Take the unhinged people seriously
When people say they're going to act violently, we should assume they'll follow through.
Years ago, in the old blogosphere days, I remember reading about a book of speeches by an aspiring Austrian landscape artist in which he set forth his plans for Europe. Genocide was involved.
The lesson was that, when people talk incessantly about doing something really, really bad, you should assume they’re actually going to do it should the opportunity arise. As we learn more about New York City subway shooter (and bomber?) Frank James, we see that he was planning a rampage in plain sight:
The prime suspect in one of the worst mass shootings in New York City history ranted about violence, race, and politics for years over YouTube.
Frank James, 62, posted angsty, straight-to-camera diatribes under multiple YouTube channels, including prophetoftruth88, in which he sometimes referred to himself as the “prophet of doom.” He glorified violence, criticized Black culture, rambled about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, held forth on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and declared that global warming means the world’s population “has to be reduced.” He said that thinking about desk-workers dying in the 9/11 terror attacks brought him joy.
[…]
Online, James had long appeared to be focused on violence.
In a video from April 5, titled “Sensible Violence,” he put together a montage of more than 20 minutes of news clips on recent shootings around the country, including a mass shooting in Sacramento that left six dead.
“They’re saying that’s senseless violence,” he said. “Well, I’m saying, no, it’s not senseless violence, it’s violence that fucking makes sense if you think about it…. It’s not a fucking mystery.”
[…]
Many of his online diatribes also revealed a torrid relationship with women.
In one video posted to Facebook in 2020, he claimed that he was once “addicted” to patronizing New York sex workers in the early 1980s, which had ruined his ability to have normal sexual relationships with women.
In a more recent video on YouTube, titled “Forced Equality”, he obsessed over new Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s marriage to a white man. In another, he railed about a white woman whom he appeared to know personally. “I would kill you, but it’s not worth the time in jail,” he said. “Killing you would be like killing a cockroach. You’re not even a human being to me.”
No prizes for guessing which ethnic/religious group James thought was really pulling the strings, of course:
Thankfully, James turned out to be a spectacularly incompetent terrorist, and no one was killed during his rampage. (Either that, or considering that he actually called the police tip line on himself, he was holding back somewhat or trying to make some kind of “statement.” Like most people who fall under the spell of extremist ideology and try killing people as a result, James apparently had some very serious underlying mental health concerns.)
James’ subway attack is the latest in a string of shootings and massacres carried out by people who espoused Black-nationalist rhetoric, including the Waukesha parade attacker last November. Conventional wisdom has it that white supremacists are America’s largest security threat, and, well, that’s correct. Having a major American political party under your thumb is a powerful weapon. But even a smaller extremist threat is still a threat.
Which brings me to the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the side that insists it’s fighting “Nazis” is engaging in some serious projection:
After a month of fighting, the architects of Moscow’s war against Ukraine had to explain to Russians why Kyiv had not fallen. That’s when the most menacing rhetoric began.
On state television, a military analyst doubled down on Russia’s need to win and called for concentration camps for Ukrainians opposed to the invasion.
Two days later, the head of the defense committee in the lower house of parliament said it would take 30 to 40 years to “reeducate” Ukrainians.
And on a talk show, the editor in chief of the English-language television news network RT described Ukrainians’ determination to defend their country as “collective insanity.”
“It’s no accident we call them Nazis,” said Margarita Simonyan, who also heads the Kremlin-backed media group that operates the Sputnik and RIA Novosti news agencies. “What makes you a Nazi is your bestial nature, your bestial hatred and your bestial willingness to tear out the eyes of children on the basis of nationality.”
Russia’s astonishing shift toward genocidal speech has been swift and seamless. Moscow officials stepped up warnings that Russia was fighting for its survival. Pundits condemned peace talks and scorned troops’ withdrawal from Kyiv and surrounding areas.
The change of gears, signaling a brutal occupation, appeared deliberate and coordinated in a nation where detailed Kremlin orders on messaging are handed down regularly to state media.
Eugene Finkel, an expert on genocide at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy, said the rhetoric isn’t just “a few crazy hard-liners” spouting off. It’s coming from prominent government officials, showing up in the press, being heard on state television — and is “clearly genocidal.”
“They’re talking about destroying Ukrainians as a group, Ukraine as a state and as an identity community,” Finkel said. “The argument is we are going to destroy this national community as it exists and create something new that we like instead, no matter how many people we kill in the process.”
None of this gets on RT or Rossiya24 without Putin wanting it there. Aside from the mass killings and destruction, he’s also allegedly orchestrating mass population transfers of Ukrainians.
Like James spouting off on YouTube, we should have taken Putin at his word when he started rehabilitating Josef Stalin.
Meanwhile, the Russian Navy’s flagship has been destroyed by a Ukrainian attack and/or their own incompetence. I’m starting to think Red Dawn was unrealistic not because a bunch of teenagers could hold off invading Russians for so long, but because they weren’t at the gates of Moscow by the end of the first week.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” - attributed to Eric Hoffer.
Many of the serious issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement haven’t gone away. As I write this, yet another questionable police shooting, this time in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is coming under scrutiny. It’s too bad so many of those who brought these concerns to public attention so decisively squandered their credibility.
Mind you, running a charity scam doesn’t mean Cullors won’t become President of the United States someday.