For some reason, authorities are taking the apparent threat implied by the Facebook posting of a couple of U.S. Marines very seriously.
So is Slate writer Christina Cauterucci.
The Marine Corps is investigating two active-duty service members involved in a Facebook post that threatened violence against gay people. “Coming to a gay bar near you!” read the photo, depicting a corporal in uniform with his finger on the trigger of an assault rifle; the man who posted the photo also wrote, “Too soon?”
Explains Cauterucci:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Orlando gunman Omar Mateen was the product of a society that tolerates homophobia and transphobia in its pop culture, schools, and laws. We shouldn’t be surprised when those phobias turn to violence.
Hmm. Except that the FBI was surprised, we are told, when the extremely, exceptionally, train-whistle-howlingly well-documented phobias of Omar Mateen turned to violence.
But there was nothing anybody could do, we are equally assured, about Omar Mateen – in spite of the fact that for years, literally, he had been shrieking, throwing things, making specific threats, and using slurs too ugly to print about gays, women, Jews, blacks, and basically everyone else, while claiming connections with Al Qaeda, actually having connections with known recruiters of and consorters with terrorists, and cheering on Islamic terror attacks against Americans, including 9/11 and Nidal Hassan’s attack at Fort Hood in 2009.
Mateen’s years and years of reported slurs, phobias, and threats were just his exercise of his First Amendment rights. The FBI followed up on specific warnings about him on three separate occasions, including the 10-month investigation of him in 2013. But the Bureau managed to conclude that there was nothing actionable in his flashing-neon-obvious warning signs.
Go ahead, read the lengthy excuses for the FBI laid out in reports like this one and this one. They’re all over the web in the last few days. They’re written to frame the foregone conclusion that, hey, terrorism happens, and you can’t always stop it. Maybe there were clues, but there was nothing the FBI could do about them. I’m not exaggerating here. Read the reports for yourself.
By that logic, the two Marines involved in the Facebook post should be back at their posts in short order, their files closed and no negative action taken. The “threat” implied in their Facebook post is actually much less explicit than threats reportedly made, on multiple occasions, by Omar Mateen. Sure, it’s inexcusable, but it’s also juvenile and silly. There is zero likelihood that we’re going to find out these Marines pose an actual threat – at least not by the criteria Mateen was measured against.
Heck, these Marine jokers are not even in the same league as Mateen. Omar Mateen assuredly beats these two by a factor of 100 in terms of how many red flags there are to signal the potential for violence.
But the FBI, we are earnestly informed, had no reason to “do anything” about Mateen. Whereas third parties who know nothing about the two Marines’ case are already certain that the Marines are steeped in “phobias that turn to violence.”
We don’t yet know what the outcome of the Marines’ case will be. We do know that Slate and its confreres in the culture of left-wing extremism are happy to prejudge what it should be.
The thing is, there’s just no sale anymore, in much of our weary nation, for this counterfactual, discriminatory, one-sided approach to cultural vigilance and public security. And a Daily Caller piece from Monday, 13 June, makes clear why. This is the logic the FBI accepted so that it could close out its 2013 investigation of Omar Mateen:
Finally, [Fox News correspondent Catherine] Herridge explained the reasons why the FBI called off the probe.
“At the end of 10 months the investigation was closed with no further action. They took Mateen’s statements he was trying to taunt his coworkers because he thought he was being marginalized because of his Muslim faith.”
Right. In lobbing terrorism-laced threats at law enforcement officers, and slurs at gay, blacks, and Jews, Mateen was just lashing out because of Islamophobia. And the FBI accepted that excuse – after all, Barack Obama bases his national policies on it – as a reason to conclude that Mateen posed no actual threat, in spite of being festooned with more red flags than Tiananmen Square on the First of October.
It’s not just that political correctness kills – although it does. It’s that political correctness is slanted, biased, unfair, and institutionalized; it gives bad, dangerous people free passes, while imposing material punishments on others against whom far less is proven or even alleged.
Whatever happens to the two young Marines – who have undoubtedly made jackasses of themselves, and would get unit-level punishment in any outfit I was running – the problem is this: the American people are justified now in assuming the outcome will probably be unfair and biased.
As much as I might trust a Marine battalion commander, I don’t trust the Marine Corps under Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and Commander in Chief Barack Obama. The two of them are too busy, like the rest of the Obama administration, making excuses for the Omar Mateens, and psychotically accusing ordinary-Joe straight guys of being at the root of everything that’s wrong with the world.
This tendency is not just turning government policy into an Alice-in-Wonderland dream sequence. It’s getting people killed. If you want to understand the Trump phenomenon, and why so many Americans consider it their highest priority to reject the dementedness of “political correctness,” start with that.
