National Review’s John Derbyshire opened the door yesterday, and others appear anxious to walk through it. I can’t say I’m completely surprised, though I thought conservatives might wait more than 48 hours before putting their callousness on display.
As we talked about yesterday, Derbyshire got the blame-the-victim ball rolling, questioning why victims of the Virginia Tech massacre didn’t do more to attack the well-armed madman. “[W]hy didn’t anyone rush the guy?” Derbyshire asked. “It’s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons… At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him.”
Since then, high-profile conservative writers at high-profile outlets have been anxious to follow Derbyshire’s lead. Nathaniel Blake at Human Events Online argued that students at Virginia Tech should feel “heartily ashamed” for what he sees as their cowardice.
“College classrooms have scads of young men who are at their physical peak, and none of them seems to have done anything beyond ducking, running, and holding doors shut,” Blake said. “Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that.”
National Review’s Mark Steyn piled on today, even tying the shootings into a rant against government in general.
[Virginia Tech students are] not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men….
We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom’s security blanket. Geraldo-like “protection” is a delusion: when something goes awry — whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus — the state won’t be there to protect you. You’ll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision. […]
Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.
Wait, there’s more.
By way of my friend Michael J.W. Stickings, Michelle Malkin is very much on the same page.
Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance. And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense.
Enough is enough, indeed. Enough of intellectual disarmament. Enough of physical disarmament. You want a safer campus? It begins with renewing a culture of self-defense — mind, spirit and body. It begins with two words: Fight back.
While I find all of this morally repugnant, I also can’t help but marvel at the political ineptitude. I suppose these far-right voices deserve credit for sharing their genuine reactions, abhorrent though they may be, but do Derbyshire, Blake, Steyn, and Malkin really want the narrative of the VT tragedy to be, “Conservatives blame victims for massacre”?
Indeed, in the wake of a national tragedy, that shocked decent people everywhere, these right-wing voices haven’t done much to improve their class-quotient over the last couple of days.
“Blame the Muslims!”
“What? The shooter wasn’t a Muslim?”
“Blame the students!”
There’s a certain tin-ear quality to the whole thing. The nation was horrified on Monday; too many on the right seem anxious to make sure the nation is offended on Tuesday and Wednesday.
It’s almost as if these guys want to drive people away from conservatism. Honestly, for those who aren’t fully engaged in politics on a regular basis, how many Americans are going to look at this week’s events and say, “You know, I want to be on the side of those blaming the students for getting killed on Monday.”