Views from Crestmont Drive

• • Steven Pinker’s new book, and how he applies its ideas to understand the Charlie Kirk matter;
  • Right-wing The Daily Caller explicitly calls for violence;
  • Trump seems to believe in “medbeds,” a science-fictional idea born of MAGA fantasies;
  • And rumors about today’s shooting at a Mormon Church in Michigan;
  • And György Ligeti – Atmospheres

Steven Pinker has a new book out this past week, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, which I pre-ordered and now have a copy of. (My impression is that Pinker is extending his purview beyond psychology and into sociology.)

And perhaps coincidentally and fortuitously, Pinker has a way to address the Charlie Kirk matter with ideas from his book.

NY Times, Steven Pinker, 28 Sept 2025: The Right’s Post-Kirk Crackdown Has a Familiar Mob Logic

He opens by summarizing the situation.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has led to more than shock, grief and a demand that the killer be brought to justice. Pugnacious and divisive in life, Mr. Kirk has been canonized in death as a saint of civil discourse. His murder has unleashed a furious assault by the Trump administration and its supporters against their political enemies, including anyone who demurs from this beatification.

And then ties it to his book’s theme.

In 1960, the economist Thomas Schelling identified this kind of phenomenon as one of many striking social events driven by “common knowledge”: the state in which everyone knows something, everyone knows that everyone else knows that thing and so on. The phenomenon, which was further explored by the anthropologist John Tooby, may be called a communal outrage.

And then he goes on with details with how the reaction to Charlie Kirk are an example of this communal outrage (and, oh by the way, veiled threats of political violence against the left).

The post-Kirk crackdown is an example of this lashing out. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, used the language of a mafia thug (“we can do this the easy way or the hard way”) to pressure ABC to take action against the talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel. Attorney General Pam Bondi warned, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech” — a category protected under the First Amendment. (After bipartisan backlash, supported by quotations from Mr. Kirk himself, Ms. Bondi defined “hate speech” as threats of violence.) President Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller threatened, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have” to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” left-wing political organizations that he said constitute “a vast domestic terror movement.”

(Do Trump fans even hear of incidents like these? I suspect they are not reported by the likes of Fox New or Daily Caller.)

Then Pinker reviews comparable historical incidents, and how such incidents involve “two coordination problems. The first problem is a contest for dominance: for respect, standing, honor, face, deference.”

While human nature has evolved various methods of dealing with these, so that every little disagreement doesn’t erupt into violence. Eventually, we get to this core issue.

It’s often been pointed out that Mr. Trump and the MAGA movement have a chronic sense of being disrespected. Mr. Trump fumed for decades about being looked down on by coastal elites, and his pique has grown with each investigation, indictment and impeachment. For many of his followers, these insults merged with a smoldering resentment at the creeping takeover by leftist values in public life, from government mandates to popular entertainment.

Mr. Kirk’s killing is, for all of them, a perfect outrage incident. As an advocate of MAGA willing to take the battle to the enemy, Mr. Kirk was a pre-eminent symbol of the coalition. And his suspected killer, an internet-addled loner with a gun, nonetheless has enough left-adjacent trappings (a transgender partner, some antifascist memes) that he can be mentally fitted into a vast liberal conspiracy. The shooting was an unendurable public offense, which mobilized the coalition to muster its forces, in this case a combination of government muscle and social media shaming mobs, to rectify the affront.

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You could hardly ask for more explicit evidence of political violence being driven by the right (not the left).

NY Times, 26 Sept 2025: Daily Caller Opinion Column ‘Explicitly’ Calls for Violence, subtitled “The column, by editor at large Geoffrey Ingersoll, calls for ‘blood in the streets’ in response to violence against conservatives.”

The Daily Caller, a prominent conservative online publication, published an opinion column on Friday explicitly calling for violence in response to physical assaults on conservatives in America.

The column, written by editor at large Geoffrey Ingersoll and promoted near the top of the site, argues that “patriots” should use force because law enforcement officials do not adequately protect conservatives, including Charlie Kirk, the activist assassinated this month.

“Is this a call for violence?” the third paragraph says. “Yes. Explicitly it is.”

“I want blood in the streets,” he added in the column, which ran with the headline “Enough Is Enough … I Choose VIOLENCE!”

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Today’s Trumpian idiocy. I’ve often noted that conservatives, especially MAGA/Trump fans, have a loose grip on reality. They don’t “believe” well-established scientific conclusions, preferring simplistic, nonsensical explanations, or even religious myths. Here’s an example of the opposite: they’re willing to believe things that, if they knew anything about anything, couldn’t possibly be true.

JMG, 28 Sept 2025: Trump Posts QAnon Video About Magical “Medbeds”

(From The Daily Beast, 28 Sept 2025: Trump, 79, Deletes Weird AI Video Shilling Magic Beds.)

It’s as if he’s confusing science fiction films, or even Star Trek TOS, with reality. But it’s not just Trump; it’s an ongoing QAnon conspiracy theory.

“Medbeds” is a conspiracy that has spread extensively through far-right, QAnon circles. The idea is that the American government has access to futuristic medical pods that can cure any disease and even regrow limbs, but liberals have been hiding this information from the American public. One sect of QAnon believes the government is using a medbed to keep JFK alive.

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Then there’s the shooting at a Mormon Church in Michigan this morning. Of course everyone is eager to identify the shooter and discover his motives. I’ve seen one Facebook post (a graphic) that claimed the shooter was a military vet and flew a Trump flag in front of his house some years ago. And that supports certain narratives. But don’t trust Facebook memes. Wait for better evidence.

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György Ligeti – Atmospheres

This is an astonishing piece of music that can change forever what you think an orchestra can do. Or, it changed for me, back in 1968 when I heard this piece on the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is not electronic music; it is orchestral music, using micro polyphony, in which all the instruments are playing micro-tonal sounds, not all on a specific key, that creates unworldly sounds.

I am listening to the dozen or so Ligeti CDs that I have, and will discuss more later.