Media Synchronicity and Confederate Thoughts on an Era of Elite Corruption

Posted on | June 23, 2015 | 57 Comments

Confederate, Confederate, Confederate, Confederate — the word is all over the headlines today, which was nothing that would have seemed a logical consequence of Dylann Roof’s shooting spree last week in South Carolina. What has happened, we may surmise, is that some activists, politicians and journalists reached an unofficial consensus that this was one of those “Do Something” moments we see from time to time: “This terrible tragedy requires that we Do Something!”

You notice there is no obvious cause-and-effect connection between the triggering event (Roof’s mass murder in Charleston) and the media-orchestrated reaction (the demand to remove the Confederate flag from a monument at the state capitol). Dylann Roof’s Internet “manifesto” contained this paragraph:

The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?

“OMG! Google and Wikipedia inspired a hate crime!” said nobody.

What the media zoomed in on was “Council of Conservative Citizens,”and why? Because the media are partisan Democrats and the CCC can be linked to Republicans. “OMG! Republicans inspired a hate crime!”

It’s that simple, really. Andrew Breitbart used the phrase “Democrat-Media Complex” to describe this problem, wherein allegedly objective journalists operate as de facto partisan propagandists and decisions about news are actually decisions about politics.

This synchronization between the news media and the Democrat Party, which has been a problem for decades, became far worse in the 21st century, because (a) Democrats went into all-out panic mode during the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, and (b) George Soros and others funded the development of an interlocking series of “progressive” non-profit organizations, including Media Matters, to shift American politics leftward. Because nearly everyone in the major media is a partisan Democrat — honestly, what percentage of people employed by CNN or the New York Times have ever voted Republican? — the Bush era was a nightmare to them. In the minds of these “objective” journalists, they have a professional and moral obligation to make sure that no Republican is ever again elected President of the United States.

Of course, they don’t think about this in such direct terms, because they never actually have to think about it at all. In the newsroom at NBC or the Washington Post or any other “mainstream” news organization (where 90% of journalists always vote Democrat), this kind of bias is so ubiquitous that no one thinks of it as bias.

They don’t even think, really — their leftist reactions are an autonomous reflex, like blinking or respiration. Go ask them why they’re liberals, and they can’t really explain it. As a matter of fact, they may not even realize they are liberals, because in a room full of Bolsheviks or Maoists, the democratic socialist is a “moderate” of sorts, and America’s newsrooms are increasingly staffed by totalitarian fanatics.

This reality — that the major news media have become partisan organizations producing Democrat Party propaganda — is the necessary background to understanding both the Charleston massacre and the reaction to the massacre. Go read the entirety of Dylann Roof’s manifesto and notice that not once does he mention the Confederate flag. So the connection between Roof’s crimes and the Confederate flag is certainly not as clear-cut as the media would have you believe. However, notice something else: Why did Dylann Roof turn to the Council of Conservative Citizens for information about black-on-white crime?

Oh, he was watching media coverage of the Trayvon Martin story and became curious. And do you suppose that any major news organization — CNN, ABC, New York Times, Associated Press, etc. — has ever produced any in-depth examination of black-on-white crime in America? No.

Why not? Some questions are never answered because some questions are never asked, you see. It is possible to imagine how a responsible news organization could have produced a report about race and crime in America that would have turned up in the Google search that Dylann Roof did. It is possible that such a report might have directed Roof’s attention to authors like Thomas Sowell (The Quest for Cosmic Justice) and Shelby Steele (White Guilt) to seek an understanding of these issues in ways that don’t provoke irrational spasms of hatred.

There are many things we could imagine, including public schools that actually teach history and political science, but we can only imagine them because the political leadership of the Republican Party lacks imagination. The GOP is run by corrupt and selfish people whose only concern is to enhance their own power and prestige, and how to leverage their power and prestige to obtain cash.

Karl Rove cares about exactly one thing: “When do I get paid?”

That’s the real bottom line. Whereas the Democrat Party is run by people who actually share the same beliefs as the people who vote for the Democrat Party, the GOP is run by people who do not remotely give a fuck about GOP voters. Karl Rove hates Republican voters. All elite GOP operatives share a profound disdain for the party’s grassroots electoral base. Mitch McConnell? Isn’t it obvious how much he is ashamed of the people in Kentucky who elected him to the Senate?

The GOP is the Party of Money, and the guys who pay big money to control the Republican Party hire people like Karl Rove whose only concern is how to get paid more money. As a result, there is a very short-sighted concern with the day-to-day poll numbers and more or less trivial “message” items, so that there is no larger vision, no deeper interest in the problems affecting the lives of the American people, and then here you have a drug-addicted dropout like Dylann Roof who goes in search of background about the Trayvon Martin story and what he finds is a dangerous “racial awareness” rather than political enlightenment. Consider this line from Roof’s manifesto:

To take a saying from my favorite film, “Even if my life is worth less than a speck of dirt, I want to use it for the good of society.”

According to Mother Jones magazine, this is “a reference to the 2011 ultra-violent Japanese crime drama, Himizu“:

The movie, adapted from a popular manga by director Sion Sono, is set in tsunami-hit Japan in 2011, and follows the story of two teenagers — unloved, unwanted — struggling to survive amid the chaos wrought by the earthquake, and corruption. It’s a twisted and dark coming-of-age story (at some points a romance) . . .

How strange that a young white man in South Carolina should find inspiration for mass murder from such a source, when he might otherwise have been directed to a far more appropriate source.

“The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”

So wrote Gen. Robert E. Lee in a September 1870 letter to his former staffer, Lt. Col. Charles Marshall. When we consider how many reasons Lee might have had to despair, and see that he instead sought to encourage hope, how can anyone who would claim inspiration from the general’s honorable example permit himself to lose hope? Bishop A.M. Randolph once observed of Lee:

“As a thinker and a man of intellectual powers little has been said of him, and, yet, intellectual power, associated with moral purity, are the true springs of greatness. General Lee was a thinker of broad sympathies, deep insight, and of philosophical grasp, which would have made him, had his vocation called him to the field of literature, one of the wisest writers of his time.”

Those “broad sympathies” certainly had no resonance in the depraved mind of Dylann Roof, who quite likely never knew anything of the “intellectual power” and “moral purity” of Lee. What we now behold is an entire generation of young Americans — North and South, white and black — who have been deprived of a legacy to which they are rightful heirs. They have been systematically cheated of their patrimony by a process of corruption that has affected every aspect of our culture.

Our schools teach nothing of value, the news media is full of shallow propaganda, and the popular entertainment produced by Hollywood is a sewer of immorality. Nowhere can the troubled youth find inspiration toward the kind of courageous patience, Christian faith and manly determination that Robert E. Lee exemplified.

Does anyone in the Republican Party understand this? I fear not, but as Stonewall Jackson said, “Never take counsel of your fears.”

Remain calm amid crisis. Heed not the voice of discouragement. News that Jeb Bush is leading Republican presidential polls for 2016 prompted Ace of Spades to mutter that he is “really running out of hope,” and who isn’t? Recent years have wrought so much destruction in our society and culture that many have lost both reason and faith. President Obama promised Hope and Change, but has instead produced a tsunami of hateful savagery, degenerate perversion and frantic insanity. Every day, the headlines bring us news of some bizarre outrage.

Miley Cyrus calls herself the “least judgmental person ever” and, in the next breath, calls Christians “insane motherf–kers.”
A woman employed at a prison falls in love with two convicted murderers and becomes involved in their jailbreak.
“Faced with a shortage of U.S. Navy ships, the Marine Corps is exploring a plan to deploy its forces aboard foreign vessels to ensure they can respond quickly to global crises around Europe and western Africa.”
An Ivy League professor explains how “everything I learned about the history of racism made me hate myself” for being white, so she decided “I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically.” Well, who can argue with a highly esteemed Ph.D. who has been awarded prestigious fellowships and grants for her valuable work in teaching other people’s children to hate white people as much as she hates herself?

The intellectual, cultural and political elite of American society are determined to destroy American society, and the influence of this decadent elite now pervades every institution of our culture. Certainly, any intelligent observer must be pessimistic about the future of a nation that has been cursed with such depraved and wicked “leaders.”

We must nevertheless resist the temptation to despair. We must each determine to do as much as we can to resist this onslaught of satanic perversity, to expose the cowardice and corruption of those dishonest Republican “leaders” who are paid by the party’s money men to assist Democrats in the destruction of our civilization. We live in a dark, disturbed and depressing age, yet we cannot take counsel of our fears, nor can we forget the history that teaches us to hope.

Rachel Dolezal Syndrome: In a culture where victimhood confers authority, people seek power through identities that qualify them as victims.

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 22, 2015

Did you ever notice that whenever the media insist we need a National Conversation about something, it always boils down to "vote Democrat"?

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 23, 2015

Chicago, population 2.7 million. South Carolina, population 4.8 million. Last week, 70 people were shot in Chicago. http://t.co/TG4hqnSLYn

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 23, 2015

Now if we could only get ALL HuffPo writers to make the same pledge. @DefendWallSt @instapundit https://t.co/l8A6lNFYZk

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 23, 2015

Of course, the whole country's "unbelievably effed up" nowadays. @HeyTammyBruce @ProudoftheUSA https://t.co/6j13gezrC2

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 23, 2015

pic.twitter.com/o8OAjGHOjh

— tracker570 (@tracker570) June 23, 2015

Gonna tell my kids, "You're welcome." And when they ask for what, I'll say, "White privilege."

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 23, 2015

If you ever begin to weaken, pray to God for more strength.

If you ever begin to fear, pray to God for more courage.

Category: Culture, History, Intellectuals, Media Bias, Racism

In The Mailbox: 06.22.15

Posted on | June 22, 2015 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Say No To Getting Boned By Boehner
Michelle Malkin: The Creepy Consequences Of Oppression Chic
Twitchy: :”They Sure Love Revisionist History” – White House Continues To Deny Jonathan Gruber Was Very Involved In O-Care

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Democrat Governor Fritz Hollings First Raised Confederate Flag Over South Carolina Statehouse In 1961
American Thinker: Evaluating The Left’s Madness On Gun Control
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – The President’s Shadow By Brad Meltzer
Conservatives4Palin: Hilarious! Susan Rice Lists Mrs. Clinton’s Top “Accomplishments” At State
Don Surber: Yes, I Went There
Jammie Wearing Fools: Media Matters Moron Says “Actually, Confederates Are Worse Than Nazis. At Least The Nazis Didn’t Take Up Arms Against Their Own Country.”
Joe For America: SPLC Targets American Women In Hit List
JustOneMinute: The Silence Of The Dogs
Pamela Geller: An Inside Account Of Obama’s Jihad Against The Jews
Protein Wisdom: Los Angeles’ $15/Hour Minimum Wage Will Have “Little Effect On Poverty”? You Don’t Say!
Shot In The Dark: They Don’t Give You Any Choice, ‘Cuz They Say That It’s Treason
STUMP: Chicago Bonds Watch – There’s One Born Every Minute
The Gateway Pundit: Iranian Parliament Chants “Death To America”, Votes To Ban Nuke Inspections
The Jawa Report: South Carolina Shooter’s Manifesto Says Jews To Blame For Race War
The Lonely Conservative: Oh Great, Now The EPA Wants More Regulations On Truckers
This Ain’t Hell: Marine SPECOPS Troops Are Raiders Once Again
Weasel Zippers: Wait Lists For Veterans Seeking Healthcare Reportedly Even Longer Than Last Year
Megan McArdle: Prepare For Life After The National Raisin Reserve
Mark Steyn: Dads, On-Screen, On-Stage, And Off

I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Category: Linkagery

Rule 5 Sunday: Pipe Dreams

Posted on | June 21, 2015 | 19 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Background music for this week’s edition of Rule 5 Sunday is provided by “Pipe Dreams”, a weekly radio show hosted by Michael Barone and devoted to the music of the pipe organ. This week’s appetizer is provided by Canadian organist Maxine Thevenot, who I found after sorting through quite a few images of women playing on another type of (extremely NSFW) organ completely. Speaking of which, since some of the following links are to NSFW images, exercise discretion in your clicking.

Just after her German debut in 2009 on the 1611 Compenius organ in Niederdodleben.

Goodstuff leads off this week with Valerie Perrine, followed by Animal Magnetism with Rule 5 Friday and a Saturday Asian Invasion while he ginger stocks replenish. We also heard from First Street Journal, who has Jewish Girls with Guns.

EBL’s herd of heifers this week includes Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, Christopher Lee with his wife and female co-stars, Postmodern Jukebox “Creep”, Waterloo’s 200th anniversary*, MSNBC Transtastic, and Ariana Savalas.

American Power chips in with Leonna Mayor (world’s sexiest jockey), Kate Hudson, Charlotte McKinney, Erin Heatherton, and Samantha Hoopes.

A View from the Beach hit the mother lode this week with Peace of the Orchard – Paz de la Huerta, World’s Worst Frisbee Game, Confirmed: Kennewick Man Was an Ancient Indian, World’s Worst Frisbee Game, The Ultimate Slo-Mo Video, Barely News, Weird Science: Is Arthritis Caused by Sunspots?, Virginia Downplays Shark Menace, “Stay”, Chefs Fight Over Sustainable Fishing, She Never Called Him by Name, What Lovely Black Tresses . . ., Whatever She’s Doing, It’s Working, Kurdish Pop Star Risks it All, and Paleontologists Pan Jurassic World (has cave girl content).

At Soylent Siberia, your coffee creamer comes in French Roast this week, followed by Vacant House Party, Monday Motivationer Penthouse View, Evening Awesome Bayou Babe, Tuesday Titillation Standing Ovation, Got Snooch?, Humpday Hawtness Bare Trees, Happy Hour Hawtness, Falconsword Fursday Leg Warmer, Fursday Night Natural, Corset Friday Filaments, T-GIF Friday Future’s So Bright, Soylent Favorite Britany, Weekender Red Rider, and Bath Night Beauty.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Sienna Guillory, his Vintage Babe is Leticia Roman, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Calvin Klein. At Dustbury, the late Monica Lewis and Bai Ling.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next week’s celebration of the female form is midnight on Saturday, June 27.

*You didn’t realize ABBA had been around that long, did you?

Maxine Thevenot Plays Hellmuth Wolff Organ
Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop

Category: Rule 5

Oppressive Biology

Posted on | June 21, 2015 | 77 Comments

Feminist Tumblr attracts strange people with strange ideas, which they feel compelled to share with the world. Megan is 20 years old and her Tumblr profile begins by telling your her Myers Briggs personality type: INTP — introversion, intuition, thinking, perceiving. Why do so many Tumblr feminists list their Myers Briggs type? I don’t know. It’s a thing.

Here’s another thing: You have to specify exactly what kind of feminist you are, describe your quirky traits and/or mental disorders, and also your sexuality. So we learn that Megan is an “Anti-porn and Anti-Capitalist Feminist . . . oblivious nerd girl, compulsive procrastinator, straight asexual.” Excuse me, straight asexual?

You almost wish these people would get their Tumblr profiles printed out as T-shirts, to warn away any sane person who might accidentally encounter them in real life. Fluorescent orange or yellow shirts with “TUMBLR FEMINIST” in large black letters on the back, with their Myers Brigg type, sexuality and other relevant information on the front. “INFJ, butch lesbian, intersectional feminist, eating disorders, chronic depression, blogs way too many Taylor Swift photos.”

This system would not only help Tumblr feminists find each other in the real world, but it would also help the rest of us avoid them. You’d be walking through the mall or riding the subway and see one of those T-shirts and know to keep your distance, so as not to have to deal with any of their unpredictable craziness. This system would be especially helpful to young single guys at college. “Oh, she’s a Tumblr Feminist. Better not speak to her or she’ll accuse me of misogynistic harassment.”

Anyway, what drew my attention to Megan’s blog was this:

“Hey, body, I have no interest in producing a child
now or ever, so it’s pretty sadistic of you to
put me through this every month. Thanks.”

Alas, the curse of having a reproductive system when you’re an asexual nerd girl feminist with “no interest” in reproduction!

Darwinian theorists must pause to wonder how it is that evolution could produce so many human beings who lack normal instincts, so that it is all but guaranteed that they will leave behind no descendants. Fortunately, as a Christian, I can find the correct explanation in the Bible.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools . . .”

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Category: Sex Trouble

FMJRA 2.0: Avoiding EDC Edition

Posted on | June 20, 2015 | 8 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Feminist Tumblr: Still Crazy
Living In Anglo-America
Batshit Crazy News
Nice Deb
Viewpoints Of A Sagittarian
Noisy Room
Trevor Loudon
The Right Planet
Ask Marion
Independent Sentinel
Bookworm Room
Grumpy Opinions

Do You Wanna Rock-and-Roll?
Batshit Crazy News

FMJRA 2.0: Heat In The Street
The Pirate’s Cove
BlurBrain
Batshit Crazy News

The Hugo Packet: The Novels and Related Works
Batshit Crazy News

Here It Is: #ClintonJennerDolezal2016
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach

James Boulware Was Crazy
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
IOTW Report
A View from the Beach

Rule 5 Sunday: Showgirls and Other Attractions
Regular Right Guy
Animal Magnetism
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach

In The Mailbox: 06.15.15
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive

In Defense Of Rachel Dolezal…
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 06.16.15
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive

We Can Haz #PartyLikeIts1992?
Batshit Crazy News
The DaleyGator

In The Mailbox: 06.17.15
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

Dylann Roof: A Ninth-Grade Dropout Who Was Playing Too Many Video Games
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

Feminist @Clementine_Ford: ‘I Admit It. Really, I Hate Men. Now Give Me Money.’
Batshit Crazy News

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge
Batshit Crazy News
Jim-O-Rama
Regular Right Guy

Indecent Liberties: Police Say Teacher Showed Her Nude Selfies to Teen Girls

Posted on | June 20, 2015 | 47 Comments

Melissa Waters Kidd, 34.

Parents in Newport News were shocked last month when it was reported that a teacher at Woodside High School was under investigation:

A search warrant filed in the case indicated three students told police the 34-year-old teacher showed them before-and-after photos of her breast augmentation. The photos were on the teacher’s phone. One student said the teacher also shared photos of her genitals.
“To me that’s pornographic, it’s not okay. It’s not okay,” Woodside High School mom Angela Leslie said. “I hope it’s not true.”

The teacher, who had been put on administrative leave in March and resigned in April, was finally charged on Thursday:

former Woodside High School teacher was arrested and charged with three counts of taking indecent liberties with a child, according to a statement from the Newport News Police Department.
Melissa Waters Kidd, 34, of the 100 block of Raptor Boulevard in Hampton, was arrested June 18. She was placed in the custody of the Newport News City Jail.
The two female victims were 16 and 17 years old at the time the offenses occurred, according to the police.

(Hat-tip: Michael Ryan on Twitter.)

In England, meanwhile, a lesbian teacher at an elite school who had sex with one of her students did not even face criminal charges:

A games coach at a top boarding school has been banned from teaching after she had lesbian sex with one of her 15-year-old pupils at her parent’s house.
Lauren Chandler, 24, who was also a teacher and residential house tutor at the private £7,400-a-term Dover College, Kent, began the inappropriate relationship in October 2012.
The pair exchanged inappropriate and flirtatious messages and pictures referring to each other as ‘babe’ and ‘beautiful’ with repeated use of ‘heart’ symbols.
Chandler then invited the girl, referred to as Pupil A, to stay at her parents’ house over the half-term holiday, the National College for Teaching and Leadership heard.
A professional conduct panel found Chandler had slept with the girl and engaged in two-way sexual touching. . . .
“Criminal investigations did not proceed due to Pupil A’s refusal, with the support of her parents, to take matters further.”
But Chandler was banned Britain’s classrooms for life after the panel found her conduct was “sexually motivated”.
Department for Education official Paul Heathcote said: “Miss Chandler has abused her position of trust by causing her relationship with Pupil A to develop beyond proper professional boundaries.
“She has committed serious sexual misconduct with a child and her actions were both deliberate and repeated.
“She has not demonstrated any remorse or insight into her behaviour having not engaged with this process in any significant way.
“I agree with the panel’s recommendation that prohibition is an appropriate and proportionate sanction.”

(Hat-tip: Melvin Vines on Twitter.)

We cannot be permitted to consider the possibility that this is more than a random coincidence. https://t.co/pa8ryV9pKn @justturnright

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 17, 2015

COMPLETELY RANDOM COINCIDENCES:

It’s almost as if there’s a pattern here or something.

“Feminism means equality, and radical ideologues
aim to make women equally deviant,
equally perverse, equally abnormal, so that
women can equally molest young girls and boys.”

Few feminists have children of their own, because they hate children.

“I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding . . . time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. . . . I don’t want a baby. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . . This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 14, 2014

This is why feminists are obsessed with other people’s children. Will your children become casualties in their War Against Human Nature?

"Feminism teaches women that to be normal is to be inferior." — from SEX TROUBLE (p. 87) http://t.co/xg7oUWBwGi pic.twitter.com/GUwzFZO18f

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 22, 2015

Category: Crime, Education, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: Saturday Morning Edition

Posted on | June 20, 2015 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: If It Quacks Like A Duck – Hillary 2016
Doug Powers: Friday Idiocy Dump – Obama Claims EPA’s New Truck Emission Regs Will Make Shipping Things Totally Cheaper
Twitchy: The Next Catastrophic Effect Of Global Warming? Pleasant Temperatures And Increased Attendance At National Parks
A View from the Beach: They Say A Bad Day Fishing…

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Indira Esparza, Illegal Immigrant Student, Unfurls Mexican Flag At UC San Diego Graduation Ceremony
American Thinker: Has The Left Reached Its Jump The Shark Moment?
Conservatives4Palin: Why Exempt The Media From Campaign Finance Laws?
Don Surber: Shucks, No Preident Fauxcahontas
Jammie Wearing Fools: Military Clearance OPM Breach “Absolute Calamity”
Joe For America: Martin Dempsey, CJCS – Obama’s Boy To The Core
JustOneMinute: The Victims In Charleston, Remembered
Pamela Geller: UK Muslims Used Threats, Rape, Control And Violence To Force Women Into Sex Slavery
Protein Wisdom: I Am Lobo. I Hunt Alone.
Shot In The Dark: Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste
STUMP: Women And STEM Academia Fix – Be Professional
The Gateway Pundit: Mexico Deports More Central Americans Than The US – Obama Puts Them In Resorts And Pays For Their Zumba Classes
The Jawa Report: New $10 Bill Prototype
The Lonely Conservative: School Nutritionists Says New Regs Send Kids To Fast Food Joints For Lunch
This Ain’t Hell: Colonel David Hodne Bans Badges, Combat Patches
Weasel Zippers: Professional Race Agitators Including Deray McKesson Try To Claim Conspiracy In Charleston
Megan McArdle: It’s Not Just Another Data Breach. It’s Outrageous.
Mark Steyn: The Moronization Of The Republic

The Essential Hayek (Free!)

Category: Linkagery

Dylann Roof: A Ninth-Grade Dropout Who Was Playing Too Many Video Games

Posted on | June 19, 2015 | 130 Comments

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air says, “any argument starting off with ‘We don’t have all the facts’ is one that should probably remain unspoken.” That applies to bloggers as much as it does to the President of the United States, and yet it seems people want to score points off the Charleston massacre, rather than to discover why this actually happened.

The why will necessarily involve the who. Let’s understand that “hate” is not an amorphous thing floating around in the air. Hate must have a home in human minds, and so the particular human who pulled the trigger — Dylann Roof — should be the focus of our attention.

Not gun control. Not any other “issue” we may want to push.

Remember the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School? When that happened, I was working at The Washington Times and interviewed retired Army Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a former West Point psychology professor who is author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1995) and co-author of Stop Teaching Our Kids To Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence (1999). Col. Grossman is an internationally recognized expert on the psychology of killing and, in 1999, he pointed to the phenomenon of “first-person shooter” games as a known factor in the atrocity committed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. This wasn’t speculation. It was a matter of fact that the Columbine killers were aficionados of these games, and the predictable reaction whenever someone points to this factor is, “Yes, but lots of kids play those games and don’t become mass murderers.”

Exactly. But you realize the same argument — “X cannot be the decisive influence, because lots of people are exposed to X” — can be used against any “cultural” explanation of behavior. Charles Manson was a hippie guru whose cult followers did a lot of drugs, listened to Beatles records and committed mass murder, but most hippies who did drugs and listened to Beatles records were neither cult members nor mass murderers. So what lessons could we, as a society, have derived from the notorious “Helter Skelter” killings? Most people at the time recognized the Tate-Lobianca murders as conclusive proof that the whole 1960s peace-and-love tune-in-turn-on-drop-out mythology of hippie culture was a lie. Manson collected his followers from among the broken flotsam and jetsam of castoff kids and runaways who flooded into San Francisco during the late 1960s. It was the Law of Large Numbers, really. When millions of kids climbed aboard that kind of bandwagon — rejecting parental authority to pursue a lifestyle of drugs, sex and rock-and-roll — it was inevitable that very bad things would happen to some of them.

You see that the example of the Charles Manson cult is not one chosen at random in this case, because Manson’s “Helter Skelter” fantasy was to incite an apocalyptic race war in America, and Dylann Roof’s murders had the same motive. Also, Dylann Roof had a drug problem. For that matter, Dylann Roof even had a Beatle haircut. Whether or not he was listening to the White Album backwards, we don’t know.

Please excuse my habitual sarcasm, but if you’re following the liberal media coverage of the Charleston shootings, you keep seeing allegedly intelligent people making a few simple-minded connections that may not actually have much to do with Dylann Roof’s crimes. “It’s the guns! It’s the racism! This happened in South Carolina! OMG! They fly the Confederate flag there!” All of this is obviously true, but exactly how much of this is really relevant? There are about 3 million white people in South Carolina, many of whom are racists and gun owners, but they didn’t kill people in Charleston, nor do they condone hateful violence.

As always, the liberal biases of the media lead them into a hasty pell-mell rush to assign collective political blame for a high-profile crime, a bias that fosters false beliefs which in turn have the effect of psychologically disarming society. We cannot prevent crime if we don’t understand crime, and understanding crime requires us to focus on the individuals who commit crime. Yes, the hippie culture of the 1960s was dangerous. And yes, we may say that South Carolina is a particularly “racist” environment. However, most hippies were not mass murderers, nor are most South Carolinians, and the attempt to defame white people in South Carolina by assigning collective blame to them — which is what the liberal media are so obviously doing — is the exact opposite of what responsible journalism is about. Let’s focus on the criminal:

According to classmates, Roof is a frequent abuser of prescription drugs.
Court records from Lexington, [South] Carolina — where he has been living in a trailer park — reveal he was arrested twice this year on charges of trespassing and drug possession. . . .
Roof used to skateboard in a Lexington suburb in South Carolina when he was younger and had long hair then.
Childhood friend Joey Meek had seen him as recently as Tuesday, said Meek’s mother, Kimberly Konzny. . . .
‘I don’t know what was going through his head,’ Konzny said. ‘He was a really sweet kid. He was quiet. He only had a few friends.’Joey Meek alerted the FBI after he and his mother instantly recognized Roof in a surveillance camera image that was widely circulated after the shooting.
In the image, Roof had the same stained sweatshirt he wore while playing Xbox video games in their home recently, Konzny said. It was stained because he had worked at a landscaping and pest control business, she said.
Roof attended ninth grade at White Knoll High during the 2008-09 school year and went there for the first half of the following academic year, district spokeswoman Mary Beth Hill said. The school system gave no reason for Roof’s departure and said it had no record of him attending any other schools in the district.
According to CBS News, school records show that between fourth and ninth grade, Roof attended six different schools, and repeated the ninth grade.

He dropped out of school after ninth grade. His parents were divorced, and his father and stepmother also reportedly had divorced. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dylann’s father had been pressuring him to stop playing video games constantly, and to find steady employment. His grandfather is reportedly a lawyer. His father is a contractor. There are some very interesting clues in this Mother Jones story:

Ken Mathews, an attorney who has been representing Roof in an ongoing drug-possession case, was, he says, “very shocked” to hear about what Roof had allegedly done. He tells Mother Jones, “The dealings I had with him, he was just a normal kid.”
Mathews, a Columbia, South Carolina, attorney, notes that so far in the drug case he has had “very limited dealings” with Roof. He says he saw “nothing that would indicate that [Roof] would take this type of action.” . . .
Mathews has known the Roof family for years, dating back to a custody dispute between Dylann’s father Ben and mother Amy over visitation rights concerning Dylann. . . .

So his family life was disrupted, he was shuttled from one school to another from the time he was nine or 10 years old, he dropped out of school as a teenager, became a drug-addicted loser living in a trailer park, constantly playing video games and, also, Dylann Roof was a racist who sewed Rhodesian flag patches on his jacket and had a Confederate flag tag on his car. OK, then, compare and contrast Dylann Roof to Colin Ferguson, who killed 6 people and wounded 19 others in the 1993 Long Island railroad massacre. Colin Ferguson was a crazy black racist who hated white people:

Ferguson spoke out against coexistence with whites and routinely made calls for retributive revolution. Ferguson regularly accused others around him of racism. During one occasion, Ferguson complained that a white woman in the library shouted racial epithets at him after he asked her about a class assignment. An investigation concluded the incident never occurred. Later, Ferguson attended a symposium by a faculty member discussing her experiences in South Africa. Ferguson interrupted the professor by shouting, “We should be talking about the revolution in South Africa and how to get rid of the white people” and “Kill everybody white!” When students and teachers tried to quiet him, Ferguson started threatening them, repeatedly saying, “The black revolution will get you.”

Colin Ferguson was dangerously crazy, but there are so many crazy people running around loose in America — because you have a “right” to be crazy here — that whenever something like this happens, there is invariably a media narrative about “warning signs” that this particular crazy person was unusually crazy and somebody should have done something about it. The other common media narratives involve guns (because liberals hate guns) and culture (because liberals hate our culture). There seems to be an unwritten rule in liberal media that if a particular crime can be interpreted as indicting America as racist, sexist or homophobic, this crime must instantly become The Most Important News Story of the Week. Liberal journalists salivate like Pavlov’s dog at the prospect of a Matthew Shepard-type hate crime, which can become the topic of a National Conversation About [Whatever], even if details of the case ultimately don’t prove what liberals say the story proves.

Jared Loughner was supposed to be a deranged Tea Party supporter, but when it turned out he was a psychotic obsessed with the 9/11 Truther conspiracy video Zeitgeist, the liberal media immediately lost all interest in Loughner’s motive. If a killer turns out to be just a nutjob, his crime cannot be made the topic of a National Conversation, and if it turns out that the criminal’s background, identity or motive are quite the opposite of the desired liberal narrative, this is Just a Local News Story of no larger national consequence.

My cynical sarcasm about these stories is always intended to highlight the media bias involved, and I do not mean to make light of the actual event. There were about 14,000 murders committed in the United States in 2013, according to the Justice Department. That’s about 38 murders a day or 270 a week. Over the course of a year, the national media will take a sustained interest in a comparative handful of these crimes. Not all murders are created equal, according to the media, and so we find them picking and choosing cases as nationally significant according to criteria that are quite often clearly political. The Creepy Little Weirdo who committed the 2014 Isla Vista massacre in Santa Barbara was a misogynist who left behind a manifesto explaining his resentments against women, and so there was a National Conversation to be had, with feminists lecturing us about What This Means.

Well, here we go again, with an obvious hate crime, and so now the liberal media are going to subject us to lectures about racism, and we shall have a National Conversation which will not mention, for example, that 12 people were killed and 43 wounded in shootings in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend. And we can be almost certain that another dozen people will be killed in Chicago during the Fourth of July weekend coming up. There have been 175 people shot to death in Chicago so far this year, and nearly a thousand others wounded.

Today, June 19, is the 170th day of the year, and already 1,163 people have been shot (175 killed, 988 wounded) in Chicago this year, so by simple math we learn that in the previous 169 days of 2015, there were an average of 6.9 people shot daily in Chicago. That’s 48 shooting victims per week, of whom 7 were killed. Despite this astonishing level of deadly violence in Chicago, however, I can guarantee you that there are people today in Chicago who are watching CNN and shaking their heads about Dylann Root’s hate crime in South Carolina. And some of those people in Chicago (probably about 30 of them) are going to be shot to death in Chicago within the next month. Of course, not every murder in Chicago involves gunfire. People are killed by strangulation, blunt force trauma and other causes, so that there have been more than 200 homicides in Chicago so far this year, and it seems altogether likely that the total number of homicides Chicago this year will exceed 400.

Who is committing all those murders in Chicago? Maybe some crazy dopeheads who dropped out of high school. Just sayin’ . . .

DYLANN ROOF: High school dropout "turned into a loner in the last couple of years." http://t.co/YZKnG8DR5y pic.twitter.com/mzUXuguLnQ

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 18, 2015

DYLANN ROOF arrested TWICE in the past six months, banned from mall for security concerns. http://t.co/YZKnG8DR5y pic.twitter.com/GKgjeyzY9o

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 18, 2015

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Category: Crime, Media Bias, Racism, Terrorism

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