Dayton

Tuesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

The Hunt and conservative cancel culture

Cancel culture claimed another victim this week. This time it was The Hunt, a Universal Studios thriller in which a group of — presumably liberal — elites go around hunting and killing ‘deplorables' for sport. The premise is awful, and it does nothing to encourage the kind of spiritual healing Marianne Williamson correctly believes our nation so badly needs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8IifEu67yU But consider some other cinematographic successes. ABC’s Designated Survivor tells the story of a terror attack that wiped out the entire American government, leaving a lowly Secretary of Housing with the job of Commander in Chief.

the hunt

Tuesday

Claire Berlinski

The Czarist image of mass shootings

Let’s retire the term ‘gun violence,’ or reserve it for jealous husbands who shoot their wives. What happened in El Paso is terrorism; more properly, it is a nihilist insurgency.We should pause to consider the origins of this phenomenon in late Czarist Russia, the cradle of modern terrorism. There is an eerie similarity between America’s shooter culture and the sinister and contagious form of violent nihilism that emerged between 1861 and 1866 in Russia. A number of young men seemed to decide that it would be fine to kill a large number of people. No one knows why. The killer in El Paso scribbled a lunatic alt-right manifesto; the Dayton murderer, to judge from his Twitter feed, was drawn to far-left bromides.

nihilism
shootings
Daniel McCarthy

Liberalism cannot stop the shootings

What makes a young man pick up a gun, head to a crowded place, and shoot as many people as he can? Liberals have two answers to this question. First, the availability of guns is by itself enough to cause mass shootings. Some people will want to kill, and the guns let them do it easily. Second, young men are not liberal enough not to kill. They might be Donald Trump supporters, and if that isn’t the same thing as being a white nationalist – for a growing number of liberals, it really is – it is a kind of gateway drug, and the president’s failure to say what liberals want him to say, as often as they want him to say it, allows young men to be radicalized into killers. What could Trump say to stop these killings?

Sunday

Freddy Gray

‘Meh’: the psychotic apathy of the Great Replacement killers

There is not much to say about mass shootings. The violence horrifies us, depresses us, we move on — on social media, this process can take a few seconds. The other media routine follows: endless, circular debates on guns are given another spin in the barrel. If the killer is white, somebody important (step up Beto O’Rourke) angrily says it is Trump’s fault. That invites anger in return. Culture wars subsume the story. Sometimes, a frightening viral video emerges, or what hacks call a ‘disturbing insight into the mind of the killer’. These excite our emotions a little longer. Deranged maniacs know that, which is why we now increasingly see their ‘manifestos’ — long pseudo-intellectual declarations of purpose — posted online.

great replacement