Over the last seven or so years, there have been plenty of hiccups in the progressive trot down to utopia.
While they've been identified and rightly rebuked, all the acolytes have been able to do is muster up denial, obfuscation, false dichotomy, and ad hominem.
The issue of progressive inconsistency is seen in issues big and small. Inconvenient particularities of the perpetrators are glossed over and transported to society at large, the transgressions are minimised or contextualised, and double-standards are activated in order to avoid indictment of the perpetrators, if the perpetrators are deemed to be members of some protected class or other.
In doing so, victimhood is turned into a moving target, with the actual victims of violence and threat or misconduct being subordinated to an ad hoc hierarchy of progressive prioritisation.
The very act of criticising the malignant outgrowths of their unintended consequences is deemed to be a self-sabotaging act since, well, you wouldn't want to be the enemy of the good... would you?
You better get in line.
There is nothing to see here.
Below is a list of controversial events that have occurred since 2015 that I think embody the progressive inconsistency in a rather malignant fashion. It is malignant because it a does harm the social body in which it resides, and may, in fact, illustrate ill will towards portions of that social body.
These are only a handful of offerings, and though many more can be added, and perhaps many more seem more prescient now than these below, the events discussed below were integral to how we got to where we are.
The Charlie Hebdo shootings:
In Janury 2015, two Muslim terrorists shot up the office of a French satirical publication called, 'Charlie Hebdo' killing 12 people. This attack was made in response to politically incorrect cartoons published by the magazine depicting Muhammed.
Media apologists for the attacks stated that there is some parity between European suspicion of Muslim immigrants and the Muslim killings of the Charlie Hebdo journalists, and to make this shooting about free speech and expression is overlooking the fact that the disrespect felt by Muslims is 'connected with memories of Western notions of cultural superiority and imperialism when Muslims were seen as inferior to Westerners'. In fact, this shooting is but a microcosmic example of the larger issues in France which '.
.. has never really tolerated multiculturalism or the kind of cultural religious diversity... [Therefore] you can see how that would create the kinds of tensions that would bubble up occasionally into acts of violence on both sides.'
The 2015–16 New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Germany:
At least 2,000 men across Germany sexually assaulted hundreds of women during a New Years celebration. The women, who were German, stated that the men who attacked them were of Arab or North African in appearance. Police and government officials initially covered up the event, and reporting was minimal. Upon its release by press, the public was warned that anti-immigrant groups would use the attacks to stir up hatred against refugees. In fact, '
what happens on the right-wing platforms and in chatrooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women.' Also, women were told to stay in groups, not to go out at night alone, and 'keep at least an arm's distance from men at major events'. Additionally, feminists pleaded in an
open letter that the anger after the Cologne incidents should not be directed against groups or ethnicities like Muslims, Arabs, blacks, and North Africans, and excoriated the public by stated that 'sexualised violence is omnipresent everyday and not only a problem of 'the others' who are not white 'non-Germans'. This is odd since, the Cologne police chief
Wolfgang Albers stated that Germany had never experienced such mass sexual assaults before. The response to sexual assault, it seems, differs depending upon the ethnicity/race of the perpetrator, and the victims were initially side-lined for optics, and the singular nature of the sexual attacks by immigrant men was minimised by absorbing it into a narrative of the 'everyday' oppression by German men.
The Chicago Kidnapping and Torture case:
In 2017, a mentally disabled young white man was kidnapped, and filmed being physically and verbally abused by four black individuals. In the video, the young man can be seen cowering in a corner as his kidnappers physically assaulted him, threatened him, and spouted anti-white and other racist slurs at him. They also made some political statements like 'F*ck Donald Trump'. This story was spun by some right-wing pundits as being related to Black Lives Matter (BLM) - the social justice activist movement for reform and/or abolition of law enforcement and incarceration. There was no credible evidence that the criminals had anything to do with BLM. What resulted was BLM activists and their representatives in the media pivot away from the black people engaging in a clearly racist crime, and to focus on the smear campaign against them. By taking these black people to be representative of BLM and BLM to be representative of black people over all, we were treated with
articles arguing that black people, as a group, were the real victims of a handicapped white guy getting tortured by four black people. (Some more analysis on this event can be found on a previous blogpost:
New Racism.)
Covington Catholic Kids Debacle versus March for Our Lives:
A group students from an all-boys Catholic high school in Kentucky went to the US capital for a Pro-Life march. There they were met with protest by a small group of Black Hebrew Israelites who believe that they're descendants of ancient Israelites. The Black Israelites taunted the students, calling them 'child molesters', stating that Trump is a 'fa**ot', and that the black students should depart from the group because 'ni**a, they're gonna steal your organs'.
In an attempt to drown out the Black Israelites' taunts, or rather to taunt right back, the students began to engage in their high school cheers. During this, Nathan Phillips, a Native American activist of sorts, was observing the commotion and decided to intervene in an attempt to 'diffuse the situation'.
He walked up to the students whilst drumming and singing the American Indian Movement (AIM) song. The cadence of his drumming matched the cadence of the students' chants and they, apparently, thought that he was drumming to their chants. In accordance, they continued to chant in the cadence of his drumming.
As Phillips walked into the crowd of students, they parted, and he continued to walk until he met Nick Sandmann, a student who stood in Phillips' way. Sandmann said he did so in order to demonstrate that he didn't want any trouble - figuring that if he stood still, he wouldn't be doing anything wrong. Sadly for Sandmann, he was wearing a MAGA hat, and as soon as the video hit social media, the shit hit the fan.
The 'Blue Checkmarks' on Twitter calling for these kids and their families to be harassed, doxxed or even attacked with bizarrely sadistic and fantastical calls for the torture and killing of the Covington kids.
Meanwhile, we have very different reaction towards the March For Our Lives kids.
These were students who survived the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on February 14th, 2018.
Some of these students had harrowing stories to tell, and there shouldn't be any need to criticism them for what they went through. Though some criticism did occur on the fringes of conspiracy, most people met these students with compassion and sympathy.
After the smoke cleared, however, some of the students went head-on into the spotlight: engaging in media interviews, documentaries and all sorts of marches, protests and demonstrations.
Some of the most vocal students put their faces willingly into the public debate on gun rights in the US, and have said some remarkably provocative stuff: that pro-gun rights politicians and groups have blood on their hands, or are complicit in child murder; that '
when you give an inch [on some gun reform] we'll take a mile', or that '
[the NRA] are pathetic fuckers who keep wanting to kill our children'; that 'our parents don't know how to use f**kin' democracy', and the like.
Truth from the mouth of babes.
These kids have thrown themselves into the public square as spokespeople for a anti-gun rights movement, and have exhibited more aggression and vitriol than any of the Covington kids, and yet when they're met with any criticism the Left, the anti-gun Left, will decry such criticism as 'attacking children'.
Which one is it? Aren't the Covington kids 'children', too? I suppose some children matter more than others.
Toronto Hijab Hoax:
A girl reported to the police that she had been attacked by an unknown Asian man with a pair of scissors - the man ran up to her and tried to cut of her hijab. This attack sprang into the news and within hours the
Mayor of Toronto, the
Premiere of the Province of Ontario, and
Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, all lept to the cameras to decry the rampant Islamophobia in Canada. Stating that '[t]hat is not what Canada is, and that is not what Canadians are... and that we are better than this', and yet '[w]e have seen an unfortunate pattern of increased hate crimes in past months directed towards religious minorities, particularly towards women... [this is] a warning sign of increased intolerance'. These two statements seem to be in conflict, here...
I couldn't help but the see that the outpouring of symapthy and concern for the young girl was overtly couched in the language of condemnation and suspicion towards Canadians, and I'm not alone since there were numerous protests across the country condemning Trudeau's
I still cannot believe that Trudeau didn’t offer an apology for his conduct towards to hijab hoax. He and others leapt to the nearest microphone and camera crew and just castigated Canadians without any evidence.
A line from the film Rob Roy comes to mind. It’s during a scene wherein Rob and a fellow clansman, Alasdair, are looking for a member of their clan who had gone missing with a large sum of cash. Unbeknownst to Rob and his men, their compatriot was ambushed and killed by the viallan, Cunningham, an evil aristocrat. Alasdair insists that their fellow may have taken the cash for himself and sailed off to America. Rob says, ‘its worse enough that it may have happened, without you wishing it so’. I feel the same thing towards the reaction to the hijab hoax.
Manchester Arena Bombing (plus any UK-based Terror Attack) versus The Grenfell Tower Fire:
On May 22nd, 2017, an Islamic extremist suicide bomber detonated a shrapnel-laden homemade bomb as people were leaving the Manchester Arena, England following a concert by the American singer Ariana Grande.
Twenty-three people died, including the attacker, and 139 were wounded, more than half of them children.
Reactions were swift, with all manner of government and religious officials coming out to condemn the attackers, and, of course, stating that they had nothing to do with Islam.
At a large benefit concert, Oasis played the song '
Don't Look Back In Anger' which became a symbolic motif of 'defiance' for how the British people were to deal with their trauma, shock, and anger. The motif was also put on display in response to other terrorist attacks in London. I don't see this as 'defiance' but 'resignation'. When you get angry, the terrorists win, I guess.
On the night of June 14, 2017, a fire broke out in the 24-story Grenfell Tower in West London. It caused 72 deaths, injured more than 70 others.
An investigation into the cause of the fire and the events of that night determined that the cause of the fire came from a malfunctioning refrigerator, and that building's exterior was the central reason why the fire spread because it didn't comply with building regulations. Additionally, fire service were too late in advising residents to evacuate.
A number of protests followed, one called '
A Day of Rage', which aimed to 'bring down the government', provide housing for the displaced survivors of the fire, and force Theresa May to resign due to her 'austerity and bigotry'. Politicians like David Lammy have stated that the fire was a '
vision of hell'; that those 'who let this fire happen' should stand trial, and that was a
cover up of the number of dead.
Less than a month apart and we see two tragedies beget very different responses: a deliberate and vicious religiously'motivated attack on innocent children is met with calls for stoicism and resilience amongst the British people, and yet an accidental though tragic fire engulfing people in a high-rise building is met with real calls of defiance, pointing fingers, and uncompromising anger to get justice for their community.
I wonder who really matters, here.
The Rape Gangs of the UK:
This has to be the creme de la creme.
Thousands of girls and young women were victims of child sexual exploitation (CSE) across the cities of Rotherham, Rochdale, Derby, Huddersfield, Newcastle, Telford, Peterborough, Newcastle, Oxford, and Bristol between the 1980s and the 2010s.
Responses to the issues are contentious because
findings showed most of the perpetrators, 84% in fact, are Asian men. 'Asian', in the UK, is a loose term that doesn't point out any one ethnicity, but tends to lump in Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Most perps, as well, were British citizens, and other perpetrators have been Somali, Romani, Kosovan, Kurdish, and White British.
As with Cologne, the concern the Left had was with a) denying the over-representation of 'Asian' men in these crimes, and b) concocting explanations of how the observation of said over-representation is evidence of racism, and therefore is unsubstantiated, and, in fact, is the real problem.
Though it is true that child abuse is not uniquely or largely a problem of particular demographics, the grooming gangs – that is, multiple offenders exploiting women they have met, manipulated, and abused outside their homes – is. On top of the demographic make up of the perpetrators, there is also the demographic make up of the victims: 'the vast majority' of the victims were White British girls and young women.
The Left consistently motte-and-baileys the issue. Despite the steady flow of cases that consistently show the perps are Asian men, we're constantly reminded that it is not only Asian men who commit CSE. When it is shown that roughly 80% of the perps are Asian men, we're told that the greatest numbers of perpetrators of CSE are White men. Well, according to the 2011 Census, 80% of the UK population is White, and 6.8% is Asian. So, the Asian men are well over-represented here - but then people are told it is '
irresponsible' to dwell on the data.
We're told that we should reject the idea that such gangs were specifically targeting White girls because they were White, but suggested vulnerable girls on the street were more likely to be White since Asian girls were subjected to stricter parenting which was more likely to keep them off the streets.
We're also told that the claim of Asian gangs targeting White girls flies in the face of evidence that shows that those who violate children are most likely to target those who are closest to them and most easily accessible.
We're told that there isn't an ethnic component. We're told that there is misogyny, class-bias, and institutional bias.
Yes. I do not deny that these are elements, but explain the radical ethnic over-representation of the perps and the absolutely remarkable scale of the abuse? Is it really the case that everyone else's attitudes towards these girls as lesser-thans is operable in their actions and in-actions, but the perps are just opportunists? Would they have gone after Asian or Black girls if they could?
I do not deny that this is surely a layered matter, that involves class and other prejudices. These girls were treated like trash not only by their abusers, but by those who were supposed to protect them. The Jay Report, an investigation into what happened in Rotherham, for instance, found that police thought of the young girls as '
undesirables' and they were not worthy of police protection.
So many excuses, and no work was done to save these girls. And we all know, as cheap and as easy as it may sound, that if the ethnicities were reversed, and there was gangs of White men sexually abusing Asian girls, there'd be a swift response.
Finally we have the example of:
The Entire Year of 2020 and the Derek Chauvin Trial:
I've written on the Chauvin trial previously, and will link that article
here. Those who wish to read that can do so, and I'll now wrap this post up...
Conclusion:
There are dozens of other such cases that can be added to lists like this - the Rittenhouse case, January 6th, all the COVID-19 bullshit, the Residential Schools Findings in Canada, etc., - but these are some of the more indicative cases in my experience.
Whenever a vicious act occurs, we're told that the evil isn't all that unique, and we are only noticing it now because different looking people are doing it. In fact, if it hadn't been some member of some racialised other, it surely would have been some local native man. After all, what is in the heads of the recently-arrived perpetrators is really nothing different than what is in the heads of those who have been born and raised in their homelands with ancestry stretching back generations...
That said, you are a heartless monster or even positing that the opposite is true.
This is what they're trying to sell you.
Are these acceptable costs?
