On November 5, 2017, Devin Patrick Kelley parked his SUV outside First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, got out, and opened fire. Kelley murdered 25 people outside and inside the church, wounding 20 others before he turned his gun on himself (after two good guys with guns opened fire on HIM) and saved Texas’s taxpayers the expenses of a trial and imprisonment or execution.

On July 7, US District Judge Xavier Rodriguez ruled, in a trial seeking damages to the victims and their families, that the US Air Force is “60% Responsible” for Kelley’s actions.

Why? Because after Kelley’s guilty plea in a 2012 court-martial, for assaulting his wife and stepson, the Air Force failed to enter his criminal history into an FBI database so that he could be legally forbidden to buy firearms in the future.

Let’s get one thing straight here: Devin Kelley, and no one else, was responsible for Devin Kelley’s actions. Period.

The US Air Force didn’t beat Kelley’s wife or fracture Kelley’s stepson’s skull. Kelley did. The Air Force tried him for it, imprisoned and demoted him for it, and kicked him out for it.

The US Air Force didn’t rape Kelley’s girlfriend in 2013. If that happened (no charges were brought), Kelley did that.

The US Air Force didn’t beat Kelley’s malnourished husky in 2014. Kelley did (and was tried and received a deferred sentence of probation).

The US Air Force didn’t develop a grudge against First Baptist Church and its congregants, which Kelley attended before apparently becoming a militant atheist. Kelley did.

All the US Air Force did was mess up some administrative paperwork (well, computer work, I guess) which, had it been properly filed, might have conceivably made it slightly more difficult for Kelley to obtain a firearm. Probably not. But maybe, just a little.

Kelley was clearly a violent and dangerous man, and a man who had no respect whatsoever for any law that forbade him to do whatever he decided he wanted to do.

It’s absurd to think that a man who made the decision to kill 25 people, and followed through on that decision, would have quailed from stealing the gun he did it with, or from buying that informally and without a background check (supposedly “illegally,” but the Second Amendment says otherwise).

The reason Rodriguez found the Air Force “60% responsible” is that he wanted to give the victims some of your money, and, well, the Air Force has a lot of your money. But in getting where he wanted to go, Rodriguez damaged the very concept of responsibility.

On the bright side, perhaps the judgment will leave the Air Force short money for another bomb to drop on a hospital, wedding, or funeral in the Middle East.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The passing of former United States Senator Mike Gravel (D-AK) on June 26 was largely overshadowed by that of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld three days later. The same need not be true of their political legacies.

Fifty years to the month before, while Rumsfeld was Counselor to President Richard Nixon, Gravel “didn’t really know what the legal consequences would be” of “resting on the speech and debate clause of the Constitution” to make public the top secret Pentagon Papers that turned popular opinion against the Vietnam War.

In 2008, Gravel was one of the few presidential candidates offering a break from Rumsfeld’s renewed militarism in the Middle East, as term limits prevented George W. Bush’s re-election but not the continuation of his wars. Those wars remained ongoing as Gravel ran again in 2020, by which time he would have entered the Oval Office as a nonagenarian.

Mike’s antiwar “Gravelanche” paralleled the scene in Jim Henson’s fantasy film Labyrinth where a motley group of underdogs use an ability to “call the rocks” to summon enough boulders to drive back an army.  If Gravel’s message had far less impact on the engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq than in Vietnam, it may not be simply because Americans have, like Dana Carvey’s Saturday Night Live impersonation of George Bush (senior), failed to generalize the example of Vietnam beyond Vietnam.

To some degree, Gravel was simply less heeded in the twenty-first century. At the height of his influence, he admitted to The New York Times that he could only “chip away, bit by bit, for what I want” if he built enough grassroots support that “they will have to listen to me in the Senate.” Even so, it’s hard to tell how many assumed that the battle against war was too far uphill for them to have an effect.  A renewed peace movement might find itself garnering wins as seemingly unattainable as what Howard Zinn called “the impossible victory” of ending the war in Vietnam.

Gravel’s 2008 announcement that “I’m joining the Libertarian Party because it is a party that combines a commitment to freedom and peace” pointed to an alliance which never quite materialized.  Yet successful efforts to expose government malfeasance and decriminalize personal choice pioneered by marginalized mavericks like Mike Gravel and Jesse Ventura could be expanded to more areas, and perhaps even all, of social life.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Gravel Can Still Make a Mountain” by Joel Schlosberg, Anchorage, Alaska Press, July 5, 2021
2. “(Mike) Gravel Can Still Make a Mountain” by Joel Schlosberg, AntiWar.com Blog, July 5, 2021
3. “Gravel Can Still Make a Mountain” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, July 6, 2021
4. “Gravel can still make a mountain” by Joel Schlosberg, Intrepid Report, July 7, 2021
5. “Gravel Can Still Make a Mountain” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, July 7, 2021
6. “Registering political views” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic],  Madill, Oklahoma Record, July 7, 2021
7. “Gravel can still make a mountain” by Joel Schlosberg, The Millbury, Ohio Press, July 9, 2021

Facebook, USA Today reports, “is asking some U.S. users whether they may have been exposed to extremist content, or if they are worried that someone they know might be becoming an extremist.”

The pop-ups are part of something called The Redirect Initiative, which attempts to “combat violent extremism and dangerous organizations by redirecting hate and violence-related search terms towards resources, education, and outreach groups that can help.”

The Redirect Initiative sounds like something that could be a valuable public service if Facebook was serious about fighting extremism. But that’s obviously not the case.

Only the least popular and least powerful extremists need worry that they’ll be targeted by Facebook. The company actively coddles and cuddles up to the most powerful, violent, and deadly extremist groups on the planet: Governments.

Facebook’s Community Standards on “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” divides extremist groups into three tiers. The top tier includes “entities that engage in serious offline harms — including organizing or advocating for violence against civilians, repeatedly dehumanizing or advocating for harm against people based on protected characteristics, or engaging in systematic criminal operations.”

And yet the US Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — two groups explicitly organized for violence against civilians — maintain active Facebook pages on which they publicly advocate for, and openly celebrate, their depredations with nary an objection from the company.

The US Internal Revenue Service — a protection racket no different in principle from any other “nice income you got there, be a shame if anything happened to it” criminal scheme — also uses Facebook without negative consequence.

Oh, Facebook will come down hard on a government or government-affiliated actor now and then, but only if that government or individual has managed to get on the wrong side of the political establishments Facebook itself supports and caters to.

Domestically, Donald Trump is the obvious example, and not a terribly sympathetic one.

Abroad,  regimes and state actors who find themselves at odds with the regimes controlling Facebook’s most profitable markets may face bans or “Facebook jail” for activities the company considers “legitimate” when the US or EU (for example) engages in them.

Facebook’s claimed opposition to extremism isn’t a principled stand against violence, hate, or criminal activity. It’s performance art, virtue signaling, and propaganda in service to the extremist groups Facebook endorses and willingly works with — with opposition to those extremist groups itself often falsely labeled “extremism,” or at least “misinformation.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY