The presumption of victimhood paired with the presumption of bigotry is a societal toxin. It wafts from the left side of the political spectrum where it has been a useful, if divisive, destructive and cynical weapon. I have written many times about how it even harms its intended beneficiaries, as in my experience having a black singer who literally could not sing the part he was auditioning for accuse me of racism for not casting him over three superior performers. It’s such a versatile lie.
Barack Obama was its master, using the threat of the presumption of racism to insulate his Presidency from legitimate criticism. Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton have worn the device shiny by using it to excuse their own richly deserved defeats. We are watching presumed bigotry (or prejudice) play out in the Cornell Rape Ethics Train Wreck right now, as the “believe all women” trope casts men and society in the presumed role of misogynists. The most disastrous—and most successful for Ethics Villains— presumption of bigotry was the George Floyd-Black Lives Matter hysteria, from which the nation is still trying to recover.
Maybe I should have found a way to set the record straight with my friend without embarrassing him, but I couldn’t think of a way in the time I had, for I am enmeshed in many battles.
This certainly put Laramie, WY in the public eye a year before I started attending the University of Wyoming. It also prompted the University to bulk up on diversity courses, pro-LGBT rallies, and the like. I had not previously been concerned about homosexuality one way or another, but the way they forced so much content on us (through our required cultural context courses), and the way they treated anyone who pushed back at the pro-LGBT agenda, did a lot to sour me towards the LGBT movement. (Though to be fair, when Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church came on campus to protest UW’s Shepard Symposium, that did a fair amount to raise the LGBT movement on my cognitive dissonance scale…)
Years later, Stephen Jimenez, a journalist who did a great deal of digging into the hidden sub-cultures in Laramie, published The Book of Matt, in which he argues that Matthew Shepard was involved in the drug highway that ran between Ft. Collins and Laramie, fell afoul with a drug dealer, and was taught a brutal lesson. Frankly, the sheer amount of drug activity Jimenez described going on in Laramie shocked me. I certainly had no idea, but then, I never put together that sour smell in one wing of my high school with kids secretly smoking pot, either.
Later, after moving to Rawlins, I talked with a member of the local Department of Corrections, and he told me flat out that probably 10% of the drivers I passed each evening in town were probably high on drugs at that moment. A lot of drugs pass through the I-80 corridor. (My wife had the privilege of sitting on a jury on some poor Hispanic mules carrying meth from California to somewhere back east, and who had the misfortune of getting arrested in Wyoming.) The reason why Laramie is an ever hotter bed of drug activity than Rawlins is because of US-287 and the direct connection to Ft. Collins. Thus 287 meets I-80 in Laramie, making it a good hub. (I’m guessing the fact that Laramie and Ft. Collins are both University towns plays a large role, as well.)
What happened to Shepard is tragic. He was a skinny kid, well-liked, and so many people in Laramie were devastated by his murder. Several people I met in college, themselves lesbian or gay, would still tear up over the incident years later. I understand that. But when it seems we keep discovering that these “hate crimes” were not racial or sexual-orientation motivated crimes, it actually does a great deal to turn what could have been a sympathetic audience hostile. There’s a reason Instapundit has the flag “The demand for hate crimes far exceeds the supply.”