Let’s see the forest for the trees, part 1

A sane, rational person can simultaneously feel sorrow over the lives lost in the recent Pittsburgh shooting and pray for their grieving families, while also critiquing the many predictable-to-extreme progressive commentaries saturating the social ether. Intellectual honesty and compassion are not mutually exclusive, even though that’s what cultural Marxists want you to think.

It’s a political phenomenon that only gets foisted upon certain folks. While leftists politicize every tragedy, trying to score the most points out of each event and pushing for outlandish “reforms” in the name of healing, questioning their premises, evidence, and conclusions somehow pegs those of us who don’t accept their knee-jerk messaging as coarse individuals. Or maybe even racists or terrorists.

It’s like when I was leaving the Trump rally in Charlotte a few weeks back, and a man was holding a sign and shouting, “Worship Jesus and not Trump.” My kids were baffled, and rightly so. “I know we can be Christians and still like the President. So what did that sign mean?”

“Well, that man was either confused himself, or he was intentionally trying to confuse us,” I explained to my sons. “After all, I like you and your brothers and your Dad, but none of y’all are Jesus. Those two things – liking humans and believing in Christ – can coexist.”

“I think he was playing the holier-than-thou card to try to insult the crowd,” I continued. “It’s highly effective on some people because it’s emotional. But it’s a blatant double standard.”

Similarly, I see the emotional response to the Pittsburgh shooting – partly that anti-semitism is taking over the world and there’s a Nazi hiding behind every door – as the same kind of thing, but on a much larger and more histrionic scale. Let’s look at the some of the “trees” supporting this disdainful and manipulative narrative, so we can get a better picture of just what this “forest” actually is.

One of the tallest obstructions blocking our view of the truth is misplaced guilt. According to humanities professor and author Paul Gottfried, this stems from a Western phenomenon he calls “surrogate atonement: you atone for something you’re no way responsible for in relation to someone who’s in no way a victim.”

In the case of Pittsburgh, there’s not just sorrow and distress over the murders of 11 humans, but there’s extra political outrage because it happened at a Jewish gathering place. Because of the Holocaust, Jews have been placed in a supererogatory position. Most every other group is afforded a position on this aggrieved hierarchy, with the notable exception of white Christians.

Take the Charleston shooting: the emphasis was placed on the race of the victims at the “historic black” Emmanuel Church more than it was their faith. They were “nine African Americans” instead of “nine Christians.” It wasn’t an anti-Christian tragedy, but a “racist massacre.”

Okay, I get it. As a former daily newspaper reporter and a wise media consumer, I understand we have to look at motive.

They say the inspiration for shooter Dylann Roof was “white supremacy” because of his purported manifesto. But the leftist corporate media also included his ornamental Confederate flag license plate and photos of him holding the “racist symbol” as additional evidence of his “hate.”

Sure, he may have been a lunatic out for blood, but the press obviously exaggerates information, so who knows what facts they’re leaving out or completely fabricating. They also cite as gospel both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, neither of which are trustworthy organizations.

Their gist is that Roof is a teed-off Southern cracker, so to repent for his individual deed, the Confederate Battle Flag must be removed from the SC capitol grounds and the Southern Baptist Convention must ban it. Both were political stunts that used the Charleston dead to propel the great progressive leap forward.

Consequently, leftists upped the cultural genocide against Confederate symbols, history, and culture, and raised the bar on castigating all white Southerners as racist yahoos and Klan members. Hell, even caring for your white kids or saying “It’s okay to be white” now gets you called “Nazi” because of Roof’s reference of the 14 Words. Can’t ya just feel the love?

It’s now racist to even talk about black crime statistics, especially black-on-white crime, or even to consider the evidence in shootings of black people done by cops or white folks (or even people who are just white enough, like half-Hispanic Catholic George Zimmerman). Just suspend your logic and reason, and trust the progressive elite and their minions. Resistance is a bitch.

In my opinion, this division by design became manifest in Charlottesville, and “white supremacist” is now the go-to insult for most anything. White folks just need to have their shit destroyed and their good names demeaned because one dude allegedly does something nuts. Resent or repel the narrative, and you’re somehow complicit in murder, they say. Fortunately for them, misplaced guilt keeps most people in line.

And what about Robert Bowers, the man accused of the Pittsburgh murders? He supposedly screamed “All Jews must die!” when entering the congregation and posted on Gab his disdain for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Being an intellectually curious person, I easily discovered that HIAS is an American organization that actively brings into the U.S. (and elsewhere) foreigners of various ethnicities and religions. Originally meant to help Jews fleeing persecution, today the 130-year-old group is really an open-borders business disguised as a “refugee rights” nonprofit. Bait with feelings, switch politics and culture.

Now, just because I distrust an organization that Bowers supposedly mentioned doesn’t mean that I’m somehow pro-shooting-up-synagogues, just as I can defend the Battle Flag and like being white and not be pro-shooting-up-black-churches. Obviously, both the Pittsburgh and Charleston stories should take into account the “who” and “where” of the heinous crimes.

Yet, such journalistic “integrity” is conspicuously absent from news accounts of certain other shootings. Curious. In fact, the zealous focus on identity is either altogether nonexistent, or is recognized but used to malign victims in these particular cases. Remember the shooting at Burnette Chapel Church of Christ, where one person was killed and seven wounded? Yeah, most people don’t.

In the short news cycle that followed, the mainstream media described those shot in this Tennessee tragedy as “churchgoers” (not Christians) and the perpetrator either as “the gunman” or just by his name, Emanuel Kidega Samson. No mention that he’s Somali Muslim immigrant.

There was no critique of Islam. No cracking down on anti-white “hate speech.” No calls for banning the Star and Crescent. No self-reflection. And damn sure no guilt. Hmm.

What about the massacre in Sutherland Springs that killed 26 mostly white “churchgoers,” including more than a dozen children? You may have an inkling of that one, as it was the deadliest mass shooting in Texas, the 5th-deadliest in the U.S., and the deadliest in an American place of worship in modern history.

Mysteriously missing were the “interfaith” gatherings to mourn the massive loss of life. Silent were the Protestant and Jewish sermons, and the Catholic and Orthodox homilies. Just a blip on the radar of the American consciousness.

Oddly, there is no Wikipedia page for this shooter, Devin Patrick Kelley, while Dylann Roof is a household name. The only time the word “motive” can be found on the “Sutherland Springs church shooting” Wikipedia page is deep down in the references section, footnote #83, in which the article claims the “far right” was trying to spread “conspiracy theories.” But search the word “conspiracy,” and it will glean 10 results. Strange.

At least some in the foreign press had the good sense to describe as “Christian” Father Jacques Hamel, an 85-year-old priest whose throat was slit by a Muslim terrorist at a church in Normandy, France, and report “radical” Islam as the motive. Mental gymnastics and selective outrage are typically required here in ‘Murica, depending on the story and the identity of the groups involved.

Consider the shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, which left 59 people dead and nearly 900 injured from gunfire and the ensuing panic. It was originally reported as the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

Leftist activists pounced, countering that the “The deadliest mass shootings were acts of white supremacist terrorism” by citing murders perpetrated by U.S. troops, killings that unfolded during war, and mob violence. Now, let me begin by affirming that I have no problem with people questioning lazy journalists and their parroting of group think.

But if we’re going to go down the road of counting in the mix federal crimes (not shootings carried out by an individual), the deadliest mass shooting would have to be the entirety of the War of Northern Aggression. After all, 350,000+ Southern soldiers and civilians were murdered by an invading army, otherwise known as “Yankee supremacists.” Their apologists call it “union,” I call it federal terrorism. Or better yet, genocide.

“I’m actually not even sympathetic (because) country music fans often are Republican gun toters,” wrote then-CBS executive Hayley Geftman-Gold of the Las Vegas dead. Nice.

Other progressives also weren’t too shaken by the deaths of what they viewed as caricatures of evil. You know, white, truck-driving, American-flag-waving, Trump-voting, Chik-fil-A-eating, Bible-toting Christians. “Soon as I heard it was country music, I felt relief. White people shooting white people isn’t terror … it’s community outreach,” tweeted one tolerant restaurant-owner. 

When the shootings don’t fit the oppressed-vs-oppressor narrative, just insult the victims, downplay the egregiousness of the tragedies, and then stop talking about the events as quickly as possible. This seems to be the overwhelming progressive strategy. Nowhere are the anniversary candlelight vigils, and down the memory hole it goes.

This is why the incomprehensible slaughter of Christians in Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Syria is under-reported – and those are non-white people! So forget about the genocide of white Calvinists in South Africa. The silence is deafening.

Noticing these corpses doesn’t further the cause of progressivism and the Marxist precept known as conflict theory. Often times, marginalizing or outright ignoring the horror even covers up progressive war crimes. Kill two Christians with one stone, as they say.

Just as American slavery is used to stifle inquiry and debate, so is “the fixation of the Holocaust,” as Gottfried describes it. It’s a political calculation meant to manipulate the indoctrinated guilt of white non-Jewish Americans by convincing them that everyone other than them has a monopoly on suffering.

To unravel where this collective guilt and surrogate atonement is born, we must dig a bit into American Jewish identity, which is built upon victimhood, claims Gottfried. In discussing historian Peter Novick’s book “The Holocaust In American Life,” he explains that this poisonous narrative all began in the 1960s, eventually becoming inextricably intertwined with Zionism and the State of Israel.

The “folk memories” of the Holocaust became the lens through which leftist Jewish Americans view everything. Similar to black leftists’ seeing everything through the lens of slavery and feminists through the lens of the misogyny, this drumbeat of fictional mass subjugation is instilled into people who mostly never even experienced the Holocaust.

With WWII atrocities firmly placed as the centerpiece of Jewish character in the U.S. and progressive Jews embracing the position of perpetually oppressed, who do they actually blame for this collective past tribulation? And as importantly, what remedies do these post-modern ideologues offer and for what disease are they trying to cure?

For more sacred-cow smashing, please check out Part 2.