RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/unravelling-the-spiral-of-silence?s=r

Recently, I appeared on the podcast of Lex Fridman, a computer scientist who has worked on AI at places like MIT and Google. He’s a virtuosic interviewer who seems to be interested in pretty much everything. Go check out his YouTube channel, and you’ll likely be impressed by his range of guests and his ability to engage them in deep conversations about their lives and areas of expertise.

I made the trip out to Lex’s studio in Austin, Texas, and it was well worth the journey. Our conversation ranged from my own personal experiences to economics to race and politics to the really big questions, like death and the meaning of life. We talked for four hours, and he posted almost the entire thing. I must say, I think it’s one of the best recorded conversations I’ve ever engaged in.

The excerpt below is taken from that conversation, and in it Lex asks me about the effectiveness of accusations of racism. We see this everywhere. A professor or politician or some other public figure is accused of racism, and before the charges can even be investigated, poof. Their career goes up in smoke, whether or not they’ve actually done anything worthy of censure. Often it turns out they’re guilty of little more than choosing their words carelessly, and just as often they’re guilty, at least in my view, of nothing at all. This state of affairs is untenable, and I have no problem saying so. Others feel the way I do, and you’re now seeing more of them speak out against specious accusations of racism.

But there are still many, many people who recognize the terrible injustice of these accusations but fear the repercussions of defending the accused. It’s understandable. They don’t want the mob to direct its ire at them, and they may be in a position where they have much to lose and little to gain by speaking out. I worry that this widespread suppression could create conditions ripe for exploitation by some canny demagogue who could harness the resentments of a stifled electorate and, in the process, unleash something very ugly on this country. The political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann theorized the mechanisms that could bring this state of affairs about. She called it “the spiral of silence,” which I explain below.

We know the costs of remaining silent in the face of injustice. When that silence is broken, as it inevitably will be broken, are we prepared for what else may break along with it?

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/22/the-chinese-communist-partys-terrorist-attack-on-america/

When Dr. John Cheng opted to attend church services at the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, just 45 minutes outside of Los Angeles, California, he had no idea that he would sacrifice his prosperous and successful life to save scores of his fellow churchgoers. But that was precisely what the 53-year-old sports medicine physician and father of two did.

Cheng was attending a church service with his elderly mother. Many of the other parishioners were also elderly, prompting the heroic doctor to take decisive action against 68-year-old David Chou. Cheng sustained multiple gunshot wounds tackling Chou once it became clear Chou was planning a mass casualty attack. According to law enforcement officials, thanks to Cheng’s quick actions, the shooter was delayed from killing more people—and it gave the other parishioners time to jump into action and attack the crazed gunman. 

John Cheng is, unequivocally, a hero. Like so many other acts of terrorism conducted against Americans, the attack brought to light the very worst and, in Cheng, the very best of humanity. But now the calls for justice must be heard. We must understand how and why this attack happened, not only to avenge Cheng’s murder . . . but to determine if the terrorist attack directed against Taiwanese Americans was an isolated event or the start of a new pattern of terrorism. 

David Chou, the suspected shooter, wasn’t just some lone wolf kook. He was part of a political movement known as the “Las Vegas Chinese for Peaceful Unification” movement. This organization is not an independent entity unique to Las Vegas, Nevada. According to reports from the Taipei Times, this organization is a “semi-official [arm] of the Chinese Communist Party with branches in several countries.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/22/joe-biden-and-racial-demagoguery/

Joe Biden has had a long history of racist outbursts. Can we even remember them all? The “put y’all back in chains” insults to an audience of black professionals, his dismissal of black interviewers variously as “you ain’t black” or ”junkie,” his he-man racialist Corn Pop mythologies, his recent condescending reference to a black professional as “boy,” and on and on. 

The Left has always contextualized his racial outbursts in the same fashion his decades-long creepy touching, sexual harassment, grabbing, and blowing into the hair and ears of young women and teens were always “just Joe being Joe.”  

So it was ironic but predictable that Biden went to Buffalo on Tuesday to leverage the recent carnage from the deranged, eco-fascist, racist, and insane lethal mass shooter of 11 African-Americans. Read the gunman’s manifesto: it is an unhinged collage of green fascist, racist, and politically incoherent mishmash.  

Purported right-wing monsters usually don’t hate Fox News and Ben Shapiro or go on endless green screeds. No matter. For Biden, as his midterm rendezvous looms ominously, the Buffalo shooter was useful in smearing his own political opponents. So Biden saw a trip to Buffalo as an opportunity, in a way other mass shootings were not, and made a rare excursion out of his secluded compound.  

The Great Asymmetries 

Biden’s despicable effort at blaming his political adversaries for the deaths failed for lots of reasons. He mangled his recitations of prior white-on-black shootings by including the recent Dallas shootings of three Asians by an African-American in his catalog of white-supremacist murders.