in the American people in order to instill pro-capitalist sentiment into them.
The authority of the capitalist boss is similar to the authority of the dictator within a fascist state. In fact, the authority of the fascist dictator was deliberately modelled on the authority of the capitalist boss; Mussolini called his model for Italy the “corporate state” for this reason.
And it just so turns out that the amount of propaganda needed to instill in a people a consensus in favour of submission to the capitalist boss, something the U.S.A. has excelled at (the U.S.A., alone amongst industrial nations, has never had so much as a politically viable social democratic party), is only very slightly less than the amount needed to instill in them an appreciation for the merits of fascism. This is the root of the problem that has now manifested with Trump, and I started blogging about it over twenty years ago, well before Trump became a major political player.
It’s not just me nor is it a particularly recent insight. Approximately 100 years ago to this very day, Norman Thomas wrote: “… political democracy itself will remain in a perilous state while industrial autocracy continues. It is the old story: a house divided against itself cannot stand. A man not good enough to have anything to say about the conduct of the industry in which he makes his living is not good enough to be a voter in a self-governing republic.”
If I were to engineer the perfect leader to transition the U.S.A. to fascism, I would create someone almost exactly like Donald J. Trump. He would have to be a businessman, yes, but he would have to be a famous businessman, one in the public eye as a result of having been a TV or movie star. His acting role would be one that exemplifies and idealizes the authoritarian power of the capitalist over the worker. He should have a catchphrase such as “You’re fired” which embodies this power. He should have a record of demonstrated success as a self-made businessman. (That final item is something Trump, who inherited his fortune, does not have. But three out four ain’t bad.)
There really isn’t anyone else with these attributes ready to step into Trump’s shoes. At any rate, the one per the Constitution who will step into those shoes is J.D. Vance, who has precisely none of these qualities. He’s not even a businessman! He’s a career government employee who has not worked a single day in the private sector. [Update: I have been informed that this is incorrect and he did work as a venture capitalist.]
The closest businessman to Trump is Elon Musk. But he’s not even a natural-born citizen, and thus is not eligible. Plus, although Musk has a measure of star power, he’s not a TV or movie star. He’s just a capitalist with a knack for grabbing the headlines.
What does this mean? Unpopularity. Trump, with all his star power, is still polling underwater. Vance can, after a possible honeymoon period, be expected to poll more underwater.
The thing is, unpopularity won’t matter so much anymore. Per the previous article, the U.S.A. will no longer be what the U.S.A. once was, Trump having transformed it into a right-wing authoritarian system.
There will probably be some unrest, but it will be dealt with harshly. And the bleak news is that harsh measures typically work in authoritarian societies with naturally submissive populaces. And the latter is what we will have; the U.S. populace having already amply demonstrated its naturally submissive proclivities.
Add to those proclivities an economy that, at least initially, stabilizes itself, and any Vance regime will in large be accepted by a populace who doesn’t value freedom very much but mostly just wants personal safety and material comfort.
And with that, we can trace out the likely arc of the coming Vance Administration:
Any hope for greater political freedom in the U.S.A. will have to wait.
There will, however, be a slow-acting ticking time bomb, and that time bomb is called corruption. Authoritarian societies are inevitably more corrupt than open ones.
Economically, corruption eventually produces collapse. Crony capitalism is unstable, and crony capitalism in the new U.S.A. will be particularly unstable, existing as it does in a political culture that has proven itself repeatedly incapable of adequately regulating its financial sector.
The only question is how long it will take. It took about thirty years in Indonesia under the Suharto dictatorship, which is squarely within the 20–50 years that fascist political orders typically last. The U.S.A. doing a poor job at financial regulation may push things towards the low end of that range.
Even a political culture with generally low morals can be compelled to reform itself morally and resist once it learns a lengthy and painful lesson in the School of Hard Knocks that wages of low moral standards tend to be most unpleasant in the long run.
Published at 10:06 on 1 September 2025
Some U.S. presidents are what can be called transformational presidents. Lincoln (abolition), FDR (welfare state), LBJ (civil rights), etc.
All evidence points to Trump being in the same category, at least as transformative as LBJ and possibly as transformative as Lincoln. My reasoning is as follows:
My initial wording was about the responses of the Democratic Party and the politicians who belong to it. Wording it as such is factually correct, but also factually incomplete, because it is not just the Democratic Party.
We could have the same old weak-willed Democratic Party we do in this timeline, but if we had a public that valued a free and open society more, there would have been massive public outrage at what Trump and the political parties (the Republicans, by enabling him, and the Democrats, by failing to vigorously oppose him) were doing. This would have prompted some combination of the Republican Party abandoning their president (like what happened to Nixon), and/or the Democratic Party pandering to the outrage and no longer being afraid to arrest, prosecute, and jail Trump and his top cronies.
Instead, we saw none of the above. Trump engaged in significant transition towards the principles of right-wing authoritarianism, and it was largely accepted by the vast preponderance of Americans. Oh, sure, there was a lot of grumbling, but in the end, the outcome was acceptance. Acceptance with grumbling is still acceptance. Acceptance with denial grounded in the mythology of American exceptionalism is still acceptance.
Sure, some inconsequential nobodies were prosecuted with much fanfare. So what. The ringleaders got off scot-free. That was the main lesson of the whole escapade.
And now we have his second term, in which Trump has ramped up his transformational initiatives, and the response has been amazingly acquiescent. A few protests here and there, more grumbling, but so far still business as usual. Trump is proposing dictatorship and Americans are generally accepting of the proposal.
Yes, yes, I know: opinion polls show Trump is underwater. Big deal. That is merely a form of grumbling. What matters is action, or lack thereof, and so far it has been primarily the latter.
If you want to see what a lack of acceptance looks like, look what happened in Greece when the Greeks decided not to accept the current state of their nation’s rail transport safety. Look what has happened in France when the French decided that reducing retirement benefits was unacceptable. Look at what South Korea and Brazil are doing in response to excesses by their chief executives.
Yes, yes: I know. There have been protests. A day of protest is planned for today. Some noises are being made about soft secession if Trump does stuff like deploying troops to Chicago. Vote blue no matter who and maybe Lucy won’t pull the football away this time. Colour me skeptical.
And yes, some are vigorously opposing it. The key word here is some. There is nowhere near the degree of opposition happening needed to stop the transformation. Focusing on the exceptions to a general trend is not the correct way to assess a situation.
This gets to why I reworded my list to remove explicit references to the Democratic Party. It’s not just the Democratic Party. Sure, it’s possible to blame a failure to lead on the Democrats. But it’s also the case that the Democrats have genuine reasons to believe that Americans by and large don’t want to be led to defend freedom. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation: the Democrats don’t lead because there’s not much sentiment from below for them to pander to, and there’s not much sentiment from below because the Democrats aren’t leading.
Ultimately, the Democrats’ institutional spinelessness wouldn’t matter if more was happening in the grassroots. Being filled with spineless panderers, the Democratic Party could in that case pander… to the resistance movement. It would be spineless pandering, but it wouldn’t matter: the necessary things would be getting done, and that, more than the mechanics of why they are being done, is what would really matter.
Advocates of revolution would point to the success of the popular mobilization. Advocates of electoral reformism would point to the big blue wave and how the Democrats delivered. The endless reform-versus-revolution arguments would continue without resolution, both camps having some facts with which to argue.
But that, sadly, is all hypothetical. The vast preponderance of currently-available evidence points to Trump being a transformational president.
Published at 09:46 on 31 August 2025
Tom Nichols, normally a cautious voice about such speculations, thinks it may not be long.
But really, we don’t know. This is the least transparent presidency in history. We know that Trump is old (the oldest man to ever take the presidential oath of office). We know that he’s not as healthy as he once was.
But he has access to the best health care money and power can buy. The absolute best. Even those with lesser access can linger in an old and frail state for surprisingly long. So there is really no way to tell.
The one thing I can say is that I doubt he will live to serve out the full four years of his term. Beyond that, I cannot say much. The obituary may come this afternoon, or it may not come for several more years.