Grey Matter, Vol. 2: Weaponizing Victimhood
Pushing back on confirmation bias and reductive partisan narratives.
If You Lean Left
Primacy of Influence
That One Side Would Like to Utterly Destroy the Other Side Seems Significant, To Me (Freddie deBoer, 25 min.)
Keep in mind while reading the following that its author, Fredrik deBoer, is a self-avowed Marxist and has spent much of his adult life as an activist. These are not the words of some reactionary right-winger. It’s a critique of the left, from the left.
A movement of identity neoliberalism now effectively controls the idea-and-story generating power of our society, outside of explicitly conservative media which exists in a large silo but a silo all the same. On any given day the most powerful institutions in the world go to great lengths to mollify the social justice movement, to demonstrate fealty, to avoid its wrath. It’s common now for liberals to deny the influence and power of social justice politics, for inscrutable reasons, but if the current level of control over how people talk publicly is insufficient, I can’t imagine what would placate them.
Dozens of new unwritten rules have been established in the past couple years, along with severe consequences for breaking them. Debates are hemmed in by the fear of vindictive reprisals. The rules of the game tell us that some people have to mind their Ps and Qs while others get to engage angrily, vengefully, jokingly, and immaturely, as for some bizarre reason we have carved out a total exemption to basic rules of conduct in argument within left-of-center spaces for those who claim to speak from the standpoint of “the marginalized.”
The activist class just insists that they are the marginalized voice, and if you disagree, they try to ruin your life. Black Democrats have been perhaps the most conservative element of the party since the formation of the modern Democratic coalition, but this fact is inconvenient for those who both claim to speak ex cathedra when discussing racial justice and who hold policy positions far to the left of most Black Democrats.
The sense of danger is palpable. The wages of living under the constant fear of people who want to divest you of your job, your friends, your reputation, and your future, is that no one feels empowered to speak truth to bullshit.
Progressives weren’t nodding along to the videos of fires and riot police saying “yeah this is good, this is how we get justice.” They were watching people reacting to it all and saying “there is no fucking way I’m sticking my neck out on this.” They were in the rear with the gear, which is true of most people who carry water for the social justice movement - they enforce the social consensus due to fear, not zeal. And we have no idea how many conversations in progressive spaces are getting corrupted in this way, how many issues are distorted by so many participants self-censoring defensively.
Racial Bias: Data and Context
Do Data On Police Shootings Show Racial Bias? (Barry Latzer, City Journal, 6 min.)
The New York Times recently reported on a study published in the medical journal Lancet showing that the federal government’s database of lethal confrontations with police woefully undercounts fatalities. The study claims that there are more black homicides missed than white, and asserts that the undercount is due to a failure to acknowledge the police role in the death.
The claim is based on the rate of police killings of each racial and ethnic group, which are calculated by dividing the number of homicide victims for each group by the entire U. S. population of the group. Measured this way, the researchers found—and the Times emphasized—that “Black Americans were 3.5 times as likely to be killed by the police as white Americans were.”
This statistic may be valid, but it does not demonstrate systematic racism. The key question, then, is not how many whites, blacks, or Hispanics per 100,000 of each group were killed by police, but what percentage of each population group is likely to be involved in the circumstances leading to such a death.
One answer may be found in the arrest statistics for crimes of violence by group. The last full FBI crime report, for 2019, shows that the racial/ethnic proportions of people arrested for violent crimes, such as murder, rape, and aggravated assault, is nearly identical to the Lancet data on those who died in confrontations with police.
% White (not Hispanic)
49% killed by police
50% arrested for violent crime
% Black (not Hispanic)
31% killed by police
31% arrested for violent crime
% Hispanic (any race)
17% killed by police
19% arrested for violent crime
What is Critical Race Theory, Really? (Wilfred Reilly, City Journal, 8 min.)
The most common age for a black American, which could be fairly called the modal average, is 27; the most common age for a white American is 58. Simply adjusting for these differences in age (and thus work experience), and for a few other traits like the regions people live in and their scores on standard aptitude tests, closes black-white gaps in income to almost nothing. In fact, either seven or eight—depending on how you count South Africans—of the top ten income-earning groups in the United States these days are made up of “people of color.”
After years of flattering mainstream media coverage of Black Lives Matter, a large recent study revealed that the majority of “very liberal” Americans believes that in a typical year police kill anywhere from “about 1,000” to “more than 10,000” unarmed black men. Last year, the actual number of blacks killed in this manner was 18.
A serious look at the data on interracial crime and conflict reveals similar patterns. Major papers run nonstop stories about cruel whites or mobs attacking minorities. Meantime, figures from the U.S. National Crime Victimization Study reveal that only about 3 percent of all serious crimes in a normal year, like 2019, are violent crimes involving a white perpetrator and a black victim or a black perp and a white victim. Further, 70 percent to 90 percent of these incidents are generally black-on-white, rather than the reverse.
Facts matter, but so does context. For example, it is undeniably true that slavery once existed in the United States. However, it is also undeniably true that almost every other powerful nation in history held slaves as well.
A trans-African slave trade run largely by Muslim merchants lasted far longer than even the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and it subjected far more people (about 18 million) to human bondage. The same amoral traders didn’t hesitate to sell battle captives or shipwrecked sailors with pale skin: the conveniently forgotten Barbary slave trade shipped more than 1 million Caucasian slaves to Arab and black masters for centuries. Focusing lesson plans and curricula on the horrors of slavery without ever mentioning the universal nature of the practice or the fact that it was ended by Western countries is hardly “just being honest.”
Scapegoating Rape Victims
School Officials Covered Up His Daughter’s Rape. Now NSBA Wants to Make Him a ‘Domestic Terrorist’ (Becket Adams, Washington Examiner, 10 min.)
The daughter of Scott and Jess Smith alleges she was raped and beaten while in the Stone Bridge High School girl’s bathroom by a biological male dressed in a skirt. School administrators attempted to deal quietly with the matter in-house, and then school board members denied it even happened. During a heated exchange with a pro-transgender policy activist who accused him of fabricating the story of his daughter's rape, going so far as to question the girl's mental health, Smith was then bloodied and arrested, and the county’s normally lenient prosecutor threw the book at him. The Smith family then learned their daughter's rapist allegedly sexually assaulted a second girl. Now, the NSBA is using the Smith family's tragedy as justification for mobilizing the federal government against concerned parents.
If you want to radicalize someone, this is how you do it.
WaPo: Say, Have Any of You Heard About These Loudoun County School-Bathroom Rapes? (Ed Morrissey, Hot Air, 6 min.)
The Post never gets around to mentioning the cover-up. They quote the PIO of the law-enforcement agency explaining why they didn’t release more information on the assaults and investigation, but that’s not where the cover-up took place. The LCPS board wanted to enact free-access rules to bathrooms, and parents had safety concerns about boys accessing restrooms set aside for girls. It was only when the board insisted that there was no record of bathroom assaults that Scott Smith, the father of a girl who had been violently raped in a girl’s bathroom in an LCPS school, spoke up.
And what happened to Scott Smith? He got bullied at the meeting, got angry, and police arrested him. The school board painted Smith as some sort of domestic terrorist, the media reported the incident as such rather than ask even a few basic questions about what had happened, and even Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice made Smith into a poster child for right-wing radicalism. Only when Rosiak uncovered the truth about the LCPS cover-up of the rapes did the truth come out, and the Post article mentions exactly none of that context.
Joe Rogan Rips CNN’s Sanjay Gupta Over ‘Lies’ About ‘Horse Dewormer’ (Jonathan Davis, Conservative Brief, 5 min.)
The Democrats’ Hispanic Voter Problem: More Evidence From the 2020 Pew Validated Voter Survey (Ruy Teixeira, 8 min.)
In 2020, Joe Biden characterized Donald Trump as an unapologetic racist who particularly detested immigrants. This was supposed to have special appeal to Hispanics and juice their Democratic support.
But Hispanic voters went in the other direction, giving Trump substantially more support than they did in 2016. According to Catalist, in 2020 Latinos had a 16 point margin shift toward Trump.
Pew’s recent report on these data were consistent with Catalist national data on the size of the shift toward Trump. Now Pew has released the microdata from their survey allowing researchers to get more detail on Hispanics and other groups.
Did Democrats fundamentally misunderstand the nature of this voter group and what they really care about? Were Hispanics incorrectly assumed to embrace the activism around racial issues that dominated so much of the political scene in 2020?
Well over 70 percent of Hispanic voters rated jobs, the economy, health care and the coronavirus as issues that were “very important” to them. No other issues even came close to this level. Crime as an issue rated higher than immigration or racial equality.
If You Lean Right
The Hypocrisy of the Anti-vax Patriot (Julie Bowen, The Atlantic, 12 min.)
4,700 military medical personnel have deployed for COVID-relief purposes since March 2020. Another 5,100 have deployed to aid vaccination efforts. They are doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and administrative workers, and they’ve shown up at 81 hospitals in 60 cities, in 19 states and the Navajo Nation. Many of them have been sent far away as the coronavirus spirals out of control in areas with low vaccination rates. It’s hard to avoid the feeling that, by refusing to do something as simple as getting a shot, people are taking advantage of the military community’s altruism. Deployments to help people who have decided not to help themselves or their communities—and who simultaneously claim to be patriots—can leave many feeling conflicted.
“I don’t fully blame” unvaccinated people, Molly said, “because I think that there is so much misinformation out there.” Military doctors and their families “respond to the call when it comes.” And yet this time, her husband isn’t focused on protecting fellow soldiers or leading a charge into the great unknown. He’s being sent away from his family, his friends, and his own patients to aid a mission fueled in part by a blatant rejection of his expertise.
We Must Win the Gender War (Abigail Shrier, Washington Examiner, 15 min.)
Conservatives ought to show compassion for children with gender dysphoria while noting that activists are exploiting them to advance a cynical, dangerous agenda.
Conservatives’ chief asset is also their chief liability: They are willing to fight unpopular battles because they’ve never been popular.
In the battle against gender ideology, conservatives have already demonstrated both reluctance and ineptitude. Their tight-lipped unlikability serves as a trampoline, propelling the Left to even greater heights.
Conservatives do not think of themselves as defenders of “women’s rights” and adopt that mantle clumsily. Conservatives prefer to fight for faith and babies, and defending women sounds too much like supporting abortion. And so, conservatives trip over their own feet, rushing to make abortion and religious liberty the point of every argument, making themselves the punchline of every joke.
They ought to fight unhesitatingly for lesbians, a sexual minority that simply wants to raise stable families, and instead finds its spaces invaded by biological men who demand to be treated as women.
Our nation, so often maligned as a “patriarchy,” has for years invested in the development of female excellence and achievement. Conservatives ought not allow woke marauders to junk female achievement as if it were a Columbus statue.
Others may shirk the cause of female prisoners because they lack even a smidgen of political clout. Conservatives ought to take up their cause because allowing a male sex offender into a locked cell with a woman is as beastly and inhumane as the Left has for so long claimed.