Posted on August 31, 2023

The Cynicism of False Compassion

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, August 31, 2023

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It is dangerous to draw a sweeping conclusion from a single event, but our rulers do it all the time. A white man shot and killed three black people at a Dollar Store. President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their media allies immediately used the killings to push an agenda.

Much of the criticism was leveled at Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “Now is the time for all Americans to speak up,” said President Biden. “History is being erased, books are being banned.” This was a crude attempt to link the murders to Governor DeSantis’s campaign against critical race theory in schools.

The President wasn’t alone. Many media outlets attacked the governor, and he was booed at an event to show support for the victims. The AP published a news article whose URL initially read “apnews.com/article/jacksonville-desantis-racist-republican-shooting-haley-scott.” [Emphasis added.] When conservatives called attention to the slur, the AP changed the URL to “apnews.com/article/jacksonville-racist-shooting-desantis.”

The article quotes the NAACP, which suggested Governor DeSantis had fostored “open hostility towards African Americans and people of color.”

If the governor had avoided the event, he would be blamed for that instead. Do reporters — and more importantly the President — really believe Ron DeSantis inspired murder?

If not, their words are beneath contempt. If so, it’s worse, because it means even trying to talk about race is pointless. If Governor DeSantis, hardly a white nationalist, is an accomplice to murder, there’s no common ground.

We cannot rule out political repression. The Dylann Roof shootings in 2015 led to a wholesale purge of Confederate flags and dealt a crippling blow to the Council of Conservative Citizens. The shooting last year in Buffalo, New York, led to an ongoing campaign to call the “Great Replacement” a form of terrorist propaganda. Even the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand led to demands for more tech censorship in the United States. This time, the attempt to pin everything on Ron DeSantis might spare us from a larger effort to blame race realists, the Right, or all whites.

Black-on-white killings don’t lead to similar hysteria. Black attacks on police led the FBI to watch for “Black Identity Extremism,” but the media forced the FBI to back down. The black sniper attacks in the DC area, the Zebra Killings, the “Knoxville Horror,” and many other crimes are largely forgotten. A black man’s attempt to take revenge for Dylann Roof is practically unknown. When a black man ran down children and old people at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin’s senators, including Republican Ron Johnson, begged people not to politicize it. One could easily say that the almost overwhelming anti-white incitement by the government, media, and academia inevitably contributes to disproportionate black-on-white violence — but no Republican will say it. They try to stop anyone who would.

In theory, this might seem fair. In 2012, a shooter attacked the Family Research Council (FRC), a group he had learned about from the Southern Poverty Law Center. In response, the SPLC called attempts to tie it to the attack “outrageous” because doing so meant that “offering legitimate and fact-based criticism in a democratic society is tantamount to suggesting that the objects of criticism should be the targets of criminal violence.”

In 2017, a leftist attempted to massacre Republican congressmen, wounding Rep. Steve Scalise. Among the groups that the shooter “liked” on Facebook was the SPLC. The SPLC replied that it condemned all acts of violence. The SPLC is obviously right, but if it were consistent, it would stop screaming about “white nationalist terrorism.”

Making political arguments is not the same thing as terrorism, especially when you disavow violence. Yet our society now denies autonomy. Democracy is based on self-government and consent, but the current obsession with controlling information and preventing “radicalization” implies that people are automatons, swayed by whatever they hear. Nowadays, individuals aren’t considered responsible for murder or other bad things. If an attacker is white, he has been “radicalized” by far-right ideology; if he is black, “guns” are the problem. The solution is always more control. People are too stupid and dangerous to be trusted to read, watch, or listen to whatever they want but, for some reason, everyone must vote.

Certainly, race realists have nothing to gain from white-on-black terrorist attacks. The SPLC gained nothing from the attack on the Family Research Council. However, when the SPLC, the Anti-Defamation League, much of the media, and even the President himself use murder to repress political opponents, it’s understandable when conservatives try to play the same game.

Showing selective compassion makes it hard to be taken seriously. President Biden highlighted Jacksonville and put even more emphasis on Buffalo but ignored Waukesha. Even killings that shouldn’t be political become so. A multiracial country makes it impossible to have a united response. Hurricane Katrina practically ended George W. Bush’s second term, mostly because the press sold the idea that he didn’t care about blacks. In contrast, Joe Biden’s leisurely response to the wildfires in Hawaii is barely news.

“Imagine if the other side did this” is a common tactic for the American Right. It doesn’t work because the Right doesn’t control the media. However, there has been a change. Most conservatives have simply tuned out liberal hectoring.

Other things are happening. Many on X seem to think the Jacksonville shooting was a “false flag.” It is understandable to think something weird is happening when the FBI director briefs the media on the Jacksonville killer’s manifesto within hours, while the Nashville trans shooter’s manifesto isn’t public, despite assurances it would be released. As for the Jacksonville manifesto, Rolling Stone reported that the killer praised Clarence Thomas as a “principled conservative.” That alone is enough to make lefties indignant.

Credit Image: © Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EFE via ZUMA Press

Our politics are about name-calling. Their acts are atrocities; ours are self-defense. Every killing becomes an opportunity for political attacks on others who are ostensibly our countrymen, few of whom actually support violence. After every shooting, we wait to see on whom it can be “blamed.” The result depends on the race (or sex, or sexual confusion) of the killer and the victims.

Our rulers have clearly decided that ordinary crime is unimportant. Homicide is high throughout the country, and clearance rates are declining. However, despite incantations that Black Lives Matter, black lives matter only when they can justify crackdowns on “racists,” or wealth transfers from whites. Otherwise, no one seems to care much about soaring black murder rates, certainly not our rulers. The right of black criminals not to be bothered by police is more important. Many whites seem to have given up trying to save blacks from each other.

Ron DeSantis does not support randomly attacking black people. However, the President implicitly linked him to it. That was so dishonest that anyone right-of-center is going to ignore what the President says. Perhaps there is some small comfort in this if conservatives learn to stop submitting to moral blackmail.

We could try moral blackmail of our own. We could tell leftists to stop putting their utopian fantasies above the lives of white men, women, and children butchered by blacks emboldened since 2020. If whites aren’t worthy of protection because of our inherent racism, maybe the leftists might be moved by increasing black-on-black murder. Stopping crime is straightforward. El Salvador’s gang crackdown and New York City’s turnaround under Mayor Rudy Guiliani point the way. The Left doesn’t seem to care.

Before long, another white guy will shoot blacks, and it will be a major story. Blacks will shoot whites, but no one will hear about it. In a multiracial country united by incitement against whites, what else can we expect?

In the long run, gun control and restrictions on free speech seem inevitable as America becomes majority non-white. That won’t stop mass shootings, but we will be less able to defend ourselves politically and physically. Even our worst enemies may be sad about what happened in Jacksonville, but there’s a touch of glee over what it will enable them to do in retaliation.

About Gregory Hood

View all posts by Gregory Hood
Mr. Hood is a staff writer for American Renaissance. He has been active in conservative groups in the US. You can follow him on Gab.