[GlickWick]

Extremely against any kind of murder over difference of opinion, but this obsession with making it look like an evil coordinated group was behind this killing is legitimately one of the larger threats to US I've witnessed in my life.

Making this event into an excuse to crack down on any kind of group opens a door that nobody, left or right, should ever want open. JD and co. are playing a deadly game here.

[zahlman]

> obsession with making it look like

I think many of the people involved sincerely believe it.

[GlickWick]

I find that hard to believe after watching the FBI shift the narrative like 6 times in a matter of days. They're just fishing.

[zahlman]

The FBI is not creating a narrative, never mind shifting it. They are trying to explain what currently best fits the evidence. Much of what they said was clearly premature. IIRC they even caught the wrong guy initially and then had to apologize.

By "the people involved" I mean those who would propose to make lists of leftist organizations and do whatever unspecified thing NYT is vaguely alluding to.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> They are trying to explain what currently best fits the evidence.

This is a narrative. If they got things wrong and had to change their explanation, it is reasonable to describe that as a "shift".

[krapp]

They intend to play a deadly game. And they've been ginning up the specter of a vast and dangerous left-wing conspiracy for a long time. Look at what QAnon's beliefs actually were, and their intersection with Evangelical Christian beliefs about the inherently satanic nature of secular and leftist ideology. Trump was accusing the media of being run by leftists coordinating with the DNC to steal the election from him in 2016. "The Nazis were really leftists","BLM was a leftist terrorist organization burning down entire cities","leftists tried to kill Trump once," etc. They've been laying the foundations for a road that only leads to one place. Hell, they were talking about a "cold civil war" back in the Obama days.

Just look at the reactions from the right and the government after the shooting[0]. Immediate calls for war and violence. The narrative was constructed and deployed everywhere, even on Hacker News - that this is the evil of "the left" [and trans people] on display. I'm not claiming it was a coordinated psyop on the part of the Trump administration or anything - I do believe the right sincerely considers the left to be vermin only wort crushing under their boot - but as many people have pointed out in other contexts, you don't always need a conspiracy, sometimes you just need a confluence of interests.

I only just learned about the "Horst Wessel effect" in relation to this[1] and it's chilling how much history is seeming to repeat itself here. The only question to me is how far Trump administration is able to take this? Simply harassing leftist organizations isn't that unusual - the US has been doing that since the end of World War 2. Right wing militias are going to keep killing "leftists," again, that's just America. I hope this administration just isn't organized enough to take us back to the 1940s instead of just the 1960s or 1950s.

Note that when I say "leftist" I implicitly include LGBTQ people, black people, immigrants, feminists, Jews and a lot of other groups that for some reason are "left coded" to the right. When the Overton Window shifts so far that the Democratic Party are considered Marxist by half the country, "the left" encompasses a hell of a lot of people.

[0]https://www.wired.com/story/far-right-reactions-charlie-kirk...

[1]https://forward.com/news/768607/horst-wessel-charlie-kirk-na...