My conclusion that Baton Rouge gunman Gavin Long was “both racist and insane” drew some criticism from commenters who said that such a judgment “plays into the Left’s hands and provides it with deniability.”
So what? What we hate about the Left is how they politicize everything. We should not imitate them by politicizing everything in reverse.
Besides which, I am a well-known expert in craziness. I’ve been studying kooks for years, and when I say somebody’s crazy? Trust me.
Gavin Eugene Long was deranged, daft, demented, cracked, zany, wacko, bonkers, off his rocker and a few fries short of a Happy Meal:
The suspect in the fatal shooting of three Baton Rouge cops maintained a robust social media presence and a website called Convos With Cosmo in which he describes himself as a “freedom strategist, mental game coach, nutritionist, author and spiritual advisor.” . . .
Long officially filed paperwork in Jackson County, Missouri, last year declaring himself Cosmo Ausar Setepenra, a “sovereign citizen” of the United Washitaw De Dugdahmoundyah Mu’ur nation, a loosely affiliated network of mostly African Americans who claim to be Native American and don’t believe the U.S. government has jurisdiction over them.
(Via Memeorandum.) More from the Kansas City Star:
Online the shooter called himself Cosmo Setepenra, and more than a week before he killed three police officers Sunday in Baton Rouge, La., he told a YouTube audience he didn’t want to be associated with organized groups in case anything happened to him.
“I’m affiliated with the spirit of justice: nothing else, nothing more, nothing less,” he said in the clip.
Cosmo Setepenra’s real name was Gavin Eugene Long, and he was from Kansas City. . . .
He was a military veteran without a criminal record. He had a robust online presence, where in “Convos with Cosmo” he doled out everything from health tips to advice to help men reach “complete and full masculinity.”
He took up anti-government views, and while he said he didn’t want to be affiliated with any organized groups, he was a member of a bizarre offshoot of the sovereign citizen movement and had been associated with the Nation of Islam. He saw police as part of the government and was outraged by the recent spate of police shootings of black men.
Followers of the sovereign citizen movement believe the government is corrupt and has no jurisdiction over them. Federal authorities consider the movement a domestic terrorist threat, and the movement continues to swell, with violent incidents erupting regularly.
Gavin Long’s bizarre Afrocentric cult mentality is neither new nor uncommon. Here is a 2004 Associated Press story about one such cult:
EATONTON, Ga. — Pyramids, obelisks and a lonely sphinx stand deserted on the Egyptian-themed compound where as many as 500 members of a quasi-religious sect lived only five years ago.
The United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors has gone quiet since its leader, Malachi York, was sentenced to 135 years in federal prison in April for molesting 14 boys and girls whose parents were members of his group.
The federal government has seized the Nuwaubians’ 476-acre farm in this middle Georgia town and the group’s members have dispersed.
“York was it. Everything flowed from York. There was never any mistake about that,” said Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills, who has clashed with the Nuwaubians since York moved his followers from New York City’s Brooklyn borough to this rural county in 1993.
“He was the absolute ruler. There was no one else,” Sill said.
At their height, the Nuwaubians brought 5,000 people to Eatonton for Savior’s Day to celebrate York’s birthday.
In 1999, as many as 500 people lived on the compound, practicing York’s malleable religion that shifted from Islamic roots to Judaism, Christianity and Egyptian mysticism, with members at times dressing as cowboys and American Indians. At one time, York even incorporated space aliens into his teachings, claiming that he was an extraterrestrial from the planet “Rizq.”
This kind of kook cult conspiracy stuff is always floating around out there. You’ve got white people who are into weird pagan sex cults, feminists who are into astrology, tarot, “goddess spirituality,” et cetera.
Was it entirely coincidental that a crazy kook cultist like Gavin Long was inspired to drive to Louisiana and shoot cops? No, because the “Black Lives Matter” movement appeals to the same kind of Afrocentric racial insanity that led Gavin long to rename himself “Cosmo Setepenra.”
This is the problem with media coverage that deliberately feeds into racial paranoia in the black community, as I explained last week:
CNN has a long history of going into round-the-clock coverage mode for stories like the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida and the subsequent trial of George Zimmerman, which fit into a certain social-justice narrative of racial victimhood. CNN devoted many hours of coverage to the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, that gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement. When the Ferguson protests turned into riots, however, nobody at CNN seemed to wonder what part their coverage had played in inciting the racial resentments behind the chaos of looting and arson. Going back as far as the 1991 Rodney King arrest and the deadly 1992 Los Angeles riots that ensued, CNN’s coverage of race and crime has been problematic, and the network’s apparent willingness to act as a publicity agency for Black Lives Matter is part of a troubling pattern.
CNN and other media act like a warped mirror, reflecting back to the audience a distorted view of the world, a sort of alternative reality, and some people are unable to cope with the cognitive dissonance this creates. TV shows us a world full of rich people, important people and famous people, whereas the vast majority of viewers are poor, insignificant and obscure, at least in comparison to the people they see on TV. There is a seemingly unbridgeable gap between TV life and real life. A dangerous kind of craziness takes hold when an obscure loser becomes obsessed by the idea that they can Be Somebody — that is to say, they can become one of the Important People on TV — by committing a spectacular act of violence. Whether it’s Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris perpetrating the Columbine Massacre or Gavin Long shooting cops in Baton Rouge, the deranged mental process involved is essentially the same.
Are there political lessons to be learned from this? Yes.
Can “Black Lives Matter” be blamed for the murders in Baton Rouge? Yes.
However, the really important lesson here is about the intersection between mental illness, politics, and life in a world where the shows on TV seem more “real” to some people than their own actual lives. And guess what? A lot of the “news” on TV is staged with the audience in mind. What is a modern political convention except a big TV show? And what’s the point of “Black Lives Matters” protests? To get on TV.
Turn off your TV! Your TV is making you crazy!
Trust me on this, brothers and sisters, because I’m a “freedom strategist, mental game coach, nutritionist, author and spiritual advisor.”
Crazy? It’s 2016 — the whole world has gone crazy.
It’s OK to be crazy. Just don’t be the dangerous kind of crazy.
