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Notes -
Right-coded violence reasserts itself (?)
It's sobering, that this morning someone might have asked you "did you hear about the 40-year-old Iraq war veteran who committed a 'third space' mass murder over the weekend?" and you might have reasonably responded, "Which one?"
(Insert Dr. Doofenshmirtz meme here!)
Of course, like any normal American, the instant I heard that someone had shot up a Mormon congregation and burned their house of worship to the ground I
crossed my fingers and prayed the perpetrator was a member of my outgroupimmediately wondered if the shooter was a right-coded wingnut who somehow blamed Charlie Kirk's death on the Mormons.(I've never managed to determine whether Tyler Robinson and his family are actually Mormon, or maybe were Mormon at some point, but nobody seems to care; apparently all anyone else wants to know is whether he was really a gay furry, a groyper, or both. But living in Utah seems sufficiently Mormon-adjacent that a psychotic killer could draw the association.)
So far, no apparent Kirk connection! However the Michigan shooter indeed regarded Mormons as the anti-Christ. Perhaps that's the whole story: he just really, really disliked Mormons (sort of like everyone else). This makes Donald Trump's commentary interesting; the President immediately declared that this was a "targeted attack on Christians" and was met with an Evangelical chorus of "Mormons aren't Christians" (which to me seems a little tone deaf, under the circumstances, but times being what they are...). In any event this is probably the deadliest case of targeted violence against Mormon congregations since the 19th century.
(There was apparently a bomb threat in 1993 that could have been a mass casualty event, had the explosives been real. Other than that, I'm not an expert on hate crimes but Google does not seem to think that Mormons are very often the target of such things.)
The North Carolina shooter got less attention (he did not burn down any churches), but that didn't stop Newsweek from digging into some peculiarities of history:
This fellow has quite a colorful record, and part of that record includes the fact that
This reads like schizophrenia to me, but on balance it seems more right-coded than left-coded, concerns over "white supremacists" notwithstanding.
All this seems to have the usual left-coded social media spaces crowing; they have spent the past few weeks assuring us all that right wing extremism is far, far more common and deadly than left wing extremism. But to my mind, neither of these cases quite reach that "political extremism" threshold. The Michigan shooting appears to be genuine sectarian violence of a kind rarely seen in the United States, and the North Carolina shooting looks like a textbook mental health event. Nevertheless, I have no difficulty seeing these as right-coded, for the simple reason that they were carried out against minority groups by white, middle-aged, ex-military men. That's red tribe quite regardless of what their actual political views are--indeed, whether they have any coherent political views at all.
This got me thinking about all the other violence that I see as a blue tribe problem, quite regardless of its ideological roots. The obvious one that Charlie Kirk himself occasionally gestured toward was inner city urban gang violence; that is blue-coded violence, to my mind, though it is arguably "politically neutral." A couple weeks ago I suggested that we should be paying closer attention to the role that "Neutral vs. Conservative" thinking has to play in the national conversation on identity-oriented violence. This weekend's events strengthen that impression, for me. I do not really like the "stochastic terrorism" framing, particularly given my attachment to significant freedom of speech. But neither can I comfortably assign all responsibility for these events strictly to individual perpetrators.
I wish I had something wiser to say about that. I would like there to be less violence everywhere, but certainly the trend toward deliberately directing violence against unarmed, unsuspecting innocents seems like an especially problematic escalation, and one our political system seems to be contributing toward even when our specific political commitments do not. I don't know if drawing a distinction between "tribe-coded" and "tribe-caused" is helpful. But it is a thought I had, and have not seen expressed elsewhere, so I thought I should test it here.
This is a classic overthinking Trump trap.
Trump has zero "faith" in terms of a cohesive theological or metaphysical system. He might have a kind of vague conception of God or a higher power, but I'd be willing to bet he's essentially a secular humanist with a little bit of "woo" and "the Christmas spirit" thrown in. He's probably knocked on wood once or twice in his life.
He is, however, a political animal and, because of that, he is aware of the power of religious groups, especially Christians. But because he does't grok "faith" or theology or metaphysics, he lumps pretty much all political-religious leaders together as powerful wizards who know many spooky words.
Here's Trump wearing a yarmulke at the Western Wall and then going up to "pray" (eyes open, of course) for an photoshoot appropriate amount of time.
Here's Trump asking the director of HUD to say grace (?) to start a cabinet meeting..
Here's Trump at the national day of prayer remarking "Is separation of church and state a good thing? I don't know...but we're bringing religion back to our country very bigly and very strongly"
The Trump thought process after the Mormon Michigan shooting and arson was pretty clearly - "Thats some version of the Jesus people. The Jesus people tend to like me. I should say how bad it is for people to shoot at the Jesus people."
I'm not trying to be flippant or to sneer at Trump as an idiot or a clown. That's actually another failure mode of Trump evaluation. The specific point, however, is that religion is an interesting weak spot for Trump. He truly doesn't understand it deeply (where, for example, I believe he actually does understand marketing as a business discipline deeply). Yet he also fails to understand religion intuitively the way he does politics.
He has managed to create a very simple and basic heuristic, which is to be generally positive all religions, more or less, with special deference to Christians first and then Jews (but only if they aren't, like, too Jewy, ya know?). Expecting Trump to be able to discern LDS vs Evangelical vs Mainline Protestant vs Catholic is silly. Asking him to then thread the needle in his remarks by saying something like "This was an attack on
Christiansa community of faith" is outright laughable. He's simply going to boo the non-religious outgroup in whatever hamfisted way he can.Yes, exactly.
With the exception of a couple hobby horses, Trump makes decisions off one of two heuristics.
Note that #2 is not “the United States.” It’s more like a Schoolhouse Rock model of the country. Any additional layers add a penalty; if something is too complicated to fit in a high school civics class, he’ll probably oppose it.
Thus, America is supposed to be respected and powerful. We have the most stuff and we won all the wars that mattered. Our government should be really effective at tasks listed in the Preamble. It shouldn’t mess with anything else. Above all, America consists of people who love these particular ideas. That means it’s white (but with room for assimilating immigrants), middle-class (but with room for people to make it big), and Christian (but not, like, in a specific way).
…which brings us back to #1. Trump has done a really really good job aligning his personal brand with this America one. It’s simple and effective. People who like the idea are supposed to like Trump, and people who hate Trump must be standing against America. Easy tribal support. None of the Democrat frontrunners since 2016 have managed to shake the association.
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