Thoughts on another miscarriage of justice in the broken USA<\/em><\/p>\n
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An unpopular cause I feel compelled to stick up for today is the cause of Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and their neighbor William \u201cRoddie\u201d Bryan, all of Brunswick, Georgia, USA, who were recently found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. Rightly or wrongly, I am convinced that this verdict is blatantly unjust. I also believe that many Americans, not just the jury and the prosecutor, are complicit in this injustice\u2014an injustice that is much closer to murder (these men are likely to die in prison) than was the actual killing of Arbery.<\/p>\n
Grievous miscarriages of justice occur frequently now in the United States, and often arise due to race-related issues that bias prosecutors and jurors. So why am I writing about this particular injustice, and not, say, the travesty of the Derek Chauvin verdict? I think it\u2019s mainly because in the Chauvin case I read a healthy amount of commentary defending Chauvin, whereas in the case of the McMichaels and Bryan I read no defenses, only smug expressions of satisfaction or at least placid acceptance of this verdict, even among people who should know better.<\/p>\n
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The guilt of the McMichaels and Bryan is, in other words, part of the contemporary American \u201cconventional wisdom\u201d that I have come to distrust almost reflexively.<\/p>\n
Why the McMichaels and Bryan were abandoned to their harsh fate so easily, even willfully and joyously, by their countrymen is something I\u2019ll speculate about later in this essay, but first I want to go over some of the basic facts of the case.<\/p>\n
The killing of Ahmaud Arbery<\/strong><\/p>\n
Ahmaud Arbery was a 25-year old African-American man who lived in Brunswick, Georgia. Like many African-American men, he had a police record for at least moderately serious crimes, including bringing a handgun to a high school football game in 2013, and an attempted shoplifting of a TV from a WalMart in 2017. He was still on probation when he died.<\/p>\n
In late 2018, apparently based on his own observations as well as those of family members, Arbery\u2019s probation officer recommended that Arbery get a mental health evaluation. At this evaluation\u2014the defense lawyers brought this up at the trial, but the judged ruled it inadmissible\u2014Arbery described to the evaluator (apparently a psychiatric nurse) \u201cauditory delusions sometimes commanding him \u2018to rob and steal\u2019 and sometimes telling him \u2018to hurt people,\u2019\u201d as well as general difficulties controlling his anger. Arbery was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and prescribed olanzapine (Zyprexa), a second-generation antipsychotic that is also used treat schizophrenia and the manic episodes of type 1 bipolar disorder; however, he apparently didn\u2019t take the drug for long, and there was no evidence of it in his system when he died, although there were trace amounts of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.<\/p>\n
The MSM stories after Arbery\u2019s death were heavily biased in the young man\u2019s favor, and tended to omit or downplay anything negative, preferring to show a picture of him looking spiffy in his prom suit . . .<\/p>\n
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. . . and preferring to emphasize that at the time of his death Arbery was \u201cplanning\u201d to attend a local technical college to become an electrician, and often went jogging for exercise.<\/p>\n
In general, because of this overwhelming bias, it is hard to trust the information about Arbery that was provided by his family and their lawyer and cannot be verified, e.g., with documents. We can\u2019t say with confidence much more about his background than what judicial records show, namely that he had a history of being armed illegally, and of attempting theft, and of showing signs of mental illness including serious impulse-control problems. This shouldn\u2019t necessarily have had any bearing on the jury\u2019s findings, but it does speak to the broader moral picture, and definitely belies the many MSM portraits of Arbery that were designed, in part, to whip up hatred against the men who killed him.<\/p>\n
Late in 2019 Arbery had begun taking occasional jogs into a mostly white neighborhood called Satilla Shores, where the McMichaels and Bryan lived. A video camera also had recorded him, in his jogging clothes, walking into a house in the neighborhood that was under construction\u2014this had happened several times, mostly at night.<\/p>\n
In the months immediately preceding his fateful encounter with the McMichaels, there also had been several break-ins or thefts in the neighborhood, including the theft of a gun from an unlocked truck\u2014reported by Travis McMichael on January 1.<\/p>\n
On the night of February 11, according to Wikipedia:<\/p>\n
Travis called 9-1-1<\/a> to report a slender 6-foot-tall Black man with short hair, wearing red shorts and a white shirt, who was trespassing on the site of a house under construction. Travis said, “I’ve never seen this guy before in the neighborhood.” The dispatcher<\/a> asked whether Travis was OK, and he said, “Yeah, it just startled me. When I turned around and saw him and backed up, he reached into his pocket and ran into the house. So I don’t know if he’s armed or not. But he looked like he was acting like he was.” “We’ve been having a lot of burglaries and break-ins around here lately”, Travis said on the call. He told the dispatcher that he was out in his truck, and that as many as four neighbors were out looking for the man. His father Gregory was one of the people out searching that night, and Gregory and at least one other neighbor were armed. Police responded and searched the house along with a neighbor, but found no one. However, surveillance video from that evening showed a man who reportedly looked like Arbery, briefly walking in and out of the house under construction. He did not take anything. The under-construction house did not have doors or windows.<\/p>\n
The caller shouted, “Stop! … Watch that. Stop, damn it! Stop!”<\/p>\n
What did happen is this: On May 5 a local defense lawyer who had consulted informally with Gregory and Travis McMichael uploaded Bryan\u2019s cellphone video to the website of a local radio station. Stories were circulating to the effect that Arbery had simply been gunned down while jogging, and the lawyer apparently thought that the video would convince the public of the McMichaels\u2019 innocence. He thought wrong\u2014not because the video shows the McMichaels to be murderers, but simply because it somewhat shockingly depicts a young African-American man\u2019s death at the hands of two fairly stereotypical-looking southern white fellows. This publication of the video was, remember, in one of the hardest, most hysterogenic<\/a> periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just a few weeks later, America would erupt in the Great Awokening after George Floyd\u2019s death\u2014but even now it was clear that this society was becoming very restive under pressure, and its politicians and politically sensitive prosecutors were doing what they could to placate the more restive elements.<\/p>\n
A few days later, Bryan too was arrested and charged.<\/p>\n
Ladies of the Jury<\/strong><\/p>\n
Women, as I have been writing<\/a> for the past decade, \u201cwear the pants\u201d now in most Western societies, i.e., have unprecedented and often dominant influence in many realms of culture. This is important because on average women think about and react to the world differently than men. Compared to men, for example, women seem much more emotionally aroused by stories of white-on-black racial conflict. Women, white women, also appear to have been the dominant participants<\/a> in the bizarre BLM frenzy of the summer 2020 Great Awokening.<\/p>\n
The Biden Administration, of course, watched this show trial approvingly.<\/p>\n
Flaws in the Law<\/strong><\/p>\n
Note that Georgia law defines the kind of murder alleged in the case as follows:<\/p>\n
The Malignant Heart of the Matter
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But I think virtue-signaling is only a small and secondary part of this. Over the past few years, and especially since the COVID pandemic started, the more or less diffuse growth of wokeness in American life seems to have cohered into a Salem-like episode of socially sanctioned savagery—arguably almost as deadly as Salem, and much more broad and durable. I\u2019ve even had the vague imaginative sense (from a distance, as an expatriate) that this mass hysteria has been developing into a kind of cult, presided over by a collectively summoned black perp-god, or purple-haired Gender Studies goddess, who in strident tones demands a constant flow of human sacrifices. (Another writer<\/a> elaborated this human-sacrifice concept before me, so I will mostly leave that imagery to him.)<\/p>\n
People in general, and I guess women moreso than men on average, are apt to be distressed when they witness\u2014for example on a video\u2014a violent death. The distress in turn creates a sense of urgency to do something<\/em>. (Consider how heavily US foreign and immigration policies in recent years have been driven<\/a> by distressing images in the media, e.g., of wounded children in Syria or refugee children crossing the Rio Grande.) Distress also tends to suppress rational thought, making the mind more susceptible to the beating tom-toms (to paraphrase McLuhan) of mass delusion and madness. And when a killing depicted on a distressing video can be made to seem even remotely consistent with the central wokelore motif of evil whites harming innocent blacks<\/em>\u2014that very live snarl of wires in the American psyche\u2014the mass delusion and madness will come together and start to lurch in a predictable direction. It will start to be controlled and guided, to do meaningful political work, by a political faction that I would say definitely has \u201can abandoned and malignant heart.\u201d<\/p>\n