Genocide as Peer Pressure.

 

Parents are stunned by a school board candidate’s comments in an Indiana town:

“All Nazis weren't 'bad' as you specify. They did horrible things … Who is to say if we were both there in the same place and time, that we wouldn't have done the same thing” https://t.co/AzrR4qIUOl

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) October 20, 2022

Loads of people over the years have asked themselves what they would be doing if they were living in Nazi Germany and how they would resist and not go along with genocide or maybe think about how they would sabotage the movement, but Dr. Matt Keefer has a different take: wouldn't you just do a little genocide, because everyone else was into it?  It's not like it makes you a bad person if basically everyone else was into it. 

Sure. Myself, I get that peer pressure makes people smoke, do crack, sleep with everyone they know and vote third party, but I tell you what, I draw the line at genocide. 

A lot of conservatives these days seem genocide-curious. At Meghan McCain's husband's little website, somebody definitely seems into it:

On the transgender question, conservatives will have to repudiate utterly the cowardly position of people like David French, in whose malformed worldview Drag Queen Story Hour at a taxpayer-funded library is a “blessing of liberty.” Conservatives need to get comfortable saying in reply to people like French that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.

If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.

What the writer is implying, is that public LGBT identity needs to be erased, and straight allies need to be punished for their support of gay and trans culture. Why? Because the writer is discomfited that these people exist. He is irked. His feelings are deranged. He is a melting snowflake in a warming world. 

But I genuinely do not doubt that his fears of a gay-friendly planet are dangerous--and echoed in the culture. Take Matt Walsh. He too, wants to see people punished for supporting queer culture. He wants people who support queer culture to be treated as child abusers, when the system he wants to impose on queer youth is child abuse, and well-documented as such. So do the jumped-up neo-Nazis who turn up in LGBT -friendly spaces at the exhortation of Libs of TikTok.  

They aren't different from Tucker Carlson, who wants to pretend MCNBC is planning a Rwanda-style race war.  Do you want me to believe he isn't saying that in the hopes white supremacists will start one, first? 

In fascist history, this happened before, and it is no surprise it is happening again. The fascist proposition is to work from easily defamed minorities and work its way on. So not-so-subtle anti-Semitism makes a comeback. Anti-Black sentiments become more common. Anti-immigration proponents start talking up crime even if immigrants on the whole are less likely to commit crimes. 

Even reproductive health care restrictions, such as those on abortion and the suggestion that birth control is next, imply that women exist to give birth. Or they are disposable. An increased interest in white fertility is about countering the so-called Great Replacement theory. Which is an utterly stupid idea that demographic change in the US has been by design to change the culture to something more progressive, and um. It's racist and makes no sense. But it has, despicably, led to a renewal of interest in the sterilization of non-white people. 

Could conservatives be better than these radical and eliminationist ideas? Maybe--but see? There's this peer pressure to make America Great Again....

They would make an abattoir and call it great. Not because they believe, but because they believe their peers believe, and they haven't the guts, sense, or conscience, the courage of any personal moral conviction, to stop the hate and violence before it comes to fruition. 

These people at the talking stage of radicalization have convinced themselves that being criticized for this is cancelation and is the real genocide, the real victimization, and they will therefore say they were justified. It gives them license to proceed to the next stage. 

They must be uniquely and thoroughly ejected and shunned from society--cancellation should be more than just a bogeyman to them, but a fact. The peer group of decent people who can coexist and live in toleration must exceed their lies and animosity, or we are in a terrible situation.  Well-meaning people of conscience must end this hateful contagion of hate now with a showing of support for the maligned. To create a barrier of good intention against the venom of people who want to crowd surf on popular viciousness. 

We can overcome this mean-spirited tide and must--but with unity. Only with unity. 

UPDATE: Somehow, I managed to not bring up The Banality of Evil.  Quite regular people can be co-opted into evil if it becomes the law, because so many people never see either law and morality as separate things, or so arrange their morality to exclude people based on their identities alone from ever being treated as moral. 

It is a discussion I think is necessary. We have failed to educate our populace in civics to a shameful extent, but the degree to which some people would consider sexual "deviance" (variance) immoral and not "getting rid of" unfavorable people shows a lack of ethical or philosophical understanding. 

I blame religion for that in some ways.