I realised the obscene nature of her question.
On the matter of obscene questions, over in my political corner, everyone on socmed is looking at each other, waiting for a shoe to drop: It is hard to describe the political elements about this shooter, but the visible elements so far point rightward.
To the other, the fake socmed screenshots in which the Highland Park shooter allegedly proclaims himself Antifa are actually an expected part of the ritual.
It seems a small contrast, but it also feels important: Some people look at a mass shooting and want to know
why it happened; others wonder how they can blame it on their political enemies.
A tweet reached me, yesterday, in which a reporter was asking after a child separated from his parents. Multiple people wrongly corrected the reporter, scolding for being late, because the kid was already reunited with his parents. The scorn seemed a little much, as things were moving quickly, and, hey, these little happy endings are about the only comforts we might find in such moments. Anyway, the scolds were wrong; this morning we know the child remains separated from his parents because they are dead.
And as to politics, the emerging evidence suggests shooter's nihilism favored rightist rhetoric, and while this seems to put the faked screenshots to rest, the question isn't really about blaming Trump, or blue-line authoritarianism; the time for scrutinizing those details is later, when we have more evidence and context.
But there was a moment, when the news broke, and I wondered about the politics of shooting up the Fourth of July, because some part of me instantly accepted—probably already believed—that of course someone would shoot up Independence Day, this year, because these are the United States of America, and this is 2022. Still, in the moment of wondering at the possibility of a shooter from somewhere in my range of the political spectrum, it's not so much a matter of being okay with the murder, but at least I would know how to deal with these politics; I was actually okay with the possibility of a leftist radical or a mainstream liberal—at least I would have some idea how to address prospective future violence.
What we have, however, recalls a
Twitter thread↱ from a few years back, in which someone who had just been through the misogynist pill mill discussed "how the online depression community has been infiltrated by alt-right recruiters deliberately preying on the vulnerable"; we've seen the thread here,
before↗, and in my own notes I have records from a separate posting, and it turns out that in such questions, some people are much more worried about the tyranny of good faith. These years later, there is no explicit moral to the story, as such; rather, we might have witnessed in Highland Park not only a result of our failure to deliver psychological health services, but also the influence of deliberately targeting perceived unstable elements.
And if someone once said to me that a particular neighbor probably doesn't think he is being intellectually dishonest, it seems worth noting: Sure, that's only one person, but it is also a strangely clear distillation of particular relativism; in my lifetime, an accusation of moral relativism has become an excuse for the progeny of the old accusers. Looking back, it seems more inevitable than ironic, compared to those who target the psychologically unstable for disinformation, agitation, and provocation. It is possible to drown in irony on this¹, if I give over to the flood.
After all, the point isn't to explicitly belabor on example from a few years ago; rather, rightists have been pitching not just to the depressed, but targeting for disinformation all sorts of people they perceive as psychologically vulnerable.
Because, yes, the Highland Park shooter brings that old twit-thread to mind. We have yet to hear anything about when or if he ever announced his manpilling, but where other recent mass killings have been about white supremacism and misogyny, we don't yet have, and might not get, a coherent manifesto for the Independence Day Massacre, but there is a lot of familiar rightist conspiracism in what I've seen, so far, but none of it is definitive. To wit, I don't want to make too much, at this time, out of his hair but at one point he was dyed in a way that made me think of something else.² If that thread, or what it intimates, holds true, then this wasn't about doctrinal politics but nihilist misanthropy.
There was a lot over the years that we either called paranoid or not, but this stuff occurs in a range where the word becomes volatile, because the colloquial and clinical definitions can start to blur. Perhaps one person, fed enough crackpottery, will walk away in search of something more useful; but if given to the right person, as such, it can possess their thinking, conscience, and identity. And in this time, in this American condition, here we are. This harvest is the nearly inevitable fruit of what rightist antisociality has cultivated in recent years. It says something that we have, as a society, so easily allowed it. Obscenity: We Americans have done this to ourselves.
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Notes:
¹ I'm sorry, it's just I don't know what to do or not with the actual example from that one person bothsiding with Trump-era white supremacism on the right, and the leftward juxtaposition a gun control position slightly to the right of where I was at the time. Taking that one at face value, while it is only one person, it is also true that he felt comfortable expressing himself as such, which in turn tells us something about his overton window, and that tells us at least a little bit about what is or isn't acceptable in the community and culture around him. As a general principle, yes, our expression tends to reflect in some way what we perceive is acceptable or not in our community. That's the thing, though; he could have picked any two issues for a lopsided equivocation, but the irony that one of them was gun control just demands at least a little attention.
² It would be more than ironic if I was right; it would be incredibly stupid.
@SadMarshGhost. "NOBODY is talking about how the online depression community has been infiltrated by alt-right recruiters deliberately preying on the vulnerable. There NEED to be public warnings about this. 'Online pals' have attempted to groom me multiple times when at my absolute lowest." (thread) Twitter. 23 February 2018. Twitter.com. 6 July 2022. http://bit.ly/2GL7UHl
