The man who made his career attacking the instability of meaning now refuses to define basic terms because "it depends what you mean by [X]."

The spectacle consumes its own critique.

The hyper-real conservative discovers deconstruction through the back door of his own evasions. We are watching the birth of accidental poststructuralism in real time.

Jubilee changing the video title from "A Christian surrounded by 20 atheists" to "Jordan Peterson surrounded by 20 atheists" is the perfect metaphor - the signifier has completely detached from any stable referent. Peterson-ness has become its own floating signification, untethered from Christianity, conservatism, or coherent meaning.

Meanwhile the "postmodern neo-Marxists" (™) he rails against are probably somewhere taking actual concrete political positions while Professor Lobster disappears into a cloud of his own definitional fog.

Seven years ago my grandmother got lyme disease in her garden because deer ticks have spread to our area as the climate warms. We can't go into the garden wearing shorts and sandals anymore, so my wife bought me a very good pair of gardening boots and pants.

Four years ago there was a zika virus outbreak in our area. The mosquito species that carries it spread to our area due to climate change. My then pregnant wife wouldn't go in the garden all summer, but she bought me a really great mosquito net to put over my head.

My son turned two this year during a global pandemic. I wonder if he'll be the last generation to grow up in a functioning society? I gave him an Elmo doll for his birthday. When he sees it, it reminds him that he'd rather be watching TV.

This is the Charlie Kirk post (not this).

This tweet here says:

The suspect who popped Charlie Kirk is a 22-yr old White Boy whose father was a 27-year Veteran Sheriff in the state of Utah.

Ain't no way in HELL that boy was raised "far left"

As you can see—and in case it's news to you—this tweet alludes to the widely-known phenemenon of any political shootings being blamed on the binary other side. We saw this with the first attempted Trump assassination (the alleged shooter was widely derided as a leftist incel, associated with trans and furries gratuitously, and linked with Black Rock in notably persuasive conspiracy theories); as well as the second assassination attempt (who appeared in news imagery as a more overtly liberal, less incel figure, and who was therefore even more demonized as a political assassin than the previous).

This pattern was set to continue with this third recent political assassination event, but the facts of the case contradict this inter-group scapegoating.

So, MAGA has now backed itself into a dialectical, ideological corner. The spectacle that is the massist MAGA worldview can't make sense anymore. MAGA has put itself in an ideological double-bind, and will now go psychotic.

Double-binds are the cause of psychosis, in brief—a truth lost on (scientistic) biological neuroscience, which cannot admit of any meaning that could be causative of neurological dysfunction (because neuroscience brackets mind and meaning as epiphenomenal, axiomatically). However, internal contradictions require real representational-space in neuronal structures, and maintaining these tensile information-structures requires expenditures of glucose—so the brain can only represent so much internal contradiction to itself before it begins to experience structural impaction and intensity-overload. In other words, the system implodes due to its inner stresses, and having no way for these stresses to escape.

We might analyze scapegoating and Charlie Kirk's alleged shooter in a similar way. Presumably, raised by a veteran sheriff, he was raised with Good Family Values and Good American Values. However, we might also be right to suspect that he was raised in an extremely authoritarian household, a household where the American hegemony and a paramilitaristic narrative of enforcement and top-down correction was the only narrative allowed to exist in the family reality.

In other words, much like MAGA's ideology, Charlie Kirk's alleged shooter was hemmed-in on all sides: Completely dominated by an authoritarian father, ideologically dominated by a sense of noble Republican values and American values which could admit of no flaw; and finally, hemmed-in by Charlie Kirk's rhetoric, which flew in the face of more traditional, decent Republican rhetoric and American values. As a good citizen who is also an authoritarian and a hero, Charlie Kirk's alleged shooter was ideologically cornered into one course of action and felt compelled to act.

However, that is not my point. My point is that Charlie Kirk's alleged shooter was scapeogoated, and that scapegoating energy has to go somewhere (or be processed in a healthy way but that's sure not gonna happen in this scenario). Since the alleged shooter was hemmed-in on all sides by authoritarian domination—he could not stand up to his father, or Trump, or other institutional authorities in his life—the scapegoating-energy flowed along the path of least resistance: Shooting a salient public figure. This is very sad, a lot more sad than if it were a truly political assassination, because what we have here is a simple case of a bullied child paying that bullying forward to the most vulnerable target available. It's a demonstration of the principle that abuse flows downwards. It's scapegoating all the way down.

This origination of abuse is coming directly from domineering authoritarians, who are treating their own families like slaves and subjects, not like children or family-members. To dominate another, you must first of all treat them like the out-group, not the in-group.

What has become entirely visible in this incident is that this system of authoritarian ownership, abuse, and domination of another cannot contain its own controlling energy nor the consequences of its own abuse. Instead, such groups are self-abusing systems which inflict authoritarianism upon themselves until they do so much self-harm that they start shooting laser-like farts of authoritarian hatred out sideways. Always punching down, these destructive leaks of authoritarianism wreak havoc on kinder, more sensitive, less controlling people who happen to become targeted by the aggressive wetiko egregore holding these families and groups hostage.

The Charlie Kirk alleged shooter "turning out" to be a "22-yr-old White Boy who father was a 27-year Veteran Sherif in the state of Utah" is an invalid result, an impossible consequence, a black skull appearing in the computations of MAGA's ideology. This impossible mark in the ledger means a self-contradiction, in which case anything becomes possible. The circle is complete and the seventh seal unlocked: The way is open for total dissolution of sense.

This does not mean I am predicting an acute fascist event. I am predicting MAGA becoming even weirder and more chaotic and nonsensical. I am predicting a mutation we can't predict or understand in advance. Because one thing MAGA is not about to do is anything real. ICE is working for them so they don't need to leave their homes. Instead, their ideology will further mutate.

Nick Land showed in his Twitter activities that there are—if not breaking-points—phase-transition-points—critical points they are called—thresholds at which an intelligence consuming dialectically advanced misinformation becomes no longer capable of thinking and speaking at the same level (even if it very much wants to and imagines it can). This happens despite the intelligence or what it might like to say, because language and its meaning grow up around the intelligence despite its best efforts to remain ignorant and at a lower lever of interpretation. This dynamic (perhaps even by Nick's hand) can be credited with much of the early psychosis-like (i.e., mismatch between message and meaning, intensity and intention) behavior of MAGA, as it rapidly upgraded and phase-transitioned into a more stable fiat-nonsense-based mode. What's happening now is the apotheosis of this long road of linguistic and ideological upgrading—now it will all come to a head, as MAGA is forced into the position of having to make sense of its own contradictory worldview, and/or be completely paralyzed into inaction by those terminal contradictions. MAGA is about to either become more conscious of its own views, or it's about to act out in a major new way, and I don't think the latter will happen because the whole MAGA movement is based on inaction-as-action (and a primordial acceptance of domination by the police force, Stockholm syndrome with the state—recall how quickly boogaloo militias became police state fan clubs).

Edit: A conclusion that can be drawn from this post is that Charlie Kirk's shooter was performing assassination in order to avoid becoming psychotic himself. Once again: offloading the contradictions

Anyone arguing that the protests in France aren't legitimate because they were "infiltrated by rioters" does not understand the most fundamental elements of the history of French democracy.

Simply put, going back well beyond 1968, civil unrest *is* political praxis.

Of course, these bad actors seeking to discredit the protests because of "migrants" aren't interested in having a real conversation about revolutionary impetus or even basic civil rights, so much as they are parroting anti-immigrant dog-whistles.

The real question is, why has the discourse surrounding protests in France been infiltrated by reactionary rhetoric? Who benefits from this divide-and-conquer rhetoric?

The attempt to delegitimize protest through the language of disorder is itself a political intervention: one that shifts public attention away from the conditions producing unrest and toward the [racist] perceived illegitimacy of those expressing it.

Insofar as fascism isn't some kind of psychological anomaly, but rather is a logical response that emerges from within liberal democratic institutions under capitalism in order to protect private property and the state from radical responses to working class immiseration arising from internal contradictions of capitalism; fear-mongering about "islamo-leftism" is to the 21st century as fear-mongering about "judeo-bolshevism" is to the 20th.

In Nazi Germany, "Judeo-Bolshevism" fused antisemitism with anti-communism, portraying Jews as an alien force supposedly orchestrating revolutionary subversion. (Don't ask them how it is that Jews who control the banks are actually communist traitors). In contemporary French reactionary discourse, "islamo-gauchisme" depicts left-wing anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and solidarity with Muslim communities as evidence of an illegitimate alliance undermining French national identity, and indeed Western CivilizationTM itself.

In both cases, the nation is defined as belonging to those who don't challenge its existing distribution of power. If you fight to preserve that hierarchy, you are a hero. If you struggle against it, you are a traitor, or you were never part of the community in the first place.

But here's the key difference. By highlighting the link between radical critique of political economy, and the struggle for Palestinian liberation, reactionaries - who, on social media, in the context of dead internet theory, function as de facto bots for amplifying fascist rhetoric - are so close to getting it.

Where they get lost is in identifying as temporarily embarrassed billionaires whose interests are in alignment with that of the state as an organ of capital. By conflating conflict over material power with conflict over legitimate belonging to the "nation", the political and economic conditions that produce civil unrest in the first place become eclipsed by arguments about who is respectable enough, human enough, "French" enough, for their belonging to be perceived as legitimate enough for their participation in politics to matter. And through this conflation, we can see that this rhetoric is explicitly reactionary and racist in that it seeks to preserve puritan racial ideas of what a nationality actually is.

Palestinian liberation is a threat to global capitalism, and that's why platforms like Meta, X, reddit, etc, curate algorithms that not only tolerate but promote the overt racism and islamophobia at the heart of "it's not a protest, it's a riot" discourse.

"They can't be French because they are black". Ferme ta crisse de gueule, you racist piece of shit. The adults are having a conversation, and you need to go back to kindergarten to learn basic socialization. Sharing is caring people. Maybe then you can begin to unlearn the imperialist propaganda that celebrates the "achievements" of colonization while dehumanizing the colonized diaspora.

But I digress. You've got to give it to reactionaries: they correctly perceive that there is an inherent connection between anti-imperialist resistance and the struggle against unequal distribution of material power. But by confusing their own material interests with a need to defend those structures of power, they admit their own internalization of a dehumanizing worldview by treating respectability as a test of political humanity.

It's a scary world out there. While providing the necessities for our well being, nature can be harsh and indifferent. In the absence of being raised in a culture that is spiritually grounded in values of reciprocity and care, many seek to fill the void left by that absence by clinging to brittle identity structures where exclusion is perceived as necessary for safety. When civil unrest arises as a natural response to institutionalized exclusion, the irony is that delegitimization of that dissent through reactionary rhetoric itself functions as a type of mob mentality.

Preservation of existing social orders built on exploitation is fundamentally at odds with the preservation of your own well being, and the only thing preventing you from seeing that is your own attachment to ideas that colonized your mind by conditioning you to believe that survival requires conformity to hierarchies of domination.

If survival is felt - coerced into being felt - as a competition for status, then another person's liberation can appear to threaten your own security. Equality looks like dispossession, and solidarity feels like betrayal. Conformity becomes a survival strategy, even when the hierarchy demanding conformity is itself responsible for producing insecurity and harm.

If capitalism is perceived as genuinely meritocratic, then civil unrest as a response to collective suffering can only be seen as anger about personal failures, or straight up barbarism.

If colonization is viewed as a righteous endeavor - bringing civilization to the savages - then immigrants who seek material stability in the imperial core will always be seen as personally responsible for the political insecurity that motivates migration in the first place.

However, if capitalism and colonization are correctly understood as inherently violent, dehumanizing systems, reproduced through exploitation and coercion, then civil unrest can be understood as an expression of the same revolutionary impetus among the masses that in France contributed to the overthrow of monarchy and feudalism, and the declaration of universal human rights to liberty and equality, in the first place.

The defense of exclusion and hierarchies of domination, then, become a way of managing one's own insecurity. People who experience their place in society as precarious may cling to national or racial hierarchies because those hierarchies promise a sense of belonging that material conditions cannot reliably provide. That promise is fragile precisely because it depends on maintaining a distinction between those presumed to deserve security and those presumed to threaten it, even as the status quo actively undermines well being and increasingly defers the cost of doing business upon the most vulnerable - in particular, future generations.

That's why treating protestors as migrant rioters who are a threat to national security is ultimately about protecting the fragile identities built on the unsteady foundation of internalized dispossession.