Unironically, though. When you’re killing “The Terrorists” or “The Drug Dealers” or “The Evil Foreigners” or whatever, murder is incredibly cool and good.
Slap a “Generic Bad Guy” label on a human and you’re free to go full Rambo, because killing Bad Guys is awesome. We love it. Especially when the Bad Guy doesn’t look like us.
The folks screaming the loudest about a guy in a North Face fleece getting got are the same ones who couldn’t be picked out of a lineup with Brian Thompson’s pre-ventilated flesh suit. The folks clapping the loudest over bombs dropped on the perfidious cartels or the insidious Hezbolmas or the vile Asian Menace Of the East also have interchangeable LinkedIn profiles with the ex-CEO of UHC.
Which is precisely why vigilante justice is so dangerous. Do I need to be worried because I said something that some asshat with a gun who was having a really bad day misinterpreted as transphobic, or in case I happen to look like somebody who raped somebody else’s sister?
You raise a point that is not only valid but really rather pertinent in the US in 2024, that yes, it’s super easy to paint groups as generic enemy, at which point it’s acceptable to do anything to them.
Demonizing Arabs and Muslims became conspicuous in the aughts after the 9/11 attacks. The US was soon in Afghanistan (still with memories of where empires go to die since USSR was there a decade earlier) and the US was back in Iraq due to Weapons of Mass Destruction (e.g. nukes) that never materialized. Hate crimes surged against both Arab and Muslim communities (with the assumption that all of one category was in the other)
Then Abu Ghraib scandal became public in 2003. We Americans soon found out it wasn’t isolated, rather there’s a whole CIA extrajudicial detention and torture ( enhanced interrogation ) program. Apparently it was okay to torture terrorists. Also we learned we couldn’t rely on local news agencies, since they were too beholden to the White House Press Office. Only foreign news agencies were willing to talk about extraordinary rendition and waterboarding.
(Eventually we’d be able to look up on Wikipedia that torture was obsolete when it came to interrogation of the enemy, as this guy, a WWII Luftwaffe interrogator, showed that being nice works far better. We were torturing Arab Muslims because some rich people wanted to know brown people were suffering for 9/11 even if it wasn’t anyone actually involved, but I digress)
Pretty soon, any media person or activist that challenged the policies of the George W. Bush administration (including torture and the use of PMCs to massacre villages) was called a terrorist, and dismissed by the rapidly growing conservative media establishment.
In the 2020s, as the United States is being taken over by a literal dangerous cult (the white Christian nationalist movement centering around Donald J. Trump) talk of demons, of possession and exorcisms and ways to justify calling other people demons or associated with Satan is rising.
And the cool thing about Satan, if you’re a Christian fanatic, is you can do anything you want to Him because he’s the enemy by fiat.
So literally demonizing folk (accusing them of being demons, being possessed by demons or in league with demons) is the first step before deciding they need shooting or lynching or packed into detention centers.
/🤓 (Sorry about the rant. I’ve been specifically studying this stuff since Waco)
In the 2020s, as the United States is being taken over by a literal dangerous cult (the white Christian nationalist movement centering around Donald J. Trump)
I mean, I’d go so far as to argue the US has always been a government of, by, and for religious extremists of one strip or another. Occasionally, those extremists break in a favorable way (abolitionism, environmentalism, anti-war movements). But by and large, its been the 30 Years War for nearly 250 years around here.
Trump is the latest incarnation of Christian Radicalism. But you can find guys just like Trump echoing through every banana republic governorship and tin-pot mayoralty going back to the Mayflower landing. The flip side of the coin is just Obama’s Moderate Rebels - the Black Baptists and Unitarians and Reform Jews and Liberal Catholics - who think Trumpism on paper is fine (immigrants bad, LGBTQ weird, education not sufficiently privatized, young people music makes me angry, brown foreigners are an existential threat), he just took things too far / executed them too sloppily.
This all stems from the font of infinite money - the big banks and the federal treasury - ultimately resting in the hands of religious leadership. Big Protestant/Catholic run banks like Blackrock and JP Morgan and Bank of America earmark billions toward their religious institutions and bankroll a host of sectarian social services to create a patronage network of millions.
Meanwhile, actual elected officials are all products of their religious communities. Mitt Romney is literally a Mormon Bishop, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis are inducted members into Opus Dei, big chunks of the House are ranking members in their local Christian mystery cults, even the “good ones” like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are ultimately just proxies for their local mosques.
Unironically, though. When you’re killing “The Terrorists” or “The Drug Dealers” or “The Evil Foreigners” or whatever, murder is incredibly cool and good.
Slap a “Generic Bad Guy” label on a human and you’re free to go full Rambo, because killing Bad Guys is awesome. We love it. Especially when the Bad Guy doesn’t look like us.
The folks screaming the loudest about a guy in a North Face fleece getting got are the same ones who couldn’t be picked out of a lineup with Brian Thompson’s pre-ventilated flesh suit. The folks clapping the loudest over bombs dropped on the perfidious cartels or the insidious Hezbolmas or the vile Asian Menace Of the East also have interchangeable LinkedIn profiles with the ex-CEO of UHC.
It’s Identity Politics all the way down.
Which is precisely why vigilante justice is so dangerous. Do I need to be worried because I said something that some asshat with a gun who was having a really bad day misinterpreted as transphobic, or in case I happen to look like somebody who raped somebody else’s sister?
🤓:
You raise a point that is not only valid but really rather pertinent in the US in 2024, that yes, it’s super easy to paint groups as generic enemy, at which point it’s acceptable to do anything to them.
Demonizing Arabs and Muslims became conspicuous in the aughts after the 9/11 attacks. The US was soon in Afghanistan (still with memories of where empires go to die since USSR was there a decade earlier) and the US was back in Iraq due to Weapons of Mass Destruction (e.g. nukes) that never materialized. Hate crimes surged against both Arab and Muslim communities (with the assumption that all of one category was in the other)
Then Abu Ghraib scandal became public in 2003. We Americans soon found out it wasn’t isolated, rather there’s a whole CIA extrajudicial detention and torture ( enhanced interrogation ) program. Apparently it was okay to torture terrorists. Also we learned we couldn’t rely on local news agencies, since they were too beholden to the White House Press Office. Only foreign news agencies were willing to talk about extraordinary rendition and waterboarding.
(Eventually we’d be able to look up on Wikipedia that torture was obsolete when it came to interrogation of the enemy, as this guy, a WWII Luftwaffe interrogator, showed that being nice works far better. We were torturing Arab Muslims because some rich people wanted to know brown people were suffering for 9/11 even if it wasn’t anyone actually involved, but I digress)
Pretty soon, any media person or activist that challenged the policies of the George W. Bush administration (including torture and the use of PMCs to massacre villages) was called a terrorist, and dismissed by the rapidly growing conservative media establishment.
In the 2020s, as the United States is being taken over by a literal dangerous cult (the white Christian nationalist movement centering around Donald J. Trump) talk of demons, of possession and exorcisms and ways to justify calling other people demons or associated with Satan is rising.
And the cool thing about Satan, if you’re a Christian fanatic, is you can do anything you want to Him because he’s the enemy by fiat.
So literally demonizing folk (accusing them of being demons, being possessed by demons or in league with demons) is the first step before deciding they need shooting or lynching or packed into detention centers.
/🤓 (Sorry about the rant. I’ve been specifically studying this stuff since Waco)
I mean, I’d go so far as to argue the US has always been a government of, by, and for religious extremists of one strip or another. Occasionally, those extremists break in a favorable way (abolitionism, environmentalism, anti-war movements). But by and large, its been the 30 Years War for nearly 250 years around here.
Trump is the latest incarnation of Christian Radicalism. But you can find guys just like Trump echoing through every banana republic governorship and tin-pot mayoralty going back to the Mayflower landing. The flip side of the coin is just Obama’s Moderate Rebels - the Black Baptists and Unitarians and Reform Jews and Liberal Catholics - who think Trumpism on paper is fine (immigrants bad, LGBTQ weird, education not sufficiently privatized, young people music makes me angry, brown foreigners are an existential threat), he just took things too far / executed them too sloppily.
This all stems from the font of infinite money - the big banks and the federal treasury - ultimately resting in the hands of religious leadership. Big Protestant/Catholic run banks like Blackrock and JP Morgan and Bank of America earmark billions toward their religious institutions and bankroll a host of sectarian social services to create a patronage network of millions.
Meanwhile, actual elected officials are all products of their religious communities. Mitt Romney is literally a Mormon Bishop, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis are inducted members into Opus Dei, big chunks of the House are ranking members in their local Christian mystery cults, even the “good ones” like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are ultimately just proxies for their local mosques.