Leftwing Permission Structures.
The things we tell ourselves let us continue believing that we are not “the Baddies.”
The Biden Administration insisted on calling the January 6 riot an armed insurrection for years, and targeted parents who wanted a say in their children’s education. Distorting the meaning of “domestic terrorism,” that narrative and others mischaracterized the conditions leading to two assassination attempts on Trump and Charlie Kirk’s murder.
When the president calls a four-hour riot where no guns were present on the side of the rioters, and “armed insurrection,” while calling 8 months of leftwing rioting, arson, and murders a “peaceful protest,” he is creating a “permission structure.”
A permission structure is a set of assumptions that can be used to justify — make permissible — certain behavior.
If one’s opponent is a fascist, and punching a fascist is OK, then punching the opponent is OK.
Hello, permission structure.
Of course, that raises the question of (a) is your opponent really a fascist?, and (b) is punching fascists OK, all other things being equal?
The reason that violence is overwhelmingly a leftwing problem is that the left has created these kinds of permission structures.
In contrast, mainstream conservatives have “anti-permission structures.” For example, most/many conservatives are religious, and their religions teach that murder is a sin, and one can go to Hell for committing a (mortal) sin of that kind.
Hello, anti-permission structure.
Of course, I am not saying that all, or even many, leftists are immoral, but I am saying that the leftist culture as a whole is not religious and, consequently, does not have such a didactic anti-permission structure built into it. This is why a lot of leftwing discussions about the Charlie Kirk murder begin with a utilitarian discussion about murder being a “bad tactic” or “counterproductive.”
When one eliminates the objective law-giver, one can start messing with the laws, and this begins with confusing the language.
This article provides an excellent discussion of the permission structures the Left uses to justify violence. These include weaponizing contempt and emotional fragility, and positioning the outgroup as an existential threat. By these moves, the Left says, “We are good people, but we are weak. They strong. They are also very bad because they are fascists/transphobes/racists. Therefore, we must strike them before they can destroy us.” There has been a good deal of “othering” and “dehumanization against Charlie Kirk. Rather than being a murdered father to two small children who will never know their father, he is a symbol of evil. His comments are mined in order to present them without context or completeness in order to confirm to Leftists that Kirk was a contemptible person, such that while, of course, murder is never good, in this case, it is understandable.
These are the tropes we are seeing on the internet.
At the same time, and in the most recent hours, there has been an effort to humanize Kirk’s killer by presenting him as the victim of his love for his transsexual roommate. (See also this article.) This is the permission structure in miniature: the implication is that Kirk threatened the weak male-to-female love interest of the assassin, who had no choice but to strike out against the reprehensible transphobe out of a noble motive.
Montel Williams’s defense that Kirk’s killer was a “love-torn child” is a permission structure no matter how he might preface it with a performative, throat-clearing statement that “well, of course, murder is wrong.”
The permission structure is mostly premised on the ingrained assumption that Leftists have the moral high ground; they must be the Good Guys. The last thing the politicians and power structure want is for their spear carriers and voters, whom they have trained to hate the Other, to be asking: “Are we the baddies?”
Yes, if you find yourself justifying — or finding it fitting — that a father with two small children has been murdered in cold blood, you probably are.