At Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene tells the story of what Black Lives Matters Sacramento did to a woman, Karra Crowley, who did nothing to deserve it. It’s a compelling story of what’s deeply wrong with the empowerment of activists incapable of handling their power, from their doubling down on the attack after being informed that their target was not the person who did it, to their calling upon their swarm of gnats to do harm, or as founder Tanya Faison called it, “make her famous.”
But Eugene has already written his post about the story, culminating in Faison settling the libel suit for a public video apology, so there’s no need for me to write it again. But what remains is the backstory to this suit, the ensuing fiasco, and putting a weapon in the hands of idiots. As it turned out, somebody was angry with Karra Crowley, and so they created a gmail account with her name, impersonated her and sent racist emails under her name to BLM Sacramento. This mechanism has become a shockingly common way to attack someone. Not only has it gone uncriticized, but has been normalized with approval by those who have found a way to cause their “enemies” public harm.
A few years back, I was told by a client about a “review” of my legal services on google.
It wasn’t of much concern to me as my clientele does not come from google, and I assumed it was someone who took offense at something I’d written here or on twitter. But the fact that someone who disapproved of something I had said would both go to this amount of effort to try to make me pay and believe that fabricating a lie was an appropriate means of payback was concerning. After all, these are the people who wrap themselves up in the righteous comfort of being the woke good guys, and yet lying for the cause gave rise to no cognitive dissonance.
Another time, I started getting some very aggressive phone calls at the office from mortgage lenders. Apparently, someone used my name and telephone number to request “urgent” information from numerous lenders. I would explain that it wasn’t me, and yet the calls kept coming, and the weirdest part about it was that the boiler room callers ignored my explanation and argued even if it wasn’t me, didn’t I still want a loan? I guess tenacity is part of the job, though “no means no” should have given them a clue that their time was better spent elsewhere.
That the internet provides a means to easily impersonate someone else is neither surprising nor new. But the fact that it can be done doesn’t explain why it’s become an acceptable thing to do by the unduly passionate. Guns can be used to commit armed robbery, but most gun owners don’t choose to do so. Why do the unduly passionate feel it’s appropriate to use fabrication on the internet as their weapon of choice to exact revenge?
The answer is likely the existentialism of their every feeling, that they must destroy their enemies no matter what. That to not do harm to their enemies is to be complicit. But I suspect there is another component to the unduly passionate seizing upon lies and fabrication to punish those they believe to be transgressors. It’s fun. Here they are, weak and powerless on their own, with a weapon that can make them matter far beyond their capacity. On the one hand, it makes puny people feel powerful. On the other hand, how much fun is it to believe you’re causing misery, or at least aggravation, to people you hate?
What this belies is their belief that they are good people, kind people, courteous people. They may do stupid, malevolent things, but they do so in furtherance of righteousness, which makes them righteous. Such is the way the sick and twisted minds of the insignificant work, and they feel no qualms about what it did to Karra Crowley, me or any other target of their petty vengeance.
Faison’s apology is a grossly inadequate resolution to Crowley’s suit, but if it was sufficient for Crowley, then it brings the case to an end. But it won’t end the belief that lying to punish the enemies of righteousness remains not only a perfectly acceptable thing to do, but a mission that must be done if the unduly passionate are to inherit the earth.
Update: Apparently, BLM Sacramento has now disavowed the apology video.
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I got some news for the climbers of Mount Saint Righteous…
I get endless phone calls from people trying to give me loans for my business, no matter how often I tell them I don’t own a business. *shrug*
You are not irrelevant. I appreciate you.
Is the disavowal of the apology from BLM Sacramento or someone claiming to be them?
Is that your two cents?
Amazing update, that the apology itself becomes the new weapon she/they try to wield against her. Not only does it undo the attempt at resolution, it’s now been converted into a more intractable grievance. Some soldiers just like war, regardless of the reason for it.
I am wondering, does the repudiation open them back up for having the lawsuit re-instated? If the grounds of the settlement were that they had to publicly apologize, and now they are saying they don’t and attacking her again where does that leave the settlement?
Curious, but not enough to make a big deal out of it.
Plaintiff is already seeking to reopen the case.
Every cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining of this granting of the “victim” superpower to the stupid and the narcissistic lies in the amusing things that they do under its influence.
A few years ago, I reported a swedish spammer to his german provider. The provider closed the spammers account, the spammer retaliated: In my employers name, from another account he sent hundreds of spams each to thousands of random swedish accounts.
A lot of his spam victims complained at my employer. They wrote bitter, often really rude and very offensive complaints.
I answered all of them. Not in a polite, but in a friendly tone. I tried to prove to them, that not my employer, but a swedish spammer had done the harm and I showed them how to reveal the mail headers and read the real senders data in the headers.
I received a lot of apologies.
So no real harm was done, I even learned, that some of that complainants used my advise and some own intelligence to unveil the spammers real address data and give that data to the swedish police (the spammer shouldn’t have used a local provider for his revenge spam wave).
Here we have a somewhat similar case. An asshole faked an email account and sent faked mail with a faked identity.
Is he responsible for the resulting damage? Absolutely.
Had there been any damage, hadn’t BLM Sacramento published that mails? Absolutely not.
You name that asshole an ‘unduly passionate’. You name his deed an ‘acceptable thing to do by the unduly passionate’. You write that the unduly passionate ‘must destroy’, they ‘punish’, they ’cause misery’ etc.
I think you are wrong. You have no idea, who that asshole was, who tried to destroy the Crowleys life.
He might be an ‘unduly passionate’ but you simply don’t know it. He might be an MAGA. He might be an INCEL with tenosynovitis in his right hand. He might be a neighbor of the Crowleys or simply an idiot with a propensity to inadmissible pranks.
Nevertheless, you are right: It were the unduly passionate, who did the harm to the Crowleys. But not the author of that mails. The only unduly passionate in this fiasco we clearly can point our finger to were BLM Sacramento.
Ummm, not sure if you were posting attention, but this post (and a quick perusal of a few other posts on this blawg) makes it quite clear that the “unduly passionate” of whom he speaks are BLM and their followers.
Scott, did you miss the “trash” button on this one and hit approve by accident?
Neither did I blame BLM nor their followers of being ‘unduly passionate’. I blamed BLM Sacramento – the guys who, with the whole weight of their organizations name, tried and still tries to destroy the business an lives of some innocent victims of an arbitrary unknown asshole.