The World According to Mr. Jones

Van Jones

Van Jones, former advisor to President Obama, recently commented on CNN about Trump's suggestion that, repugnant as he finds it, we may need to start racial profiling to fight jihadism. The headline for the story is “White Christian men commit most mass shootings, so why not racially profile them?”

Paybakc time: how are those white Christians who support Trump going to like it if they are the ones being profiled?

“I just think it’s really interesting that we’re talking about racially profiling in the context of mass shootings,” Jones said. “The vast majority of the people who are doing the mass shootings in America aren’t Muslims at all.”

“Young white men…” CNN host Brooke Baldwin interjected.

Everybody knows that, right? Jones didn't even have to say, it, only drop the hint, and the point was made for him by the helpful interviewer. Most mass shootings are done by “whites.”

Only problem is, it's not true. I just checked the stats online. Turns out 44% of mass shooters are “white.” Their proportion of the US population is over 76%.

If you're talking racial profiling, the average white individual is, based on that characteristic alone, about half as likely to commit the crime as a non-white. It is still non-whites you would want to target.

My numbers here are simply the first figure for each that came up in a Google search: first, ethnicity of mass shooters, then the ethnic proportions of the US population. May not be perfect as statictical analysis, but the randomness of the method makes it unlikely they are skewed to a particar desired political outcome.

Like so many facts that “everyone knows,” this myth of the white mass shooter was probably originally a deliberate lie planted for political advantage. There are so many of them: the claim that one in five college co-eds gets sexually harassed, that women make 76 cents on the dollar compared to men, that men used to be allowed to beat their wives so long as the rod used was no thicker than a thumb, the smallpox blankets, the Beothuk genocide, and so on and on. And yes, I seems it is the left that is generally responsible for these lies. As Lenin used to say, the end justifies the means. And few ever check the claims, because it becomes one of those things that, as Ward Churchill would say, “everyone knows.”

Jones makes even wilder claims. He goes on, “If a Christian shoots somebody, we don’t say a Christian shot them. But if a Muslim shoots somebody, we say a Muslim shot them. I think that’s starting to muddy the waters.”

That might work, if there were records of any mass murderers spraying the crowd with bullets while crying out “Jesus loves you.” Perhaps as familiar, in it's way, as “Allahu Akbar,” but not really in the same context. Soomehow, it just doesn't seem to fit the occasion.

Have there been any mass murderers who could be clearly identified as Christian, much less having murdered for Christianity?

It goes without saying, surely, that anyone doing so could not, in fact, be a Christian in any real sense, because he was violating a basic tenet of Christianity in doing so. That is probably also true of Islam, but in the latter case it is less clear and has, historically, been far more debatable, including within Islam.

Possibly Jones could point to an incident or two in which someone shot an abortionist. But if this is where his claim comes from, there are several problems with this. First of all, these are not mass murders. They are individual killings. Take all individual killings into the mix, and you discover that killers in general are overwhelmingly likely to be black. Second, the killer's motive may in such a case have nothing in particular to do with Christianity. That must still be demonstrated. They might just as well be motivated by the US Declaration of Independence, which asserts a universal human right to life. If this is so, as the dEclaration of Independence says, by natural law, they are morally in the right, and if the law does not agree, that only means the government is not doing its job. If this is not so, one must accept at the same time the awkward conclusion that the US has no right to exist. Third, if you point to shootings of abortionists, you cannot then exclude abortionists themselves from your list of mass murderers. Heavily reweighting the tally, probably against your preferences, to the left.

Gets complicated.

Then Jones says, “You are seven times more likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist—a racist or an anti-government nut job--...than a Muslim.”

Quickly now, can you think of any mass shooters who were, in fact, politically right-wing? I can think of no shooters, but one bomber, Timothy McVeigh. That's one. I trust Jones, like myself, has not yet run out of fingers. Before Islamism came into vogue, though, the usual pretext for any sort of mass killing was Marxism. Remember the Symbionese Liberation Army? Remember the Weathermen? Remember Baader-Meinhoff? Remember the Red Guards? Remember the Black Panthers? Remember the FLQ? Remember the IRA? Remember the People's Army? Anti-government, sure, but since when has Marx been the prophet of the right-wing? Since when was being anti-government a distinctly rightist thing? When was mass killing ever a rightist thing in the US?

Jones also slyly seems to equate “right-wing”with “racist.” What is and is not “right-wing” is a slippery thing to determine objectively, but if we take “Republican” to represent, overall, the US right, and “Democrat” overall to be the party of the left, then the case is unequivocal. Racism is a left-wing thing, not right-wing. Certainly it is so today. Democratic politics is all about race; Republican politics tends to emphasise the individual.

Meaning, if Jones is otherwise right, that mass-shooters are mostly left-wing and naturally Democrats.

And, of course, there is another problem with his statement. Why can't a Muslim be either racist or anti-government? Sounds like a case of the common deeply racist, and so self-contradictory, notion that “only white people can be racists.”

Thanks for the clarification, Mr. Jones.

The Mystery of Mateen's Motivation

The real culprit?

My friend the leftist columnist—let's call him “Xerxes,” so I don't have to keep saying “my friend the leftist columnist”-- sent out his column on the Orlando bloodbath just two days ago. I make that a week after the shootings.

He writes “ No one knows Mateen’s motivation.”

This is odd, because he says himself that Mateen phoned 911 during the shooting, and took the trouble to state his motivations. Several times.

This weird blindness has not only afflicted my friend, of course. I have seen it in most accounts in the mainstream media. They all seem to sit around somewhere puzzled. Somehow, it was the gun that did it. Naughty gun. It might not have looked like an AR-15, but it had to be an AR-15, too. The US Department of Justice has even released a transcript of the 911 call in which they tried to actually delete any reference to Mateen's motivations.

What is going on here? More evidence that the world is mad? Being out of touch with external reality, after all, kind of defines that experience.

In the case of my friend, he concludes that it is all down to “fundamentalism,” which, he then clarifies, means “specifically, American right-wing religion.”

Mateen was a registered Democrat.

Fundementalism is specifically a movement within American Protestantism. As a Muslim, Mateen was certainly not fundamentalist in that sense.

More generally, and in common discourse, “fundamentalism” has also come to mean someone who reads the scriptures of their religion in a strictly literal sense, as the fundamentalists do and did.

This tendency, of course, has nothing to do with politics. Reading your scriptures literally does not make you either Republican or Democratic. If, on the whole, the Protestant “fundamentalists” do tend to be right wing politically, then so, according to surveys, do those who take religion seriously in any sense. Was Mother Teresa a fundamentalist? Was Gandhi? Joan of Arc? Saint Francis? Is a Benedictine monk a fundamentalist?

It might be instead that there is a moral problem, not merely a problem of scriptural interpretation, behind such current left-wing policies as unisex toilets, abortion on demand, or a legal obligation to cater gay weddings. A generation or two ago, being religious did not equate to being “right wing” politically. Good Catholics generally voted for Kennedy. Aimee Semple McPherson was a fan of FDR and the New Deal.

In this second sense, of taking his scripture, whatever the particular scripture, literally, Mateen was not a “fundamaentalist” as far as we can tell. Yes, there is a tenet of sharia that calls for death as the penalty for sodomy. But then, the sharia is not the Qu'ran, and is not even based on a literal reading of it.

Moreover, Mateen actually—has anyone else even noticed this?--does not say he is shooting anyone because they are gay. Intimates and previous acquaintances say he was gay himself. He says he is shooting them in protest against the bombing of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Unless they went and redacted something else they're not telling us about.

So, yet again—has the world gone mad, were they always mad, or are they really that dishonest?

Yes, the world has probably always been insane. But we have a special problem here, and this example illustrates it. The reason we have a culture war is that we have lost all possibility of civil discourse. The reason we have lost all possibility of civil discourse is that one side no longer accepts any rules. There is no longer anything common to appeal to: no evidence can be of any weight, not even the evidence of the senses, no morals, and no logic.

That is the explicit agenda of postmodernism, and it did not begin with postmodernism. It saturates feminism: a woman can be and do whatever she wants, and if all established moral codes say otherwise, the problem must be with all established moral codes, and they must be condemned. It can never be with her desired action. That would be oppression. It was certainly already there with Marcuse, in the Sixties and even the Fifties. It is seen plain in the supposedly Marcusan slogan found on some wall during the Paris uprising: “Be careful! Even the ears have walls!”

By this now-common doctrine, “reality” and “truth” are whatever you will them to be. And nobody gets to say any different. It is all a matter of the triumph of the will.

Marcuse claimed in turn to find it all in Marx. He may be right; some part of it at least seems implied in the Marxist idea that man is infinitely malleable. Maybe all of it follows.

I think you can also find some of it, maybe by implication all of it, in Martin Luther, who considered “faith” the essential human act and a moral choice. If he meant “faith” in the sense of trust, all well and good. But a lot of people, and maybe Luther himself, take it to mean “belief.” So, indeed, we even talk of religious people generally as “believers.”

Probable co-conspirator.

Wrong. Truth is not a matter of choice.

I admit that Imyself, once, as a college freshman, even as late as grad schoool, found this attitude exhilarating, liberating. But it is logically nonsense, morally evil, and the death of all community. If everyone gets to choose their own reality, what happens when two people with different realities meet? The only option for resolution is for one to dominate or kill the other.

Hitler and Mussolini were very much in this tradition.

And it is where we are headed, more and more each year.