Revisiting The Myth of "Lowering the Temperature" of Western Politics

Or, this day a year ago I predicted Charlie Kirk would take a bullet. I'm not happy about it.

This isn’t the piece I had planned to run today, but sometimes something, uh, comes up. I’m on vacation and so I’d prepared some shorter than usual pieces and some reruns. This is a rerun, but not one I had prepared.

It needs a new introduction, which is this: On this very week of September last year, I published a piece titled The Myth of "Lowering the Temperature" of Western Politics, which contained a serious point stated in a joking way about how Charlie Kirk was playing a dangerous game of rhetoric that would one day get him shot. This was not a threat, it was a prediction.

The joke has been removed from the re-edited version below, but the point itself was obviously very real. In actuality I didn't think his rhetoric was going to get him killed, I thought it was going to get somebody else killed. Is it preferable that I was more correct than I'd known?

I’ve refined some points where I’ve slightly changed my view in relatively insignificant ways over the past year. I’ve also updated parts of the article to reflect the fact, not true at the time of its writing, that Donald Trump is President of the United States. The rest is largely the same as its original run in September 2024.

I am unhappy that Charlie Kirk was murdered. On a personal level, he did not deserve the death penalty, and on a broader level, I believe very bad things are going to happen as a result of this that will outweigh the benefit of him not being around anymore. I will not, however, celebrate his life. I believe he was a bad and nasty person.

We do not, as of this writing, know the identity or motive of the killer, but I don’t think it’s going to change my point when we find out one way or the other: The line the Republicans are pushing is incorrect. This is not the result of left messaging. This is the inevitability of their own dangerous game. Kirk wanted and expected this to happen; it never occurred to him that he would be who it happened to.

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On July 13, 2024, at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, the then-only-presumptive Republican nominee for president, a guy named Donald Trump who might be familiar to you if you follow the news closely, was shot in the ear by a kid who managed to sneak a gun onto the roof of a nearby building and decided, as so many do, that he wanted to commit suicide in a way that would get him into the history books.

My point today isn’t about what a big deal this is. My point is what a big deal this wasn’t.

Forget all the conspiracy theories on either side of the aisle here. There was no hoax that would benefit either camp. The fact is that somebody—yes, a “lone wolf,”—managed to squeeze off a legitimate few shots, killing one bystander and actually drawing cranial blood from the high profile target, clipping his ear and giving the Trump team the best campaign photograph they could possibly have hoped for.

Until then, they were running with this one.

But then, about a month later, nobody cared anymore. The conversation had moved on, but not to more serious things. On the contrary, the biggest stories in Trump world then mostly revolved around what a creepy little weirdo JD Vance is. Have you seen the one where he walks into a donut shop and tries to pretend he’s even seen a donut before?

The Trump campaign wasn’t even pushing those assassination photos anymore. They didn’t generate the energy you would expect they should. Everyone had just… moved on.

Can you imagine, though, if the assassin had succeeded?

Can anyone doubt that would have been one of the defining news stories of the century? Honest to God, I think the zeitgeist defining events of the 21^st Century so far would have been that, and September 11. Put aside how you feel about the man, the consequences would have been all bad.

So how do we explain this? How can the history book zone lie only one inch from the who gives a shit zone when it comes to the trajectory of a whizzing bullet?

Turn the dial back to just over a decade ago. In January 2011, Arizona Representative Gabby Giffords was shot in the head at close range in an assassination attempt at a public constituent meeting. Giffords, like Trump, survived the encounter, but the ripples were far more significant even though Giffords, a congresswoman, was far less politically consequential than a presidential nominee.

Her brush with death came at the tail end of a particularly nasty US midterms season, and it wasn’t long before attention was drawn to a campaign ad put out by Sarah Palin, Alaska Governor and holder of the title of least popular Vice Presidential candidate right up until… 2024’s JD Vance (because time is a flat circle, you see.)

Palin’s advertisement put Giffords (among other Democratic candidates) under a literal crosshairs, with the caption “We’ve diagnosed the problem, help us prescribe the solution.”

According to the Palin campaign these were actually mapmakers’ surveying symbols, and the idea that these were intended to look like gun sights was an absurd mischaracterization. Clearly, Palin, who was known for her gun imagery and the heavily gun-themed nature of her campaigns, was simply trying to arouse the attention of the all-important professional cartographers’ demographic.

Nonetheless, the tragedy invoked calls to “turn down the temperature” of politics. The request was bipartisan—after all, playing the blame game here would be kind of counterproductive to the mission. It was like a scene from the schoolyard where a group of jocks keeps wailing on the math club kids until one of them gets seriously hurt, and the bullies pressure the nerds into telling the principal that they were all just horsing around. Things got too heated and golly it sure is a tragedy that someone got hurt this time, but it’s a great teaching moment for us to all step back and consider the consequences of all of our actions. There are very fine people on both sides of this… right?

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I mean, besides, the Democrats were doing the same thing! During the backlash against Palin, her team dug up a Democratic campaign poster that showed a map of America with Republican seats marked with dartboards.

If we’re being absolutely honest with ourselves, there is sort of a difference here, right?

I think that a huge amount of the political trouble we face in western countries is due to the gamification of politics—we’re not just a bunch of diverse people resolving our differences of opinion as to how to run a country, we’re actually Team A versus Team B.

But even that doesn’t strike at the heart of it. The real issue is within the two-team frame, Team A is in the mindset of sports while Team B is in the mindset of war.

Put the Giffords assassination attempt, and the media sensation that it was, against the June 2025 shootings of two Minnesota legislators and their spouses (one of the couples, the Hortmans, died). There was barely a peep out of the Trump administration about it, and the whole thing fell out of the news cycle within days. Nobody cared this time.

The Trump assassination attempt also mirrored that of Giffords in many ways. There were immediate calls to “turn down the temperature.” There were efforts to pin it on specific comments made by the opposition. In this case, a comment made by Joe Biden about “put Trump in the bullseye,” meaning the campaign focus. But again, that’s a bullseye. A sporting term. Metaphor though it may be, putting human beings in gun sights is a pretty solid Republican tradition.

In America, unique among western nations, the difference between the two different games with different sets of rules played by the opposing parties is stark. On one side, the talking points are about Project 2025 and the aggressive reversal of hard-won social progress and civil rights. The “we’re not going back.” The need to restore balance in the judiciary and take back territory on the game board.

On the other side the rhetoric is that there is a literal invasion of brown-skinned people, there is a literal invasion and epidemic of gay people and transgender people, they are going to rape your children and erase your culture, and elections are the compromise we are willing to entertain right now so that we don’t have to shoot these people, but we are getting tired of elections.

Now to be clear, I still think this is mostly just rhetoric. The vast, vast majority of Republicans are far less interested in picking up a gun and using it to water the tree of liberty than the people running their comms would have you believe. If that wasn’t true then the country would be in a near perpetual state of political violence, and I mean battleground violence. The tone setters know that it would be a catastrophe for them if a bunch of red caps went on a killing spree in a way that couldn’t be easily spun.

What the fuck is a “global civil war,” dipshit?

Even so, there is no “lowering the temperature” occurring here. There would be no strategy left. A key component of that strategy is keeping the temperature very high. Not boiling—again, a war isn’t the true goal—just simmering right below the phase point. The purpose is two-fold, just like generals setting the tone for a hostile interaction: For the enemy it’s a deimatic display. Power and displays of force are the language the far right mostly understands and they think the same of everybody. For their own constituents they need to keep the adrenaline raging. Keep everybody “on” all the time and keep the anger and the hatred acute and focused.

This is how Democratic campaigns differ from Republican campaigns, but also where they fundamentally agree: The Democrats say “we need to be afraid of Republicans.” The Republicans say “We need Democrats to be afraid of us.”

And so…

So hey, you know what the biggest problem is with a strategy that involves keeping the temperature of the room uncomfortably hot? Just, like, perpetually forever? The problem is that people get used to it. This is essentially one of our primary superpowers as the human species, something designed by evolution to aid our survival that nevertheless comes to fuck us when we attempt to destroy ourselves with drugs or politics. Our bodies excel at this, physiologically and psychologically:

If we’re trying to enjoy a hot bath, our bodies adapt to the temperature, so we have to keep raising the heat until we reach that point where we burn ourselves. If we enjoy spicy food, our bodies adapt to the sensation so we need to up the scovilles until we get an ulcer. If we enjoy drugs then our bodies adapt to the high and so we need to up the dose until our organs shut down. If we need to maintain a level of violent rage to keep people motivated to vote for our candidates…

Instead of finishing this sentence I feel my line of thought here is best illustrated by this video of somebody trying to beat someone with an American flag, something Trump thinks should be legal as long as you’re not burning it.

The need to keep the temperature of conservative voters uncomfortably hot, and cranking that temperature up just a notch every year to account for them adapting to it, makes for some frightening politics. For one thing, Democrats need to ratchet up their response to match: If more and more Republicans are saying “we are going to start shooting you,” that’s what they’re going to put in their campaigns. Secondly, we begin to run up against the reality that there are people who legitimately do want to boil the pot. The civil war freaks and accelerationists who actually would like to see the rivers run red.

They are products of the high temperature rhetoric that the right has been immersing them in for decades. They are true believers in the pretend threat and they are coming of age and coming into positions of power right now.

I’ve thought for a while that JD Vance is actually more frightening than Trump because he either agrees with the rhetoric about needing a second Civil War to establish an American fascist autocracy or else he’s too stupid to tell the difference between real talk and campaign slogans. I think it’s a bit of both but I’ll leave it to you to decide which column holds more weight.

Vance has written endorsements for two books that call for a violent end to the American experiment in democracy. He wrote the foreword to Kevin Roberts’ book Burning Down Washington to Save America, and in that foreword he writes:

As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.

Kevin Roberts is president of the Heritage Foundation and one of the principle authors of Project 2025, a document so fascist that even Donald Trump cannot defend and continues to comically suggest he has nothing to do with despite his own running mate having everything to do with it.

But even that’s not the most frightening thing Vance’s name has been associated with. He has also written a cover blurb for the book Unhumans by Jack Posobiec.

Posobiec is almost certainly the author behind the white nationalist Twitter account “End Wokeness” (a favourite of Elon Musk), and his book is pretty much what you expect from the title: Democrats, liberals, and leftists should not be considered human beings. It makes it easier to kill them. The book praises both Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, and Vance, in his blurb, writes:

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through H.R., college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

Here is the danger when the temperature rises too high. That pot will boil. People have their limits and they can only take so much energy of violence and hatred, as with any other drug. Any Republican who fostered along this idiotic arms race now has to deal with the concern of what happens when people among their ranks don’t want to stop short of the violence.

I realize I’m mixing my metaphors but any trainer of a fighting animal knows that they have to make damn sure they know how to control that animal. If you’re careless and reckless then the attack dogs’ rage will spill over and they’ll realize they outnumber you and see you as just another enemy. Just think about Mike Pence.

Charlie Kirk was one of those provocation agents who lacked the rhetorical or intellectual skill to stop only on the verge of incitement. He was fond of saying things like calling on “real men” to “take care of” transgender people the way they did in the 1950s and 60s.

By “taking care of” them, he was not reminiscing about the superior LGBT healthcare of the 50s and 60s, by the way. It’s lynching. He was talking about lynching.

One of Kirk’s most notorious projects was his “professor watch list”—basically a list of “radical leftists” (ordinary liberals) in the education system, who he encouraged his fans to non-specifically harass, knowing full well this meant that they would be doxed and terrorized. If something worse than that happened, hell, who could prove the connection? This is the exact same tactic used by Chaya Raichik (LibsOfTiktok) who constantly directs her followers to do nonspecific things to children’s hospitals, gyms, and other places she accuses of harboring LGBT people. She then acts coy about the fact that these “would someone rid me of this turbulent priest” style directions almost always lead to bomb threats. Hey, it’s not like she directly told anyone to do that!

Now here’s some footage of Charlie Kirk stammering over himself and trying to walk back on his own revolutionary rhetoric when one of his fans asks—reasonably, given Kirk’s talking points—when will be the best time for them to actually start shooting liberals on sight?

One of Kirk’s talking points was that Republicans would get to water the tree of liberty eventually, but they needed to wait, for optics sake, for someone to kill a high profile Republican first. He thought this monster he was feeding could be contained in the flimsy cage he was building for it. The irony is that this was something his war strategy counted on. He wished it on a monkey’s paw.

I think many Republicans were legitimately spun for a loop when January 6^th happened and became one of the few events we refer to solely as a calendar date. I don’t honestly know if Donald Trump intended it to spill into violence, but what convinces me is neither here nor there when the fact of the matter is that this is what happens when the temperature is up just about as far as it can go and a bunch of reckless win-at-all-costs sociopaths start to mistake it for complacency.

This isn’t only an American phenomenon, of course. I wrote about Britain’s version just last week. Britain has its own political temperature, though its pain points have more to do with Muslims than Mexicans. The race riots in the wake of the Southport child stabbings of July last year were a result of the pot boiling over, the flames stoked by Tommy Robinson. But further upstream of him is Elon Musk, who seems to be one who genuinely wants to boil the pot and was happy to barrack for Yaxley-Lennon’s war.

Musk has long established that his goals are more than political and much more than self-serving enrichment. He wants to mold western civilization in his image and knows that violence is a necessary and inevitable step toward his ultimate dream of a creepy racial separatist tech CEO dystopia full of ugly cars.

From the comfort of his office chair abroad Musk has been implicated now in the fomenting of at least two large scale riots—the UK in July and Brazil back in 2022 (an insurrection by Bolsonaro loyalists that was modelled after, you guessed it, January 6^th). He’s ever emboldened by the fact that, if all he’s doing is boiling the pot without providing real material support then he can more or less get away with it.

In 2011 the temperature in America was still low enough that the attempt on Gabby Giffords’ life sent shockwaves through America and left a lasting impact to the point where Giffords was again a guest speaker at the DNC last year. The attempt on Trump’s life caused very little lasting shock because that’s just where the temperature is now. Political assassinations are becoming the new norm, but each one ratchets it up a little more.

Now you’re gonna get some Charlottesvilles now and then. You’re gonna get some January Sixes.

What will come of the Charlie Kirk assassination? Where will this be taken by the chaos agents. The Elon Musks and Tommy Robinson-Yaxley-Wellington-Smeagols who want to crank that burner right up and see what climbs out of the rubble?

They’ll most likely be fine. But they’re the cooks. You’re the ones sitting in the pot.

On a completely different note, I’m writing a book about how reactionary geeks in the internet era tumbled down the fascism pipeline and set about smashing up the world out of hubris and spite, and how they worked their way into the deepest corridors of power. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: