Psychologists speak of the need of Narcissists for attention, which some call “Narcissistic Supply”.
I would suggest there is a similar need among the psychologically weak, lost, and rudderless for “Moralistic Supply”. They need to feel regularly and often, the sense that they matter, that their lives are not the utterly boring, utterly uncreative wastelands that they in fact are.
As I have noted for some time, the pun “Kos/Cause” at the Daily Kos cannot be accidental, even if that was his nickname–perhaps or even likely the one he gave himself. Knowing nothing other than that he is the publisher of that site, it seems likely Moulitsas was not liked by many people, whatever he may say to the contrary notwithstanding.
To complete the thought, I am reminded of the Lion Tamer skit in Monty Python.
As Alex Jones and perhaps others have noted, there was a casting call that went out the day before the Charlottesville violence, for actors to play demonstrators. The tacit assumption seems to be that they were to cast as Antifa, but why not toothless rednecks waving swastikas? (And he never said they were Jewish, by the way: this is more fake news).
I read too that the police were told to stand down, in what was a more or less open provocation to violence.
So, you have organizers only with effort–and one of the organizers is seemingly a falsely flagged Obama supporter and anti-white racist–get together perhaps up to 200 people willing to march behind white supremacists banners, in a nation of 350 million. Antifa, so called, routinely gets much more than that. Even when the Klan actually was marching on their own initiative, they were routinely outnumbered some 5 to 1 by protesters, and violence prevented by responsible, non-politicized policing.
But the Left NEEDS, in an apt metaphor, badness like junkies need their drugs. They need it obviously to support their propaganda. This is why so many leftists–and the number is high, something like 10-15 incidents at least which got national attention for a second–felt the need to fabricate hate crimes, so that their own hate would be, could be, justified.
But they were lying, as indeed they are now. This is why they have transitioned from provoking and fabricating “hate crimes” to calling much of the public history of this nation itself a hate crime.
From the standpoint of provocation, this is much more potentially useful. Many more people will react to the monuments of their history being destroyed by gangs of thugs and overly eager Democrat appeasers, than would ever commit to symbols of intolerance framed racially. Thus, they get more white anger, which they can then use in tandem with their media relationships to paint all non-conforming whites as racist.
As with all military histories, though, many in the South are proud of their ancestors who fought and in many cases died for States Rights. Yes, it is true the proximate issue was slavery, and yes it is true that fighting under the banner of freedom for the right to enslave other humans is hypocritical, but the core issue remains: what is the proper role and power of the Federal Government? Can States leave? Does the Federal government have the power, SHOULD it have the power, to tell any or all of us to violate our own moral conscience, under pain of being taken prisoner and held captive?
These are consequential, important questions. And I will note again that they have never appeared in fully fleshed form before the Supreme Court. Jefferson Davis was arrested, but never tried, because had he been acquitted, Secession would have been rendered permanently legal, and the invasion of the South by the North the war of imperialistic aggression the South always claimed it to have been.
All of the statues around the country were built to heal wounds, to rebuild a common polity by repatriating important heroes of a very violent, very difficult war.
And virtually all of them were built before 1930 or so. They were not built in the living memory of virtually anyone, and as Charles Barkley notes he, like everyone else, had not spared a second in his lifetime to think about any of them, until this manufactured tempest in a teacup. They don’t affect his life, or the lives of substantially anyone else, black or white, in any way.
I for my part get, but don’t get, the Republicans in particular who have criticized Trump’s response. He did nothing more or less than speak the truth.
In Charlottesville, you have an angry, agitated man surrounded by protesters, some of whom are hitting the back of his car with sticks or bats. He panics, hits the accelerator and rams the cars in front of him. This man then becomes the embodiment of hundreds of millions of people–all non-Communists, if we take the rhetoric of the Left to its logical extent–who don’t have one fucking thing in common with him. These people–the Left–WANTED this outcome. They provoked him. They provoked everyone they could. The Democrat Mayor and Democrat Governor both told all the available police and National Guardsmen to do nothing, to stand down. This is what I read.
Then literally within a few short days, in Spain we have a car ramming into a crowd, with no provocation, with the sole intent of killing, and the Left really doesn’t care. That was not the act of a Muslim, even though the panicked driver is supposed to stand in for all conservatives.
Leftism really is a creed of evil and mental illness. It is to spreading Good what drinking saltwater is to slaking thirst.
Because no authentic good is ever done, the drugs must be administered continually, literally and figuratively, to keep the illusion alive. That is what the media does, that is what stupid ideas do, that is what the continual evocation of anger does. These people cannot ever be allowed to unwind, because they might then realize how batshit insane and destructive even to the people they claim to care about they really are.