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A Substantive Debate with Kurt Schlichter

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Kurt Schlicter’s upset his critics didn’t debate him on the merits of his war fap-fic. I get that. It’s frustrating when you think you’ve made a compelling argument and people come back at you nothing more than snark and sarcasm. I was guilty of snarking at Schlichter myself. But I have a reason for that: I don’t think his argument was substantive because I don’t think terrorist groups like ISIS can be bombed away.

Listen, I’m just a simple country hyper-chicken. But I’m married to an Air Force colonel, a deputy wing commander, a graduate of the Naval War College. I had him read Schlichter’s warotica and he said it was goofy and mentioned something about the fact that we don’t use some sort of bomb anymore. Fair enough. But it doesn’t matter to me that Schlichter got a detail or two wrong. I just think he’s wrong on the merits of his over-arching argument: that terrorists can be defeated through war.

To me saying you can defeat ISIS is like saying you can defeat Gamergate. I liken trying to defeat terrorist groups (yes, I do think Gators are terrorists of a sort) with brute force to trying to cut the head off a hydra with a never-ending supply of heads. Sure, you can cut off one head, but there will always be another head waiting to take its place. Terrorist groups are–by design–unwieldy and ubiquitous. Sure, we could bomb the shit out of some country in the Middle East, but I fail to see how that would have prevented the attacks on Paris.

I think that terrorism–in all its various forms, both foreign and domestic–will exist so long as we a culture that makes terrorists feel supported. A teeny-tiny percentage of several billion people is still a scary number of people. And, yes, terrorists of all stripes have the unspoken–and at times spoken–support of lots of people. Because we still live in a world where religious bigotry, xenophobia, racism, homophobia,  anxious, toxic masculinity and misogyny aren’t nearly as unpopular as they should be. Groups like ISIS and Al Qaeada are made up young men (many of whom are educated and middle class) who feel they have not gotten their due. They are jobless, they don’t have wives or girlfriends and they’re looking for someone to blame for that. Sound familiar?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I think some terrorists are created because people think–often rightly–that Americans have behaved badly on the national stage. But to me that that just bolsters my argument that foreign terrorist groups are just immortal hydras. Get rid of one hydra head via indiscriminate violence, and another head will surely take its place.

But the Planned Parenthood shooting got me thinking about how so many horrific acts have their roots in the same awful soil: entitled, toxic masculinity, racism, misogyny and religious bigotry. Tell me that the Charleston church shooting wasn’t motivated by the same things.

The only thing that will stop terrorism–yes even groups like ISIS–is to make the goals of terrorists so profoundly unpopular that they know there’s no chance to convert us nonbelievers. And if you don’t think that folks like Robert Dear and the men of ISIS don’t think they can charm or kill their way into converting folks, you’re nuts. THAT’S THEIR AIM. If there’s no chance for conversion, they’d have no aim.

It’s depressing, but that’s the the long and short of it: terrorism will continue to exist because it’s not nearly as unpopular as it should be. In the end, we live in a world that creates enough oxygen for it to persist and no amount of bombing will rob it of that air.

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