Edmund Connelly: Moral Panics and Anarcho-Tyranny

Edmund Connelly: No sooner did I get my column on Selective Moral Panics in Higher Education done than a perfect new example popped up in front of me. CNN is now spawning yet another moral panic: 

Police in New Jersey arrested a teenager in connection with a public-address-system announcement telling “all Blacks” to leave a Wal-Mart store, a police spokesman said. The 16-year-old boy is from Atlantic County, New Jersey. 

I remember when such a thing was merely called a prank. Now the national media has gone into overdrive to cover it. Let’s think a little more about why that is.

Here again I turn to James Edwards and his crew from The Political Cesspool, specifically his co-host Keith Alexander. Mr. Alexander was unknown to me a year ago when I was invited to appear on The Political Cesspool to talk about my Hollywood writing. My interview went very well thanks to the professionalism of both James and Mr. Alexander. In fact, I was flattered to discover that Mr. Alexander was very familiar with my writing for The Occidental Quarterly.

Since then, I’ve learned to download the weekly show and have become even more enamored of the show, especially the first-hour banter between James and Mr. Alexander. First, to this Northerner, it is an eye-opener to discover what great manners these Southern gentlemen have. Further, their facility with the English language leaves me embarrassed. It is a superior form of communication.

Last week (March 13) we were treated to two hours of James and Mr. Alexander talking, and Mr. Alexander perfectly placed what was happening with these anti-White moral panics. First, they presented a list of cases where minorities were given exaggerated attention for alleged offences against them.

For instance, as was recounted on the radio show, a black man driving through Georgia is now suing Georgia police for $10 million because he was stopped and arrested. Never mind, as Mr. Alexander pointed out, that the arresting officer was also black. White racism is at fault.

Then there was the case where police posted a sketch of a black serial rapist. When a White man called in a sighting of the rape suspect, he was investigated for a hate crime.

Finally, we were treated to the story of three White Los Angeles school teachers charged with racism and suspended for allegedly mocking Black History Month by giving students pictures of Dennis Rodman, RuPaul and O.J. Simpson. The kicker is that all three African Americans were on a list approved by the school district for inclusion in Black History Month.

As James Edwards summed it up: 

Got that? Is that incredible, or what? In other words, these three teachers have been fired for following the approved curriculum. The school had actually approved these three, including a tranny and a double murderer, as appropriate subject matter for Black History Month, but when “white males” follow the curriculum, they’re suspended and are probably facing termination.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Alexander was able to draw a larger lesson from these stories. He explained during the second hour (go to the 25 min. 40 sec. mark) that these developments constitute what the late Sam Francis identified as “anarcho-tyranny.” Let’s allow Wikipedia to describe it for us:

Anarcho-tyranny

Samuel Francis argued that the problems of the managerial state extend to issues of crime and justice. In 1992, he introduced the word “anarcho-tyranny” into the paleocon vocabulary. He once defined it this way: “We refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).”

In one of his last essays, he explained the concept:

What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.

Francis argues that this situation extends across the U.S. and Europe. While the government functions normally, violent crime remains a constant, creating a climate of fear (anarchy). He says that “laws that are supposed to protect ordinary citizens against ordinary criminals” routinely go unenforced, even though the state is “perfectly capable” of doing so. While this problem rages on, government elites concentrate their interests on law-abiding citizens. In fact, Middle America winds up on the receiving end of both anarchy and tyranny.

The laws that are enforced are either those that extend or entrench the power of the state and its allies and internal elites … or else they are the laws that directly punish those recalcitrant and “pathological” elements in society who insist on behaving according to traditional norms—people who do not like to pay taxes, wear seat belts, or deliver their children to the mind-bending therapists who run the public schools; or the people who own and keep firearms, display or even wear the Confederate flag, put up Christmas trees, spank their children, and quote the Constitution or the Bible—not to mention dissident political figures who actually run for office and try to do something about mass immigration by Third World populations.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. Was the hard fist and truncheon of Soviet control more deadly to our race, or is this American form of White dispossession actually more effective?  Personally, as I’ve written time and again, I think what we Americans have seen thus far heralds a move to the far deadlier tactics of Soviet tyranny.

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.