Look, sometimes real life intervenes and I have to fulfill certain obligations that require me to be away from a computer for extended periods of time. If you’ve been around here over the last ten years, you know that this doesn’t happen very often, although I will be going on a very rare vacation beginning in the middle of next week.
In any case, I saw that there was a shooting in a black church down in Charleston, South Carolina, and then I did manage to see that they had identified the shooter, apprehended him, and begun to interview people who grew up with him and knew him.
I didn’t know much beyond these things until this morning, and I certainly didn’t know that people were already calling this some kind of false flag operation intended to further the cause of gun control. I suppose that is predictable, but it’s hard for me to anticipate just how low Sen. Lindsey Graham will go, despite my incredibly low opinion of his character. Appearing on The View, Senator Graham at first said a couple of things that struck me as fair and sensible:
Graham wanted to assure viewers that this act is not a “window into the soul” of South Carolina. “It’s not who we are, it’s not who our country is, it’s about this guy,” he said of the assailant, “and this guy’s got tons of problems and to kill people in a church after sitting with them for an hour shows you tells you how whacked out this kid is.”
Yeah, I know that South Carolina has a special kind of bad history with racial matters, having started the whole Civil War and everything, but we didn’t say that the tragedy in Newtown was a window into the soul of Connecticut or the movie theater shooting in Aurora was a window into the soul of Colorado. These shootings happen in many states and have many motives, and it’s pretty obvious that despite the clear racial motive of the South Carolina tragedy, it was the act of sick individual and not a reflection of some widespread character flaw in South Carolinians.
But Sen. Graham then went a little further, and what he said was simply inexcusable:
But despite the fact that the Justice Department has labeled the attack a “hate crime,” Graham was not willing to go that far. “There are real people who are organized out there to kill people in religion and based on race, this guy’s just whacked out,” he said. “But it’s 2015. There are people out there looking for Christians to kill them.”
Now, it’s nice that Graham was willing to acknowledge that the victims here were Christians because that strongly implies that they were human beings. But, even with as little as I’ve read about this story, I’ve already picked up on the fact that his roommate said he was “big into segregation” and wanted to start a race war, that he was into the white supremacy movement enough to think Rhodesia was a special place, that he had Confederate Flag vanity plates, and that eyewitness survivors of the attack said that he complained about black people raping white people.
Under the circumstances, I think it was safe to say that this was a hate crime, and also that it was a hate crime directed against black people for being black. So far, I haven’t seen anything to indicate that this was a hate crime against Christians for being Christian. And to suggest that that is what this was is to do two things. First, it denies the legitimacy of the trauma this causes all black people regardless of their religious beliefs. Second, it feeds the paranoia of white Christians, many of whom already have an unhealthy and borderline insane persecution complex.
In other words, it’s just a shitty thing to do.
This guy was mentally unstable, may have been suffering from opiate addiction, and clearly had anger issues. But someone had to feed him this crap about the great Apartheid regime in South Africa and the long lost white wonderland of Rhodesia. People fed him hate and paranoia which he then channelled through his sick mind into mass murder. We’ll always have sick people, but we don’t need to make them sicker. We don’t need to give them the fucked up ideas that they turn into action.
This guy turned his anger on black people. The next guy may turn his anger on so-called secularists because politicians like Lindsey Graham are saying that secularists are out to get Christians.
We should have leaders who tamp down paranoia. They should be tamping it down even in the black community right now, because it’s beginning to feel like it’s open season for black people in this country and this mass killing can too easily fit into that narrative. We have a problem with police violence against black people in this country, but this lunatic wasn’t a police officer and his actions were basically unrelated to the culture and training of police.
Yet, Lindsey Graham won’t even acknowledge this feeling, which is something you have to do first before you can help people settle down their fears a bit and keep things in perspective. Graham isn’t interested in settling down people’s fears. He never is.
He wants you to be afraid all the time, which is how he gets you to support his domestic policies and his foreign policy adventures.
He’s an awful person, and I wish everyone could see right through him. Unfortunately, he’s a very effective politician.
