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Can we talk about Rebekah Jones? Should we? I'm honestly incredibly conflicted about these questions. One of the rules of the Motte is that we shouldn't weakman:
Discussing Jones feels like walking a tightrope (called "meaningful cultural and political issues") that has been strung over an open toxic waste pit (called "are my political opponents just mentally ill?"). Out of sheer both-sides-ism I want to say "there are surely equally bizarre figures in right wing politics" but I can't actually find any. The best I can do is to say, suppose you combined Marjorie Taylor Greene's extremism with George Santos' fabulism, then made the resulting chimera guilty of the things Matt Gaetz was only ever rumored to have been guilty of doing--that would get you pretty close to Jones, I think. Except that MTG and Santos and Gaetz aren't darlings of reddit and don't command fawning loyalty from major media outlets, which Jones also does.
As a refresher, I first learned of Jones back in the old subreddit, when someone posted about her COVID activism. I don't remember when I learned of her criminal activities, but to simply quote the Wikipedia:
Jones went on to say she was going to run for office in Maryland (IIRC), but when that didn't pan out for unclear reasons, she returned to Florida. I don't know how much she has received in crowdfunding from the anti-DeSantis crowd at this point, but two early efforts pulled over half a million dollars. Jones has continued to hold herself out as a "whistleblower," specifically against the DeSantis administration in Florida, even though these claims appear pretty thoroughly debunked.
"Aha!" You might say. "PolitiFact leans left, and debunks Jones, so even the Left is willing to disavow this nut!"
Sure, maybe, to some extent. She went on to win the 2022 Democrat primary to challenge Matt Gaetz for his seat in the House of Representatives, so at least 16,000 Democrats still preferred Jones to someone with an actual legal education and genuinely relevant experience. And yes--by this logic, some 50,000 Republicans preferred the candidate who was under investigation for sex trafficking minors! It's baffling, I agree. But this is one of those "meaningful cultural and political issues" I mentioned--the only way I can make sense of any of this is to take a deep breath and remind myself that most people lack anything approaching coherent principles, they don't care about these details--they only care to win.
Anyway, that's all just the background!
This morning I woke up with this in my feeds.
If you don't want to read "WhitePeopleTwitter" (and I wouldn't blame you), it is a tweet from Rebekah Jones, followed by others, which I have partly reproduced here:
Naturally, Jones also provides links to her crowdfunding platforms of choice. The reddit "discussion" is... predictable? Outrage, occasional people (mostly, but not always, downvoted) asking whether this is legit, very few people posting actual information. Well, proles gonna prole I guess. But the headline in the Miami Herald?
So, that sounds bad! But is it really why he was arrested? In fact it is not. He was arrested for posting stuff like this:
As this information was coming out, Jones added to her tweetstorm:
It's not clear when these events are supposed to have occurred; Max Nordau shared video of Jones delivering her son to the police station. Rather, as this tweet suggests, it appears that "Rebekah Jones tried to blame DeSantis and RAISE MONEY off law enforcement stopping a possible school shooting."
I don't know what Jones' problem ultimately is. Narcissism? Paranoia? DeSantis Derangement Syndrome? That she is a habitual fabulist is well-established. That she has profited substantially from vocal opposition to all things DeSantis is a matter of public record. She is a sufficiently shady known quantity that most really big national news outlets seem reluctant to continue signal-boosting her, but the Miami Herald (by circulation, reportedly Florida's seventh-largest paper) still seems happy to run false headlines at her mere behest.
This seems discussion-worthy, and yet part of me wants to just not even post about it because it seems wrong, somehow, to even discuss Rebekah Jones. Giving her any attention at all feels a bit like encouraging a delusional person to persist in their delusions; she clearly wants notoriety, she doesn't seem capable of handling notoriety in a healthy way, surely it would be best to just stop paying attention to her?
But also, this is a kid talking about doing violence at school, with guns or knives. Is narcissism hereditary? Did his home environment contribute to this? [CONTINUED BELOW]
I think that violence is, if not necessarily a good reaction, at least an understandable reaction to being forced by the state to spend eight hours a day at a containment center run by a bunch of glorified babysitters. Of course in practice, many school shooters target not just school staff but also their fellow students, often not even because of any justified personal grievances against them.
This comment has received at least three reports, with some commenters saying they've reported this comment.
I am responding with a modhat to remind the reporters that this is a forum for testing shady thinking, which means that by default even shady thinking is allowed. While concrete threats of violence are in many instances illegal and would in any event violate our ruleset (at minimum by excluding the targets of such threats from the discussion), opinions regarding what might arguably justify violence are not the same as threats of violence.
From the reports, @Goodguy stands accused of being "pro shooting up schools" and sounding "really unhinged." From @NolanE's comment on the other reported comment:
But this is uncharitable and suggests an aversion to thinking charitably about the motives of violent people, which--if we actually want to prevent school shootings, or even threats of school shootings--it might be helpful for us to think about clearly and accurately. @Goodguy says that violence is "not necessarily a good reaction" but an "understandable" one. This is supported with a characterization of public education that many people disagree with (some, here in the comments), but not one that is presented as the only or even the correct perspective. Nothing about this comment "justifies" school shootings--only attempts to explain them.
There is a famous story about John Adams defending British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials. It has become the center of essays, books, television productions... Adams does not seem to have even been excessively sympathetic toward the soldiers, though he was certainly accused of such sympathies. Rather, he just regarded it as an injustice for the soldiers to go to trial unrepresented, and he had some rational doubts about the stories he was hearing. In the end, many of the soldiers were actually acquitted, because there was good evidence that they weren't involved or at fault, but this evidence would not have come to light had public opinion prevailed and the soldiers simply been lynched. Still, there were some people who continued to regard Jon Adams as "pro shooting up Americans" as a result.
In hopes of throwing reporters a bit of a bone, I want to say something like "@Goodguy's comment could be higher effort," but even that I think would not be quite right. If @Goodguy had written a higher-effort version of this comment, I think it would only have strengthened the objections; the comment as written does not excuse or defend school shootings, only explains (some of) them in a way that could potentially be probative of root causes. That it does so succinctly helps, rhetorically, to strengthen the idea that shooters are not being defended as, well, the "good guys"--just as humans responding to an arguably coercive environment.
If anyone using this website ever turns out to commit a serious crime, I will be very sad about that! But I'm not going to moderate people for trying to understand violence, on grounds that understanding violence might lead to violence. Because I think the opposite is at least as likely to be true--that honest attempts to understand violence could help us to prevent it.
Obviously that’s rubbish. School shootings are neither justifiable nor “understandable” by any sane metric, and there is in fact no real distinction between those two phrases.
How can anybody “understand” an adult shooting a few 6 year olds, based on “workplace hostility” is beyond me. They aren’t workers for one thing. The shooter often has no relationship to the school.
(Maybe @Goodguy wanted to talk about workspaces in particular he didn’t. He preferred to understand school shooters.)
You vaguely admit that he has no real justification when you say were he try to explain his position it would be worse for him.
Nice piece about John Adams though, albeit totally unrelated. After all I didn’t suggest a mob take out @Goodguy, or that there be an online lynching, but reported him to whatever travesty of due process this site enforces. I myself got a 2 day ban for a perfectly good analogy a while back. So banning can be done. You can do if you try.
And the whole lecturing tone is a bit off, isn’t it? The weird defense of goodguy’s post could perhaps be a bit less verbose, and not dwell all that much on rather irrelevant American history, but it drips with unearned condescension.
Anyways I don’t see any way to delete myself from this community, so feel free to ban me. This is to be clear because I don’t want to be associated with y’all. I can see why Scott cut the posters here out of the loop.
There is a huge difference between "justifiable" and "understandable." We often understand why people do things without believing they were justified.
You caught a ban for offering your "analogy" in bad faith.
You know you can just... go away, right?
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Honestly, it seems to me that you have taken an impractically high degree of offense at Goodguys post. I think it takes only a small helping of charity to see his post as reasonable and motte-adequate. What exactly did he do wrong? Are school schootings a unique evil where one may not play devils advocate even on the motte?
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Scott is still on good terms with The Motte AFAIK. He even offered to host ads for the site after our migration. We parted ways because people who disliked the Culture War thread harassed him and IRL swatted him.
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How often do comments get reported here? I feel like I pretty often seen thinly disguised calls and sometimes undisguised calls for violence here.
Actually I am a bit surprised given this site's political leanings that anyone on this site cares about school shootings enough to be upset by something that describes them as in some cases understandable. But then, I like being surprised by this place.
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If I were to summarize my objection to the op comment - "extraordinary cllaims require extraordinary evidence". I can understand why OJ Simpson would kill his wife. But i think there is a lot of information missing before I can come to the conclusion of "of course he would shoot up the school".
Well, OP's suggestion was:
And the conclusion was not "of course"--the conclusion was "I understand."
Do you find stories of prison violence extraordinary? Do you think prison violence is an inescapable fact about imprisonment? You might object that schools are meaningfully distinct from prisons, but if you've never encountered comparisons between schools and prisons before, well, now you have--and I assure you that they are common comparisons. You might say "schools are meant to benefit children" but prisons are arguably meant to benefit criminals (through rehabilitation). You might say "school is not so unpleasant as to justify murder" and I'd say that's true! But no one in this thread has yet said "murder is justified." Only explained one thing that might drive a person to commit murder.
And sure, OP could have said more about it, but the difficulty there is, the more you say about it, the more it sounds like you are trying to claim that the violence is justified, rather than claiming that it is understandable. I didn't mind going to school as a child, but I undertstand that many people find the experience absolutely torturous.
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That's an uncharitable re-phrasing of the op comment. He simply calls it "an understandable reaction" to what some would consider involuntary capture, but then qualifies it with the observation that many school shooters appear to kill not only their "captors" but random fellow "inmates" (implying that op believes there's a good chance these shooters are simply unhinged people).
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