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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.
As a Mormon, I have access to the Mormon rumor-news network via my mother, which can confirm that the Robinsons are Mormon - it’s been a bit so can’t remember specifics but the guys who talked him down from suicide and into turning him in? His home ward bishop (volunteer pastor-ish), and due to worries about being treated roughly or poorly if he just confessed to random cops, I believe it was a former young men’s leader who was a part time sheriff or something along those lines that used his connections to make him turning himself in discreet.
Regarding anti-Mormon sentiment (violence is rare), I will say that despite us being quite long-suffering, we still might be at least the third most badmouthed religion in America after maybe Jews and Muslims - yet receiving the least popular protection. Just this very week, BYU played Colorado and sure enough the student section had some “Fuck the Mormons” chants. Can you imagine the media shitstorm if people chanted that against Jews, Muslims, or heck even Baptists? But nope, it’s the Mormons, no one cares. It’s a double standard. Nothing new for us of course. The leader of the church who passed away also this last week at 101 (a pioneering heart surgeon on the bleeding edge of open heart surgery in the 50s and 60s, on the team that developed the heart lung machine, who brought open heart surgery to Utah as only the third state with such abilities, and more) spent a lot of time talking about being peacemakers, especially in private life, an approach diametrically opposed to that of many other right wing religious ecosystems and also the growing chorus of advocates for political vengeance (though admittedly general politics does not always dovetail with private politics). At any rate, it’s heartbreaking that the people first shot were literally people going to assist someone they almost certainly assumed had crashed their truck in an accident, and that said attack put a child as young as 6 iirc in the hospital.
If anything can be said about cultural and political significance from this shooting and its aftermath, it’s that the right is not immune to the fact that all victims are not created equal. While many right wing commentators will loudly point out that leftists tend to be bothered more by certain idpol crimes than others, lo and behold rightists are also bothered more by certain idpol crimes than others. Yes the Kirk shooting had more explicitly political implications but there is an unmistakable relative silence here. As just one example, I looked up the first MAGA type Senator that came to mind: Josh Hawley. Not even a tweet about it. Yet yesterday, we do get another tweet about Kirk, and not even a banal one: “Charlie Kirk would debate anybody and do it cheerfully. That’s what we do as Americans. Meanwhile, Democrats’ insane rhetoric is causing deranged people to commit deranged crimes. It needs to end”. The Bible thumping Christian Senator from, okay yes, Missouri, doesn’t care. Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville posted single tweets without using the C word of course. Ted Cruz? Not a peep - but four tweets today about murders in DC!
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