Neo has a post up about trends in sociopathic behavior that features a brief excerpt from a YouTube interview with a lawyer named Robert Barnes, addressing the best explanation for Antifa outbreaks. He studied peaks and troughs of violent Klan behavior between 1870 and 1960 and concluded, first, that it's primarily a function of sociopathy, for which racism is just the handy excuse, and second, that it rises and falls with what he calls "political permission slips." He believes that the incidence of sociopathy in humans is fairly stable over time, and found you could best match the changing pattern of politicized violence by examining the message put out by people in positions of political prominence. In the case of the Klan, the key was local White Citizens Councils. In the case of Antifa, the key is the Democratic Party leadership.
Could it be, as leftists are arguing, that it's really President Trump who hands out the permission slips to white nationalists, who are stirring up violence among mostly peaceful but fiery protesters? Daniel Greenberg notes Joe Biden's recent speech claiming something of the sort, in which Biden argues that there were no riots when he was in the White House. Greenberg counters that there were no riots, except when there were riots, and asks: If the current riots are Trump's fault, whose fault were the Ferguson riots? Who misreports racially charged incidents so that riots are in full force before anyone even has a chance to examine the evidence and figure out who did what? Who painted Trayvon Martin as a small, innocent 12-year-old murdered without provocation by a "white Hispanic"? Who perpetrated the myth that a Ferguson cop shot Michael Brown while he had his hands up in an unthreatening posture? Who pushes the narrative of vague "systemic racism" when nothing about a particular incident supports the charge of individual racism?
Who preaches violence?
Worth noting, for anyone who counters to you that you can find violent statements from the right as well, that those are not fringe players in that video. They are not the worst that a reporter could find at a protest, nor low-quality phone video from some small group making violent statements. These are high-ranking politicians, mainstream journalists, and A-list stars making these comments.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the assessment that many of the violent in political groups are simply sociopaths looking for their best gig rather than true believers. I've written on it a few times, at least. I have also long claimed that the tacit encouragement of violence, which he aptly calls "permission slips" has been a feature of the left for decades. I don't think it has ever gone away since the 1960s, but it has had ebbs and flows and does seem to be especially intense at present.
I agree. No one in power or influence is winking at right-wing violence, even if the occasional private nobody is. Even someone like Rittenhouse, who's on video defending himself, is scrutinized and threatened with immediate and overwhelming prosecution as if he were a one-man crime wave and ethnic cleanser. If President Trump says there are good people in Charlotte even among the crowd who opposed tearing down Confederate statues, and explicitly says, "I don't mean the white supremacists, there's no excuse for them," the press treats it as though he were giving a political permission slip for Nazi youth, but Nancy Pelosi's or Kamala Harris's or Maxine Waters's or Andrew Cuomo's explicit incitements to unrest and violence are treated as if they were harmless paeans to the First Amendment.
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying that throughout history it's been the left giving out the slips. I won't forget the example of Weimar Germany as long as I live. But the pendulum swing in modern USA clearly is that the left is handing them out, and the right is constraining itself.
I remember feeling uneasy when Bush supporters stormed the vote-counting committee in Florida in 2000. On the one hand, I was tired of the corruption beyond locked doors, but on the other I thought "Am I encouraging mob violence?" But they weren't violent. What we're looking at now is violence. The Bush supporters didn't burn things down or sneak up behind people on the street and knock them out with a brick or shoot them dead. The police aren't being caught on video randomly executing people in the street; they're on video dealing with people who are resisting arrest. I reject the sloppy moral equivalence.
I'll contend that the current situation is exacerbated by the increasing legalization and use (and increasing strength) of Marijuana.
ReplyDeleteThere's a really good piece in Imprimis by Alex Berenson called "Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence" which outlines the ties between marijuana use and violent behavior.
Note how a couple of the epicenters are in the notoriously marijuana friendly cities of Seattle and Portland, and the way marijuana is promoted in Rap culture (Snoop Dog for instance).
If I were a foreign power like Russia, or China, I'd have been funding research into stronger strains or the plant, legalization efforts etc. as a way of destabilizing the country.