The benefit of no doubt

Nah, I'm not waiting for confirmation

Screenshot.

Earlier in my guess-you-could-call-it-a-career, I was very scrupulous, one might even say punctilious, about giving the conservative writers I criticized the benefit of the doubt and a fair shake. For instance, in this 2008 column about the “Whitey Tape” (a non-existent Michelle Obama rant rightbloggers promoted to try and smear her and her husband), I said Bob “Confederate Yankee” Owens and Michael Yon had failed to update and correct an outrageous claim they’d both made on their sites. After I filed but before the story published, however, they did correct their items.

The authors each let me and my readers know and, though they were dicks about it (“the story is false,” declared Yon, not being scrupulous himself about details), I apologized to these bad-faith clowns in an update to my own story because I thought that was only right and proper.

For years I made a habit of combing my copy for any such glitches that might reflect even a little unfairly on my subjects. In recent years, though, while I’m still against publishing outright falsehoods, I’m not sweating the small stuff with these guys anymore. Let me explain.

First, let me show you a 2019 Fair Observer article on some attacks on Turkish immigrants in Germany that were not identified as neo-Nazi terrorism until many years later — during which interim “authorities concluded before 2011 that there could be no political basis for the crimes committed against minorities, suspected minorities and a German policewoman…”:

Why, then, would right-wing terrorists decide not to claim responsibility for their crimes and miss the chance to transmit their messages to a wider audience? First, practical aspects should be considered. The leaders of the Hepp/Kexel Group took the view that letters or pamphlets always involved the risk of leading prosecutors on the right track. If the investigators initiated an active search for the actual perpetrators, the terrorists would probably soon be detected. This assumption may also apply to the NSU, since a significant bonus for terrorists in hiding was that the police never seriously investigated within the radical-right scene.

Assuming that terrorism is a communication strategy, following Peter Waldmanns’ analysis, a second aspect needs to be taken into account. One primary goal of terrorism — to produce a state of fear through the use of violence — is fulfilled when the victim group is intimidated. 

I thought of this when I heard about the power stations that were shot up in Moore County, North Carolina on Saturday — which seems likely, if not certainly, to have been an act of terrorism by local Proud Boys and neo-Nazis because a drag show was going on that night in that jurisdiction in defiance of their threats.

I have heard a lot of people saying we should all be good and sure before making anything even resembling accusations of terrorism against anyone before all the facts are in. Well. Since I am not good and sure about any specific suspect in this case, I wouldn’t accuse any particular one of the local assholes who’ve been marching around with their neck gaiters up over their faces yelling about groomers, as seen in stories like “Proud Boys ‘Came to Fight’ at North Carolina Drag Brunch.”

But I am good and sure that the “Downtown Divas” show was getting threats as part of a wave of terrorism — as reported by WRAL:

WRAL News obtained a letter sent by Calvary Christian School in Southern Pines to businesses in the town sponsoring the event.

“The LGBTQ forces are coming to Southern Pines and they are after our children,” the letter reads in part. “This is their target audience to peddle their abomination”…

Sandhills [Pride, which produced the show,] was already [e]valuating safety concerns for the Downtown Divas show, due to the fact they could face opposition from the far-right militia group known as the Proud Boys, whose members disrupted an October drag event in nearby Sanford.

This past weekend, members of the far-right militia group known as the Proud Boys showed up to a drag brunch in Raleigh...

WRAL put up some footage on YouTube of a drag performer at the Southern Pines, N.C. LGBTQ fundraiser struck by the blackout saying, from a darkened stage, that “we are a safe space, but we are also the arms that will carry you through this fight that will never end, [and we] will only continue to get stronger with your motherfucking support.”

Half the commenters to that video are saying it’s too soon to say terrorists shot up a power station to stop a drag show — and the other half are glad terrorists shot up a power station to stop a drag show.

No one’s fooled about this.

I’ve known for a while about the rightwingers’ dreams of power station attacks as revenge for elections that don’t go their way. Here’s something I quoted at alicublog after the 2012 election, when the reelected Obama proposed what I characterized as “some weak-ass gun rules” and the brethren screamed he was Hitler: It’s a very specific fantasy published by Bob Owens (yes, the same Bob Owens I was trying to be nice to back in 2008):

Were an angry group of disenfranchised citizens to target in a strategic manner the substations leading to a city or geographic area—say, Albany, for example—they could put the area in the dark for as long as it took to bring the substations back online. Were they committed enough, and spread their attacks out over a wide enough area, perhaps mixing in a few tens of dozens of the residential transformers found every few hundred yards along city streets, they could overwhelm the utility companies ability to repair the damage being caused or law enforcement’s ability to stop them...

How many days with partial power or no power, how many nights in the dark, would it take before the local economy collapsed in the targeted area? Insurgents could cripple a city, region, or state, without ever firing a bullet at another human being.

Progressives seeking to undermine the Constitution seem to think they hold all the cards. I would warn them that they are not remotely prepared for what will happen if they attempt to cross Constitutional boundaries and natural rights.

It could be a cold, dark winter.

Tread carefully.

Shortly thereafter, Donald Trump started raving that Obama was ineligible for the presidency because he was born in Kenya, which led to Trump’s nomination by the Republican Party and election to the Presidency.

(Owens, by the way, blew his brains out in 2017.)

When Trump lost in 2020, he tried everything including a violent coup to invalidate the result. Remember?

And now, as his Republican cat’s-paws circulate footage of Biden’s son getting a foot-job and claim its suppression before the 2020 election was somehow election fraud, Trump is trying to overturn the result again — not figuratively, either:

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” [Trump] wrote. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

We could laugh off the goofy traitor continuing to encourage treason, as the New York Times did with Hitler a hundred years ago. We could idly float parlor-game theories about what he’s really trying to do — does it have to do with his legal troubles, Ron DeSantis, dementia, etc.?

And though not only drag shows but also gay, trans, and non-binary people in general are under attack across the country — so much so that their conservative enemies couldn’t even muster their traditional “thoughts and prayers” bullshit after the latest mass murder of LGBTQ people — we could continue wait for “Mother, May I” to make simple logical connections about the horrors that are staring us in the face. That’s how top journalists like Maggie Haberman do it, right?

Well, fuck that. I say it’s fascism and I say to hell with it.