Meditations on threats.

Being hated, just because.

Not what I was actually looking for, but I’m too tired to argue with the AI.

I have red hair, light green eyes, and fair skin. If my picture isn’t in the dictionary beside the entry for “Northern European”, the picture that is there is close enough.

When we lived in recently decolonized Africa, there was lingering hate towards Europeans, and I felt it.

In the Middle East, I was obviously Christian — if not Israeli¹— and there was more contempt than hate … but the hate was still present.

When I started my law enforcement career in 1993, threats were something that peace officers just had to deal with, and there were only a couple that I took seriously, but I’ve been threatened literally thousands of times in those 26 years.

I discovered the internet — particularly gun forums — in the late 90s/early 00s. Being proud of my career, I used the nom de cyber of LawDog. Which — in hindsight — might not have been my best idea. The gun world was still reeling from Ruby Ridge and Waco; and cops on internet gun forums were “jack-booted thugs”² until they passed some kind of ideological purity test. There were death threats, some veiled, some not so much, on the public boards, and in PMs and emails.

I still didn’t take them very seriously.

I started blogging — still as LawDog — and thought of myself as a centre-right, mostly conservative blogger, but I am a Second Amendment absolutist, a minimum government absolutist, and when police were wrong I called them out on it. While not huge³, in certain parts of the blogosphere I was known.

Known enough that every time there was a mass casuality incident involving a firearm the hate and threats showed up from one side; and every time I called out stupidity and incompetence on the part of law enforcement, the hate and threats showed up from the other side.

I used a SearchMalta email anonymizer, kept a pretty firm air-gap between my on-line persona and my real life, used the ban-hammer, blocks, and the email delete bin pretty religiously; and didn’t get worked up.

Larry Correia is an old and dear friend, and when the Culture Wars landed on his doorstep, I caught some of the splash from new trolls, and I noticed this time that the sheer viciousness of the rants and the threats was ramping up significantly, but they still didn’t rate more than a yawn as they were binned.

Then came the over-reaction to Covid. Bloody damnation. I had trended away from my blog at this time, was pretty active on social media, and I was a loud — and I like to think articulate — critic of pretty much every government and social policy enacted during this time. Holy gods did that earn me a whole new raft of hate, discontent, and threats.

All of that is the long way of explaining that I’m used to the vitriol of trolls. Death threats typed with cheeto-stained fingers from some basement somewhere don’t register real high on my Give-A-Damn meter.

Then I saw the reaction to the Charlie Kirk murder. I’m seeing glee from those who take of our most vulnerable — from teachers, counsellors, and school administrators. I see celebration from those who take care of us at our most vulnerable — from nurses, therapists, and doctors.

Not from wheezing beanbag-ridden trolls, furiously typing out their delusions of adequacy with one hand while the other crumb-snatcher is … occupied under the desk, but from everyday, trained professionals.

So, I’ve got to ask: If you hate conservatives so much that you will brazenly post videos of you dancing, singing, and celebrating the death of a young conservative father .. what are you doing — either consciously or unconsciously — to conservatives in your care?

Oh, I’m sure that the thought of actually killing a conservative in your care probably doesn’t cross your mind⁴ very often, but …

… Are you slow-rolling meds? “Accidentally losing” their files? Moving them to the back of the triage list? Passing their care off to the newbie, or the less-competent person on the floor?

I can handle random trolls from some stinky basement sweatily typing out threats to firebomb my house. Whatever. The poorly-typed rape fantasies about me and mine — work on your grammar, dude. Offers to drive-by my house? Poison my dogs? Kick in my front door? Sigh. Apparently the line forms on the left. Take a number.

This, though? This celebratory, child-like glee regarding the brutal murder of a conservative by professional people?

Now I have to wonder if the sub-optimal result of a medical procedure is due to Chance, or is it because someone on the medical team hates conservatives so much that they didn’t bother being as careful as they should have been.

Now when a schoolchild commits suicide, or something else, I have to wonder … did a teacher or counselor who hates conservatives so much that they publicly post their revelry and rejoicing at a murder of one … maybe unconsciously let their contempt slime over that child?

Open threats? No problem, been dealing with them my entire life.

Making my life, or the life of my loved ones, more difficult, or flat-out in peril, through your unconscious (or conscious) contempt, malicious compliance, or petty self-justified bushwa?

I don’t think these jackasses realize how very furious I am right now. And if I’m almost in a rage, I’m betting a whole bunch of other conservatives are just as wound-up as I am.

Professionals posting their merriment over the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk might want to rethink their public dumbassery before said public dumbassery becomes Plaintiff’s Exhibit A at the trials where the institutions they work for are being sued into the poor-house.

Just saying.

Ian

1. Dear old blond, green-eyed Dad was once accused of being an Israeli officer at a Customs checkpoint in a Middle-Eastern country, Da’ — being a linear-thinking problem-solver — immediately dropped trou, pointed at his wedding tackle and demanded, “Does that look Jewish to you?” Apparently it did not. Apropos of nothing, that was also the fastest trip we ever took through an Arab Customs point.

2. Courtesy of Wayne LaPierre’s four page NRA advert in the October 1993 issue of American Rifleman.

3. If you remember The Truth Laid Bear ecosystem, I started as an Adorable Rodent, and moved up to Large Mammal.

4. The absolute glee and unbridled joy you display lets me know you have, indeed, contemplated at least once doing harm to a random conservative.