Assault with a deadly memeplex

Trump and Chris Rufo prepare to arrest you for thoughtcrimes

Reason TV, used under a Creative Commons license

I’ve talked many times about the Rightwing Mood Swing and the breathtaking swiftness with which they alternate between delusions of grandeur and persecution mania. One minute they’re thumping their chest, exulting in their own power and glory (as with Tubby’s braggadocio) ; the next, they’re crying hot tears and flopping on the pitch about how liberals, who were as dust under their feet during the high side of their manic cycle, are suddenly their persecutors, talking mean about them, cancelling them, using “the culture” to make them look bad.

It’s unseemly, and also hilarious. But it gets a little more grim when it involves accusations of murder, as is becoming the trend.

Since the rollback of gun control made America a shooting gallery, there has been a certain amount of nuh-uh you when it comes to political violence. Every time someone with an ideological axe to grind kills someone, for example, Erick Erickson can be counted on to bring up the 2017 Congressional baseball game at which Republican Congressman Steve Scalise suffered multiple gunshot wounds. And every news story about any such incident invariably contains a bothsides element.

But when I look at the current political environment, I see Republicans getting very comfortable with the idea of killing people they don’t like — as Tubby likes to show off by murdering some Caribbean fisherman from time to time. And with the latest violent outbursts from rightwing loons, from the Trumpy Mormon church killer to the suburban incel who allegedly ran down two girls at least in part because one of them talked smack about Charlie Kirk, I’m not feeling too bothsidesy about the situation.

Still I’m willing to entertain the idea that I’m more sensitive to the people who want to kill me than I am to the people who want to kill the people who want to kill me, so I read as much as the paywall would allow of an Atlantic story about an observed uptick in “left-wing terrorism” in 2025, and author Daniel Byman’s more scholarly version at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

One can challenge Byman’s findings — for example, he considers “Luigi Mangione’s assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson” a “left-wing” attack, which seems to presume too much given the universal hatred of heath insurance executives. But even he says that “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing attacks outnumber those from the far right,” and this makes for an interesting graf:

Of course anything can be read in bad faith, and the king of rightwing bad faith Chris Rufo, in his City Journal article called “The Left-Wing Terror Memeplex,” says it means “even The Atlantic, which previously seconded the idea of stochastic terrorism, has now conceded that political violence from the Left outstrips that from the Right.” So we know right off the bat what we’re dealing with.

If you’re wondering what a “memeplex” is, according to Rufo it starts with claims “that Donald Trump is analogous to Adolf Hitler; that America is about to fall to fascism; that conservatives are organizing a genocide of transgender people; that deportations are laying the groundwork for martial law.”

These would indeed be my claims, certainly, and I expect everyone reading this who also follows national news (and the numerous and distingushed people who have pegged Trump as a fascist) will find them uncontroversial.

In fact, given that just yesterday, after several days of the ICE goons that Trump deployed to Chicago smash-and-grabbing citizens and immigrants alike (not to mention shooting a citizen and misrepresenting the circumstances), Trump claimed he’d be justified to invoke the Insurrection Act against blue cities, I should think that with all the other available information such characterizations would be beyond dispute.

But Rufo will have none of it: These, he says, are just “carefully crafted narratives,” devised and deployed by liberals “to activate the radical elements within the broader coalition, including, most notably, anti-fascist and transgender activists.”

Yeah, I know: Weird to talk about anti-fascism as a menace (transgender people too, but leave that aside for now); but after all Tubby’s recent EOs and ravings about antifa, we have to accept that conservatives are now quite open about believing that being against fascism is worse than the alternative.

Here’s where the “memespace” shtick comes in:

The second element is the radicalized memespace. The prestige media writes the metanarratives, which filter downward through Reddit, Discord, Steam, Twitch, and other web platforms. Because these digital spaces rely on user-generated discussion and lack the editorial guardrails of a traditional publication, individuals can plunge deep into the radicalization process and take the premises of left-wing narratives to their grim conclusions. Democratic politicians shout that Trump is a fascist; users on Reddit and Discord conclude that the proper response to fascism is political assassination.

Again, to anyone who watches even the sanitized Prestige Press versions of the news — let alone saw the footage of the January 6 attack on the Capitol — this is topsy-turvy. Truth Social has probably ginned up more genuine terrorism than Reddit.

But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet: Rufo also says “these radicalized memespaces are also tailored to psychosexual themes” and that’s where the transgender people come in: Rufo cites two alleged trans killers (and one of these is Charlie Kirk’s slayer, whose gender provenance has been propagandized but not proven; perhaps Rufo just considers him a tranny-lover), and claims “this spate of recent terror incidents illustrates the connection” between liberal terrorism and transgender people.

Behold the terror memeplex! Perhaps fearing that he’s losing the normies, he tarts the concept up by comparing it to, I’m not even kidding, The Manchurian Candidate, claiming that like the Chinese torturers in that film “the memeplex operates to remove ‘guilt and fear’ through brainwashing and political conditioning — but, this time, in a totally decentralized and depersonalized manner.” (To quote another Cold War-era film: we’re still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.)

Eventually Rufo gets to the solution, which is, as you might expect, to call opposition to Trump terrorism and bring the full force of the state against it.

First he’d soften the ground with “social punishment for politicians and media figures who promote irresponsible narratives about impending fascism and ‘trans genocide’”; then “law enforcement” (presumably federalized and including ICE, DHS, and maybe the Space Force) will be authorized to “monitor radical left-wing memespaces and disrupt acts of violence… and swiftly identify and arrest ringleaders, in the same way they target other criminal networks and conspiracies.”

So, in Rufo’s view people who call Trump and his multiple challenges to democracy and the rule of law fascist should expect to be investigated and perhaps arrested on charges of Aggravated Memeplex. I wonder if Daniel Byman would consider that threat terroristic.