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The Power of Social Media
So a 16-year-old girl in Ohio doesn’t want to clean the house, and gets in an argument with another girl about it. She decides to stab the girl she is arguing with. The girl is unarmed, but fortunately a police officer arrives just in the nick of time, and heroically saves the unarmed girl by shooting her knife-wielding assailant. Normally this would warrant little more than a pat on the back for the cop, who saved a life that day. But unfortunately, the girls were black. And even more unfortunately, the cop was white. Still, this may have remained a local matter. Until a video of the incident went viral on Facebook and Instagram.
A basketball player in California saw the video and threatened the white cop with a vaguely menacing, “You’re next.” This may have remained a private matter between a California basketball player and an Ohio police officer, but the basketball player posted the threat on his Twitter feed. He has 50 million followers on Twitter. So his threat went viral.
A basketball player in California threatening a cop in Ohio because he saved a girl’s life seemed absurd to many people. Including a cop in Idaho, who filmed a brief (less than 2 minute) video of him pretending to call the basketball player during an attempted murder to ask advice on what he should do. This may have remained a private matter between the Idaho cop and the California basketball player, but the video went viral on TikTok, and got millions of views within days. The Idaho cop was immediately suspended without pay and is likely to lose his job because he made fun of a basketball player who threatened a cop who saved a girl who was in an argument about housekeeping in Ohio.
Sort of.
In reality, none of this could have happened without social media. Without Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, the Idaho police officer would still be employed. These are powerful forces, that can lead to unpredictable results.
Suppose the Idaho cop’s boss was unusually prescient, and he could have anticipated all this. Imagine him calling the cop into his office the day of the knife fight in Ohio:
Boss: Hey, Jerry, just thought I’d let you know in advance. You should start looking for other work.
Idaho cop: Gee, boss, why is that? I thought I was doing a good job around here.
Boss: Oh, absolutely. You’re one of the best cops on the force. But a teenage girl in Ohio doesn’t want to clean her house, and therefore is about to stab another girl in a suburb of Columbus.
Idaho cop: Oh, I see. Ok, thanks for the heads up. I’ll start putting together a resume. I’ve really enjoyed my time working here boss.
This is surreal.
It’s also scary. The modern Democrat party seems motivated by little more than gaining as much control over American citizens as possible. Social media is a powerful weapon for Democrats in this battle.
Black Lives Matter played a big role in getting Joe Biden elected president. Some cop in Idaho has the temerity to make fun of them in a humorous video. Biden didn’t have to go after the guy himself. Powerful allies took the guy out on his behalf. Biden didn’t even have to make a phone call. It just happened. Very, very quickly.
And very, very quietly. I find it extremely concerning that the video from Columbus went viral, the threatening Tweet went viral, and the Idaho cop’s funny video went viral. What didn’t go viral? The story of the Idaho cop losing his job for making fun of a basketball player and, indirectly, Black Lives Matter. You might think that story would be a big deal.
But no, never mind about that. Nothing that might interest you there. Everything got taken care of. Just a minor personnel matter in an Idaho police department. By the way, there’s a hilarious cat video going viral right now – it’s awesome!
This is surreal.
And this is scary.
Published in General
I don’t get how antifa et. al. can dress up in black bloc and do those tactics day after day after day. Plus it’s organized crime. I would start with those guys.
I do not think so. Cancel Culture is everywhere, and even democrats are afraid of being destroyed. I see nothing to show that it will stop anytime soon. It has only been growing in power. Right now, all the instruments of power are inline with Cancel Culture. Prosecutions are political everywhere. White people are the enemy. White lives are destroyed in witch hunts. Men are destroyed in witch hunts. Every voice with power is arrayed against whites and men, that they are the source of all evil in the world, unredeemable monsters who cannot escape their natures. At a time when in D&D they are changing races not to be evil by nature, white men in the real world are being called just that.
The only logical conclusion to deal with a race of people who cannot be redeemed, who are the cause of all problems for others, is to wipe them out. That is where we are headed. Have you studied history, Henry? That is how it has always worked in every instance in history. Victimhood leads to genocide.
I know you don’t like to watch videos, but this one is short.
[ For those just tuning in, Bryan is referring to white people in his comment, and to the prevailing anti-white woke bigotry. ]
History really isn’t my strength, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that genocide rarely involves the extermination of the demographic that is, in virtually every respect — numerically, economically, culturally, educationally, professionally, politically, and in the ownership of arms — far and away the dominant portion of society. It seems like the kind of fight that only someone with a death wish would entertain.
So I think we’re more likely to have an echo of the early ’70s, which was bad enough, but nothing like open conflict.
Put differently: I don’t think what is going on in Portland scales well in America.
I am not saying it will be successful. There is a reason I invoked Rwanda. I am saying it is coming. I don’t want to live through it, and I don’t want my children to live through it.
And, at the risk of being condescending, anyone who wants to comment on politics should understand human history. It does explain what I see to be your pollyanish attitude.
Do you think concern of being a victim of genocide causes the genocide?
Causes? I don’t believe in such simple chains of cause and effect in political matters.
I am not sorry. I am going to call things like I see them. I certainly don’t think the answer is to ignore it and put our head in the sand. “It can’t happen here” is a lie we tell ourselves to sleep at night. It can happen here. It is happening here in some parts of the nation. We are sliding into chaos and anarchy. Unlike the 1970s folks, there are two generations of people who don’t know history (heh) who don’t love America, and don’t remember Communism. There is no Reagan in the wings. Reagan was already well on the map during Carter. Remember, he ran against Ford.
Be armed, so when your neighbors come for you and yours, you can defend your family.
There is nothing simple about it.
And we see it happen in history. It is not like I am pulling this out of the air. It only took a handfull of people to overthrow Russia.
Rwanda doesn’t seem a good example for your argument, given that the aggressors in the genocide outnumbered the victim demographic by five or six to one. I’m not aware of any instance in history in which genocide has been attempted, successfully or otherwise, against the numerically, economically, and culturally dominant majority by a much smaller minority. It just doesn’t seem to make sense.
Victor Davis Hanson likes to point out that wars occur when people become unclear about the balance of power, or when there is an apparent parity in the balance of power. I think that, were violence to escalate significantly in America, and to begin targeting normal Americans, the superior strength of normal Americans would very quickly become evident.
That is not my point. My point is that it does not matter if normal Americans “win” a sectarian war, it will have happened.
You seem to be conceding my point, but dismiss with with “We will win, so who cares?” Since you invoke VDH and WWII, do the millions dead in WWII because of unclarity of the balance of power not matter? Of course not. The damage done to America by a sectarian civil war is going to be great. And, right now, the minority appears to have all the power. The military is going woke. They control every single level of power in this nation, and they will use it to silence us, or at least try. Then it all breaks down.
I just don’t understand why you are so blase’ about the destruction of civilized order.
I didn’t invoke World War II. My point in citing Hanson was to suggest that the balance of power in America is, or will quickly become, clear enough that it will likely forestall widespread armed conflict.
When normal Americans start reacting, the woke will scatter. I believe that.
The balance of power in America became clear on January 6 and in its aftermath.
Ret, I don’t think so.
My perspective, my sense of things, may be different from most others here. I don’t think normal America has been awakened yet. Deplatforming has directly impacted very few people. Very few normal people have been cancelled. The worst of wokeness has really only occurred in the past few years, and a lot of people still have no idea what’s going on.
I maintain that the so-called “trans” movement will be the proverbial camel-breaking straw, in that it’s both too stupid and too consequential to be allowed to continue.
Once the patina of protected victimhood is stripped from the woke, as I think it will be when their idiotic bigotry and gender fantasies begin touching many normal lives, I think the pushback will be loud and emphatic.
Two different issues. The balance of power is one thing. The consciousness of normal America is another.
Two very closely connected issues, I would argue.
When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, there were those who correctly understood the magnitude of their error. Normal Americans are still distracted by other things. But, as we are beginning to see in the pushback against wokeness in our elite schools, that’s changing. In any case, I believe it’s changing.
The left is trying to fix it so we can’t fight back.
Well, I believe that you are wrong, and that like Russia, the Woke will continue to tighten their grip. The evidence and weight of history supports my view.
Of course it did. We have had abuse of the DOJ and FBI in the last three administrations, and one was a Republican. The Left controls all levers of power. Every last institution is controlled by the left. Half the elected members of the GOP are part of the elite, and you have people like our resident anti-Trumpists here who support that elite in their complete surrender to the left. The left has won everything. Culture, schools, corporations, government, the military and Media. They own it all. They control the internet and the courts. There is nothing to stop them squeezing something like Ricochet out of existence. Already, Scott has admitted that he keeps some stuff off the main feed in order to keep the money flowing. That is not free speech.
The Woke rule us. They have won, and they are intensifying their Asselt on us to strengthen their control.
You are simply wrong. My whole life has been a steady advance of the left. Government spending has gone up and up under every administration. Government transfers of wealth have done nothing but increase. Taxes may go up and down, but purchasing power has been static or decreased. Every single graph from 1970 onward shows the growing disaster the left’s control of our economy has.
This is how it works:
Henry, have you not been watching? How old are you?
Doesn’t feel like the USSR. Not yet anyway. Thankfully, Wokists destroy the institutions they control. In the last census, red states got more population.
Oh blue staters who will vote in the same polices they are running from.
That usually doesn’t happen. Most people who flee the blue states are a little bit red leaning. Ctlaw made a convincing case for this.
Colorado, Arizona, Texas.
The first two (as well as Georgia and Virginia) are examples of progressive blue-staters colonizing conservative states, but there is evidence (not necessarily definitive or beyond dispute) that the blueing of Texas is due more to creeping progressivism among the natives.
But yeah, in general I agree with you. Add Montana to that list (and the primary reason I don’t consider deep red Wyoming as necessarily a safe state for conservatives to retire to, it wouldn’t take that many trendy progressive enclaves to turn a state with such a small population purple).