Mob compliance is a vicious and deadly cycle. The only way to stop the cycle is to stop complying with the mob’s demands.

Federalist
Stella Morabito
JULY 18, 2018

“Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling predicted back in the 1950s that we’d soon have a citizenry unable to think. Many of his screenplays warned of the specter of runaway mob psychology. Today it seems that’s exactly the sort of citizenry we’ve got.

Social media trolling drives mindless street theater, which drives more mindless social media trolling, and on and on. Most Americans aren’t taken in by it, but the illusions mob behavior promotes can wreak havoc even on reasonable people.

The mob mindset seems to be in hyper-drive. Consider a July 14 Quillette article, “I was the Mob until the Mob Came for Me,” written under a pseudonym due to the author’s reasonable fear of retribution. These days, “Barrett Wilson” delivers pizza and sushi to support his young family, a job he can’t afford to lose.

He explains: “I once had a well paid job in what might be described as the social justice industry. Then I upset the wrong person, and within a short window of time, I was considered too toxic for my employer’s taste. I was publicly shamed, mobbed, and reduced to a symbol of male privilege. I was cast out of my career and my professional community.”

Wilson confesses that he was once part of that mob, and as such, he fed the beast that did him in:

How did I become that person? It happened because it was exhilarating. Every time I would call someone racist or sexist, I would get a rush. That rush would then be reaffirmed and sustained by the stars, hearts, and thumbs-up that constitute the nickels and dimes of social media validation. The people giving me these stars, hearts, and thumbs-up were engaging in their own cynical game: A fear of being targeted by the mob induces us to signal publicly that we are part of it.

What should we make of Wilson’s amazing acknowledgement that people generally signal their compliance with the mob to avoid being targeted by it? Indeed, this is a very human defense mechanism, but it’s only temporary. Mob compliance is a vicious and deadly cycle. The only way to stop the cycle is to stop complying with the mob’s demands. Such refusal is an actual act of bravery.

What to make of Wilson saying he’d “get a rush” every time he smeared someone publicly? Again, a human behavior. Mob participants are spellbound by the addiction of fake adulation, being called “brave” when they collectively gang up on an individual. Doing so reflects emotional neediness and arrested development. This emotional immaturity is fed by a culture with an education system that does not value independent thought. But I digress.

So, the mob did to Wilson what mobs naturally do: turn on their own: “Then one day, suddenly, I was accused of some of the very transgressions I’d called out in others. I was guilty, of course: There’s no such thing as due process in this world. And once judgment has been rendered against you, the mob starts combing through your past, looking for similar transgressions that might have been missed at the time. I was now told that I’d been creating a toxic environment for years at my workplace; that I’d been making the space around me unsafe through micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions alike.”

Political Correctness Has Built a ‘Snitch Culture’

Wilson also describes the social justice industry, which thrives on political correctness, as “a surveillance culture, a snitch culture.” This description is very apt, especially if you recall last summer’s Twitter crusade by celebrity Lena Dunham. She encouraged people to eavesdrop on others’ private conversations to report something politically incorrect to authorities.

Dunham publicly celebrated getting two American Airlines employees investigated after she reported overhearing their conversation in an airport terminal. The employees allegedly engaged in what she called “transphobic” talk. Dunham was modelling the snitch culture so her followers could do same to anyone and everyone.

American Airlines cooperated by publicly agreeing to investigate the employees based on Dunham’s manufactured complaint. As it turned out, the airline claimed it didn’t have conclusive evidence. So, as far as we know, no employees lost their jobs as a result of that particular incident. But it all paves the way for the metastasis of a snitch culture.

That’s standard procedure today for all of the corporations that now operate under the rainbow-colored flag, which is to say just about all of them. As we can see from Wilson’s experience, it’s working so well that the mob can now turn on its own with impunity.

For every high-profile story of a shamed target who basically lost a job for the simple act of thinking or speaking thoughts the mob didn’t authorize—for example, Google engineer James Damore or former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich or Business Insider columnist Daniella Greenbaum—there are likely thousands of unknown Barrett Wilsons walking among us.

Some of them didn’t even know what they did or said to offend anybody. Their superiors wouldn’t even say who accused them. But they were no doubt hauled into a human resources department and told they didn’t have the correct values or attitudes for the organization. Next thing they knew, they were escorted to their desks to clear out of, say, a tech company like Microsoft, or the California State University system, or any number of banks or corporations or schools.

The Phenomenon of Psycho-Mob Metastasis

If mob behavior is the antithesis of mature thought processes, we should be able to see anti-thought behavior everywhere today. We most certainly do. The pack mindset leads people to harass others without provocation. Recall that the owner of the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia threw White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and her family out of the restaurant because she didn’t agree with Sanders’ politics.

The mob also congregates with bullhorns in front of officials’ homes, such as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s, telling them they shouldn’t be allowed to sleep. It loiters menacingly in front of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices, such as the one in Portland, Oregon, in a campaign that would lead to abolishing border control and law enforcement. It mindlessly riots. It encourages an adult to assault a kid wearing a Trump-supporting MAGA hat.

The mob mindset engages in ritual defamation, a procedure practiced by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many corporations and tech giants rely on the SPLC as a means of policing and punishing independent thought under the guise of fighting “hate.” It’s the same mob mindset that inspired a gunman to open fire at the Washington office of the Family Research Council in 2012. It also inspired a gunman to attempt a mass assassination of Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice last year, seriously wounding Rep. Steve Scalise and two police officers.

Yet certain members of Congress continue to feed this mentality, most famously Maxine Waters, who rallied a personal mob and called for increased physical swarming of government officials at their homes, at gas stations, at restaurants. Everywhere.

Why Illegal Immigration Is a Centerpiece of Mob Action

It’s interesting here to note how calls to abolish ICE have become such a lynchpin of mob action recently. We needn’t wonder very hard about why rent-a-mob activity is being used to shut down law enforcement, particularly the enforcement of immigration laws. Mob psychology simply can’t sustain itself through logic or reason. After all, thoughtfulness in a society, which can only come about through free expression, is anathema to mob creation and activity.

Power elites who support and incite this sort of mass mobilization—otherwise known as “community organizing”—are forever invested in maintaining a dependent underclass. That’s pretty much the extent of immigration’s usefulness to them. Hence the enlisted social justice warrior mobs stridently and quite suddenly now emote about “children” and “family cohesion” and “American values.”

Please. All of a sudden, these people purport to care about children? Since when has the anti-thought camp in “progressive” American politics ever cared about a child’s need for both a mother and a father? About keeping families together? The answer is: Never.

The mob’s newfound interest in family cohesion at the Mexican border should be clear to anybody who can think it through: it’s a political ploy to use the kids as pawns in order to open the borders. The anti-thought Left cannot win arguments on the merits, and certainly not with rule of law or due process. So it needs bodies, and gets them with bribes: welfare, health care, and education subsidies.

The anti-thought Left cares as deeply about family separation as it cares about the emotional health of individuals like Barrett Wilson whom they enlist in their rent-a-mobs. If they cared about the emotional health of mob participants, they’d be interested in helping them develop means of independent thought rather than force-feeding them a diet of identity politics and ignorance in the schools. They’d have promoted family cohesion and happiness for children. Instead, they’ve addicted them to the emotional rush of “progressive” mob politics.

Family separation happens to be a centerpiece of so many so-called progressive policies that SJW mobs and their creators in the Democrat Party have been promoting for years. This includes, but is by no means limited to, family law—e.g., no-fault divorce, which forcibly separates kids from parents; medicine—e.g., Obamacare’s lower premiums for the divorced than for the married; education—e.g., teaching kids that their parents are bigots if they promote the cohesion of the organic family; and welfare policies—punishing mothers if fathers are present in the family.

In fact, the intentional breakdown of families has always been the crown jewel of such regressive policies because intact families have always been the bane of big government proponents. That has never changed since Karl Marx declared war on the family. Don’t expect it to change now.

Just Call Them On It

Most frustrating of all are the supposedly conservative leaders who actually listen to the rantings of the mob and try to earnestly explain that no, we conservatives are not like that at all. We actually do care about kids and families. Sigh. So when did we stop beating our wives? The mob can never be appeased, even if all of its demands are met.

There’s no point explaining anything to the anti-thought Left. People who intend harm usually know it at some level. They habitually project their intentions onto their perceived enemies. The mobs calling for abolishing ICE and border control use the charge of family separation because they are guilty of doing just that in just about every area of policy.

In like manner, garden-variety mob members who get a “rush” from smearing their perceived opponents are shifting their own sins onto others. Try asking them this: What makes you so perfect? So immune to ever doing anything bad? So pure as the driven snow? They’re always somehow above reproach for anything and everything. So perfect.

In the end, the people used to prop up mob behavior—whether appointed SJW flying monkeys or hard-luck immigrants themselves—are all expendable, as far as the progressive mob is concerned. As Wilson wrote, there is no due process in that world.

There comes a point when those who keep trying to give the anti-thought camp the benefit of the doubt have to face reality. By appeasing, we’re enabling. And that hurts everyone, including members of the mob like Wilson, who end up learning the hard way.

So, if the mob is ever firmly ensconced in power, know this: they are coming for you, no matter who you are.

Link

Exactly what happened To Scarlet Johansson with her role as a transgender. The SJWhiners screamed until she backed out and now their movie likely won’t get made. Idiots.

Thanks for the article.

I am a big fan of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic 3 book series "The Gulag Archipelago". It is interesting to me how much human nature stays the same. This "snitch culture" was a huge part of the whole Gulag system. In our society rather than accusing somebody of an offense "against the party" and sending them to freeze to death in the gold mines of Kolyma at -70 degree weather we have a culture that uses social media to take away their livelihood and their jobs.

Unfortunately, just like in the days of Russian Communism we have a huge part of society that plays along and even encourages this. I consider it a very scary path to go down. The history of the human race has proven that people must be labeled in terms of a language that degrades them and takes away their humanity before bad things can be done with them.

We all make mistakes and say things we regret. The lack of compassion in this mob mentality is a scary thing.

Anyone who gets an exhilarating "rush" from gold stars, hearts and thumbs ups in social media is an idiot, part of a sad component in today's society.

Sounds familiar, and not just with regard to dystopian fiction:

https://www.history.com/news/h...n-of-kids-into-nazis



How the Hitler Youth Turned a Generation of Kids Into Nazis


The Boy Scouts’ motto was “Be Prepared.” But nothing could prepare Max Ebel, a German teenager, for what happened after Hitler banned the Boy Scouts. As other boys cheered, the 17-year-old was surrounded by a gang of Nazi Youth—one of whom had a knife. Ebel’s refusal to leave scouting behind had just turned into a fight for his life.

It was 1937, and the Boy Scouts were one of many youth organizations on the Nazis’ verboten list. Now, every non-Jewish boy in Germany was required to be part of the Hitler Youth, the Nazis’ youth arm, instead. Ebel, a pacifist who distrusted the Nazis, refused—and paid the price.

The Boy Scout was harassed and then attacked by a group of Nazi Youth. In an attempt to force him to join, one of the members stabbed him in the hand. Ebel fought back, grabbed the knife, and cut the other boy’s face. Later, realizing his life was in danger, he escaped Germany and eventually became a U.S. citizen.

Ebel was just one of millions of young Germans whose lives were changed by the Hitler Youth—a group designed to indoctrinate kids into Hitler’s ideology, then send them off to war.

By the time Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, hundreds of thousands of kids were members of youth organizations like the Boy Scouts, which was invented in England in 1909 and quickly spread to Germany. But there was also another powerful youth movement afoot—one invented by the Nazis. Since 1922, the National Socialists had had a youth arm designed to train and recruit members for its paramilitary. As the Nazis became more powerful, their youth arm grew.

In January 1933, there were 50,000 members of the Hitler Youth. By the end of the year, there were more than 2 million. And as the 1930s progressed, the Nazis waged war on the groups so popular among German youth. First they banned children’s groups associated with political movements like Communism. And in 1936, they banned all youth groups—including the Boy Scouts—and forced members to become part of the Hitler Youth instead. Jewish children were banned from participation.

Banning scouting sent a message—obey, or be punished. It had a practical effect, too: Since other scouting organizations were banned, the only way for kids to get scouting experience was to join the Hitler Youth. As Germany hurtled toward war, children who refused to join were alienated, then punished. By 1939, over 90 percent of German children were part of the Hitler Youth organization.

For the Nazis, the group had other benefits. Not only did it allow the Third Reich to indoctrinate children at their most impressionable, but it let the Nazis remove them from the influence of their parents, some of whom opposed the regime. The Nazi Party knew that families—private, cohesive groups not usually under political sway—were an obstacle to their goals. The Hitler Youth was a way to get Hitler’s ideology into the family unit, and some members of the Hitler Youth even denounced their parents when they behaved in ways not approved of by the Reich.

Though the Boy Scouts were banned, the Nazis co-opted many of its activities and traditions. Hitler Youth took part in typical scouting type activities like camping trips, singing, crafts and hiking. They went to summer camps, wore uniforms, recited pledges and told stories over campfires.

But over time, the activities changed. Though girls’ groups focused on things like rhythmic gymnastics and winter coat drives, the boys’ groups became more like a mini military than a Boy Scout den. They imposed military-like order on members and trained young men in everything from weapons to survival. And all groups included hefty doses of propaganda that encouraged an almost religious devotion to the Führer.

Alfons Heck’s experience was typical. As he told the Boston Globe in the 1980s, he couldn’t wait to become a full-fledged Hitler Youth member and relished marching, singing and attending rallies. “I belonged to Adolf Hitler, body and soul,” he recalled. It took him years to step away from that indoctrination after the end of World War II.

Really good article, JALLEN...thanks for posting. The only thing we can hope is that more and more "Barrett Wilson's" out there see the light and get turned on by "their own". Hopefully then, they can carry the insanity of the SJW movement forward, as "Wilson" did, to the point that said movement dwindles to almost nothing. It will still exist, but hopefully it gets worn to a nub. It would behoove these idiots to take heed to my verse from Isaiah below. Their smugness would never allow them to believe it, though. I say GOOD!

quote:

Originally posted by Leemur:
Exactly what happened To Scarlet Johansson with her role as a transgender. The SJWhiners screamed until she backed out and now their movie likely won’t get made. Idiots.

Dennis Prager was talking about that very topic on his show yesterday. It is mind-boggling. I can't even come up with an example that demonstrates the sheer stupidity of SJW mentality. These people are mind-numbingly ignorant. I never thought in a million years I'd see it in my lifetime, but yes...this country IS repeating history. JSMH...

When reading this the first thing I thought of was First they came. I guess that's just reaffirmed by reading the first few responses. It's pretty damn sad in this day and age we have thought police.

quote:

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

In addition to Nazi Germany, much of that discussion could have been directly applied to China during the “great leap forward” and Cultural Revolution movements.

^^^ The Red Guards were composed of mostly university kids and others of like age, were they not?

quote:

Mob participants are spellbound by the addiction of fake adulation, being called “brave” when they collectively gang up on an individual.

And yet the punch line to the joke is that those providing the fake adulation to the "brave" are either afraid to actively participate in the mob or are waiting for the anonymity of a full mob press to be "brave".

It must be truly humiliating to realize that one has let oneself be used as a crash test dummy by a cowardly, brain dead basement dweller who just wants a cheap rush.

This has happened all throughout history.

Remember Maximilien Robespierre?

He too was The Mob...until the Mob demanded he pay a visit to Madame la Guillotine.

It's bittersweet to see Frankenstein get killed by his monster. I like when SJWs get their own medicine except that somehow their illegitimate medicine gets validated in the balance. Frankenstein's monster is still at large to continue the slaughter. No, the monster needs to die. Political correctness will destroy us all eventually.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
In addition to Nazi Germany, much of that discussion could have been directly applied to China during the “great leap forward” and Cultural Revolution movements.

Which is somewhat ironic, because the Chinese regard the Cultural Revolution as something of a "dark ages" and a national embarrassment, whereas our progressive culture seems to be running headlong into the morass of an ever accelerating, and shortening cycle of fanatical revolution that is increasingly accepting of violence as a means to an end if not the end itself. Once you extinguish the conservatives, who is left? Next to go are the moderates, and so on. The problem with being a progressive revolutionary Ouroborous is that entropy applies--the tail just keeps getting shorter.