Distilling The Crazy
Modern philosopher and social critic Eric Hoffer observed that,
Cynical, yes, but also accurate. Sometimes, the degeneration takes a long time, sometimes it happens with shocking speed. By my estimation, Black Lives Latter (the movement) turned into Black Lives Matter (the racket) in about five weeks.
Even if you're disinclined, however, to take such a cynical view of activism, you can lament the problems with organized activism. Take a look at history, and you find that movements that gain enough momentum to organize into actual entities become permanent parts of the landscape. Even when their initial goals have been achieved.
Being rooted in human nature, this is inevitable. A movement that develops a structure - because structures are more efficient, because people gravitate toward leaders, and because leaders gain status by collecting followers - does indeed become a business.
What happens when the business achieves its first goals? Those most committed to the cause want to do more. Those who embraced those first goals, on the other hand, might find their desire sated and their focus moving on to other aims. The latter might dial back their efforts in the movement, or leave the business entirely.
This has the unfortunate effect of tipping the balance between the moderates and the "most committed" in the latters' direction. The "most committed" will grow in relative numbers, power, and influence. This will, in turn, alienate more and more moderates, and in time the organization will become dominated by the most radical.
This "distilling the crazies" phenomenon has also emerged on social media, especially if National Review's Jeff Blehar's report about BlueSky is accurate.
From his recent column:
[A]nyone who has spent a moment there (as I have) knows why: It’s a joyless madhouse full of shrieking lunatics actively on the hunt for people to hurt.
People there regularly make violent and crazy threats without consequence, because they are made against the right victims (Zionists and Republicans). Blocklists (lists of accounts that are blocked from viewing one’s posts because of some transgression or other) are aggressively propagated and encouraged. It is a hothouse remarkable for, if nothing else, the derangement its insularity has wreaked on those who fled exclusively to it. The only subjects of general discussion encouraged at Bluesky are woke politics, LGBT politics, and anti-Trump politics. The only tone thought to be appropriate is rage. Most of all, no jokes are allowed. Nothing is funny — ever.
Some people decried Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter because of the right-wing haters and crazies that now infest the place. My reply to that has been, "it's social media, haters and crazies are part of the landscape."
That infestation appears to be a mild cold compared to the raging Ebola-level of nutter that dominates BlueSky. Twitter pre-Musk was "policed" by those nutters, but they were a (loud) minority among the broader population there. They abandoned Twitter-now-X in favor of an echo chamber where they can nut together, absent pesky dissenters and mostly hidden from the public eye. Seriously - does anyone you know who doesn't fit the leftist mold even have a BlueSky account, let alone spend any time there? Given the concentration, distillation, and intensification of the Angry Left there, and its near-total obscurity as far as the general public goes, why would an average Joe have any interest?
The problem, unfortunately, is that obscurity enables further radicalization. Doubly so when the Left has been openly condoning political violence for years. Since Team Blue justice departments elected time and again not to prosecute crimes against others, "good cause" destruction and mayhem have been justified and normalized, and that toxicity grew from pockets of Antifa and BLM carnage to "anywhere" violence. After the October 6 massacre, when the Left decreed that Hamas terrorists were the "oppressed," the targets of violence have expanded* to include Jews in America.
Distillation of crazy has also been at work in our elite universities. It started with ideological conformity among the faculty and staff,
and turned places of learning into "this is what you are to think" indoctrination centers.
Trump is attempting to address the problem, but in typical Trump fashion he's going beyond removing the things that prop up these toxic cauldrons and trying to blunt-force change. Removing federal funding is something I can totally get behind - universities are not entitled to no-strings-attached taxpayer dollars, but that's about as far as I'd take it. Targeting only Harvard (and perhaps a couple others) with revocation of tax status, broad cancellation of visas for foreign students**, taking aim at endowments and the rest of it are bridges too far for me. If Trump wants to change the tax status of universities, he should seek it across the board via legislation (see: Congress).
The crazies will always be there, and they will continue to congregate and concentrate. Nothing to be done about that. Try to suppress it, and they grow even more resentful and hardened.
The counterweight lies within each of us, and in demanding our elected representatives draw the right lines. Don't allow them to bully us, ignore their rantings - or better yet, mock them. Those that devolve from speech (protected) to violence (not protected) should be prosecuted promptly and punished appropriately. Government's first role in even the freest societies is to act against those who violate the rights of others.
*As I type this, indictments are coming down for the murder-minded Egyptian national who lobbed over a dozen Molotov cocktails at a pro-Israel group calling for Hamas to release its remaining hostages. The American Left and the remnants of the legacy media beclowned themselves in the wake of that attack, of course, with one CNN analyst mocking the FBI’s labeling of the event as terrorism, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being called out for hollow “virtue signaling.” At least she didn’t “Yes, but…” in the fashion of most Leftist apologetics for Islamic misdeeds.
What is commonly referred to as Islamism or Radical Islam is embraced by about twenty percent of the world’s Muslims. While that’s a minority, it’s still a population greater than that of the entire United States. The illiberalism, bigotry, hatred of Jews, subordination of women, gays, and those of other faiths, and death sentence to anyone who dares try and leave the religion, to name but a few of the irreconcilable differences with Western culture, should baffle us when pondering the Left’s support for Islam over almost all else. I’ve attempted to explain that support here on the blog, but that’s just informational - the support itself tells us what we need to know.
“Queers for Palestine” is as bonkers as you can get.
**Cancelling student visas takes a financial toll on universities. Foreign students typically pay full tuition, and sometimes higher tuition, while a good fraction of American students receive financial aid from the university. In one sense, foreign students subsidize American students’ studies.
I understand the idea of going after all universities equally, but we know where the egregious offenders are. Harvard is the face of it, because it's always been a model for other universities and its a hub for elitists. You go after the head of this monster, and the body dies.