The January 6 rioters and campus protesters: Motive attribution and those who side with evil

 The title of this post would only be clickbait if anyone clicked on these posts.  No clicks, no bait.  Anyway, I see a clear relationship between the January 6 rioters, and those currently engaged in aggressive protests on college campuses in support of a jihadist movement.  Let us be clear about the January 6 insurrectionists.  They were motivated by an insane lie-- that the 2020 election was stolen.  They stormed the Capitol, committing acts of violence and intimidation in an attempt to overthrow democracy, falsely believing themselves to be the new American revolutionaries saving democracy.  How many people did they kill?  That is actually a little complicated.  One of the insurrectionists-- Ashli Babbitt-- was shot during the riots, and several more deaths were connected, including medical incidents like heart attacks.  The rioters did not kill Ashli Babbitt.  She got herself killed, and I do not have much sympathy for her.  Whether or not we count the medical incidents that followed, like the heart attacks, has become a political-medical-accounting debate of the strangest form.  Whether or not to include officer suicides after January 6 gets into the thorny issue of PTSD.  As a matter of simple fact, though, while deaths occurred as a result, we must also acknowledge that those deaths do not fall under the rubric of simple murder by the insurrectionists.  I think I have some credibility when it comes to taking on Trump and his ilk, but let us not speak falsely now.  The hour is getting late.  No, I do not have to give proper attribution.  Academics can plagiarize now.  Right, Claudy-baby?

Anyway, we must understand that the rioters were sincere and fundamentally misguided.  They were bizarro-revolutionaries, duped and in thrall to Donald Trump, who has never told the truth in his life.  He lost the 2020 election, told insane lies about it, and the insurrectionists were duped into believing conspiracy theories.  That is why they stormed the Capitol.

What of the horrors on college campuses?  There are assaults, but no deaths.  (Yet.  And hopefully never, but let us acknowledge the possibility.)  Some campuses have moved to on-line classes because they cannot protect Jews.  Why are students doing this?  They have been duped.  They have been lied to.  They have been fed conspiracy theories, ginned up, enraged by propaganda, created by those who have contempt for the very notion of truth, who basically just want to watch the world burn.  I write, of course, of the lowest species currently walking the Earth.

Leftist college professors.

(Try being a college professor who is not a leftist.  Lots-o-fun!)

Yet the students, like the January 6 rioters, believe the lies.  The believe the recycled Soviet propaganda which has outlived the USSR by decades, propaganda documented by Izabella Tabarovsky through its history.  They believe every conspiracy theory fed to them by their anti-intellectual faculty and social media echo chambers.  They believe.  To quote Shepherd Book, "they believe hard."  They are harassing, threatening and intimidating Jews, and siding with jihadists because they have been duped.  Into believing hard.

After January 6, I participated in a forum on the event.  I have referenced the forum before, and it was distressing, in part because any event with academics means dealing with identitarians.  Worse, the event was organized by the identitarians.  As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  If you are a critical race theorist, then everything is about race, and the critical race theorists who organized the event demanded that everyone a) agree that January 6 was fundamentally about "white supremacy," and b) provide an explanation for why anyone would fail to see that the entirety of the event was nothing but white supremacy, white supremacy and more white supremacy.

Hey, look, what's that?  Dunno, but it must be a nail, because all I have is a hammer.

If I had a screwdriver, I'd screw in the mornin', I'd screw in the evenin', all over this land!

That has a better ring to it, doesn't it?

There's a track here, somewhere.  Just gimme a minute to find it again.  Ah, there it is.

CRT and January 6.  Critical race theorists, of course, reject the very principle of objectivity as... white supremacy.  You cannot debate a critical race theorist.  If you reject critical race theory, that just proves you're a white supremacist.  It is exactly like talking to a Marxist.  If you reject Marxism, that's false consciousness.

Critical race theory, thus, is anti-intellectual, and has no place in academia.  (It has taken over academia.)

Anyway, here's the problem if you accept the concepts of objectivity, science, rationality, analysis, intellectualism, or really, anything except that hammer.

What is the counterfactual?  Take away Trump's lies about the election.  Would January 6 have happened?  Leave literally everything else the same.  Whatever you think about "white supremacy," leave that the same.  Just take away the lies about the election.  Does January 6 happen?  No.  The claim would be unworthy of consideration.

OK, now run it the other way.  Take away all of the racism, and just stir up insane conspiracies and throw in Trump's storm-the-Capitol rhetoric.  Does January 6 happen?  Cough, cough, Bolsinaro...  Yes.

Mill's methods.  As in, John Stuart.  My man.  Why did January 6 happen?  Race had two things to do with January 6.  Jack, and shit.  Critical race theorists reject the concepts of science, rationality or objective analysis, but January 6 had zero to do with race.

Yet, the identitarians who organized that forum could not think of a single candidate other than Trump who had ever denied an election result before.

Stacy Abrams.  Hillary Clinton caused a major shitshow in the 2008 primaries (although Republicans like to lie about her response to 2016).  Bernie Sanders whined about everything being rigged.  I could keep going, but the point is that the CRT-ers believed that Trump must be unique, because a) they had no historical knowledge, and b) needed to construct a narrative.  It was a bullshit narrative, like all CRT narratives, but it was necessary for their purposes.  Critical race theory is all about narratives.  That is, in fact, a central tenet of CRT.  (Quite literally.  Go read about it.  Critical race theory rejects objective scientific analysis in favor of narratives, using narratives as tools for engagement in power struggles.  It isn't about truth because they reject the concept of truth.  Critical race theory is insane.)

Yet as I go through this kind of analysis, what am I doing?  I am not precisely exonerating the January 6 rioters, but I am exonerating them on the worst of the motivate attribution accusations.  Racism.  (Is racism the worst motive?  According to the modern rules, it is, but I don't know how to rank-order evils.  There are a lot of different evils.)  The January 6 rioters committed among the more serious federal crimes we have seen.  They tried to overthrow American democracy, yet they did so because they falsely believed they were trying to save democracy.  Pointing to some of them and saying, "some were racist," does not show that the event was motivated by racism.

I read science fiction.  I listen to jazz.  It does not follow that I listen to jazz because I read science fiction.  Actually, it's worse than that.  Go to a restaurant.  You will find roughly 50/50 men and women.  Thus, some of the patrons will be men.  Does it follow that they are there because they are men, and thus the restaurant exists for the patriarchy?  Do you see the problem?

Motive attribution.

Let us turn, now, to the increasingly threatening and sometimes violent demonstrations on college campuses.  The participants say that they are not anti-Semitic.  They say that they have nothing against Jews.  They just care so much about the Palestinians, they reject the state of Israel, and the actions taken by the IDF.

I could go through their claims, point by point, and show yet again that everything they believe is a lie, they ignore real genocides like Darfur, the horrors in Syria and Yemen and elsewhere, and none of this really makes any coherent sense if you are simply thinking from a humanitarian perspective, but let's grant them the belief.  If I do that for the January 6 rioters for the purposes of motive attribution, must I do the same for the college demonstrators?

Consider that they have been duped, and that they believe (falsely) that Israel is committing genocide.  Consider that they have been duped, and that they believe (falsely) that Israel is a European colony.  Consider that they have been duped, and that they believe (falsely) that Palestinians want "freedom."  Consider that they have been duped, and that they believe (falsely) that Israel has an apartheid system.  Consider that they have been duped, and that they believe (falsely) that Israel is the aggressor.

I could keep going, but the point is to grant them sincere beliefs in their stated premises, however false those premises are.  The question is whether or not one can attribute beliefs separable from anti-Semitism in the same way that we can attribute beliefs to the January 6 rioters that are separable from racism.  There are clearly anti-Semites among these people.  Social media are quite good at culling the many hours of video clips and thousands upon thousands of protesters to find the most obviously anti-Semitic two-second clips.  That's not even selection bias, that's selection by purpose.  Yet there are also Jews.

There is an old cliche about the self-hating Jew, a cliche so worn and tired because there is so much history to it.  One considers the Simpsons exchange, in which Krusty hears that he is not Jewish and says, "I thought I was a self-hating Jew, but it turns out I'm just a plain, old anti-Semite."  Rainier Wolfcastle (Arnold Schwarzenegger) walks by, and says, "we have so much to discuss."  Truthfully, Arnie gets a bad rap, but the point is that the self-hating Jew is an image that exists because it is built on an archetype.  That allows these movements to hide behind Norman Finkelstein and a few other ostentatious outliers, putting the Norman Finkelsteins at the front so that they can say, "I'm not anti-Semitic, look, we have Jews in our movement!"  Norman Finkelstein is Jewish, but he holds negative affect towards Jews.  Yet, his ethnicity and family history make him very useful, so he cashes in, making him also the worst stereotype of the money-grubbing Jew.  The symmetry is almost too perfect.

Of course, such people reinforce the question of whether or not the demonstrators are anti-Semitic.  Can they hold the beliefs they hold without anti-Semitism, in the same way that the January 6 rioters could hold the beliefs that they did (and do) without racism?

This is the point at which we distinguish between two types of protesters, and if you watch the videos and listen to the interviews, you see the distinction clearly.  On every college campus in the country, the officially approved position from a social standpoint, including both peers and faculty, is that the good guys are the Palestinians and the bad guys are Israel, because that is what the power framework teaches you.  The stronger is the oppressor, which is evil, and the weaker is the oppressed, which is good.  Everything is an extrapolation from that.  No, you are not allowed to have another position.

Go watch the video of the Jewish Columbia professor whose campus ID was shut off, blocking him from campus.  Things are probably worse in the UK, where you can watch clips of cops telling people walking down the street, minding their own business, that they must not go near the protesters because, "you are quite openly Jewish."  Which is both an infringement on his rights, and an admission that the protesters aren't protesting Israel, but Jews.  Or, you can see the occasional swastikas, praise for Hitler, and all manner of open admission that no, it's about Jews.  Indeed, a little closer to my home, there is praise for Hitler-- actual praise for Hitler.  Yeah, that happened here.  Yup.  Yuppers.  Yup, yup, yup.

Anyway, though, let's consider the two groups.

Group A is fully committed to both the general premise and the specific issue.  Genus, and species, in the philosophical sense (general and specific being the etymology).  Group A sees the world as a conflict between oppressors and oppressed, powerful versus weak, and they wish to rise up in support of the downtrodden and dispossessed.  They apply that framework to the Middle East, and arrive at a conclusion in support of "Palestinians," and I put that in quotation marks because functionally and often openly, they actually support Hamas, there being no real difference when the Palestinian people and the terrorist organization they elected to govern them.

Group B is following the crowd, meaning Group A.  They are dispositionally aligned with Group A, but primarily signaling group affiliation with Group A rather than fully engaged, either intellectually or emotionally.  They will have a more difficult time articulating anything about history or philosophy, flawed though either explanation may be among Group A, but they will make vague statements mimicking the language they hear from Group A.  They will show up to a protest on occasion for a brief period of time, but they are not the core activists.

We might also add Groups C and D.  Group C would say, if asked, that they side with the Palestinians, but with insufficient interest to engage actively.  Group D sides with Israel.  On any college campus, Group D will be small, and largely silenced out of fear, which is part of the point of Group A. Silencing people out of fear may sound a little like terrorism.  It is only truly terrorism if it uses violence, but of course, they have used violence, so yes.  They are terrorists.  But anyway.

If we are considering the question of the protesters, we are considering Groups A and B.  They are the ones whose actions range up to and including occupying administrative buildings, blockading Jewish students in libraries, physical assaults, and making some campuses so threatening to Jews that they have moved to on-line classes.

If Group B has no philosophical commitment to any position, then to what degree can any motive beyond social signaling be attributed to them?  Hardly any.  One can scoff at the act of showing up to a protest of any kind for mere social signaling, but we know that such a group exists, and to accuse them of anti-Semitism would perhaps require more evidence.  If their goal is to signal solidarity with Group A, then it may be true that Group A is anti-Semitic, in which case we might consider a kind of second-order anti-Semitism, but there is something else happening.  Yet Group B is also not the group committing the actual, physical assaults.

We turn to Group A.  We must address both the genus and the species of the belief.  The general and the specific.  The philosophy motivating them, the nature of the charges, and how they relate to anti-Semitism.  Let us begin with the general.

The general philosophy of all social justice ideology is the power dyad, and conflict theory, with a postmodern view of morality.  Huh?  Fuck, I just typed a bunch of jargon-y gobbledygook.  Conflict theory:  the world can be described by a fundamental conflict between two opposed groups.  For Marx, the head honcho here, that was the owners of the means of production, and the workers, whom they exploit.  In critical race theory, swap in race for class, and Bob's your uncle.  You can do a neo-feminist version for a sex/gender conflict built on the patriarchy.  In queer theory, it's normalcy (heteronormativity and gender conformity etc.) versus those deemed outside the social constructs of normalcy.  There are a lot of versions.  In postcolonialist theory, it's the rich, white, European colonialist powers versus the countries they exploit.

Overlay that onto the Middle East, and it tells you who your heroes and villains are, not through a logically derived moral structure of deontology, but through a system in which morality is subjective, and the only real truth is power.  That is postcolonialist theory, which begins with Frantz Fanon and is odes to violence, moving through Michel Foucault's postmodern philosophy of rejection of truth in favor of power dynamics, up to Edward Said.

You cannot understand any of this without understanding the theory and philosophy.  You need to read what they have read, and what their professors have read.  Yes, it sucks, because these books are crazy, but you cannot understand what is happening without reading this shit.  Then, you see exactly how bonkers this is.

Do these philosophies have anything to do with anti-Semitism?

Yes.  Social justice ideology really is anti-Semitic, and always has been.  These principles have always been bundled together, and they work on the same empirical principle.  If there is any disparity, at any level, then when you see Group 1 doing better than Group 2, that is because Group 1 has created and rigged a system to oppress Group 2.  This is what critical race theory is, at the national level when the groups are racial groups.  Most of the time, they are only thinking of white people and African-Americans, because they are myopic, but that is the empirical principle.  At the international level, in postcolonialist theory, if Country 1 is rich and Country 2 is poor, that is because the neoliberalfuckthatword system is a system in which Country 1 rapes and pillages Country 2 because Country 1 is an evil, white, European colonialist oppressor.  This is how the entire ideology works, at the empirical level.

One may note that postcolonialist theory glitches when it cannot overlay the European/racial framework, which is why these people say nothing about Syria, Darfur, Yemen, China's oppression of the Uighurs, Boko Haram, or so many horrors around the world.  But we'll get back to that.

Instead, apply social justice pseudo-empiricism to the Jews.  Do that, and you have essentially every anti-Semitic conspiracy of the modern world.  It is no coincidence that Marx hated Jews, and it is no coincidence that successful minorities throughout history around the world are always hated, for finding successful economic niches as middlemen.  See Thomas Sowell's analysis.  But, the point is that the philosophy of social justice, applied to Jews, is every anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in the modern world.  Jews have higher incomes, are over-represented in prestige professions, and so forth.  Therefore, the system is rigged by and for the Jews.  Yes, that is literally the exact same logic as critical race theory.  There is zero difference between critical race theory and the standard anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.  How about Israel?  You have a rich and prosperous country, next to an impoverished shithole.  Jews get rich by exploiting and oppressing.  Postcolonialist theory again looks just like every anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Social justice ideology always results in anti-Semitism when you ask how it applies to Jews.  Always.

That's your genus.  It is impossible to begin with their premise and not go somewhere anti-Semitic.

Or to take the famous, bullshit line from Ibram X. Kendi, the only remedy for past discrimination is present discrimination, and the only remedy for present discrimination is future discrimination.

So how did some minorities outperform whites, without discrimination in our favor?

Jews are a big problem for modern leftism by outperforming without discrimination in our favor, which just exacerbates the growing anti-Semitism among the left, as Sowell argues.

Anyway, that's the genus.  We turn to the species.  Remember, all I just did is examine their underlying philosophy and argue that their underlying philosophy is anti-Semitic.  Yet they may also believe their claims about Israel and the IDF, so can they hold those specific beliefs separate from the anti-Semitism intrinsic to their philosophy?  Particularly, can Group A hold those beliefs separate from anti-Semitism?

The most important problem is that in order for you to accept a claim against a group, you must already be open to that claim.  Your philosophy and ideology dictate your openness to such claims.

Ask members of Group A about October 7.  You will get one of many responses.  At best, they will say yes, yes, it was wrong, and then try to shift the discussion because the last thing any of these kids want to do is admit anything about October 7 or talk about October 7.  You know, the reason this war is happening.

You will hear a lot of denial.  They will deny that it happened at all, claim that it was a false flag, claim that it was exaggerated, or something like that.  Holocaust denial, redux.  These reactions tell you something.  When you see posters of the hostages torn down, that tells you a lot.

Why do they react this way?  Why do they have no interest in any atrocity committed by any Muslim, like Bashar al-Assad, Boko Haram, take your pick?  If they care so much about the treatment of Muslims, what of the Uighurs?

Group A has a pre-existing moral framework, into which all actions must be fit.  No Muslim can ever be classified as a villain, because Muslims are the oppressed.  Hence, they have no framework with which to analyze Darfur, nor Syria, nor Yemen, nor really so much of the atrocity in the world.  The Uighurs?  China is in a complicated place, and they cannot say anything negative about China because Trump has a complicated relationship with China and they idealize communism, and while China is not truly communist anymore, it all complicates the moral framework.  Their moral framework only works when they have already classified one side as the oppressor and one side as the oppressed through postmodern social justice ideology, which is intrinsically racialized.  Their framework does not permit them to cast value judgments on October 7, because their framework has classified the Palestinians as the oppressed and therefore good.  October 7 fucked with their pseudo-moral systems.

However, their framework had already classified "Israel" as the villain because it is a rich, "European," white (?), colonialist oppressor, those being characteristics determined because its population is not Muslim, but Jewish.  The fact that so many of the people in Israel are Mizrahi means nothing to the protesters, but the point is that the framework is built on a determination of who is the villain prior to October 7, and based on population characteristics used to construct a notion of the good/evil dichotomy.

Here, then, is the problem.  The Group A protesters had already decided that Israel was the villain based on a racialized notion of good and evil, with Jews in the evil camp because of the structure of their ideology.  That preceded not only the IDF's response to October 7, but October 7 itself.  Their moral framework would not allow them to cast judgment on Hamas/the Palestinians, but it had already judged Israel before Israel did anything.  You can see that by their unwillingness to cast any real moral judgment on October 7 itself, and indeed, their willingness to defend it.

The problem, then, is that the Group A protesters have a motivation that is connected to a racialized view of good and evil rather than a deontological view.  The January 6 rioters, while some indeterminate number were racist, were not motivated by racism.

The campus protesters are, anti-Semitism being a subcategory of racism.

I'm done pretending that "Zionist" isn't a stand-in for "Jew" when spoken with hatred.  These same leftists used to speak of "dog whistles," and if you said to any of them, "I can't be racist, I've never called anyone the n-word," what would the reaction be?  Go and read about the history of racial dog whistles in politics.  Hell, in 2008 Joe Biden gave Barack Obama a compliment, and because the tone of the compliment sounded a little weird to some ears, he got called racist for it.  He said Obama was articulate.

What, because other African-Americans aren't?  Racist!

So that's the standard for racism when talking about African-Americans, but I'm supposed to pretend that when you substitute the word, "Zionist" for "Jew" and speak it with the same hatred as any anti-Semite, even asking the question is a scurrilous accusation?  Am I supposed to pretend to take these people intellectually seriously?

You know that document was called "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," right?

Yes, we need to take the question seriously.  You cannot reflexively call people anything.

But I'm done with this shit.  I am 100% done with this shit.  There are protesters on college campuses who side with a terrorist organization whose charter calls for the extermination of the Jews, who use the word, "Zionist" in the same way that old-fashioned goose-steppers used the word, "Jew," and you can watch the images of kids physically trying to block Jews from campuses by forming human chains, and compare them to, yes, Germany.

I am done indulging the lie.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk, "Search for the Reason Why," from Volunteered Slavery.