By Stella Morabito
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
“Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling predicted back in the
1950s that we’d soon have a citizenry unable to think. Many of his screenplays
warned of the specter of runaway mob psychology. Today it seems that’s exactly
the sort of citizenry we’ve got.
Social media trolling drives mindless street theater,
which drives more mindless social media trolling, and on and on. Most Americans
aren’t taken in by it, but the illusions mob behavior promotes can wreak havoc even
on reasonable people.
The mob mindset seems to be in hyper-drive. Consider a
July 14 Quillette article, “I
was the Mob until the Mob Came for Me,” written under a pseudonym due to
the author’s reasonable fear of retribution. These days, “Barrett Wilson”
delivers pizza and sushi to support his young family, a job he can’t afford to
lose.
He explains: “I once had a well paid job in what might be
described as the social justice industry. Then I upset the wrong person, and
within a short window of time, I was considered too toxic for my employer’s
taste. I was publicly shamed, mobbed, and reduced to a symbol of male
privilege. I was cast out of my career and my professional community.”
Wilson confesses that he was once part of that mob, and
as such, he fed the beast that did him in:
How did I become that person? It
happened because it was exhilarating. Every time I would call someone racist or
sexist, I would get a rush. That rush would then be reaffirmed and sustained by
the stars, hearts, and thumbs-up that constitute the nickels and dimes of
social media validation. The people giving me these stars, hearts, and
thumbs-up were engaging in their own cynical game: A fear of being targeted by
the mob induces us to signal publicly that we are part of it.
What should we make of Wilson’s amazing acknowledgement
that people generally signal their compliance with the mob to avoid being
targeted by it? Indeed, this is a very human defense mechanism, but it’s only
temporary. Mob compliance is a vicious and deadly cycle. The only way to stop
the cycle is to stop complying with the mob’s demands. Such refusal is an
actual act of bravery.
What to make of Wilson saying he’d “get a rush” every
time he smeared someone publicly? Again, a human behavior. Mob participants are
spellbound by the addiction of fake adulation, being called “brave” when they
collectively gang up on an individual. Doing so reflects emotional neediness
and arrested development. This emotional immaturity is fed by a culture with an
education system that does not value independent thought. But I digress.
So, the mob did to Wilson what mobs naturally do: turn on
their own: “Then one day, suddenly, I was accused of some of the very
transgressions I’d called out in others. I was guilty, of course: There’s no
such thing as due process in this world. And once judgment has been rendered
against you, the mob starts combing through your past, looking for similar
transgressions that might have been missed at the time. I was now told that I’d
been creating a toxic environment for years
at my workplace; that I’d been making the space around me unsafe through
micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions alike.”
Political
Correctness Has Built a ‘Snitch Culture’
Wilson also describes the social justice industry, which
thrives on political correctness, as “a surveillance culture, a snitch
culture.” This description is very apt, especially if you recall last summer’s
Twitter crusade by celebrity Lena Dunham. She encouraged people to eavesdrop on
others’ private conversations to report something politically incorrect to
authorities.
Dunham publicly celebrated getting two American Airlines
employees investigated after she reported overhearing their conversation in an
airport terminal. The employees allegedly engaged in what she called
“transphobic” talk. Dunham was modelling the snitch culture so her followers
could do same to anyone and everyone.
American Airlines cooperated by publicly agreeing to
investigate the employees based on Dunham’s manufactured complaint. As it
turned out, the airline claimed it didn’t have conclusive evidence. So, as far
as we know, no employees lost their jobs as a result of that particular
incident. But it all paves the way for the metastasis of a snitch culture.
That’s standard procedure today for all of the corporations
that now operate under the rainbow-colored flag, which is to say just about all
of them. As we can see from Wilson’s experience, it’s working so well that the
mob can now turn on its own with impunity.
For every high-profile story of a shamed target who
basically lost a job for the simple act of thinking or speaking thoughts the
mob didn’t authorize—for example, Google engineer James Damore or former
Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich or Business Insider columnist Daniella Greenbaum—there
are likely thousands of unknown Barrett Wilsons walking among us.
Some of them didn’t even know what they did or said to
offend anybody. Their superiors wouldn’t even say who accused them. But they
were no doubt hauled into a human resources department and told they didn’t have
the correct values or attitudes for the organization. Next thing they knew,
they were escorted to their desks to clear out of, say, a tech company like
Microsoft, or the California State University system, or any number of banks or
corporations or schools.
The Phenomenon of
Psycho-Mob Metastasis
If mob behavior is the antithesis of mature thought
processes, we should be able to see anti-thought behavior everywhere today. We
most certainly do. The pack mindset leads people to harass others without provocation.
Recall that the owner of the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia threw White House
Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and her family out of the restaurant because she
didn’t agree with Sanders’ politics.
The mob also congregates with bullhorns in front of
officials’ homes, such as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s,
telling them they shouldn’t be allowed to sleep. It loiters menacingly in front
of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices, such as the one in
Portland, Oregon, in a campaign that would lead to abolishing border control
and law enforcement. It mindlessly riots. It encourages an adult to assault a
kid wearing a Trump-supporting MAGA hat.
The mob mindset engages in ritual defamation, a procedure
practiced by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many corporations and tech giants
rely on the SPLC as a means of policing and punishing independent thought under
the guise of fighting “hate.” It’s the same mob mindset that inspired a gunman
to open fire at the Washington office of the Family Research Council in 2012.
It also inspired a gunman to attempt a mass assassination of Republican members
of Congress at a baseball practice last year, seriously wounding Rep. Steve
Scalise and two police officers.
Yet certain members of Congress continue to feed this
mentality, most famously Maxine Waters, who rallied a personal mob and called
for increased physical swarming of government officials at their homes, at gas
stations, at restaurants. Everywhere.
Why Illegal
Immigration Is a Centerpiece of Mob Action
It’s interesting here to note how calls to abolish ICE
have become such a lynchpin of mob action recently. We needn’t wonder very hard
about why rent-a-mob activity is being used to shut down law enforcement,
particularly the enforcement of immigration laws. Mob psychology simply can’t
sustain itself through logic or reason. After all, thoughtfulness in a society,
which can only come about through free expression, is anathema to mob creation
and activity.
Power elites who support and incite this sort of mass
mobilization—otherwise known as “community organizing”—are forever invested in
maintaining a dependent underclass. That’s pretty much the extent of
immigration’s usefulness to them. Hence the enlisted social justice warrior
mobs stridently and quite suddenly now emote about “children” and “family
cohesion” and “American values.”
Please. All of a sudden, these people purport to care
about children? Since when has the anti-thought camp in “progressive” American
politics ever cared about a child’s need for both a mother and a father? About
keeping families together? The answer is: Never.
The mob’s newfound interest in family cohesion at the
Mexican border should be clear to anybody who can think it through: it’s a
political ploy to use the kids as pawns in order to open the borders. The anti-thought
Left cannot win arguments on the merits, and certainly not with rule of law or
due process. So it needs bodies, and gets them with bribes: welfare, health
care, and education subsidies.
The anti-thought Left cares as deeply about family separation
as it cares about the emotional health of individuals like Barrett Wilson whom
they enlist in their rent-a-mobs. If they cared about the emotional health of
mob participants, they’d be interested in helping them develop means of
independent thought rather than force-feeding them a diet of identity politics
and ignorance in the schools. They’d have promoted family cohesion and
happiness for children. Instead, they’ve addicted them to the emotional rush of
“progressive” mob politics.
Family separation happens to be a centerpiece of so many
so-called progressive policies that SJW mobs and their creators in the Democrat
Party have been promoting for years. This includes, but is by no means limited
to, family law—e.g., no-fault divorce, which forcibly separates kids from
parents; medicine—e.g., Obamacare’s lower premiums for the divorced than for
the married; education—e.g., teaching kids that their parents are bigots if
they promote the cohesion of the organic family; and welfare policies—punishing
mothers if fathers are present in the family.
In fact, the intentional breakdown of families has always
been the crown jewel of such regressive policies because intact families have
always been the bane of big government proponents. That has never changed since
Karl Marx declared war on the family. Don’t expect it to change now.
Just Call Them On
It
Most frustrating of all are the supposedly conservative
leaders who actually listen to the rantings of the mob and try to earnestly
explain that no, we conservatives are not like that at all. We actually do care about kids and families. Sigh.
So when did we stop beating our wives? The mob can never be appeased, even if
all of its demands are met.
There’s no point explaining anything to the anti-thought
Left. People who intend harm usually know it at some level. They habitually
project their intentions onto their perceived enemies. The mobs calling for
abolishing ICE and border control use the charge of family separation because
they are guilty of doing just that in just about every area of policy.
In like manner, garden-variety mob members who get a
“rush” from smearing their perceived opponents are shifting their own sins onto
others. Try asking them this: What makes you so perfect? So immune to ever
doing anything bad? So pure as the driven snow? They’re always somehow above
reproach for anything and everything. So perfect.
In the end, the people used to prop up mob
behavior—whether appointed SJW flying monkeys or hard-luck immigrants
themselves—are all expendable, as far as the progressive mob is concerned. As
Wilson wrote, there is no due process in that world.
There comes a point when those who keep trying to give
the anti-thought camp the benefit of the doubt have to face reality. By
appeasing, we’re enabling. And that hurts everyone, including members of the
mob like Wilson, who end up learning the hard way.
So, if the mob is ever firmly ensconced in power, know
this: they are coming for you, no matter who you are.
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