As the smoke clears in America, what kind of image greets a foreigner? Violence that makes international news nearly always has political worth. Anyone paying attention from abroad has got to see the similarity to sports team loyalties.
Fans who are on it, before grisliness online is taken down, can even resort to instant replay. The ubiquity of cameras has hyped up the game. What’s on a video gets exponentially more ink, blabber and outrage than any mere report can convey. One motion picture is worth millions of words. Much of the language is heartfelt, but, crass as it is to say, more of it is cashing in.
Mourning noises are expected etiquette, inaudibly though, you can almost hear the grief-casters thinking, ‘how does this work for us, how soon should waterworks cease and scorched Earth aggression begin?’
Restraint is generally the exception. Jumping the gun and pointing fingers before reliable facts are known has become the norm. That kind of haste stung in Jussie Smollett’s case. The newsmouths take no heed. They still squander what they see as opportunity, before any certainty arrives.
At the risk of taking sides myself, this needs saying: there are some differences between what are in fact ‘fan bases,’ however crude the term is right now, that should not go unnoted. Look at the coverage.
The newsy industry might tell us how misleading the visuals can be. Did anybody see the Kirkonians blocking traffic, torching town or making off with cases of the good stuff after the murder? If only Charlie had been resisting arrest at the time, riotousness could be fully condoned and justified.
Kirk’s murder has placed a recurring debate point upfront again. We keep rehearing the ongoing score. Partisan political violence is like golf – the lower for your side the better. Stats cited by Mehdi Hasan, The Washington Post, Dan Goldman and numerous others find the left wing consistently under par on the ideologically motivated homicide course.
Comparative figures blasted daily in podcasts have placed 333 out of 444 so-called “terrorist” killings between 2013 and 2022 at the feet of the “right wing.” The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report gives 179,301 as the number of murders over that period. 333 comes to 0.185721%, or about 1/500th, of the total. Dividing by 444 would not move things left of the decimal point. This leaves a susceptible observer with the, supposedly qualified, conclusion that nearly 179,000 murders can safely be ruled out as ideologically inspired.
Where then, would closer examination of individual cases take us? Presumably Dylan Roof and Peyton Gendron’s slaughters are counted among that 333. What about slayings like Iryna Zarutska’s? Does Decarlos Brown muttering about “white people” have any bearing? Does even asking this question in numerous instances of crime evoke “racist” hackles? The mere fact of ruling the demographics of crime, and criminal motivation, morally out of bounds gives rise to monsters like Roof, Gendron, Brown and many others in the first place. It gets worse. When the race of criminal and victim differ, why are editorial principles flexible? Media managers who stoop to switching standards must think they’ve speciated from lowly consumers. Marks that don’t fall for the con can be conveniently labeled “racist.”
A classic example of giving certain victims precedence over others occurred when Andrew Lester shot Ralph Yarl for ringing his door bell. A week later, Robert Singletary shot 6-year-old Kinsley White and her father William – one bullet grazing the mother – after a basket ball rolled into Singletary’s yard. The Washington Post had 3 front page stories – all mentioning race of the shooter in the headline – on Lester’s crime. Another opinion piece that Sunday did the same. A single page 2 story brought up Singletary’s act. The word “White” only came up because of the victims’ surnames. In the middle of that article both Yarl and Trayvon Martin got mention.
Is anyone naïve enough to believe these kinds of editorial priorities play no part in cranking up violent cranks? If whiteness is overwhelmingly prone to reach description in criminal narratives only when a Caucasoid does it, where does that leave the default? Have we reached a place where noticing that descriptive disparity can be characterized as “racist” in itself?
Around 75,000 murders between 2013 and 22, went unsolved. How reliable can the number 333 be in our understanding of a culprit’s “wing” in the clutter of unknowns about teeming criminal carnage? The subjectivity in judicial findings of “terror” came up again in a ruling on the Luigi Mangione case. New York Judge Gregory Carro found insufficient evidence of a motive to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government unit” as prescribed in statute. Should that have been left to a jury? Was similarly judicial fastidiousness applied in those 333 cases?
The reality is that journalistic, academic and political fads have been clouding precise and unbiased treatment of criminal behaviors for ages. Who takes it worse at trial and sentencing shifts with what’s in style at the moment. Laymen are expected to accept that present hot legal trends have finally got it right. People with any cool presence of mind know that human fates can swing wildly as emotions are stoked by polemicists with a mic. A potential upside of that is that anyone fearing punishment should be warier than ever about attacking others in a fickle human environment. The downside is that people inclined to act irrationally can be motivated witnessing literary, academic and legalistic absurdity.
I can no longer count how often claims that Tyler Robinson had “no known motive” have surfaced in both podcast and written media. What spurred the killer is as clear as what did it for James Earl Ray. The one’s making political hay out of Kirk’s tragic death search desperately for a “Raoul.” The axe-grinding industry’s greatest conflagrations are kindled with innuendo of a nefarious plot. Tragic events provide opportunity … to proclaim “they” were all in on it. Guilt, spewed out with a manure spreader, can gather a lot of political momentum.
Herschel Grynszpan killed Ernst vom Rath, but did no harm to Nazis plotting Kristallnacht. Victims of that pogrom might ask whose side Hersh thought he was on? There’s little telling where gratuitous violence may lead. Kirk’s demise has given Mehdi Hasan a new reason to bring up January 6, 2021 and half that magic number 666. Meanwhile, Marc Thiessen’s Washington Post column is titled “Yes, the left has a political violence problem.” In that article polling, which can be as lacking in precision as the “333,” has the “woke” coming off as the trigger happiest on the spectrum.
Anytime violence is prima facie political, reactions fall into place with eerie neatness. Ooh, how it hurt the grievance movement when Jussie Smollett got caught. And, golly gee, how others prayed that Jan 6 was an FBI false flag. Likewise, summer 2020 some still swear, was really the work of Proud Boys and allies. And, has Trump ever backed off his unsupportable claim that immigrants are rapey animals from Gehenna? Goebbels’ Sender Gleiwitz PR has become the inspiration for 21st century American factional exploitation. You might wonder if the diehards of either “side” find all bad news good.
Articles and books like “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, have often been criticized as hitting wide of the mark. It’s a strange comfort to some Americans to find the slander true. They’ll stick by the facts they like to believe. Others prefer that crossing into city limits is risking life and limb across the country – and refuse to accept stats on crime rates dropping. It’s hard for anyone gazing intently, not to see a desire by political sectarians for their opponents to be lynchers or cutthtroats. The crimes they pretend to abhor are TD bombs in the perpetual Super Bowl of political capital.
What might improve things is unequivocally literal description and properly weighted editorial allotment of copy. Criminal violence has the same consequences for the victim whatever his attacker was thinking. It often looks like the purportedly aggrieved, when violence happens against one of their own, were thinking “now we’ve got ‘em, run out the clock.” Placing coverage in order to “get” some faction or demographic is propaganda whatever the ideological motivation. Words aren’t violence but putting them in where they don’t belong, or subtracting them where they do, certainly fuels unwelcome outcomes.
If understanding what reality is is your goal you’ll always find yourself in the same place: wanting to know. If you already know you can find out nothing. Fans in the spectator sport of ideological carnage already know. “They” are out to get us and soon it’ll go so far we have to strike back. The chance that mediacrats will ever wise up to this reality doesn’t look good. They can find no hope in the proles.
