Is there a meme that's the opposite of that Onion “Worst person you know makes a valid point” headline? When someone you respect makes repulsive assertions.
Patrick McKenzie is sharp, and I like his writing (“Whether one describes them as tools or weapons depends mostly on whether one touches them with the hand or the face”). I also like his discussions of financial institutions enforcing U.S. laws. It's a complicated issue, especially when groups like Collective Shout can use those enforcement mechanisms to successfully attack speech they disagree with.
But sometimes it’s challenging for me to understand where the fuck McKenzie is coming from.
In his 17,000-word post about the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), I understood two points:
- It seems likely that the SPLC has broken existing laws as they were written, and
- Some financial industry executives had to attend unpleasant meetings from 2017 to 2021.
Much of the financial services industry relies on an SPLC list to identify people linked to terrorists, but that list is managed without any public oversight. Now the SPLC is linked to people who terrorized the financial services industry, and they could be punished accordingly.
It's difficult to tell who has the moral high ground. McKenzie is not overtly supporting Trump, but he extensively criticizes the SPLC's failed effort to restrain him.
(Should we have a problem with that effort? The SPLC was formed to fight hate groups. Trump's white nationalist administration rounds up undesirables and puts them in camps. The fight seems ideologically consistent to me!)
After struggling through the entire post, I finally identified a third point: that the SPLC list is problematic, and the financial services industry needs something better.
I can't argue with that, but I’m annoyed that the whole thing reads like a victory lap from someone who believes that the ends can never be used to justify the means. It tells the story of the United States successfully blocking the SPLC from accessing funds after that group's extrajudicial efforts failed to block a convicted felon from doing the same thing.
I can’t object to the principle, but I hate both when and how the point is being made.
