Quotulatiousness

October 7, 2025

Antifa and the “propaganda of the deed”

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:30

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR examines the irrational behaviour of Antifa as an inheritance from their chosen historical models:

“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0

An important concept for understanding why the behavior of Antifa is not strategically rational is “propaganda of the deed”.

This is a concept with a long pedigree in left-anarchist theory, transmitted to Antifa via its minority “black flag” left anarchist faction

19th-century romantic anarchists viewed the state and capitalism as powerful illusions that could be shattered by bold, exemplary acts, thereby proving their vulnerability and offering hope to the oppressed. These deeds were intended to ignite the spirit of revolt by alerting the masses to the possibility of revolution, much like a spark that could set off a larger fire — thus, the emphasis on symbolic targets over objectively effective ones.

This kind of political communication could be effective if a majority of society, or at least a critical minority, are seething cauldrons of resentment just begging to be triggered against their oppressors. It also assumes that the revolutionary rage of the masses can, once unleashed, be effectively directed against Antifa’s enemies.

Both assumptions are highly questionable, but the important thing to understand for purposes of predicting Antifa’s behavior is that (a) Antifa behaves as though it still believes them, and (b) Antifa’s aboveground allies don’t have the capacity to restrain its behavior in detail.

The Gramscian infiltrators in the U.S.’s institutions need to keep their links to overt terrorism deniable, so they manage it mostly by raising or lowering the temperature of public propaganda. For example, when a Democratic politician says “Abolish ICE”, describes government actions as “fascism”, or wishes death on the children of a political opponent, this is raising the temperature. The effect, the intended effect, is to license increased propaganda of the deed by Antifa.

Reminder: unceasing damnation of conservatives as fascists and Nazis constituted instructions to stochastic terrorists like Tyler Robinson that the time had come to do something like shooting Charlie Kirk through the neck.

One problem with this is that because of Antifa’s psychology and doctrine, raising the temperature is easy, but lowering it is hard. Thus, it’s not a process the Gramscians want to start unless they believe either that they have escalation dominance over their opponents, or their political position is deteriorating so rapidly that they’ll never get a better chance to induce a legitimacy collapse.

It is out of scope for this essay to analyze to what extent those conditions are true. The point is, we are in a situation where the limited control Antifa’s aboveground allies can exert is all directed towards escalation, and Antifa’s belief in “propaganda of the deed” makes this very difficult to reverse.

Antifa has probably lost sight of the fact that escalating to insurrectionary violence is premature — it doesn’t have an army or a sufficiently powerful and nearby state sponsor for that.

Thus, absent serious degradation of Antifa’s capacity by law enforcement, expect increasing violence. Including, but not limited to, the deliberate murders of law enforcement personnel and opposing politicians.

September 26, 2025

“Create no-go zones for federal forces”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR responds to a comment about his three possible futures after the Charlie Kirk assassination (linked here):

    Mike Benz @MikeBenzCyber

    Antifa websites totally open to the public explicitly call to so utterly terrorize ICE that federal agents are physically afraid to enter a city. If the Proud Boys wrote this about the FBI how fast would every single person around that website be indicted by Merrick Garland.

“Create no-go zones for federal forces.’

In one of my previous analysis postings, I outlined three possible scenarios for the future after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

This corresponds to scenario 3, the one where insurrection edges into a simmering civil war a la Bosnia. I caught some flak in my replies at the time from people who thought an insurrection based in urban areas isn’t practical under modern conditions.

Antifa thinks it is. It’s what they’re planning for.

One of the things I have to remind myself of occasionally is that most people know essentially nothing about Communist theory and Communist revolutionary tactics.

Antifa is running the classic Communist playbook. Make the enemy fight you where you are strong and they are weak — where you have support among the people and (when possible) cover from sympathetic local officials.

Historically that has usually meant fighting from rural areas where the reach of the government is weak. But the Russian Revolution was an exception, and the revolution Antifa is trying to fight is another. Their natural home ground is large coastal cities run by left-wing Democrats.

September 23, 2025

“[A]nyone who tries to tell you ‘Antifa is just an idea’ is not merely deluded, but consciously and deliberately lying”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR uses the methods of counter-terror analysis:

None of Antifa’s public propaganda channels have attempted to deny that they were behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This is a fact of considerable significance, which I will now use the methods of counter-terror analysis to examine.

Antifa’s distributed structure makes it impossible for any one chapter or cell to know what another subgroup didn’t do.

It is quite possible that Tyler Robinson is a true stochastic terrorist, inspired and motivated by Antifa propaganda and considering himself part of Antifa but without planning or logistical support from others in the organization. I give this about 60% probability.

The fact that Robinson had peers on Discord with apparent foreknowledge of the assassination attempt does not falsify this possibility. Even if they did assist with the assassination, their connections to Antifa might be equally deniable, equally just a matter of their states of mind.

The assassination was in complete accordance with Antifa doctrine and propaganda. Direct action against “fascist” targets, ranging from low level intimidation up to political killings and organized attacks on government facilities, is exactly what Antifa is organized to do.

Thus, with over 90% probability, other members and aboveground allies of Antifa regard the operation as a (tactically) successful Antifa op, whether or not they had any foreknowledge of it and whether or not Robinson was stochastic.

The ones who aren’t fanatics or idiots have probably figured out by now that the assassination was a serious strategic blunder. You might expect that they would be scrambling to deny that Antifa had anything to do with Kirk’s death.

Some of Antifa’s aboveground allies [are] in fact doing this; the dominant form of denial by Democratic politicians and activists is to deny that Antifa even exists as more than an idea.

But Antifa itself has not done this, and I predict very confidently (95%) that it will not. The real reason it won’t has nothing to do with its structural inability to know that no member of Antifa was involved.

To understand why this is, you need to grasp what Antifa is for. Not its ultimate purpose, which is to foment a violent revolution that will enable Communists or Left-Anarchists to seize power, but the way it operationalizes that goal in practice.

The purpose of Antifa direct action is to shape the political environment through terror. Its goal is to intimidate its opponents into paralysis — to raise the costs of their speech and public action by predictably opposing it with violence.

I am not speculating about this, because if you read Antifa’s propaganda and organizing materials it will tell you exactly this.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is perfectly accordant with Antifa doctrine. Antifa cannot deny this, nor disown Tyler Robinson even in the likely event that he is only stochastically connected to the organization, because … what use is a terror network that disavows intimidation of its opponents?

Antifa’s goals require it to be a credible threat to “fascists”. If it denied that it had anything to do with killing Charlie Kirk, it would demotivate its own foot soldiers and decrease its usefulness to its aboveground allies.

Antifa needs to exist in a kind of mixed state — simultaneously deeply threatening to its enemies but deniable by many of its allies in the Democratic Party, journalism, and academia.

It is also, however, important that none of its aboveground allies can actually believe their own denials. Otherwise Antifa, perceived as useless, would risk losing the funding and political cover that has until now allowed it to operate with some degree of impunity.

You may therefore safely assume that anyone who tries to tell you “Antifa is just an idea” is not merely deluded, but consciously and deliberately lying.

At Woke Watch Canada, C.C. Harvey discusses the “red thread of Antifa subversion” over the last ten or so years:

Establishment leaders now even cuddle up with extremists who do not hide their violently subversive orientation. When the ENTIRE establishment took a knee for for the (self-identified) queer, Marxist, violently revolutionary group BLM during the 2020 riots, the subjugation of the professional classes was complete. We stopped being allowed to object to our institutions becoming vehicles for communist revolution. We were called racists and far right extremists and conspiracy theorists for even thinking bad thoughts about BLM and the woke communist revolution, and could be punished for talking to friends about it in group chats. We all became ideological captives of neoMarxist revolutionaries.

The DEI industry exploded, and although it is losing steam in the USA, it still functions as a modern Red Guard policing Canadian discourse and behaviour. If we’re being honest, we will admit that even most conservative politicians here were cowed. The entire establishment worked together to erect a new politburo and stasi throughout Canada and the USA, and far beyond.

Republicans are dismantling the neoMarxist structures that have been erected in America, and this is of course being disingenuously characterized by leftists as proof that Trump is fascist and authoritarian. BLM has largely imploded with corruption and infighting, but Antifa appears to have grown even stronger, especially its queer contingent, and their membership is agitating heavily as they see the Trump administration tearing down what they built.

Antifa is not just a gang of idealistic rabble-rousers in black hoodies rebelling against authority. It is the heir of a century-long Marxist project seeking massive, sweeping revolution, and advancing their goals via inversions: turning truth into lies, sin into virtue, desecration into liberation. From the beginning, Antifascist communists were passionately committed to revolution in all areas of human life and society.

It is not by coincidence that antifa and the LGBTQIA+ are entwined. Antifa have always been committed to sexual revolution — crossing sexual boundaries, normalizing deviance, dissolving the family.

Even in earliest iterations, the antifascists were dangerously radical in sexual ideology and policy: the historical record shows they handed children to paraphilic predators in the name of antifascist sexual liberation as early as postwar Germany. That anti-family, fetishistic spirit runs straight through antifascist history and is on full display in today’s TQ+ movement. TQ+ is conjoined with Antifa (Trantifa, if you will) to actively promote hypersexualization, the destabilizing of sex identity and family, and the mainstreaming of disorder and perversion.

Marx and Engels attacked the family as a “bourgeois prison”. Later Marxists carried this out through radical experiments in sex and pedagogy, all under the banner of liberation. Today’s gender and queer theorists are majority Marxists.

Marxists deal in inversions, so indoctrination presented as education, perversion rebranded as liberation, abuse disguised as compassion, self-mutilation celebrated as authentic selfhood. Today, Antifa-aligned “Queer Resistance” brigades advance sexual inversions and corruptions that are just as damaging as antifascists of bygone eras: in postwar Germany, the antifascist Kentler experiment assigned orphan boys to be raised by wealthy pedophiles. Today, an uncomfortable number of LGBTQIA+ activists have been caught adopting babies and toddlers to abuse, raping their own children, or sexually assaulting minors. As a result of our establishment embracing the far left revolutionary zeitgeist and sacralizing “marginalized” identities, safeguarding has been sacrificed on the altar of LGBTQIA+ identitarianism.

Update, 25 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

September 19, 2025

What’s the next thing to be devoured on Trump’s menu? Ah, Antifa it is …

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Again leaning heavily on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR has several posts on Donald Trump’s announcement that Antifa is in his crosshairs:

Next comes the part where every NGO/nonprofit implicated in funding a major terrorist organization gets a proctological exam by people with no sense of humor at all.

As I have emphasized several times in the last week: the long game in taking down a terrorist network is to smash its funding chain.

ESR’s analysis begins thusly:

Antifa has just been declared a “major terrorist organization”. Putting on my intelligence-analyst hat again, I’m going to examine its strategic options in the new political and legal conditions following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I’m going to start with a briefing on what Antifa is and what it does.

A reminder: Antifa is not a unitary conspiracy. It’s a cluster of horizontally-networked cells, some visible aboveground, some semi-covert, possibly some that are fully underground. By design it doesn’t have a central command.

So we’re really asking what range of behaviors Antifa cells normally choose, or can choose.

Before we can explore that we have to identify what Antifa is for and how it fits into the political ecology of the U.S.

None of what I’m about to tell you is speculation. It can be verified by reading Antifa’s propaganda and watching its behavior.

Antifa is an organization of Communists and Left-Anarchists; thus the red and black flags in the main Antifa logo. Its ultimate goal is a violent anti-capitalist revolution that will destroy American constitutional government. The Communists and Left Anarchists have agreed to argue about the shape of what comes afterwards after the revolution.

In practice, Antifa acts as willing street muscle for a range of associated Communist and Socialist organizations, most notably the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), CPUSA (Communist Party of the USA), the SWP (Socialist Workers Party), and various SWP splinter groups.

Antifa also takes strategic direction from the left wing of the Democratic Party. My readers can make their own judgments about whether there is anything remaining in the Democratic Party other than a left wing; the answer to that question is not relevant to the rest of this analysis.

An important point is that the links between the Democratic party and Antifa are personal and deniable. They probably do not run through the Democratic National Committee. A good place for counter-terror analysts to look (and I’m sure Palantir already has this mapped) would be the politicians known as “the Squad” and their close associates.

The strategic sub-goal that was being executed when Charlie Kirk was shot was the creation of a climate of fear that would inhibit public speech by conservatives. This is an explicit goal of Antifa direct action.

Antifa’s funding is deliberately obscure. Before USAID was dismantled, a significant percentage of it was probably coming from the American taxpayer through several layers of shadowy NGOs.

It is very likely that one way or another most of its money comes from low-profile liberal dark money groups such as Arabella, the Tides Foundation, and the Open Societies Foundations.

The effectiveness of Antifa as a political actor has always depended on its ability to act as a terror instrument for left-wing American politicians while maintaining deniability that the politicians’ rhetorical hate-targeting of opponents ever cashes out as violent action.

The first major constraint on Antifa’s future behavior is that this deniability is going to be much more difficult to maintain from now on. Because while the deliberate diffusion of its structure makes legal proof that something called “Antifa” shot Charlie Kirk difficult, it also made Antifa affiliation of any left-wing assassin impossible to effectively deny.

In my next post, I will examine the consequences of this shift.

Continuing the discussion:

Mafia families don’t have membership cards.

Why am I bringing this up now? Because one attempt to head off the hammer coming down on Antifa that we’re hearing from its aboveground allies is that Antifa doesn’t exist.

It’s just an idea. There’s no central command. No common funding. No membership cards. No way to tell who’s a member and who isn’t.

The reductio ad absurdum of this bullshit is to point out that, following the argument, the Mafia cannot possibly exist. Which would be interesting news to all the people it murdered.

Historical note: there was a period when the Mafia was structurally different from Antifa in that it had a Boss of All Bosses, but the position was abolished by assassination in 1931.

In reality, when you’re dealing with a criminal or terrorist conspiracy that doesn’t have membership cards, you identify members of it the same way that other members do: by their willingness to cooperate with each other on shared projects.

And sometimes, by their participation in shared bonding rituals like a Cosa Nostra initiation ceremony or a “bash the fash” demonstration.

None of this is difficult, and it’s exactly the kind of situation that the RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Influence) laws were written to address.

From Trump’s public statements, I’m guessing that they’re going to go right past RICO to a Foreign Terrorist Organization designation.

This won’t be difficult either. If you have any doubt that at least some Antifa chapters are funded by Chinese Communist money, you really need to get out more.

The announcement clearly didn’t come out of the blue:

Still wearing my intel-analyst hat, and have realized something.

Trump’s announcement that Antifa is being designated a “major terrorist organization” doesn’t make any sense unless law enforcement is already holding evidence that the assassination of Charlie Kirk was an Antifa op.

Otherwise, the risk of political blowback from that announcement would be way too high. Trump can be erratic, but he’s cunning about stuff like this and obviously has a shrewd sense of what he can get away with.

So, yep. The most likely scenario was the correct one. The hoofbeats really were horses, not zebras. Everybody still in denial about this is destined for more pain.

And back to the analysis:

“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Continuing my analysis of Antifa’s strategic options following the Charlie Kirk assassination. These have changed yet again — narrowed considerably — following President Trump’s declaration yesterday.

The Federal Government has legal instruments that it can employ. The RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Influence) laws were specifically designed to attack a different headless network of horizontally connected nodes — organized crime. The fact that Antifa doesn’t have membership cards or a unitary command structure isn’t even going to slow the Feds down.

I think that it’s likely the Feds will designate Antifa a foreign terrorist organization, zeroing in on Chinese Communist funding of some Antifa chapters. This will allow the direct use of the CIA, which is normally heavily restricted from operations on American soil.

Nothing Antifa itself can do as an organization will be able to prevent or deflect a massive multi-agency investigation. It is very likely that Palantir already has their core membership identified and their communications channels mapped. Fusion centers will be capturing an unknown but probably large percentage of Antifa message traffic.

(They’ll be helped by the fact that Antifa’s communications security is terrible — it uses Discord for most comms, which is strictly amateur-hour. To be fair, the inner membership is likely to be savvy enough to be using Signal.)

Antifa’s only hope is pressure by its aboveground allies in politics and media. The cells with intelligent leaders will understand that they must cease all direct actions in order to avoid putting those allies in any position of appearing to support assassinations.

Unfortunately for Antifa, in order for hunkering down to work, every single cell has to have leadership that is both strategically patient and capable of restraining its more mentally unstable footsoldiers.

A related problem is that subversive and terrorist organizations that don’t act tend to develop morale problems. A certain minimum level of satisfying violence is required to keep their troops engaged.

Antifa probably has a worse issue here than the average terrorist organization because they recruit so heavily from sexual deviants and borderline mental cases who are likely to have other MBD-related issues including impulsivity and high time preference.

Over time, external pressure for Antifa to look easy for its aboveground allies to defend will remain steady or increase. This is especially so if the Democratic Party line remains Joe Biden’s “Antifa is just an idea”.

At the same time, internal pressure for direct action will increase. Antifa’s survival may depend on how long it is able to manage that pressure.

Antifa needs the investigation to be stalled out and paralyzed by Democratic lawfare before its stupidest cells do something too public and violent for its allied mainstream media to willfully ignore or suppress.

Longer-term, if Antifa survives, it faces a different problem. It dreams of revolution, but is only capable of operating on the sufferance of a general public that largely dismisses it as a LARP for nose-ringed freakazoids. Having committed a gaudy murder of an Everyman figure, it is not likely to get that sufferance back.

After the Charlie Kirk assassination, here are three possible futures

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR lays out what he sees are the three most likely short-term futures for the United States after the assassination of Charlie Kirk:

I’m a student of history. Here are three possible futures following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They’re based on historical examples of what happens when a Communist subversion campaign or insurgency overplays its hand and triggers broad popular resistance.

1. Popular revulsion against aboveground leftists celebrating the murder gives the Trump administration political cover to go after Antifa and its shadow funding network hard. Both are smashed.

Communist agents of influence in the mainstream media and academia continue to self-discredit.

Relatively few Communists are arrested, but their millions of aboveground tools become isolated and demoralized.

Propelled by a huge swing in voter registrations that we are already seeing happen, the Democrats get crushed in the 2026 midterms.

The long period of fever, madness, and Left ascendancy that began with the assassination of JFK by a Soviet agent in 1963 ends not with a bang but with a whimper.

This is the best case scenario for everybody, including the Communists who don’t get thrown out of helicopters or shot down in the streets.

If things don’t go this way it will likely be because Democratic lawfare prevents the counter-subversion push from being fully effective. An obvious index of this failure would be another high-profile political assassination or attempt against a conservative target after about 4 months out.

What happens in the event of that failure, especially if the third public attempt to kill Trump succeeds:

2. A period of Caudillismo. A charismatic strongman rides popular anger into power. If this happens, the Left better pray that the strongman is an infuriated JD Vance, because any alternative to him is likely to be worse for them.

The crackdown against the Communist network becomes brutal and routinely uses extra-Constitutional means, possibly thinly covered by a declared state of emergency.

At the harder end of this range of possibilities, right-wing death squads not exactly formed by government but winked at by it go after Communist public figures that are out of reach of the law because they’ve carefully preserved deniability. Many journalists are at the top of this target list.

It is not likely that the Communist network can survive this future. The only way it happens is if they have enough popular support to develop a semi-militarized resistance — in effect making certain parts of the country no go regions for Federal agents.

Going by historical precedents, the index of this failure would be a resurgence of banditry by armed groups, initially with overtly political goals but decaying into general predation.

This would land us at:

3. Low-grade civil war, a la Bosnia or the Irish troubles. Anybody wishing for this has no idea how bloody, ugly, and brutal it would probably be. Especially if the Left succeeds at what it will with absolute certainty try to do, which is racialize the conflict.

I don’t think there is any realistic scenario in which the Communists win any of these confrontations. Not in the U.S., not in the 21st century. The question is how much blood and agony the rest of us will go through before they are finally defeated.

Update, 20 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

September 12, 2025

A primer on patterns in past political assassinations

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR shares his observations on common patterns in political assassinations which may be relevant to the investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk:

The Salt Lake City FBI office released these photos of a “person of interest” in the Charlie Kirk assassination.

I don’t know anything other than public information about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

However, a primer follows about patterns in past political assassinations. I will sketch what scenarios an intelligence analyst would come up with looking at this one.

The first and most important rule in this kind of investigation is: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.

In political assassinations, as an ordinary murders, the correct suspect is usually the most obvious suspect. Airport-thriller-style convoluted plots and false-flag ops pulled off by unlikely people or organizations are rare in the real world.

Accordingly, when you’re trying to solve a political assassination, the right question to ask is “Who said they wanted him dead?”

Then, you infiltrate those organizations, or arrest a bunch of members, and do contact tracing. Usually you do in fact find your killer that way. It’s not very different from ordinary police work except for the stakes.

There are broadly speaking three different kinds of assassin: the nutter, the zealot, and the pro. They are not difficult to distinguish once you got your hands on them.

Nutters don’t have a coherent political ideology, though they may spout semi-random slogans that political actors can seize on to pretend that they do. They generally have quite an obvious history of mental illness

Before capture, given the kind of public evidence we have now in Charlie Kirk’s assassination, it’s difficult to tell the zealots from the pros by their MO. It used to be easier, but as I noted in a previous post sniper doctrine and technique have been leaking into popular culture for decades.

It’s easier to spot the nutters; they tend to have poor forward-planning capacity. A very obvious way this manifests is a weak or non-existent plan for exfiltrating after the hit. Thus, the nutter is very likely to get caught quite soon after the assassination, often at the site.

This also produces a false-prominence effect – people think political assassins are more likely to be nutters than is actually the case.

Pros – professional assassins working for intelligence agencies or militaries – are also rare. They do occasionally strike – as when, for example the Bulgarian secret service whacked Pope John Paul – but high-profile public assassinations carry a risk of diplomatic and political blowback the most nations are unwilling to assume.

Also, trained assassins are a scarce resource and exfiltrating in the hue and cry following a very public assassination is chancy. Usually you’re going to send them against more obscure targets like exiled dissidents that you think might still be dangerous, hoping not to trigger a full law-enforcement and counterintelligence response.

There’s been talk in some of the wackier corners of the Right that the Mossad did this one. No analyst would take this seriously; the blowback risk to the Israelis is far too high to justify any gain. Same goes for the Russians, though they have a higher risk tolerance than the Israelis and had a much higher tolerance in Soviet times.

In the case of Charlie Kirk it’s pretty high odds we’re looking at a zealot. That’s usually the way to bet, and in this case, the quality of his exfiltration plan and the fact that he has successfully disappeared raises the odds.

Given all these factors, LEOs are going to be looking for zealots associated with domestic organizations that said they wanted Charlie Kirk dead.

Yes, this seems boring and obvious. The main point I’m trying to drive home here is that the boring and obvious theory about a political assassination is usually the correct one.

Accordingly, the first place investigators of the assassination of Charlie Kirk are going to be looking is gun clubs associated with Antifa and the hard left, like the John Brown Gun Club and Redneck Revolt.

It’s not certain that Kirk’s assassin is a member of one of those groups, but if you had to place a bet that would be where to put it.

Update: while I was composing my analysis there was a leak from inside the ATF. They found a .30-06 with engravings expressing “anti-fascist” and transgender ideology.

As I said: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. The obvious suspect is usually the correct one.

And later, on the particulars of this particular assassin’s work:

PSA for those speculating about the sniper who killed Charlie Kirk:

No, the shot he made was not a difficult one, and does not constitute evidence that he was a professionally-trained sniper.

His choice of hide and the quality of his exfiltration plan was impressive. That could indicate pro-level training. Or, it could just mean he played the right videogames.

Information about sniper practice has been leaking into popular culture for decades. It used to be that good practice could enable you to make deductions about the background of the sniper, but that time is past.

Nothing has yet been released about what ammunition or weapon he used. It is highly likely that the bullet has been recovered and identified.

About the most we’re likely to be able to extract from the caliber is whether the sniper used an American traditional caliber like .30-06, NATO-standard 7.62, or Russian 7.62. The latter two cases may not be distinguishable if the bullet is deformed.

Knowing this won’t really tell us anything, as rifles in all plausible calibers are generally available in the United States. Furthermore, if this were a pro-level hit, misdirecting investigators by choosing an adversary or third party weapon is part of normal covert operations doctrine.

All in all, it is not possible to deduce anything of significance about the sniper from the publicly available information. Mistrust anyone who claims otherwise.

September 11, 2025

QotD: Heritable IQ and the ability to think critically

Filed under: Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Critical thinking may not be a heritable trait, but the IQ required to do it is.

It has become well-known recently that at IQ 90 and downward people start having real trouble handling counterfactual conditionals. “How would you feel if you hadn’t eaten breakfast this morning?” is the probe of this capability that has gone viral.

How are you going to do critical thinking if you can’t process counterfactual conditionals? It would be like trying to dance when you can’t walk. But this is a problem that extends above the normal IQ 85 threshold for mental subnormality. We’re looking at 20% to 25% of the U.S. population here.

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-19.

August 30, 2025

QotD: SaaS – software as an “intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches”

Filed under: Business, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Commercial desktop software is getting worse, not better. I’ve been generally aware of this for a while — the relentless pull away from “you pay for it once and own it” to monthly subscription models that extract money from you forever has been a leading indicator.

But my friend @DrInsensitive reports that the enshittification is accelerating. He says that in addition to a lot of tediously stupid UI changes, his most recent upgrade of CorelDraw now spams ads at him even when CorelDraw itself is not running! Furthermore the plague of microtransactions that has afflicted AA games for years is spreading — the set of free fill patterns for rectangles that his old version had is gone, instead when he tries to fill a rectangle he gets a pop-up invitation to buy an extra-cost feature pack of them.

When one asshole vendor thinks they’ve successfully numbed their user base into accepting this kind of crap, others immediately follow. We’ve seen this movie before, we know how it ends — with applications, like games, designed to be deliberately frustrating and low-level awful, intended to give you itches that you can only scratch by buying their endless parade of “enhancements”.

I’m sure a surcharge to suppress the spammy CorelDraw ads won’t be long in coming. And soon after that it will be everywhere.

If this goes on, open-source software will finally win the desktop not because it’s gotten enough better but because closed-source desktop applications have reached final form as an intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches.

This is not the way I was looking forward to winning.

ESR, Twitter, 2025-03-22.

July 15, 2025

QotD: Music on YouTube

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

High on my list of esoteric forgotten things that I still love is ’70s and ’80s electric jazz fusion and the more esoteric reaches of prog rock adjacent to it. Return To Forever, Brand X, Billy Cobham, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, that sort of thing. Also its modern descendants like Planet X and Protocol.

I’ve spent years trying to encourage the YouTube algorithm to find me more stuff like this. Fairly successfully, until recently it seems all I can get is repeats of stuff I’ve already heard.

Could be the algorithm is stuck in a rut and underweighting novelty. Or it could be that YouTube’s coverage is inadequate. But this morning the truly horrifying possibility occurred to me. That YouTube’s coverage is complete, and …

Maybe … maybe I’ve heard it all.

ESR, Twitter, 2025-04-14.

July 3, 2025

QotD: Why Marxists turned away from space exploration and colonization

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, Russia, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Devon Eriksen recently pointed out that today’s Marxists are hostile to space flight and off-world colonization. But in Cold War times, Marxists who ran countries were aggressively futuristic about space, treating it as the empire of their dreams.

What caused this turnaround?

To understand this, it’s helpful that to notice that spaceflight is not the only technology about which Marxist attitudes have done a 180. Nuclear power is another. More generally, where Marxists used to be pro-growth and celebrate industrialization and material progress, they’re now loudly for degrowth and renunciation.

But the history of western Marxism is more interesting than that. Western Marxists flipped to strident anti-futurism in the late 1960s and early 1970s while futurist propaganda in the Communist bloc did not end until its post-1989 collapse.

That 20-year-long disjunct was particularly strong about nuclear power, with the Soviets providing ideological support and funding to the foundation of European Green parties and the US’s anti-nuclear-power movement at the same time as they were pouring resources into nuclearizing their own power grid.

And that’s your clue. Domestic Marxism favored making power cheap and abundant, while their Western proxies pushed to keep it expensive and scarce and preached degrowth rather than expansion. Futurism vs. anti-futurism: why?

We don’t need to theorize about this. Yuri Bezmenov, a former gear in the Soviet propaganda machine, told us the answer starting in the early 1980s. Fewer people listened than should have.

Bezmenov explained that unlike Marxism in the Sino-Soviet bloc, Western Marxism was a mind virus, a memetic weapon designed to weaken and degrade its host societies from within, softening them up for totalitarianism and an eventual Soviet takeover. The West was to be denied power, both in a literal and figurative sense.

Ever wonder why today’s Marxists are so quick to make alliances with radical religious Islamists? This shouldn’t happen. According to Marxist theory, Islamism is a regression to an earlier stage of the dialectic than capitalism, and today’s Marxists ought to fear and hate it as a counter-ideology more than capitalism. But they don’t, because to them Islam is a tool to be used for nihilistic ends.

That nihilism is the actual purpose of Western Marxism and all its offshoots, including “woke”. One sign of this is how fervently it embraces the sexual mutilation of children.

The Soviets are gone but their program is still running autonomously in the brains of people who were infected by their Cold-War-era proxies and the successors of those proxies. And that program is nihilism all the way down.

Yuri Bezmenov should have been heeded. There is no simpler theory that fits the observed facts.

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-14.

June 22, 2025

QotD: “Autism stolen valor”

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Autism stolen valor”. What a concept.

The very concept that anyone would ever claim to be autistic as a status move would have seemed incomprehensibly bizarre to me when I was growing up.

I get it, though. In the intervening decades, somehow a lot of people have developed the notion that anybody above the middle range of IQ must be autistic-spectrum.

It’s not true. I’ve met enough autists, brights and super-brights to know differently. I’ve read a fair bit of the literature on psychometrics and MBD syndromes. And I’ve been a guest for faculty tea at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is very illuminating if you’re even a little bit observant about people.

Here’s what I think I know:

Many autists are seriously damaged and non-functional, to the point where they need to be institutionalized or have semi-institutional special care. Few people outside the mental-health profession know this. The “autists” we encounter in daily life are a selected high-functioning group.

HFAs (high functioning autists) have one advantage over average-IQ neurotypicals: they can really concentrate on things that aren’t social-status games or sexual maneuvers.

Average-IQ neurotypicals can only just barely manage that, so it’s difficult for them to compete with HFAs in fields where you have to be able to concentrate for long periods in order to do decent work.

Like, say, writing software. The upper reaches of software engineering are stiff with HFAs. This has become well known.

This doesn’t mean your typical HFA is actually brighter than a median average-IQ neurotypical. In fact, if you put a whole bunch of HFAs through a psychometric battery you’ll find their average IQ is lower than for neurotypicals, not higher.

HFA is actually a drag on general intelligence that HFAs overcome by being obsessive — grinding really hard on intelligent-people stuff.

The result is that HFAs as a population excel over average-IQ neurotypicals, compete fairly evenly with bright neurotypicals, but top out lower than super-bright neurotypicals do.

This is hard to notice because there are so few super-brights that many people never meet one at all. Very few people have observed enough super-brights to make valid generalizations about them. And of the few people who have a large enough observational sample, still fewer are themselves bright enough to comprehend what they see.

But I have been to faculty tea at the IAS. (I had been an invited speaker that day.)

Most of my friends and peers are people in the tippy-top end of the HFA cohort. Top 1% software engineers and people like that. So at the IAS, people-watching a bunch of Nobel laureates and people bright enough to work with Nobel laureates day-to-day, my jaw dropped open.

Because compared to who I usually hang out with, these people are mostly *normal*. Neurotypical. As near as I can tell, the people in the crowd showing HFA tells are the slow ones.

Imagine if you can being so natively intelligent that even though your brain is constantly trying to distract you into playing monkey socio-sexual status games, you can still think rings around 99.9% of the people in the world.

That’s what actual super-brights are like. They’re not brain-damaged. They’re not obsessive or compulsive or neurotic. They don’t have sensory disabilities. And they leave high-functioning autists in their dust.

Because I know this, I find the concept of people faking being autists amusing. They think they’re positioning themselves as the superior, smartest people. They are hilariously wrong.

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-27.

June 3, 2025

QotD: Heinlein’s opinions on the right to bear arms

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, Quotations, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Robert Heinlein was a complex man whose views evolved greatly over time. The Heinlein of 1942, who put into the mouth of one of his characters the line “Naturally food is free! What kind of people do you take us for?” was only five years on from having been enchanted by social credit theory, which underpins his “lost” novel For Us, The Living; in later years he was so embarrassed by this enthusiasm that he allowed that manuscript to molder in a drawer somewhere, and it was only published after his death.

Between 1942 and 1966 Heinlein’s politics evolved from New Deal left-liberalism towards what after 1971 would come to be called libertarianism. But that way of putting it is actually misleading, because Heinlein did not merely approach libertarianism, he played a significant part in defining it. His 1966 novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress was formative of the movement, with the “rational anarchist” Bernardo de la Paz becoming a role model for later libertarians. By 1978, we have direct evidence (from an interview in Samuel Edward Konkin’s New Libertarian magazine, among other sources) that Heinlein self-identified as a libertarian and regretted his earlier statism.

But if Heinlein’s overall politics changed considerably and wandered down some odd byways during his lifetime, his uncompromising support of civilian firearms rights was a constant on display throughout his life. Brin observes that was already true in 1942, but attempts to attribute this position to John W. Campbell. Multiple lines of evidence refute this claim.

[…]

Heinlein, on the other hand, was a vocal and consistent advocate of civilian weapons ownership both during and after his association with Campbell. This is perhaps clearest in his 1949 novel Red Planet, written after their parting of the ways. In that novel, the bearing of personal weapons is explicitly connected to the assumption of adult responsibilities.

Red Planet is also interesting because, although we might consider the views of Heinlein’s characters an unreliable guide to Heinlein’s own, Heinlein’s letters about the novel reveal much more. His editor at Scribner attempted to delete the section of argument in which weapons-bearing is connected to adult responsibility; Heinlein rejected this, objecting that it eviscerated the book’s ethical core and making very clear that the views of the pro-gun mentor figures in the novel were his own.

Heinlein was to reiterate similar views not only in his later fiction but in the posthumous nonfiction collection Grumbles From The Grave – by which time they were no surprise to any Heinlein fan. And it would be difficult to overstate the influence they had on firearms-rights activists during the dark years between the Gun Control Act of 1968 and our vindication in the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling.

Heinlein’s gift to firearms-rights activism during that bleak four decades was to be able to draw on the principled case for civilian firearms going back to the framers of the U.S. Constitution and English Republican sources and restate it in language appealing to the brightest children of post-WWII America. But he did more than that, because in Red Planet and elsewhere firearms rights were presented as an inextricable part of a philosophical whole, with the personal firearm both as instrument and defining symbol of personal liberty and responsibility.

Eric S. Raymond, “Brin on Heinlein on guns is dead wrong”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-07-18.

June 1, 2025

QotD: Robert E. Howard was more accurate with Conan than the historians of his day

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This is one of my favorite facts of history that makes me laugh maniacally when I think about it. In some respects, Robert E. Howard’s “Hyborian Age” fantasies of Conan the Barbarian described the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age more accurately than archaeologists and historians managed to during most of the century after the fantasies were published.

(I’m not the first to point this out. Credit goes to Greg Cochran, co-author of “The 10,000 Year Explosion”, on his blog West Hunter.)

How did this happen? Scholars, reacting against 19th century Romanticism (and especially the weird polyp of it that turned into Nazi racial theory) adopted a sort of meta-model of prehistoric civilizations in which they usually evolved peacefully in place, with large-scale migration and warfare being exceptional.

It was only the advent of paleogenetics that shattered this cozy image. We now know that the Cimmerians (the Yamnaya ancestors of modern Europeans) did in fact come storming off the steppes to kill every male in sight and take all the women as sex slaves. We can read the traces of this catastrophe in our chromosomes.

ESR, Twitter, 2025-02-10.

May 14, 2025

QotD: To hell with visual distractions on your desktop GUI

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Even that 1990s desktop is too frou-frou for me now, let alone the excessively cute GUIs that replaced it.

My desktop layout doesn’t have a background, or icons, or action buttons, or gradients, or any of that crap. It barely even has color.

I’m not going to name my window manager here, because I don’t want to sound like I’m evangelizing for a particular one. The important part is that it’s all tiled windows all the way down with an absolute minimum of dead space and visual noise.

And I am so much happier than I was with conventional desktop GUIs. I love not having that visual noise constantly pull at my attention.

In hindsight, we spent decades being obsessed with UI details that were just meaningless, distracting fluff. That not only didn’t help us get work done, they were actually a drain on our concentration.

Only part of that can be blamed on pixel-pushing “UX” designers who got erections every time they changed the color or shape of a button. The rest of it’s on us, on people who bought into this glittery fake progress. I used to be guilty of this myself, but I’ve learned better.

Fancy visually-noisy desktop GUIs that suck your attention are the enemy. Fuck all that sideways with a chainsaw. Go simple, go tiled, go minimalist — stop abusing your brain!

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-28.

May 4, 2025

QotD: Women and depression

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Why wouldn’t powerlessness cause depression in women too?

Well, in a backwards sort of way it actually does.

The difference is this: women feel powerful when they are loved, and powerless when they are not, because their instinct wiring tells them that safety lies in being able to form social coalitions and attract a strong mate.

Women, in general (there are always outlier exceptions) don’t get major antidepressive help from just going outside and chopping up a cord of firewood, the way men do. Because the woman’s game is to give a man a good reason to chop firewood for her.

It’s when she can’t do *that* that she feels powerless.

ESR, Twitter, 2024-05-06.

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