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Notes -
W.H, liberal morality, and why co-existence is undesirable
A little while ago, I read a story of a recent scandal which I think conclusively shows that the Dems have finally gone too far. You see, the state legislature of Massachusetts passed a prisoner rehabilitation weekend pass program, in which prisoners with good behavior could obtain leave to spend time unsupervised in society and then return to serve their sentences. Unfortunately they forgot to exclude first degree murderers serving life without parole sentences who, for obvious reasons, could not be trusted to return. As such, the court said they must be allowed to participate unless the legislature specifically excluded them. The legislature passed a new bill to do so, but the Massachusetts governor vetoed the bill.
Enter inmate W.H, who with his 2 friends got bored robbing a cooperative teenage clerk, so they stabbed him 18 times and threw him in a dumpster. Sentenced to life without parole, he was furloughed from prison and escaped. But normal life was of course boring. So predictably, he broke into a woman's home with a pistol, tied up her boyfriend, stabbed him, and then raped her in front of him.
Perceptive readers will have guessed by now that by recent, I mean 36 years ago. You see W.H is Willie Horton, the governor was Michael Dukakis and this was the scandal that helped sink his campaign for president. or as the Times covered it back then:
"Foes accuse Bush campaign of inflamming racial tension": https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//www.nytimes.com/1988/10/24/us/foes-accuse-bush-campaign-of-inflaming-racial-tension.html#site-content
Now, as much as i'd like to dunk on the Times they didn't cherrypick random nobodies. Their sources for the accusation of "inflaming the nation's racial fears", Dukakis' running mate, Jesse Jackson and the future DNC chair, Dona Brazille. And of course, if you look up Willie Horton today, basically every non-conservative source including your high school teacher will tell you about the "infamous"... ad, which unlike unleashing rape and murder on your innocent citizens violates the sacred values of our Democracy or something. Some degree of deliberate unrestricted warfare is going on here, but I don't think this fully explains it. I'm reminded of Amy Biel who went to South Africa to fight apartheid, only to be pulled out a car by a black mob which slaughtered her despite the protests of her black friends that she was on their side. And then her parents flew into the country to testify a the "truth and reconciliation committee" in favor of releasing her murderers. They then started a foundation and hired these murderers.
Hlynka, I'm sure, will find a way to call them hypocrites. Moldbug will ask, 'but don't these elves eat great food'? As for me, I neither desire nor expect cooperation with these people, whatever their thought process or culinary habits. I wanna see the conservative movement* draw a clear unambiguous moral line between us and them, accept those that will cross over, and to crush the opposition permanently and with the same concern they feel for their pets' victims.
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*Of course they are more concerned with saving the enemies' feti.
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Here are the two ads Bush ran on the issue.
Willie Horton ad https://youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y
Revolving door ad https://youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y Note how in the second one, the campaign goes out of it's way to find white criminals for it's footage.
This is it.
WELL THIS IS IT BOYS. I've been Permabanned. I appeal to the other mods not for "a second chance" but for an outright acquittal, as I believe this charge to be a travesty. Paging @naraburns, @ZorbaTHut, @TracingWoodgrains
Commenters who are tempted to draw conclusions from this ban should... do exactly that. Seriously, read @Amadan's rationale and try to defend his integrity. There are people who place no value on your life, and others who, whatever their pretensions to the open discussion of ideas and others who find pointing this out intolerable. The outer party lives on, laundering gross atrocities into respectability by demanding that you not be outraged by them. And so, in this eternal re-run of the scene from "politics and the english language" releasing monsters to slaughter innocents becomes, "a policy that resulted in a criminal doing some crime." Depicting the criminal becomes "racialized imagery", and the promise of open discussion becomes, "I'm not sure how you'd make it relevant today without being pure "boo Democrats,"...
Have people actually watched the ad? Here it is. People claiming that this ad is racist seem to be making a fully general argument that ever bringing up a crime committed by a black man in a political context is racist, full stop, no exceptions. The verbiage used isn't inflammatory, the photos are simply of Bush, Dukakis, and the murderer. The facts presented all seem to be basically accurate. The policy seems to be the most unambiguous example possible of a soft-on-crime policy that led directly to a brutal rape and murder. I have no idea how you could make the point the ad is making without it being "racist" from the people lobbing that accusation.
As someone who remembers the ad - you can certainly argue that it's not literally "racist" to state facts and show a picture of the criminal. But I think you'd have to be very naive, or disingenuous, to claim that they did not carefully select that particular crime and that particular criminal for its obvious valences, or that no one involved in the campaign gave any thought to what was being signaled.
Was it powerful? Was it effective? Was there a legitimate argument being made about soft-on-crime policies? Sure. But let's be real here, you can argue that the racial messaging was on point, but you can't argue that it wasn't intentional.
Is that crime somehow out of the ordinary? If we assume that black and white people in MA were about as likely as their counterparts elsewhere in the U.S. to be criminals, I don't think the Bush team would have had to try very hard to select a murder with a black perpetrator in 1988.
Famously, between 1980 and 2008 52.5% of all murder offenders nation-wide were black. Thus, if the Bush team wanted to spotlight an American murder and picked one at random, the perpetrator would be black slightly more than half the time. As MA was only 5% black (pdf warning) compared to the national population's 12% (pdf warning), that would make appx. 22% of all MA murderers black unless either my math is wrong or there was some factor which made the population of MA murderers not representative of national trends.
Thus, Bush would have had to work harder than flipping a coin to find a MA murderer who was black, but 1-in-4.5 is still not particularly bad odds.
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One of the youtube commenters claims "There has been a serious rewrite of history. This ad was only run in New Hampshire, on cable, a couple of times. Yet it is shown in history classes as "the infamous Willie Horton ad. The real Willie Horton ad, which was also denounced as racist, did not show a picture of Horton or mention his race." Do you remember if that's true or not?
Obviously the makers of the ad weren't "not seeing color". But racial messaging could mean "be racist! hate black people" ... or racial messaging could be "there's a crime problem, perpetrators are disproportionately black, a desire to be anti-racist is preventing the left from solving the crime problem, and it won't stop us".
I won't swear to it (memories of things you might or might not have seen on TV 35 years ago being what they are), but I think I recall actually seeing this ad (and I did not live anywhere near New Hampshire).
I would be very curious to know which "history classes" show that ad.
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I think there's two different questions getting blurred, here. I'm very skeptical that Lee Atwater, of all people, overlooked the racial implications. But I'm also very skeptical that Lee Atwater, of all people, would have overlooked a case where an opponent's tremendously controversial policy decisions (Dukakis had pocket veto'd a bill specifically meant to stop furloughs like the one Horton received!) had lead to a murderer going on a raping and stabbing vacation from jail, had it turned out that the murderer and rapist looked like Charlie Manson instead. I'm not even sure Atwater would have refused to include a picture.
And it's not like there was some wide universe where the Bush campaign carefully selected the worst one. Horton wasn't the only LWOP murderer to get furloughs, but there had been a total of 11 first-degree murderers to escape during a furlough as of 1988. While Horton wasn't the only noteworthy escapee, I can't find anything from the others talking about shoot-outs with police, nevermind the rape and stabbing.
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This is like the reverse Chinese robber fallacy. People often care about heinous crimes. Black people are more likely to commit heinous crimes in the US and when it comes to rape are very much more likely to rape victims outside of their race (even after accounting for population sizes).
Picking someone that looks like Horton was very likely to happen if it was random. Suggesting therefore that there was something racist or intentional about selecting Horton confuses something that has racial valiance with racism.
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