[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]
It’s St. George's Day, April 23. This has actually been St. George's week; not the chap who slew the dragon, but St. George Floyd of Minneapolis, who was slain himself last year by something much more fearsome than any dragon—by systemic racism!
So the Narrative tells us, and so a jury ruled on Tuesday.
Why did they rule that way, and how did we get stuck with such a crazy Narrative? Let’s explore.
The jury’s verdict itself was absurd. Derek Chauvin did nothing wrong. The best case here was made by retired lawyer Harold Cameron over at Revolver News a week before the verdict came out:
When Floyd continued resisting arrest after being placed in handcuffs, Chauvin didn't beat him with a baton. He didn't taze him. He didn't put in him a chokehold. He put one knee on what the prosecution is now optimistically calling Floyd's "neck area" and waited for the ambulance to come save Floyd's life … The worst that could be said is that he didn't simply let Floyd go because he was still complaining about being unable to breath, just as he had been since the beginning of the encounter. The state's case so far boils down to a collection of experts equating that to murder.
[ Derek Chauvin Did Nothing Wrong, April 13, 2021]
Hamilton also reminds us of the size discrepancy between Chauvin, who weighs a slight 140 lbs., and Floyd, 230 lbs. and all pepped up on chemical stimulants. If you have ever been involved in a close-quarters struggle for physical mastery with another adult, you're impressed that Chauvin managed to subdue Floyd.
In the famous kneeling video, Chauvin has a look of being somewhat pleased with himself. I would have been, too.
Aside from that look of muted pride, I thought from the beginning, and still think, that Chauvin did not at all have the appearance of someone who was aware he was doing something wrong.
Come on: If you are doing something grossly wrong, something that might end another person's life, you know you are, and it will show.
Chauvin's entire affect in that video was of someone who's done an unpleasant job, and believes he's done it rather well.
How does that square with the charges as presented? Following the verdict, Jared Taylor just referred readers to Judge Peter Cahill's instructions to the jury before they deliberated [Read: Judge’s instructions to Derek Chauvin trial jurors, Washington Post, April 19, 2021]
He quoted several phrases taken from those instructions, which Judge Cahill in turn took from the statutes under which Chauvin was charged, and asked:
Did the prosecution really prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Chauvin "intentionally inflicted substantial bodily harm"? That he was "perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life"? That he "consciously [took] chances of causing death or great bodily harm"? Was this "[un]reasonable force in the line of duty in effecting a lawful arrest or preventing an escape from custody"?
Jared, ever the punctilious gentleman and scholar, added: "I wasn't in the courtroom, so I can't answer these questions …"
But he knows perfectly well, of course, that they answer themselves: No, absolutely not.
So, to quote from Lady Ann, another virgin has been tossed into the volcano to appease the hungry god.
The most parsimonious explanation for the jury's verdict: fear. Given the hullabaloo surrounding the trial—of which Judge Cahill made sure they were well aware—the jurors voted to not have their homes burned and their family members lynched.
In a society under the rule of law, that would not have been something they would need to worry about. In such a society, the municipal, state, and federal authorities would have gone to any necessary trouble and expense to preserve the jurors' safety, up to and including giving them aliases and parking them in witness protection programs in Malibu on generous lifetime pensions.
Those authorities, in the interest of maintaining impartial justice, would also have hunted down and prosecuted any persons promoting, or even just suggesting, violent retribution against the jurors.
But we don't live in that kind of society, and I'm sure the jurors know it. The mobs demanding guilty verdicts and threatening violence, arson, and looting if there was any other outcome, have the full support of the public authorities—municipal, state, and federal.
Also on the federal front, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a televised interview Monday, whimpered about "racism," as if that word hadn't been drained of all meaning twenty years ago: “We do not yet have equal justice under law” [ AG Merrick Garland calls racism ‘an American problem’, by Mark Moore, NY Post, April 20, 2021].
We sure don't, when white police officer Michael Slager is doing 20 years on federal charges for shooting a fleeing black prisoner, while the black cop who shot unarmed white Ashli Babbitt without challenge or warning, has not even been named…although those cases were not, I'm guessing, what our nation's chief law-enforcement officer had in mind.
President Alzheimer chimed in, mumbling something about the missile gap and a chicken in every pot. To be fair, though, the president didn't speak up, or mumble up, until after the jury had been sequestered.
So yes: The jurors all knew that should they come up with anything short of a guilty-guilty-guilty verdict, not only would their identities be quickly exposed to the vengeance of the mob, but that the authorities at every level would brand them Enemies of the State and not lift a finger to protect them.
Not a surprising result, then, under these circumstances. Fear ruled the day.
Is that the whole story, though? Fear must have been a big factor, but was it the only factor?
I don't think so. The god in charge of that volcano was hungry and had to be fed. The jurors rightly feared him. God-fearing people don't only fear their god, though; they love him, too. Is it likely that none of the jurors were faithful believers? Who is that god, anyway?
The twelve jurors who delivered up the verdict break down as:
That's seven females, five males; six white, six other[Derek Chauvin trial: What we know about the jury that found ex-cop guilty, by Amy Forliti, AP, April 20, 2021].
Is there anything to be deduced from that? Not much, but I think there are one or two things worth saying, so I'll say them.
Our culture has lapsed into a very peculiar state. A majority of Americans identify as white: sixty percent at the last count, if you exclude white-identifying Latinos, almost eighty percent if you include them.
Yet the dominant belief system in the U.S.A.—that Narrative—is frankly, openly anti-white.
Some of that anti-whiteness is in the minds of black Americans, who can put forward some rational, or semi-rational, explanations for it.
Fair enough. There aren't that many black Americans, though, and not all of them are so negative. The real major force of anti-whiteness comes from whites. "Ethnomasochism," I've called it.
Huge numbers of white Americans, tens of millions of us, hate our own race, our own ancestors. Best-selling books, eagerly bought and read by white people, tell us how irredeemably wicked we are. Expensive private prep schools with mostly-white enrolments set aside entire teaching periods to instill white guilt in their students [Private Schools Brought in Diversity Consultants. Outrage Ensued, by Ginia Bellafante, NYT, April 23, 2021]. Ethnomasochism is very much a white thing.
To those of us not infected by ethnomasochism, it all seems deeply weird, and we struggle to find explanations for it.
Some portion of it, especially in the zone of employment, can be dismissed as lawsuit insurance. The bosses of your company may or may not be ethnomasochists, but they all want to avoid the trouble and expense of a race scandal.
So: "Hey, look, we make all our employees take Diversity Training! No racism here!"
That surely explains some of what's happening, but it leaves unexplained why a majority-white population would let its elected representatives pass the laws that make those lawsuits possible.
Just inattention, probably. A big problem with representative democracy is that normal people can't be bothered much with politics; so key political decisions, including even some elections, are decided by the minority who can. The current Mayor of New York City is, by common agreement—even among liberals—the worst mayor the city's ever had; yet he was elected to that position twice. Total voter turnout the first time: 13.4 percent. The second time: 18 percent. You get what you don't vote for.
It's actually worse than that. Even when normal people do show up to vote, the freaks and misfits who really care about politics have ways to keep control of things. Here’s a longish quote That's from an April 21st post by blogger Richard Hanania, titled Why is Everything Liberal?
Let's say I vote Republican every two years, but otherwise go on with my life and rarely ever think about politics. You, on the other hand, not only vote Democrat, but give money to campaigns, write your Congressman when major legislation comes up, wear pink hats, and march in the streets or write emails to institutions when you're outraged about something.
Through the lens of ordinal utility, in which people simply rank what they want to happen, we are about equal. I prefer Republicans to Democrats, while you have the opposite preference. But when we think in terms of cardinal utility—in layman's terms, how bad people want something to happen—it's no contest. You are going to be much more influential than me. Most people are relatively indifferent to politics and see it as a small part of their lives, yet a small percentage of the population takes it very seriously and makes it part of its identity.
Other explanations for mass white ethnomasochism are available. Chicago pundit Dan Proft blames a post-Soviet, refurbished style of Marxism. Following the all-too-obvious failure of Marxism as an economic program, he says
It is far more effective to zero in on an important aspect of how people identify themselves—that is, their race—and reduce them to nothing more than that race, followed by assigning "oppressor" and "victim" name tags accordingly. [It’s Not a Race War. It’s Something Much Bigger, American Greatness, April 21, 2021]
Eh, maybe. That still doesn't explain the widespread acceptance of white ethnomasochism, with which, I suspect, some of the six white members of the Chauvin jury, those four white women and two white men, were likely infected.
Here is the bottom line, in plain sight these past few days.
Huge numbers of white Americans, perhaps a majority, get some kind of psychic reward, some kind of emotional charge, from thinking guiltily about white people being mean to black people. As the quip goes: They feel good about feeling bad about themselves.
"We enslaved them!" they cry: "We lynched them! We redlined them! We keep them out of our advanced academic programs! We lock up way too many of them! And look—we choke them to death with a knee on their neck!"
Some of that is true, some is half-true, the rest is just false. Yes, whites enslaved blacks. Lynching? Twenty-seven percent of those lynched were white. Redlining? The federal government practicing fiscal responsibility over the loans they guaranteed … and so on.
The main point again is the emotional rush that tens of millions of white Americans get from believing it all and feeling terrible about it.
So yes: While I think fear was the main factor in the Chauvin jury's decision, I'll bet ethnomasochism was in there, too.
We are so steeped in the anti-white Narrative, so accustomed to it now, we forget how unnatural it is. Other races aren't like this at all.
The Japanese have done some seriously wicked things within living memory. You'll never hear any of them express remorse about it, though, unless there is some immediate diplomatic or commercial advantage in doing so.
Can't load tweet https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1378399124538687497: Sorry, that page does not exist
China the same. India, Africa, Muslims, … The only people who get a pleasant collective thrill from feeling bad about themselves are whites.
It's weird. For the future of our civilization, I would like to see a task force—a Manhattan Project—of historians, psychiatrists, neurologists, behavioral geneticists, quantitative psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists get to work explaining this strange, weird, suicidal phenomenon.
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
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