In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I’ve been following the American right especially closely.

I want to share two responses that I found surprisingly sensible and reassuring, and one response that is appalling in its shamelessness, vile almost beyond belief.

The first was a podcast featuring former BlackRock portfolio manager Edward Dowd that I was watching because I’m a financial doomer. The conversation turned to Charlie Kirk:

Edward Dowd: Anecdotally, people are saying they’re leaving the Democrats because they’ve lost. A lot of normal Democrats who aren’t high media consumers who just are watching what’s going on and hearing some of some of the people that they thought were friends saying abhorrent things are running (from the) center to the right.

So that needs to show up in the poll numbers because right now it’s anecdotal.

The worry of course is this Charlie Kirk assassination. Charlie Kirk interviewed me three times. He’s a wonderful human being. I’m 58 and I marveled at his communication skills and his ability to create what he did from such a very young age.

I mean, he was he was a phenom in at 19 and he just built something that, quite frankly, I was in awe of. He was quite an individual and I’m sad that he’s gone.

But when you step back and analyze this, my biggest fear is that this is the beginning of a divide and conquer strategy. I’ve said forever that this is a class issue, not an us versus them, left versus right, black versus white, Hispanic, Muslim.

This is this is a class issue and we are at the end of a grand cycle and we need to focus on who’s really in charge and the divide and conquer strategy has been well used throughout the millennium.

The key to focus on is whatever narrative is coming out. If it’s about dividing, ignore it. And remember, this is a class issue. When I say class, I’m not talking about someone with $10 million. I’m talking about the oligarchs, the super ultra wealthy, the .01% 01% that control the lion share of the wealth of the globe.

I must admit I was not expecting a former BlackRock portfolio manager to come out with a class war angle on Charlie Kirk. I must say I agree.

Which might make me more open to the things he had to say about the COVID pandemic and illegal immigration later in the video, or maybe not.

The second was a video featuring John Robb of Global Guerrillas, a security consultant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and a tech millionaire who was involved in the creation of RSS, among other things). Robb was contacted by a younger self-described Patriot, Brian Keith, in the aftermath of Kirk’s death, and the two streamed their conversation live on X.com.

Keith described the conversation as “part WTF, partly why am I so angry, partly how can I avoid being someone else’s tool, and how to deal with this swirl of current events.”

He goes on to quote some advice from Robb’s writing that inspired the conversation:

Brian Keith: I remember I was out hiking when I heard about (the death of George Floyd), and I remember being tribalized on the side of anti-cop when I was experiencing the empathic triggers that you talk about. And then later upon learning more, you realize, wait a minute, what I was immediately experiencing was quite different from after I had backed away from the empathic trigger or looked at more of the data, I had quite a different conclusion than I had in that first moment.

But that was then. This time’s different. This time, my immediate response is right, because my tribe I’m currently identifying with is completely accurate. So that’s how I feel in the moment. And you’re talking me down in chat.

With George Floyd, it was I didn’t know at the time when I first saw the empathic trigger. It was a black guy in an inner city of some kind. But it was police violence and I’ve experienced police harassing me. So it was sort of like me.

But then there’s Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk’s a lot like me. He’s who I wish I would be in some ways. So can you help us, John? Can you help us not necessarily decouple from the empathic trigger, but contextualize it in a way that helps us be more sane and less tribalized, make better decisions?

John Robb: With Charlie Kirk you feel that the bullet hit the neck it’s an internal transfer it’s a massive amount of information from the head of the victim how they’re seeing the world their fear their their desperation and it comes right into your head and it’s instantly modeled and it’s overwhelming . We don’t have the kind of barriers that we would have in real life when we’re online. When that happens, you feel an intense rage at the perpetrator.

You’re immediately jumping to a conclusion that fits your new framework, your tribalized mentality. That somebody says something, they’re immediately enemy. non-human, absolute evil. And if you get to that point where you’re bouncing around like that, you’re just a redshirt in Star Trek kind of thing. You’re just a fodder.

Keith: You don’t have any agency in this conflict. And what does fodder look like in the digital age? It looks like retweeting things or commenting on things or… acting in a way that if someone was attempting to control you they would want you to act as opposed to treating yourself as an individual that has ability to orient that might be different than someone else who looks sort of like you. Yeah, um fodder.

So far so good, right? Then the conversation took a turn that I wasn’t expecting, which sent a chill down my spine:

Robb: Usually in a civil conflict, the people who get activated, who lose agency, are the first ones to jump on board, the first ones to initiate violence. Those are the people that almost invariably get killed. Those people, those groups are run over by the bigger players that come later. So just for this audience you don’t want to be in that first group.

Keith: This reminds me of Eric Prince’s new phone, where some of the thought when he came out with his new phone was, well, do you want to be aligned with Eric Prince?That may have significant pros or significant cons in the future, depending on what you believe the future holds.

And now all this happens and Prince is on Twitter saying executions, executions, executions. He could easily be the next president right now. I’d vote for him. Trump has a few days before he loses me. I’m like, no, no, we need executions right away.

Because I’m so angry that it’s the whole seeing red thing. It’s seeing red for a guy I’ve never met in a place I’ve never been and yet, I’m ready to say, oh yeah, Eric Prince, President for life. Executions everywhere. No mercy against them.

Robb: But that’s life. You’re connected at a deep level. And that’s one of the major reasons Trump has to act, to designate many of these groups, left activists, as terrorist organizations and act. in order to prevent the kind of upswing and violence where we get those kind of street battles between the right-taking kind of revenge or action against these groups at a level of violence that we haven’t seen so far.

I’d like to see some compelling evidence for this wave of “leftist” violence before the death of Kirk is used to justify a horrifying clampdown in the U.S.

I’m not aware of any actual leftists in the U.S. with any measure of influence, and I’m not aware of any organized “leftist” violence since the Weather Underground disbanded in the early 1980s.

But let’s get to the really bad, totally appalling shit.

Of course, it’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, speaking at the Kirk Memorial in Arizona:

So yeah, this is bad, and things will continue to get worse in the United States.