Why The Focus On Ahmaud Arbery?

More on the Ahmaud Arbery case.

I know I am writing a lot about this but it is important. Not because of what actually happened, a career black criminal getting shot by some possibly overzealous white guys and this is notable only for how rare it is for a black man to be shot by a white man, but for what it has exposed in our political culture and what it means for the future.

I have already noted that it often seems that when a black does anything questionable, their community rallies around them and gives them an overwhelming benefit of the doubt, but when a white person does anything questionable, they are not afforded the same benefit by other white people and often quite the opposite (see: Trial By Social Media Outrage And The Politics Of Racial Solidarity). It is a sign of how deeply entrenched the politics of perpetual racial guilt are in the average white person.

What is even more distressing is that a lot of the people assuming the worst about Travis and Gregory McMichael are not white liberals, but are instead people who claim to be “conservative” and many who are “defenders of the 2nd Amendment” who seem perfectly willing to jettison gun owners our of fear of being called “racist”.

Most of us would probably have enjoyed hanging out with Travis and Gregory McMichael, sharing a beer and barbecue. They would probably be great neighbors, someone you could rely on and trust. Legal gun owners, fishermen, a former law enforcement officer? They sound on paper like people I would like to live next to me.

Ahmaud Arbery? The guy was a thug and a loser. He had already been convicted twice, once for bringing an illegal handgun to a school event, and again for shoplifting. It is safe to assume, given the two convictions and the video evidence of him snooping around a construction site multiple times, that those were not the only two crimes he committed, they were the only two times he got caught. If he had escaped while fleeing from the house he was trespassing in, it is safe to assume he would have been doing something else illegal shortly thereafter.

Would you want him living next to you? Of course not. Most of the guilty “conservatives” making excuses for him would lock their car or house doors if they saw him on the street.

The cold, hard fact is this: most “conservatives” are pussies, terrified of losing their cushy gigs. To varying degrees, people like Rod Dreher and David French are perfectly content to color within the lines of respectability. The only thing they are passionate about conserving is their pseudo-intellectual hustle and I suspect most of them find average American working class conservatives to be scary and revolting. They know that demographics are irreparably changing America to ensure that we will never have a “conservative” agenda with any chance of being enacted but they don’t care. The path is set and they are just getting what they can while they can.

The greatest impediment to a real “America First”, right-wing political movement is not liberals or Bernie-bros but are the very people who have weaseled their way into positions of respectability and prominence in American conservatism.