Chris Cotten

Ad astra per aspera

[Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry @pegobry_en]

Regular reminder that leftists don't have empathy, they only have pseudo-empathy which they exercise on distant targets who don't exist for them as people, only as blank canvas on which to project narcissistic power fantasies, and as tools to hurt those they don't like. To think through "Why would a devout Muslim woman be in a lesbian couple with another woman and have a baby with her?" would be to think of the people involved as actual humans, which they're incapable of.

[Southern Chestnut 🇺🇸 @AppyOrtho]

Because we don’t move North and tell you how awful you are.

Let me tell you honestly what we face from Northerners

-drive up our home costs
-rush around always pushing, always busy
-have no manners, do not say ma’am and sir
-tell us our religions are wrong
-take down our monuments
-tell us we can’t celebrate our history or ancestors
-literally spit on our graves
-teach our kids that they are inferior to Northern kids by birth
-buy our old, well maintained homes, gut them and paint them gray

And on and on and on.

Any small Southern community who has had an influx of Northerners faces one of these issues almost daily. It’s not all Northerners of course but it’s enough to make a distinct impression.

[Chris Cotten @crcotten1]

@BonifaceOption Please go back to Minnesota.

[Seasonal Clickfarm Worker @ClickingSeason]

“So you’re telling me you’re cucked into self censorship?”

No, I’m telling you that the people who see things differently than you do have determined that you’re not emotionally mature enough to handle disagreement in a spirit of camaraderie

[Duncan Reyburn @duncanreyburn]

Recently, a student told me about this epiphany she had and the comfort gave her. She said, “I am enough for myself.” “You’re not, tho,” I said. “You can’t even grow your own veggies and organise your own technological enslavement. And even the idea that you’re ‘enough’ is a meme.” I said it gently and I don’t think it actually went in. But it was a stark reminder that so many people probably walk around with slop in their heads instead of thoughts. What a horrible thing that is.

[David Freddoso @freddoso]

If you go online to celebrate *any* political assassination, you are signaling moral unfitness for jobs that involve being around other people's children.

[Chris Cotten @crcotten1]

Four days old — and already comfortably rationed — but reposting it now to call attention to the reasoning powers and unwavering ideological commitment of your average Tennessee Senate Democrat

[Senator Heidi Campbell @Campbell4TN]

Did you verify this @elonmusk? No- bc it’s not true. At all! It is, however, veering towards Horst Wessel territory- and isn’t that really the point?

[Chris Cotten @crcotten1]

@LauraRbnsn @Teddtheparasite Might want to check the shell casings.

[John Slaughter, Esq. @JSlaughterEsq]

“The Left is a revolutionary coalition built on grievance, held together by a permanent enemy. If it tones down the rhetoric, it loses power. If it purges its clients, it loses its votes. If it tries to split the difference, it gets torn apart by the very activists it relies on. That is the cost of choosing permanent revolution over a shared national culture. It’s why Stalin had Trotsky ice picked.”

[Mary Katharine Ham @mkhammer]

As a widow who specialized in raising two young kids, it takes a ferocity and faith you can hope you’ll never have to understand. Also, no one should talk to a bereavement psychologist who is unfamiliar with anger in the face of death, particularly murder.

[Grummz @Grummz]

The Left just blew all their trust.

Normies see a nice guy doing a simple debate, not a political speech, not leading a rally or a riot, getting gunned down in 4k.

Then they see a bunch of people, even their friends, cheer and clap and dance. They ask why.

"Well, you see, he was evil!" they cry gleefully, eyes feral.

The normie just stares a the screen. A clean cut guy with a microphone is bleeding out horrifically. It reminds them of the scared young blonde they saw bleeding out on the subway just a few days ago. A question forms.

"What did he do that made him evil?" they ask.

"He SAID things!" they scream back, a bit of spittle flying from their mouths.

"So you are happy they murdered him....for talking?"

"YESSSS!!!! You get it now!" claps their kids teacher, their pilot, or their doctor.

The normie is horrified. Someone they trust their kids to, their health to, or their safety is acting like a foaming, raging lunatic who wants people dead because they said something they didn't like.

Do you realize how this comes across?

[David Hines @hradzka]

holy shit: the head of a student chapter of DSA in Minnesota *got criminally charged last year for threatening the lives of the heads of the TPUSA student chapter*

that this was not a national story a year ago is a failure on the part of our press and to be frank TPUSA

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

(Warning: long rant)

My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue.

I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues.

Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious.

And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left.

Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly.

I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own.

Here are the facts:

Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over.

Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept.

Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it.

These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements.

Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this:

These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not.

These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened.

When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice.

They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit.

And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety.

When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.”

They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep.

And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes.

When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person.

And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them.

For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit.

In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations.

In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism.

> “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.)

> “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.)

> “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?)

> “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.)

In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection.

> “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.)

> “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.)

All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells.

You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it.

Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do.

If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.

[David Hines @hradzka]

*taps the sign*

[Adrian Vermeule @Vermeullarmine]

Ce n’est pas par le chemin du néant que vous arriverez à la création

It is not by the path of nothingness that you will create anything

— Joseph De Maistre, Considérations sur la France

[Chris Cotten @crcotten1]

This got 9 likes just under 24 hours

[Tennessee Senate Democrats @TNSenateDems]

🗣️ Senate Minority Leader Raumesh Akbari: “We do not need the National Guard occupying our city.”

Full statement: https://t.co/0k8r0LkOyR

[GoldenGopherFan @GoldenGopherFan]

Make Haley Kreidl famous. She should be fired immediately. She is a sick human being should not be employed by the city of Nashville or anywhere else. @NashvilleMCO

[Leslie McAdoo Gordon 🇺🇸 @McAdooGordon]

The big names in the D party - except Pelosi who has failed to understand the change that Charlie Kirk’s killing represents - are working hard to try to tamp down on the rhetoric because they recognize that they have a real problem: regular Americans won’t accept that you can murder a guy because you don’t like what he’s saying, even if he’s saying stuff that is really bad. Still doesn’t justify murder.

But rank and file Leftists are confused because they thought it was okay and they don’t understand what has changed. They missed the point that it was always supposed to stay rhetoric, not actionable, because rhetoric is politically productive, whereas murders in broad daylight not so much.

You can literally see on their faces and in their reactions that they are confused about why celebrating this murder is a problem.

These Dem leaders played with fire or ignored it when others did so, and so now it’s going to burn them.