This post is about anarcho-tyranny and two of the managerial state’s latest helpless victims, Dharun Ravi and George Zimmerman. Dharun Ravi is currently in jail for being or acting or thinking (legal scholars are still figuring out just how this all is supposed to work) "homophobic." George Zimmerman is currently on bail facing a murder trial because he may or may not be a racist.
I have some problems with this. The first is the abandonment of what is called the "rule of law," which includes the principle that criminal liability arises only when objective proscriptions are objectively violated. I’ll talk about this in connection with the fifteen-count indictment that Dharun Ravi faced, and the likelihood that Zimmerman will get a fair trial where irrelevant evidence about his attitude toward race is kept away from the jury. This wholesale abandonment of objective criminal liability is related through the anarcho-tyranny principle to another fact: It is normal to be homophobic, it’s normal to be racist, and that’s what these two are in prison for.
[Background material: The New Yorker had an in-depth piece about Dharun Ravi a few months ago. You might need a subscription or a fee to read it, but it actually says what happened instead of just loosely summarizing the facts and then braying about homophobia. I've just re-read it and it's actually a really interesting piece for a number of reasons (for instance the online dimension to these interactions) and a credit to the author, Ian Parker. For the Zimmerman case I go to Steve Sailer. Obviously he is a racist and therefore not credible and I should choose another source, but I don't get paid enough to worry about that and anyway Sailer is nothing but reserved and judicious in his coverage and saves his scorn for the press and government officials.]
So first I guess I have to establish that these two really are on trial for the crimes of having a normal attitude about homosexuality and having a normal attitude about race, respectively. The first clue in the Ravi case is the fifteen-count indictment against him. Break it down thus: four counts of invasion of privacy, four of bias intimidation, and seven of tampering with physical evidence or hindering apprehension or prosecution. Consistent with the anarco-tyranny principle, we now have so many statutes on the books that prosecutors can indict you for being someone the state disapproves of. One aspect of a fifteen-count indictment is that it looks to a jury more like a menu from which they’d feel rude not ordering, than a serious accusation of something that normal, decent people actually regard as a crime for which someone should be locked in a cage.
So. Crimes are classified and sentenced by "degree" in New Jersey law. The highest crime with which Ravi was charged is second degree "Bias Intimidation," which carries a sentence of five to ten years imprisonment. The bias intimidation statutes are not an original source of criminal liability: they attach to primary offenses, in this case the invasion of privacy charges. What this means is that you can literally be given a jail sentence twice as long as it would have been because of the "why" of your actions. (I just read the statute and it specifically makes the bias crime charge one degree more severe than the underlying offense.) "Right-thinking" people scoff when you call this thoughtcrime, making me wonder just what was the point of making everyone read Orwell’s books in high school. In fact, New Jersey’s bias statute really covers all its bases. The state has to prove that you had the purpose of indimidating a member of a protected class OR that you should have known it would so intimidate the victim OR that the victim reasonably felt intimidated. Any of these will suffice. No statutory definition is given of ‘intimidation.’ Probably something like "feels yucky."
Of course in order for the bias charge to stick you need at least one underlying offense to hang it on. That’s the invasion of privacy offense. And let’s just suppose that it’s a pretty reasonable statute. It makes it a crime of the fourth degree to spy on people having sex, and a crime of the third degree to record them. Let’s suppose for the sake of this discussion that this statute is a just way of protecting people from voyeurs, blackmailers, and so on. The third-degree flavor can get you up to five years in prison; so can’t we just call this whole Ravi case a close approximation of that and not get worked up about the bias angle? I don’t think so. Nobody really thinks that prosecutors would have pursued this case if instead of being gay, Clementi were, for example, an awkward virgin who killed himself after his roommate recorded him masturbating—even though under the law that would be a third-degree offense punishible by three to five years in prison. In fact I guarantee that that offense happens a thousand times every weekend in colleges across the country. "Invasion of privacy" in the context of a university dorm is a silly thing that the state authorities usually leave alone for the campus authorities to deal with (most universities in this country require first-year students to reside in dormitories. Reap what you sow). This is classic selective enforcement consistent with the theory of anarcho-tyranny, and at the end of the day, Ravi is going to jail for being a homophobe.
But what’s wrong with that? Isn’t homophobia evil? Well, if it is almost everybody, or at least straight males, is guilty of it. Homosexuality, like all paraphilias, causes anxiety in normal males. That’s life, that’s nature, and in America, that’s a crime. Ravi was jailed because his act revealed a kind of anxious fascination (disgust and fascination are related, and why else would he volunteer to watch Clementi and his date fool around that first time?) with homosexuality. If that’s a crime, they’d better make room in the prisons for most of the nation.
George Zimmerman stands accused of second-degree murder. His justification is self-defense. The only thing that is, or ought to be, relevant to his fate is what happened between him and Travon Martin. Police questioned Zimmerman for hours, in consultation with local prosecutors, and then released him. So what’s the story here? The prosecutor and all the cops are so racist and so thrilled over this dead black teenager that they interrogate Zimmerman for hours and then let him go? (Why not just skip the questioning?) Cops love making arrests, and prosecutors love murder trials. These are the things you sign up for.
So the national race machine picked up the case and now we have a federal investigation in the works. I know I only got through five semesters of law school but I would love to hear someone explain how a neighborhood shooting has invoked federal jurisdiction. Oh wait: that doesn’t matter: the feds do what they like. In Zimmerman’s case we don’t as far as I know see this laundry-list indictment, and in theory, a trial is supposed to distill the evidence (the relevant evidence) and get to the facts, with a presumption of innocence and a high burden of proof. But ask yourself, if you’re George Zimmerman and you really did act in self-defense: how are you sleeping these days?
Summary: local police and prosecutors had a homicide on their hands, and an assertion of self-defense. They explained that they didn’t arrest Zimmerman because they didn’t even have probable cause to arrest Zimmerman; the lead investigator apparently wanted to charge him but the prosecutors said there wasn’t enough evidence on which to base a conviction. That is exactly what prosecutors are supposed to do—not just indict everyone in sight, but only those they think are actually provably guilty.
Is there any doubt that the case would have ended then and there if not for the race of the dead guy? Now that there will be a trial, the question is whether completely irrelevant evidence about Zimmerman’s attitudes toward race will be kept away from the jury. Outside the courtroom, a lynch mob of national proportions froths for his blood.
Zimmerman carried a gun and attempted to protect his parents’ neighborhood from real actual crime. This used to be expected of every able-bodied man. Now it’s a crime.
Samuel Francis defined anarcho-tyranny thus: "We refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny)." I have a hard time putting it better than Jerry Pournelle did:
We do not live by rule of law, because no one can possibly go a day without breaking one or another of the goofy laws that have been imposed on us over the years. No one even knows all the laws that apply to almost anything we do now. We live in a time of selective enforcement of law.
What these cases, Ravi’s and Zimmerman’s, add is the punishment of utterly normal feelings and beliefs. (Even yuppie cartoon musical Avenue Q features a song called "Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist," as though that’s a revelation.) Even worse than the oppression of some innocent group, say, smokers, is the oppression of everyone who is a normal human being. The managerial state casts its evil eye on normal people with normal attitudes toward race and sex and whatever else, and we all feel the shame. We are made to display our tolerance papers on demand, and the effect is, I believe, end up being internalized. People begin to hate themselves under conditions of oppression—which is the whole idea. I sense that some people react to these things by going in the other direction; by clinging to pointless bigotries, by for example emphasizing and cultivating the racism or the homophobia that they and most normal people harbor, because psychically it seems a better option than giving in to the shame we’re told to feel over it. There’s nothing sillier than a man bragging about how much he hates people that really aren’t much of a threat to him, bragging about how much he hates fags or hates minorities that he doesn’t even come into much contact with, and I suspect we’d see less of that among middle-class Americans if we didn’t have a class of cognitive overlords who basically hate us.
