National
Review Online
Wednesday,
August 30, 2023
Having learned
that a white supremacist had murdered three innocent African Americans at a
Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Fla., Governor Ron DeSantis took every
appropriate step. He recorded that the shooter, whom he called a “racially
motivated” “scumbag” and a “coward,” had been “targeting people based on their
race.” He confirmed that the killer had penned a “manifesto.” He made it clear
such behavior was — and would always be — “totally unacceptable.” Next,
DeSantis announced plans to suspend his
presidential campaign and
return to Florida, he pledged funds to protect a historically
black college in North Florida, and he resolved to visit the community where it
had happened — despite activists’ promises to shout him down if he did.
For
this, DeSantis was blamed by the press for the actions of the killer.
Quite
how DeSantis is responsible is never explained. Instead, the charge relies upon
insinuations, elisions, and non sequiturs. DeSantis is guilty of rhetoric that
is never quoted, of policies that do not intersect with the crime, of an
attitude that is widely implied but narrowly sourced. At no time is any effort
made to connect any of this to the man who pulled the trigger. The state’s new
slavery curriculum is mentioned but never connected to anything concrete. So,
too, are the governor’s opposition to DEI, his contention that critical race
theory teaches people to hate one another, and his disdain for racial
gerrymandering — all of these stances against race-conscious
thinking and collective racial guilt. The chief political writer at the
Associated Press, Steve Peoples, observed on
Twitter that
“Ron DeSantis scoffed when the NAACP issued a travel advisory this spring
warning Black people to use ‘extreme care’ if traveling to Florida” and yet,
“just three months later, DeSantis is leading his state through the aftermath
of a racist attack.” How these two things relate wasn’t addressed. At the White
House Monday night, NPR’s Franco Ordonez asked, “Does the White House see any
connection with the changes that the Florida governor has made in teaching
about African-American history to the kind of violence that we saw in
Jacksonville?” Does Ordonez? What is it?
The most
recent racially motivated mass shooting that captured the media’s attention was
carried out in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2022. Ought we to assume that it was the
product of New York’s policies? That abomination was four times deadlier than
the one in Jacksonville. What might we conclude from that? The answers, we’d
venture in both cases, are “nothing.” Indeed, there can be no answers to such
questions because their framework is absurd. The killer in Florida, like the
killer in New York, acted out of raw hatred — a flaw that exists in humans
everywhere, and always has. Their acts were not caused by arguments over the
meaning of tangential terms in the school curriculum, or by esoteric debates
over the legality of affirmative action, or by ineffable atmospheres of any
sort. They were caused by an old-fashioned sort of evil that, through hard work
and the passage of time, has been divorced from our political debates. There is
almost nobody in America who approves of what the scumbag did in Florida.
Mercifully, it was universally condemned — on the left, on the right, and
everywhere in between. Such unanimity, which was not always the case following
racial violence in America, is today routine.
The
scale of the outpouring ought to have inspired defiance. Instead, it prompted a
handful of political entrepreneurs to search for whatever fault lines they
could find and to start banging away at them with a chisel. This was a profound
mistake. It has taken a great deal of pain and an extraordinary amount of work,
but Americans can now say without doubt or hesitation that their country is
better than the racist loser from Jacksonville, whose grotesque worldview did
not have a constituency and, despite his baleful behavior, is not likely to
have one ever again.
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