The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Murder, Lies and Feminism

Posted on | July 4, 2018 | Comments Off on Murder, Lies and Feminism

1994: L.A. police pursue murder suspect O.J. Simpson.

The word “mansplaining” was inspired (although not coined) by Rebecca Solnit, whose book Men Explain Things to Me became a bestseller. In this book, Ms. Solnit writes: “So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year — meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror.”

Here we have an actual fact — that the U.S. annually records “well over a thousand homicides” in which women are killed by their male partners or ex-partners — supporting a dishonest insinuation, i.e., that “this particular kind of terror” is a pervasive reality of American life, a widespread form of oppression which our sexist society ignores.

It should not be necessary to say this: Murder is a rare crime, for which our criminal justice system metes out the harshest punishments.

Furthermore, criminal violence — including murder, including rape, including every species of crime against women — is disproportionately a phenomenon of the social and economic underclass.

This is not something that feminists like Ms. Solnit wish to acknowledge, because their political allegiance to the Left requires them to believe that members of the underclass (especially those who are black and Hispanic) are victims of systemic social injustice. After the Ferguson riots of 2014, for example, every feminist began hashtagging #BlackLivesMatter as a gesture of solidarity against allegedly racist police. It is asserted by feminists that the “intersectionality” of oppression in American society is such that women and racial minorities are both victimized by systemic injustice, thus uniting them in a common cause — the struggle against “capitalist imperialist white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy,” in the words of Vanessa Diaz, former executive director of the University of Southern California Women’s Student Assembly.

Feminism’s devotion to an “intersectional” concept of oppression serves to obscure the messy reality of American life, which does not conform to such tidy ideological categories. Blaming all social problems on systemic causes (capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc.) is a way of denying individual responsibility for wrongdoing, while suggesting that every problem is political and can be solved by left-wing policies.

If feminists wish to reduce violent crime against women, how did it make sense for them to support #BlackLivesMatter, a movement that demonized police officers? How can we prevent violence, without police to enforce the law and arrest criminals? Ideology triumphs over common sense among intellectuals, and Ms. Solnit’s comments about the murder of women are typical of how feminism produces confusion.

Who is murdering whom in America? According to the FBI’s Crime in the United States report, there were 15,070 homicide victims in 2016, of whom 11,821 (78.4%) were male. In other words, for every woman murdered in America, 3.63 men were murdered. The fact that male homicide victims outnumber female victims nearly 4-to-1, however, doesn’t fit Rebecca Solnit’s belief about violence against women as a “particular kind of terror” comparable to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Murder is a rare crime, as I say. While 15,070 homicides a year is a large number, the U.S. population is 325 million, which means that the average American has less than a 1-in-20,000 chance of being murdered in a typical year. However, murder in the United States is not randomly distributed over the general population; homicide is overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon that disproportionately affects African Americans.

Of the 15,070 U.S. homicide victims in 2016, more than half — 7,881 (52.3%) — were black. As to the perpetrators, the FBI reports: “When the race of the offender was known, 53.5 percent were Black or African American, 43.9 percent were White, and 2.6 percent were of other races.” Black people are 12.7% of the U.S. population, and are over-represented in murder statistics — both as victims and perpetrators — by a factor of more than 4-to-1. The reality of violent crime in America does not conform to the ideological beliefs of Ms. Solnit and other feminists, who insist that women, racial minorities and homosexuals are united in an “intersectional” struggle against the systemic oppression perpetrated by heterosexual white males. It isn’t white guys murdering all those black people in urban America, however, nor is there any reason to suspect that white men are disproportionately responsible for the murder of women by their partners and ex-partners; quite the opposite is more likely true.

 

The gun an Arizona man used to kill at least four of his six victims was a .40-caliber Glock that he was lawfully allowed to own — despite a 2009 arrest for domestic violence, a federal agent says.
Dwight Lamon Jones, 56, was not the original purchaser of the semiautomatic handgun that was found [June 4] in the suburban Phoenix hotel room where he fatally shot himself. . . .
Jones used that weapon to kill prominent forensic psychiatrist Steven Pitt, psychologist Marshall Levine, and paralegals Veleria Sharp and Laura Anderson, Mangan said.
But police have not confirmed whether the Glock was used in two other killings that have been blamed on Jones — the murders of Mary Simmons, 70, and Byron Thomas, 72, who were found fatally shot in a Fountain Hills, Arizona, home. . . .
Jones is believed to have been targeting people who played a part in his bitter divorce from his ex-wife, Connie Jones — a radiologist at a mammography center now married to a former Phoenix police detective — when he embarked on the deadly rampage [May 31].
Shortly before Connie Jones filed for divorce in 2009, Jones was charged with misdemeanor assault, threats and intimidation, and disorderly conduct. He later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct.
At one point, Connie Jones sought an order of protection from her husband, who acted as his own lawyer in a divorce case that was not settled until 2017.

Murder is a rare crime. It is wrong to pluck one story from the headlines and exploit it as anecdotal “evidence” for political purposes. Yet this is what feminists and their allies on the Left do routinely, seizing on statistically unusual incidents (e.g., police shooting an unarmed black man) as symbols in a “social justice” crusade. I’ve described this as the “Atrocity Narrative” method of propaganda, which the Left uses to portray America as a place where racism, sexism and homophobia are pervasive menaces. By selectively highlighting stories that fit this ideological narrative, media outlets like CNN present the public with a warped image of American society, distorted by a left-wing political agenda. The difference between those crimes that get 24/7 saturation coverage on CNN and crimes that are considered just “local news” is a matter of politics. Consider how the recent mass murder at a newspaper office in Maryland was covered by the national media.

CNN provided wall-to-wall coverage of the shootings at the Annapolis Capital, as liberals on the Internet ran wild with speculation that this attack might have been inspired by President Trump’s frequent criticisms of the “fake news” media. Overnight, however, the story changed. It turned out that the perpetrator was a man who bore a personal grudge against this particular newspaper, which had reported on his conviction for criminally harassing a woman. Not only that, but the suspect was (a) Hispanic and (b) a former federal employee. Had the gunman been a white Republican inspired by Trump’s anti-media rhetoric, the shootings in Annapolis might have dominated CNN’s coverage for weeks; as it was, however, the network dropped the story as soon as the facts about the accused perpetrator and his motive became evident.

Annapolis massacre suspect Jarrod Ramos.

Given the reasons why Jarrod Ramos had originally come to the attention of the Annapolis Capital, you might have thought feminists would find some sort of lesson in this story. The way Ramos had cyberstalked and threatened a woman is the kind of story that perfectly fits the feminist worldview, and his murderous rampage at the newspaper office suggests Ramos represented a real danger of “male violence.” Alas, because Ramos is Hispanic, and because “intersectionality” means feminists must never criticize Hispanic men, his crimes didn’t quite fit the narrative in which all evil is attributed to “privileged” white males.

Realism requires that our beliefs must conform to the facts, but feminists are ideologues who prefer unreality, persisting in their warped political beliefs no matter what the facts may be. Genuinely newsworthy stories of male violence — like Dwight Jones, who killed six people in Arizona because of his bitterness over his divorce — are just “local news,” if the suspect doesn’t fit the profile of “privileged” white male evil.

Who is murdering whom? Feminists don’t want us to start seriously researching this question, because the answers might not support the categorical identity-politics “oppression” narrative of the Left.

Nicole Brown Simpson could not be reached for comment.


 

Category: Crime, Sex Trouble, Violence Against Women

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