This week in circular firing squads

The revolution is coming, but only after we punish comrades who didn't use the correct pronouns.

I am no fan of right-wing nor left-wing radicals, but I find myself sounding the alarm about the far right much more frequently. This is for two reasons:

1. The extreme right has taken control of one of America’s major political parties, to the point of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 elections, and has been responsible for much more violence in recent years than left-wingers.

2. Lefties are too busy fighting among themselves to do any real damage.

There’s a reason Canada has two Communist parties, which together garnered a whopping 9,232 votes combined out of over 17 million case in the 2021 federal election. The Wikipedia pages for political parties in the United States and Britain, meanwhile, list several dozen extreme-left parties, each of which might have just enough members to fill a school bus.

Lefties and internal schisms. Name a more iconic duo.

Two very amusing stories illustrating this phenomenon recently made it into my inbox. First, Bari Weiss’ sister attended a meeting of (overwhelmingly white) Brooklynites trying to organize a neighborhood watch group following a recent crime spree, and even if Tom Wolfe and P.J. O’Rourke were still with us, they couldn’t have scripted it better:

‘Crime Is a Construct' : My Morning With the Park Slope Panthers

The Venn diagram for Park Slopers and Democratic voters is pretty much a circle. No one wanted to be labeled Park Karens. This made the whole crime-fighting thing a bit awkward: “It’s about finding a way that’s non-biased to report these things and have people feel like it’s safe here,” said Emily, one of the Panthers.“You don’t want to fall into that stereotype of privilege.” 

A group of four who looked to be in their early twenties—three women and one man—rolled up about 15 minutes into the meeting. “Are y’all the Park Slope Panthers?” The one who asked was dragging a speaker on wheels and playing electronic music, presumably to drown out the meeting. “We are super not into you guys having your meeting or doing anything in the park.” 

The young activist—who was white, wore glasses, grew up in Park Slope, and had a medical-grade face on, like his three comrades—was also super not into the cops, or anything resembling the cops. When Nammack told him we were taking turns introducing ourselves, the activist informed Nammack that he “wasn’t super into abiding by the structure that you’re setting up.”  

Nammack asked them to just move along. When the glasses kid replied, “Yeah, we’re not going to do that,” Nammack invited them to sit, prompting the group of Conscientious Interrupters to decamp to a nearby tree to game plan. The park was filling. There were barbecues and birthday parties underway. Eventually the young activists decided to join the circle.

“What’s with you calling yourself the Panthers?” said another dude who had just appeared wearing a black hoodie and looking to be in his forties. He seemed more of a weathered activist, a bit more hardcore than the kids, and he didn’t want to wait his turn. He said his piece, followed by another newcomer named Damien, who wanted to join the group rather than protest it.

[…]

But what should they reasonably do about the man who had killed Moose? He’d reportedly been spotted swinging a stick on Flatbush Avenue, chasing down another woman and her dog in the park while screaming, “Let’s see some action here!” The kid with the speaker spoke up: “So, it sounds like this person has been pushed out of an unimaginable amount of systems.” He added that the assailant was probably “neurodivergent.”

“Crime is an abstract term that means nothing in a lot of ways,” said Sky. “The construct of crime has been so socially constructed to target black and poor people.” 

“Right, yeah, I agree with you!” countered one of the older folks, who seemed confused.  

Damien—the one black guy here, who had emigrated to Park Slope from Trinidad and Tobago—chimed in. “Just to levelset the room, we’re not here to cause harm or be vigilantes to anyone. Maybe we could work together to find a solution, because I don’t fucking know what the solution is, but we all want the same thing.” Do we? 

A woman in a blue jumpsuit approached the group, pulling her gray hood over her blue cap that read “ACAB” (as in, “All Cops Are Bastards”) in big white block letters. Her name was Cece. 

She suggested we could build a community where we all took care of each other and no one ever had to call the police. Someone else said, “I get angry and lash out at people when I’m hungry and haven’t slept well and people are being mean to me all day.” Another observed, “I’ve never killed a dog, but we’ve all hurt people.” 

Reminds me of the old joke about two liberals who come across a guy beaten nearly to death, lying in a gutter, begging for help. They walk past him and say, “man, the guy who did that to him really needs help.”

Meanwhile, here in Canada a major political party is tearing itself apart after its interim leader was assigned the wrong pronouns in a caption on a Zoom call.

…which is what I’d say if the Green Party was a major political party and not a fringe group that manages to get into Parliament on the strength of a couple of seats on Vancouver Island, but in 2021 won fewer than half as many votes as the far-right conspiracy kook party.