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Notes -
The Karen Sleeper Cell Has Activated
A woman in Kansas City attempted to set fire to a warehouse that was alleged to be an ICE facility of some sort. Or, maybe, it was planned to be an ICE facility in the future. Or something.
I suppose there's room to quibble over this being a technical act of terrorism, insurrection, or just normal arson. Despite my tongue-in-cheek title, I also don't think this is some sort of a flashpoint for semi-organized violence on the part of lefty activists. Probably, it's just one individual who took a leave of their senses and did something dumb, pointless, and illegal.
But it is worth speculating on, on the internet, the mental processes that led to this behavior. One product of the many, many, _many, comments on the Minnesota ICE shootings was the idea that a large part of what's going on is an extreme from of LARPing. Some of these protestors see themselves literally as the inheritors of the Civil Rights Movement, the American Revolution, and The Rebels from Star Wars all in one. They are of The One Right and True Cause and, therefore, all of their actions have inherent justification.
When that line of thinking gets to compound on itself for long enough, people start to burn things.
I've always been suspicious of the "radicalized online" idea. Aside from a few already very mentally odd individuals, I don't buy the idea that you can read enough schizo posts that, one day, you decide to up end your life and do something drastic. I think it's far more likely you just spend more and more time online and indoors engaging in fantasy conflicts.
But I do believe in radicalization as a concept more broadly. Cults and mass social movements exemplify this. At a lower stakes level, simply hanging out with a certain "scene" (think metalheads, goths, punks, whatever) can meaningfully change a person's behaviors and beliefs.
I wonder to what extent the various Minnesota-like organized protesting is now seriously breaking contain for lefties - many of them female - who would, otherwise, mostly vent their aggravation by doing their own kind of schizo posting on Facebook or elsewhere. If this is the case, then we're dealing with something a lot more like a cult or, more geopolitically relevant, something similar to how ISIS spread so quickly after their initial emergence. That does concern me.
Anecdotally, one (broadly) lefty woman I knew didn't believe me when I told her that Americans in fact do not have a constitutional right to obstruct government agents ("so what, they're just supposed to protest on the side? Are you sure?"). I think some people just don't really understand what's allowed and what isn't for reasons that I can only speculate about. We may find this Karen someday shocked to be clapped in irons for attempting to burn down the ICE fulfillment center.
My opinion is that US schools do a really bad job of teaching the civil rights protests of the 1960s era. A lot of people unironically believe that Rosa Parks was just some random nice lady who was too tired to change seats on the bus that day, and that MLK Jr assembled a group of purely peaceful protestors who shamed the evil whites into doing the right thing. The reality is... a lot more complicated.
Furthermore they should teach that other countries have wide spread use of public transit and even wealthy people use it. Meanwhile in the US Rosa Parks made public transit a last resort option for those too poor to care about being stabbed.
I dunno about that take. I feel pretty confident that Montgomery, Alabama did not have great public transit in the 1940s. I also think history classes should stick to teaching history instead of opining on the quality of public transit in different countries in modern times.
It would be interesting to find some statistics on public transit use by race in Southern cities, year by year, from 1945 onward. Plus Chicago and DC for never-segregated controls.
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