The Modern Rise of Evil Chic

The left is increasingly celebrating acts of undeniable evil and anyone watching who has noticed the pattern but hasn’t figure out the reason must be asking themselves, what the hell is going on?

By now, most of us understand that in the proximal sense, this all started with the murder of George Floyd. The subsequent riots resulted in up to $2 billion in claims due to arson, vandalism, and looting. Over 140 cities were set ablaze. Dozens murdered. Yet progressives called the violence a “racial reckoning,” claiming police were killing unarmed blacks at astronomical rates.

In 2015, Truthout published an essay arguing police were conducting a literal genocide against blacks. In his 2021 book The 400-Year Holocaust, Mayo Clinic professor Dante King describes a “perpetual racial genocide of Black people in America.” Naturally then, 73% of black Americans believe they should give their kids “the talk.” Except here’s how many unarmed blacks police killed in the years leading up to Floyd:

• 2016: 17

• 2017: 21

• 2018: 14

• 2019: 14

• 2020: 18

Considering there are 47.9 million black Americans, even a figure like 500 would be astonishingly low. In fact, that would pencil out to roughly 1 death per 100,000, which reflects the homicide rate of some of the safest places on earth, such as Finland. And the Finns are over 30 times more likely to be murdered than an unarmed black American is to die at the hands of an officer. It happens so rarely, in fact, that lightning kills twice as many people in the United States each year.

More importantly, Harvard economist Roland Fryer’s research proves there are no racial differences when it comes to police shootings. This was so scandalous a discovery that Harvard’s disgraced former President Claudine Gay infamously went to war against Fryer to silence the facts.

What mass psychogenic illness convinced so many to fear a nonexistent threat?

I recently explained the evolutionary origins of victimhood mentality and suicidal empathy, which is a dangerous cocktail because if you can convince people their lives are in danger, or that others are being harmed, you can get otherwise good people to support nearly anything in the belief that justice must be won, as pro-Palestinian protesters love to chant, “by any means necessary.”

In the years after George Floyd, when people who ignored safety protocols died during the COVID pandemic, progressives mocked them as fools who got what they had coming. As the pandemic was winding down, Russia invaded Ukraine and neo-Soviet troops carried out genocidal massacres, raped women in front of their husbands, daughters in front of their fathers, even infants. Progressives blamed the U.S., NATO, even the victims, all while defending Russia as “anti-imperialist.”

Eight months later on October 7, Palestinians carried out the bloodiest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. They slaughtered infants, raped young girls, and burned mothers and fathers alive. Yet before Israel even retaliated, leftists in the West were celebrating, with many specifically celebrating the atrocities and blaming the victims.

Then we saw the Red Sea crisis and terrorist attacks by Houthis, a fanatical tribe of Shia Muslims living in Yemen who practice literal slavery, murder gays, use child soldiers, rape little girls, and torture African immigrants for being black. Progressives took to the streets and chanted, “Solidarity with Yemeni resistance!”

Next came attacks by Hezbollah, a behemoth of terroristic butchery that makes Hamas look like an Alabama KKK book-reading club—and again, leftists cheered.

More recently, Luigi Mangione murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a father of two, and leftists began openly thirsting for the murderer, talking about how sexy he is, writing love ballads to him, making t-shirts with his face on them, and again, blaming the victim.

In early December, the Syrian genocidal dictator Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow as rebels entered Damascus—and leftists tripped over themselves to tell everyone how much they adored the man. His fans include Richard Medhurst, Aaron Mate, Max Blumenthal, George Galloway, Jimmy Dore, Ben Norton, and Jackson Hinkle. Nevermind the slaughter of almost 1 million Syrian Muslims. Leftists are far too occupied with the death of 30,000 Gazans.

But let me tip my hat to the left and acknowledge that they do have a bit of a point. Anti-black racism and police brutality have been problems in our society. It is good to keep your distance and wash your hands if the fifth-deadliest pandemic in human history is sweeping the globe. U.S. foreign policy has come back to bite us in the ass. But every correction is an overcorrection, and the left has taken all these sensible priors to the point of fanatical stupidity.

One common talking point among progressives is that the ends justify the means. They characterized the October 7 attacks as a prison break and said when the prisoners are claiming their freedom, we have no right to question how they do it.

The first thing to note is that this is nothing new. The left championed Che Guevara, Leila Khaled, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Leonard Peltier. The fact that the Sandinistas carried out mass executions of indigenous people didn’t turn them off either. BLM’s founders cite the sociopath Assata Shakur as their hero.

The political left is supposed to be where you go when you want to care about things like sexism, racism, and other forms of systemic oppression.

But now some of the most horrifically sexist rhetoric is to be found on the left, specifically in the trans movement’s anti-TERF rhetoric, where people commonly talk about wanting to rape women to death or cut them into little pieces. Some of the most racist rhetoric is also found on the left, specifically in the anti-racist and BLM movements, where white people are depicted as inherently racist, i.e. evil. And of course, the left also perpetuates and benefits from systemic oppression, specifically the systemic protocols and practices of DEI. Not to mention leftist antisemitism.

What are we to do when the tree-huggers and bleeding-hearts among us trade in their peace signs and flowers for Antifa badges and long knives?

It may be cold comfort, but there is some refreshment to be drawn from the well of literary reflection. Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four both critique revolutionary movements that devolve into authoritarianism. Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon explore the moral compromises inherent in ideological pursuits, where the quest for utopia justifies atrocity. In Greene’s The Quiet American, misguided idealism sees well-meaning interventions result in grievous harm. What all these stories share is that they underscore the importance of first principles and caution against the allure of moral absolutism.

The extreme left wants to burn the village to save it, and half of that philosophy is worth keeping. Theirs is a kind of holy war mentality, a jihad against the West, not flawed in its design but rather in its aim. Outrage over oppression is noble, after all, unless it never turns to look within. As Koestler wrote, “A revolutionary must set himself against revolution, if he is to remain a revolutionary.”