Last Monday, the Club Q shooting was recent enough that I hadn’t thought it through yet. Quick reactions to disturbing events often turn out to be misguided, and I didn’t want to muddy the waters any further. But the more I think about it, the more I reaffirm my original sense that this represents something even worse than the typical mass shooting. I write that while realizing that it’s crazy to diminish any mass shooting by calling it “typical”. What could possibly be worse?
That’s what I’ll try to flesh out this morning in “Is Club Q just the beginning?” What’s particularly disturbing about the Club Q massacre is that the far-right end of our political spectrum didn’t react with the horror that mass shootings usually require, at least in public. Usually, people whose rhetoric has attacked the targeted group may not take responsibility for their malign influence, but they usually at least go silent for a while. This time they didn’t. Anti-trans rhetoric in particular continued apace. The people pushing it had to recognize the they-had-it-coming interpretation of their words, but they didn’t seem to care.
Of course there will be more mass shootings in general. That seems to go without saying in our gun-saturated country. But going forward, it seems increasingly likely that there will be more mass shootings like this one. To me, that’s disturbing in a new way.
That post will be out late, maybe not until noon EST. Before that, I’ll post a review of two recent books: Yascha Mounk’s The Great Experiment about diverse democracy, and Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest about a bizarre change in the fantasies of the very rich. That should be out shortly.
The weekly summary will cover guns, Twitter, protests in Iran and China, Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, and a few other things, before closing with an extremely condensed version of Dickens. That should be out by 1 or so.
The Weekly Sift 