Is “Political Correctness” to Blame for Orlando Massacre?
“The National Rifle Association (NRA) on Tuesday defended gun rights, two days after a gunman killed 49 people and left 53 others injured at a gay nightclub in Orlando,” Jesse Byrnes at The Hill reports:
“In the aftermath of this terrorist attack, President Obama and Hillary Clinton renewed calls for more gun control, including a ban on whole categories of semi-automatic firearms,” Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, wrote in a USA Today op-ed.
“They are desperate to create the illusion that they’re doing something to protect us because their policies can’t and won’t keep us safe. This transparent head-fake should scare every American, because it will do nothing to prevent the next attack,” he said.
Cox said “political correctness” allowed for the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history to take place, noting that the FBI had interviewed the shooter multiple times since 2013 and that he maintained a government-approved security license.
“Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s political correctness prevented anything from being done about it,” Cox wrote.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who the NRA has endorsed, also attacked “political correctness” in a speech following the shooting.
So what exactly is the connection between “political correctness” and mass murder? Let’s ask an expert: mass murderer Anders Breivik (the following is reposted from EconoSpeak, August 2015)
“…voters crave the anti-status-quo politician. They want results. They need a fighter. They need someone to fire all the political-correct police.” — Sarah Palin, interview with Donald Trump
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Anders Breivik |
In the introduction to his “compendium” manifesto, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, mass-murderer Anders Breivik asked, “What is Political Correctness?” and “How did it all begin?” His answer dwelt on the Frankfurt School, and singled out Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization as especially important. Breivik’s text was copied and pasted almost verbatim from a screed called “Political Correctness: a Short History of an Ideology?” by William S. Lind, “Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.”
Along the way, “conservative” Republican stalwarts Ralph de Toledano and Patrick J. Buchanan have recycled those crack-brained conspiracy theories, documented by abundant footnotes that typically lead either to a source who didn’t say what they were credited with saying, to some other hack propaganda recycler or to an “authoritative” emigre like Victor Zitta or Lazlo Pasztor relying extensively on official histories published by the Axis-allied Horthy regime. Martin Jay traced the strange trajectory of this propaganda meme in “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe.”
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Roger Kimball |
This month saw the publication by Roger Kimball‘s Encounter Books (an “activity” of the Bradley Foundation) of yet another rehash of the discredited crap, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, by Michael Walsh. A credulous review of that book in the Washington Free Beacon presents the book’s argument, apparently oblivious to its dubious lineage:
In The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, Walsh argues that the current obsession with politically correct speech began with a group of Marxist academics at the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, who would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. The scholars, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, among others, developed a wide-ranging, if often contradictory, critique of the principal tenets of “bourgeois” Western culture—from the centrality of reason and individuality to Christian sexual mores.
As Barkley and I have discussed, the term “politically correct” probably was popularized in the late 1960s and early 1970s by left-wing student activists wary of the self-righteous dogmatism displayed by self-styled Marxist-Leninist political grouplets. But that’s not the way the conventional mythology goes.
At the end of December 1982, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed, “The Shattered Humanities” by William Bennett, who at the time was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bennett’s complaint was that “matters of enduring importance” — “the true,” “the good” and “the noble” — had been abandoned because “we have yielded to the bullying of those fascinated with the merely contemporary.” By the early 1990s, Bennett’s lament about the decline of traditional values in the humanities had swelled into a moral panic about the alleged tyranny of political correctness on campus, fueled by best-selling books such as Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The politics of race and sex on campus.
Even President Bush I had to get into the act with a commencement address at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in which he railed against “political extremists [who] roam the land, abusing the privilege of free speech, setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race.”
Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses. The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.
Isolated anecdotes and broad generalizations can only get you so far. The elusive scourge of political correctness needed to be explained by theory of its origins. Thus the Minnicino/Larouche conspiracy theory, taken up by Lind, Buchanan, de Toledano, Breivik and now Walsh.
Meanwhile, “A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 71% of American Adults think political correctness is a problem in America today, while only 18% disagree. Ten percent (10%) are undecided.”
National Survey of 1,000 American Adults
Conducted August 25-26, 2015
By Rasmussen Reports
1* Do Americans have true freedom of speech today, or do they have to be careful not to say something politically incorrect to avoid getting in trouble?
2* Is political correctness a problem in America today?
No, political correctness had nothing to do with it. Constitutional correctness did. Our Constitution does not allow citizens’ rights to be infringed without due process of law. In fact, it does not allow NON-citizens rights to be infringed without due process. That means a conviction, in court, of a crime. The man was investigated, twice, and nothing was found even to charge him with.
Our Constitution does not allow citizens’ rights to be infringed without due process of law
………….Patriot Act.
Sandwich Man,
My husband somehow got on Lyndon LaRoche’s mailing list back in the ’90s. I had no memory of ever hearing anything about him, so read some of the crap Don was sent. Didn’t take long to figure out this group was too much like Scientology for my taste, and I tried to get Don off their mailing list for months before the begs for money, that regularly came with their propaganda, stopped.
not being a scholar I have to take “political correctness” to mean what I have seen it mean in my own encoutners with it: something like “you can’t say what you think about someone in a currently fashionable victim group, you can’t even use normal language that those professional victims find offensive.”
okay, i could even go along with that. if it weren’t for the professional victims showing absolutely no regard for what hurts me or that i find offensive or worrisome.
but what i find even more deeply offensive is the “damned lie” of the people who say that “political correctness” caused the shooting, or permitted it. they seem to be claiming that the constitution except for the second amendment is a “politically correct” road to degeneracy… the loss of those higher values of strength, honor, and racial purity.
after all, why would we permit “potential” terrorists to roam freely on out sacred soil when we can so easily identify them by what they say and how they look?
so I think I am agreeing with Warren here.
except that “we” do not respect our own Constitution so much as we like to think. consider what happened to John Walker Lindh. Is still happening.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, Sandwichman. You just don’t understand.
Guns don’t kill people. Political correctness does.
In what may end up putting me in strong (if rare) agreement with Warren, I don’t think it’s possible to make hating gay people, or Jews, or other ethnic minorities illegal. Not with any law I can imagine supporting anyway.
In some sense I prefer an environment where people are okay putting that hatred out there. It makes them easier to watch for one thing. So no also to the (apparent) recent trend trying to marginalize “hate speech” on college campuses etc. Let the haters have the freedom and space to try to defend and engage their ideas among the largest community possible.
This is why I strongly suspect the Tsarnaevs were similarly looked at by the FBI etc. and then left alone. IIRC they were probably profiled as more likely to be relatively ordinary anti-semites than potential terrorists (wrongly as it turned out). The FBI just doesn’t have the resources to follow every weapons crazed anti-semite, misogynist, or homophobe in the country.
We’d have to turn into the old East Germany. Which didn’t turn out so great for them anyway.
“Cultural Marxism” is a easy way out for those type of people. I also could just as easily call it “Christian” influenced do gooderism by affluent people whether they are “believers” are not. Jesus Christ Pose. Considering in in the post-war era the mentality of the world was to “save” all the under classes: colored people, gays ete ete ete. My guess Marcuse eyebrows would rise at the suggestion of “cultural marxism”.
Don’t rip LaRouche to hard, his attacks on Ron Paul/Libertarian ‘sound money’ myths +Andrew Jacksons true motives in the 1830’s is terrific.