DocWatts

If you'd be okay with it, I'd love to throw your forum post into a Google Doc and share it with my local Indivisible Group (just let me know how you would like me to credit you). Again, fine work on doing Conscious Politics in an accessible way.

It is, but I think you need an understanding of both. The ringleaders of post-truth movements aren't making honest epistemic mistakes. They're intentionally flooding the zone to overwhelm people's capacity for truth-seeking, and cynically feeding upon the emotional vulnerabilities that the Concentric Model so elegantly describes. In my own work, I make a distinction between Low Quality Perspectives (where our thinking departs from observable reality due to cognitive and emotional biases) and Malicious Perspectives (viewpoints that are engineered to cause harm, or allow bad actors to avoid accountability for their actions). Low Quality Perspectives distort our sensemaking in problematic ways, but they can be held honestly. Whereas Malicious Perspectives are intended to mislead.

Also, you should consider turning your Concentric Model into a Substack article - one that's more easily shared than a forum post - since this is valuable information.

This model is great. Lots of overlap with what I've been writing about for my book lately. That also reminds me, I made a cute little graphic to explain what post-truth means for normies (ie your coworkers, your grandma).

Did you not see the brazen lack of empathy from Trump about Kirk's death? It's obvious that Kankles doesn't give a shit about Kirk. When a reporter asked him how we was doing in the wake of his friend's death, rather than expressing grief he immediately pivoted to bragging about that gaudy White House ballroom that's being constructed. It's fracturing MAGA's coalition.

I'm not even much of a fan of Hasan Piker, but here's %1000 on point here. People sometimes ask me what the 'point' of large protests like No Kings are. And a large part of it is to push back against the atmosphere of fear which leads individuals and institutions to obey in advance. The regime wants you to believe that their rule is inevitable, but in actuality it's incredibly weak and unpopular. Fear is contagious, but so is courage.

The Orange Shit Stain is having comedians pulled off the air for not showing due reverence for the thin skinned dictator in the wake of Kirk's shooting. Just goes to show that the far right pretending to care about 'free speech' was always a load of horseshit - this is and has always been about naked, unaccountable power.

Pro tip, but you might want to consider renaming this thread 'Are Liberals More Epistemicly Developed Than Centrists' or something like that, since evolution doesn't have an end goal. Based on anecdotes from my personal life (so take this with a grain of salt), it's my observation that centrists tend to be folks who don't want to pick a lane. Engaging deeply with issues involves far more than picking the middle point between two extremes and assuming that this is the reasonable or correct position (is the Fallacy Of The Middle).

Charlie Kirk's political career was about propagandizing young men into white supremacist Christian Nationalism. This is someone who said children should attend public executions and that the man who tried to kill Paul Pelosi with a hammer was a patriot who should be bailed out of prison. I would never advocate for Kirk's execution but Charlie Kirk sure did. Live by the sword (ie advocating for dehumanization and political violence), die by the sword, as they say.

Beat me to it.

Surprise, surprise that the far right spin machine is going to blame this on 'the Left', regardless of what the actual facts turn out to be

What are the odds that the malicious incompetence of this regime - which has gone out of its way to replace career bureaucrats with yes men whose only qualification is personal loyalty to Trump - comes back to bite them in the ass, and they never catch this guy.

So, two things can be simultaneously true: 1) Charlie Kirk was a piece of shit who has a large degree of culpability for the climate of political violence we're living through today. 2) Nothing good will come of his death. Innocent people are going to die if and when this escalates. _______________ Trust me, we do NOT want to go down a path where we resolve our political differences with bullets. The last thing we need right now is a 2025 version of Bleeding Kansas. Defeat the fascists at the ballot box, over the airwaves, by putting our bodies in the streets, and through mass, strategic noncompliance with the regime. Vigilante political violence is counter productive to the kinds of outcomes we (that is, those of us who want to live in a democracy) actually want. Assassinations aren't something to be celebrated.

Yet another school shooting happened today as well, but that's already been forgotten about. The far right tells us to 'move on' when school children get gunned down in their classrooms, but a fascist propaganda artist becoming a victim of the climate of political violence he helped instigate is a national tragedy

Charlie Kirk was a piece of shit, but nothing good will come of this.

Lest we forget, the same day of the No Kings protests a series of targeted political assassinations of Democratic lawmakers took place in Minnesota, to defeating silence from Trump and MAGA. Live by political violence, die by political violence (as Trump himself almost did, and might still). Zero sympathy for Charlie Kirk (Rest In Piss), but there's zero chance of anything good coming from this.

Nonviolent does not mean 'nice' or 'nonconfrontational'. Plenty of ways to go scorched earth against a regime without resorting to killing people. Violence is counterproductive for pro-democracy movements - it produces a rally around the flag affect for the regime, and is antithetical to separating a regime from its pillars of support. It's also anathema to being able to create stable, democratic outcomes afterwards. Look to what happened in Russia or China after their civil wars to see how easily a violent insurgency can become worse than the regime it replaced.

You're not incorrect, but I'd argue that it's a distinction without a difference. It could just as easily be argued that MAGA is just what 21st century fascism looks like - it just depends on how narrow or broad one defines fascism.

The far-right wants nothing more than for the resistance to fascism to turn violent, because it gives them an easy pretext to carry out their violent fantasies against the elements of society that they don't like - the Left, black and brown Americans, LGBT folks, trans people. So let's not give them what they want.

America has a conservative party that's fully embraced fascism (The Republicans) and a centrist party with a center-left wing (The Democrats).

Well we've already decided that mass graves for school children are an acceptable price to pay for easy access to firearms, so Charlie Kirk should be proud that he gets to lay down his life so that gun owners aren't inconvenienced in any way. In all seriousness, I have zero sympathy for the guy, but this is a really bad portent of where we are as a culture. 2020s America is looking more and more like 1850s. And if you know anything about American history, that's an incredibly dangerous parallel to be living through.

The correct response to this event, plus every other unhinged thing that the Orange Shit Stain is doing right now:

You might enjoy this SubStack article I wrote over the 4th of July called 'Death Throes Of The American Republic' which delves into this topic. The tldr is that America began with the trappings of democracy, but only for a privileged few. It's only within the last 60 years, since the passage of the civil rights and voting rights acts, that we could be considered a full democracy in practice. The USA of today is what's known within political science as a flawed democracy that's on its way to becoming a hybrid regime under Trump 2.0. A hybrid regime is essentially a failed democracy that's in the process of authoritarian consolidation, but isn't a full-on authoritarian state yet. It’s a political system that retains some formal features of democracy - such as elections and a constitution - but these are increasingly hollowed out in practice. In such a regime voting still happens, and on paper you still have 'rights,' but those rights function more like optional guidelines than guarantees. If they get in the way of the ruling faction's ambitions, they're ignored, reinterpreted, or swept aside entirely.