POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

A post I wrote on the massacre in El Paso was removed from the blog because it did not have anything specific to do with higher education. And at a certain level, that decision was justifiable because the blog is about topics and issues related to higher education, and it is very easy to lose that focus if contributors are permitted to post on unrelated topics and issues. (I myself have clearly been guilty of occasionally making very self-indulgent posts.)

But, in this instance, I am republishing it with added thoughts about the effect of the recent shootings. To not post it on the blog is to suggest that higher education is affected only by mass shootings that occur on our campuses, and that is simply not true. I wrote the original post in response to the El Paso massacre—not knowing that just a few hours after I posted it, a similar massacre would occur in Dayton. I cannot provide specifics about the massacre in El Paso, but in the subsequent massacre in Dayton, one Wright State student was killed (the sister of the gunman, who was a fifth-year senior), at least one other was wounded, the son of a faculty member was killed, and a graduate student from elsewhere who was completing a summer internship in Dayton was also among those who were gunned down. But beyond those direct connections to my university and to higher education, our colleges and universities, whether urban or rural, are integral parts of the communities in which we are located and which we serve. We are impacted not just by tragedies caused by malevolence. In June, when our region was devastated by a tornado outbreak, the worst of the tornadoes missed our Lake Campus in Celina and tracked both north and south of our Dayton Campus. But clearly, the university was impacted and continues to be impacted in countless ways by that natural disaster.

Moreover, the legislation that affects the vulnerability of our campuses to mass shootings depends on state and federal lawmakers, and none of them are creating exceptions for colleges and universities: that is, the entrenched views that some lawmakers have been bringing to these issues have been making our campuses less safe, and our campuses will not become more safe without a change in those views or a change in the composition of the legislatures.

Here is what a member of our state legislature from Middletown, just south of Dayton, posted in response to the massacre:

Mind you, this is not some anonymous troll. This is a statement by a member of the state legislature who apparently did not have any misgivings about posting this very shortly after a massacre in which three dozen people were killed in less than a minute. But there is no acknowledgement that assault weapons, large ammo clips, etc., etc., etc. might have had a role in the massacre. Instead, what’s at the top of the list: transgendered people, gay couples who wish to be married, and “drag queen advocates.” The Cincinnati Enquirer deemed the Facebook post to be worthy of news coverage—fairly clearly for just those reasons—and the Enquirer is not known as a newspaper with progressive leanings.

On a practical level, our campuses are never going to be safer if all of these things are publicly asserted to be the causes of mass shootings and not contested. On a moral level, if our universities actually stand for even the most mainstream of American values, we should, at the very least, be committed to  enhancing awareness of what is complicating the governmental responses to the unprecedented kinds of violence that are directly and indirectly impacting our institutions.

On the plus side, within a day of Keller’s post, Jane Timken, the Chair of the Ohio Republican Party, released a public statement asking her to resign her seat. Moreover, Mike Turner, the U.S. Congressman whose district includes much of the Dayton metro area, became one of the first Republicans on the federal level to endorse a reinstatement of the ban on military-grade automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines. Some have noted that Mr. Turner seems to have changed his position largely because his daughter was in the “Oregon District” of Dayton on the night of the shooting and his anxiety over her safety was acute. I understand that we’d like our lawmakers to be able to do the right thing without necessarily having some personal impetus for doing so. But I think that the better stance is to applaud whoever demonstrates empathy for victims over ideological stances, without being overly concerned about their reasons for doing so. Placing a great deal of emphasis on motives seems to me to be both one of the causes and one of the effects of political polarization and legislative gridlock.

What follows is my original post.

After each mass shooting that has not been committed by someone with a Muslim-sounding name, gun-rights advocates admonish their opponents and journalists that it is not an appropriate time to politicize a fresh tragedy. This afternoon, in the midst of the coverage of the most recent massacre, at a Walmart in El Paso, one of the cable news anchors or commentators pointed out that since there have been more mass shootings than days thus far in 2019, such a stance effectively eliminates any possibility whatsoever of discussing the related issues. (I’m sorry that I cannot recall who made this observation because whoever made it deserves to be credited.)

This is the opening of a considerably longer item published by Fox News very shortly after the shooting:

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick explicitly warned the left-wing group Antifa against coming to the state following Saturday’s mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart.

The shooting came 29 days before a scheduled visit from Antifa, which planned to conduct a “Border Resistance” militancy training tour.

“Stay out of El Paso,” Patrick told Antifa during an appearance Fox News. He noted that while the group wasn’t usually welcome in Texas, they especially weren’t welcome after the shooting.

“Stay out of Texas, basically,” Patrick said. “We don’t need them coming in on Sept. 1. We didn’t need them coming in before this happened.”

Antifa is leading a “Border Resistance” militancy training tour that will converge on a 10-day siege in El Paso, TX. The promotional image shows border enforcement officers being killed and government property fired bombed. Organizers asking for “white comrades” to pay for others. [Notice the incongruous juxtaposition of the points in these last two sentences.]

A flyer for the event posted on Twitter by conservative journalist Andy Ngo showed people shooting arrows at a tower near what appeared to be a border fence. The group issued a “Call to Action” for 10 days in El Paso. Antifa is known for violent protests and attacks on police and journalists, including Ngo.

Patrick also expressed confidence that Texas would rally together and stay strong after the shooting. “We’re never going to give up to the shooters, never going to give up to the lawbreakers,” he said.

Patrick said that there were between 15 and 20 “casualties” in the shooting, but did not specify a number of fatalities.

I include the last, one-sentence paragraph because it indicates how soon after the massacre at the Walmart this counter-narrative focusing attention on Antifa was disseminated: law enforcement had not yet come up with any “official” estimate of the numbers killed and wounded.

I have no desire to defend, never mind to promote, Antifa. But the group last made any sort of national headlines when they conducted an ill-conceived after-dark protest at Tucker Carlson’s home and were chastised on Far Right media and social media as if they had done something absolutely heinous, rather than something fundamentally stupid. Likewise, one of the two posters cited by Ngo does depict what he describes—in an amateurish pencil drawing showing Antifa shooting arrows—and it is also just stupid because it allows those demonizing Antifa to extend a false equivalency between Antifa and White Nationalist groups and thereby sidestep the very immense differences in the body counts attributable to both groups. While Antifa seems to be going out of its way to justify the Far Right’s demonization of it as a cartoonish sort of Far Left bogeyman, White Nationalists are actually indiscriminately slaughtering Americans–by the dozens. In fact, I doubt that more than a handful of experts can actually provide anything close to an accurate count of the total number of Americans who have been murdered in these kinds of mass shootings over the last three years, never mind the last decade.

If you want to put the lack of any meaningful response to the mass shootings committed by “domestic terrorists” into perspective, imagine if Antifa members had committed these massacres. Or Islamic terrorists, instead of “domestic terrorists.” I am placing the phrase “domestic terrorists” in quotation marks because it seems to me to be a lame attempt to echo the Far Right’s insistence on the importance of using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorists” and comes off, ultimately, as euphemistic.

On July 25, The Hill published another Antifa-related item, the opening paragraphs of which are quoted here:

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) is asking the FBI to add a new subsection to its list of extremist ideologies that would include Antifa, according to a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray provided exclusively to Hill.TV.

“While the FBI declines to keep a public or official list of domestic terrorist organizations, it does outline extremist ideologies that often lead to domestic terrorism,” the letter states. 

The list right now doesn’t include a category “under which Antifa could reasonably be counted,” Banks wrote.

He then wrote it was his suggestion “that the FBI add a subsection that properly encompasses Antifa’s political goals as openly broadcasted by its leaders on their social media platforms.” 

Banks suggested the addition cover “Anti-1st Amendment Extremists,” something he said would cover Antifa.

“Antifa has redefined fascism to include anyone who disagrees with their opaque political agenda. What that agenda is exactly is imprecise by design—their central aim is to silence any and all moderate and conservative politics or ideologies,” he wrote. 

And two days ago, The Guardian published an article by Mark Harris that opens:

The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six Midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal.

 Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois.

 Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”, according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, an aerospace and defence company.

 The balloons are carrying hi-tech radars designed to simultaneously track many individual vehicles day or night, through any kind of weather. The tests, which have not previously been reported, received an FCC license to operate from mid-July until September, following similar flights licensed last year.

 Arthur Holland Michel, the co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York, said, “What this new technology proposes is to watch everything at once. Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘combat TiVo’ because when an event happens somewhere in the surveilled area, you can potentially rewind the tape to see exactly what occurred, and rewind even further to see who was involved and where they came from.”

Harris notes that the tests are provoking many concerns about privacy and other individual rights—concerns focused broadly on where all of this data is going to be stored and how it might be used and by whom.

So, taking these last two articles together, when Antifa and Islamic terrorists are the ostensible targets, there is, on one end of the political spectrum, very little concern about infringements on First Amendment and privacy rights. But, those same politicians have refused to engage in any meaningful discussion of even the most limited restrictions on gun rights and to acknowledge, never mind address, the very obvious threat posed by “domestic terrorists”—a threat that can be tracked on social media platforms that apparently ought not to be monitored, never mind censored or held accountable, in any way.

A threat that, nonetheless, can be measured in the blood left on the linoleum, concrete, and asphalt at the scenes of a now nearly uncountable number of massacres.

The complete article published by Fox News is available at: https://www.foxnews.com/media/texas-lt-gov-tells-antifa-to-stay-out-of-el-paso-after-walmart-shooting.

The complete article published by The Hill is available at: https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/455752-congressman-asks-fbi-to-add-antifa-to-list-of-extremist-ideologiesi.

The complete article written by Mark Harris for The guardian is available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/02/pentagon-balloons-surveillance-midwest?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark.