Don't Feed The Animals

Yesterday, during my lunchtime constitutional, I listened to this episode of the Glenn Show. It was my first introduction to the podcast and I'm going to give it a try from now on. It was two black academics, one from Brown and one from Cornell discussing race and current affairs. They're very impressive thinkers.

Sigh. They seem like such nice boys. I wonder what they might teach us if they could get past the color of their skins. Oh well.

In any case, they both registered surprise and fear at the violence from the campus lefties. They'd experienced the hate on their Twitter feeds as well, almost all from the left. This did not prevent them from saying that what they really feared was a reaction from the right, but that's par for the course.

They were a funny, in a humorous way, mix of far-sighted wisdom and hopelessly ignorant myopia. I had to laugh a couple of times at their innocent revelations of the way living in a progressive bubble had warped their thinking. It wasn't that they didn't accept others' points of view, it's that in many cases they didn't fundamentally understand them or had a grade-school comprehension of them. The podcast desperately needed Jonah Goldberg or Charles Murray.

These are minor criticisms, however. If you've got a half hour, I highly recommend it. Glenn Loury and John McWhorter were excellent.

Getting to the point: What they missed in the leftist violence section of their discussion was that they had been feeding the animals for a long time. If I live around Julian here in the mountains of eastern San Diego and I put out big bowls of cat food for the local ferals, I know enough to expect mountain lions to eventually show up. That's what these two have done with their endless focus on race. Put enough of that out there and eventually it will feed people who have a natural bent towards violence. You're just giving them an excuse to release their natural rage and take it out on the "oppressors."

I mentioned the real risk we take when we feed our audience the raw meat of injustice on a daily basis in this post.

If everyone is agitated about everything, if some percentage of "everyone" tends to fits of rage, then aren't we just asking for physical altercations, a la the ANTIFA riots?

ANTIFA and the Evergreen State tantrum-throwers are the mountain lions in my analogy. The residents of Julian are sufficiently experienced to know the mountain lions are out there and attracting them is a very, very bad idea. I guess we've not yet learned that lesson in our politics or use of social media*.

Here, we see one of the leaders of the Evergreen State protests.

* - That includes me. As a natural polemicist, My raw meat distribution probably means I need to register for a wholesaler license.