You should only be arrested if you steal or do something violent, not merely because your relatives or people who live near you did. People tend to agree with that basic intuition when they’re faced with arrest themselves, but when other people are the ones accused, then guilt by association, geographic proximity, or physical resemblance seems to be more than enough to start the draconian roundups or less-than-strategic bombing.
It’s not surprising anger over horrific crimes causes people to blur the crucial distinction between the guilty and the innocent, but it lately looks as if American political activists can be made to forget that distinction by the short-term zeal caused by the violence of the punishment itself. That is, the same citizens who’d understand the need to carefully establish guilt before issuing a parking ticket—and could probably bicker about it for hours—may be happy to shout, “Kill them all and let God sort them out!” if the proposed government action is instead bombing an entire region of southeast Asia where there might be a few communists.
Take (sometimes moderate-sounding) Megyn Kelly’s stated reaction to Sec. of Defense Hegseth reportedly reveling in the killing of drug traffickers who posed no immediate threat: “I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”
That’s not individually-tailored justice or even sloppy-but-necessary military strategy talking, and it certainly isn’t thoughtful drug treatment planning. It’s sadism, obviously. It’s been making people stupider as long as there have been people—and sloppier about properly tallying harms and punishments. Kelly and Hegseth seem to have outdone Kristi Noem’s pride in her own long-ago dog-killing, but it all fits into a long-obvious sociopathic pattern of Trump associates thinking cruelty’s strength, indeed a pattern of Trump picking them for precisely that monstrous psychological trait, which he no doubt sees as effectiveness.
The alarming Kelly quote above was pointed out by Jonah Goldberg, who I criticized in a column just two weeks ago for the comparatively minor and technical transgression of defining utilitarianism incorrectly. He was also one of a handful of pundits who startled me by defending high school bullying when that was a hot topic of political debate years ago. But he’s not flat-out celebrating bloodthirsty carnage, so many of my past quibbles seem trivial by our current fast-declining moral standards, utilitarian or otherwise.
Since people are much more eager to keep a tally of other factions’ barbaric actions than of their own, they also easily become amnesiac about whole nightmarish swaths of history if the crimes therein were mainly perpetrated by their own (loosely defined) faction. A few communists setting off bombs is all it takes to make most people on the right dismiss all the harms of slavery or imperialism. The Klan sets fire to a black family’s home and the left loses its ability to recall the Khmer Rouge murdering a third of the population of Cambodia. And so on, in a downward spiral.
Add to those problems the desire of the authorities to steer blame toward the most politically useful target group when defining a perp with multiple overlapping allegiances and associations. Recent alleged political shooters Thomas Crooks and Tyler Robinson (shooters at Trump and Christian conservative activist Charlie Kirk, respectively) seem to have been prolific online activists in the furries and Antifa communities, though authorities initially downplayed Crooks’ membership in such groups and, by contrast, were quick to play up Robinson’s.
I’ll never favor censorship or glossing over awkward demographic patterns that might have predictive value, but given the less-than-zero chance that morons either in the general population or, worse, government will react to something like furry involvement in a major crime with a call for arresting anyone who wears an animal costume, there’s something to be said for reacting to such patterns with the time-honored, healing power of apathy. Animal-costumed criminals, you say? Ah, well, each perp’s fate should be sorted out in the ensuing trial or looney bin treatment program, what you gonna do, people are nuts, etc.
Government and media will eagerly pounce on the chance to dissect a shooter’s race or religion, perhaps knowing how easily we’ll be distracted by such divisive factors, but they seem far less interested in noting other, sometimes stronger patterns such as, say, shooters linked to military, police, or intelligence operations. It happens a lot, even if it’s merely because people in those categories (and their family members) tend to like guns. With people in politics and political media so keen to see blood flowing, the best way to keep the young and the psychologically unstable from turning into killers may be to keep them away from unsavory gangs such as mainstream media and the Dept. of Defense.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.