The Crisis Of Social Terrorism

It’s a pretty terrifying world we already live in and that’s no exaggeration.

A truly repulsive story out of New York City. All isn’t well in the Big Apple, to say nothing of the whole country.

Here’s NY Post with the round-up:

The hospital employee, who Marino says is a six-months-pregnant physician assistant, was placed on leave by NYC Health + Hospitals this week after her heated encounter with the men emerged online Saturday and has been viewed tens of millions of times.

Marino called the caught-on-tape interaction “incomplete” and lacking facts.

He said after the health care worker wrapped up her 12-hour shift, she got on an available bike, “which no individuals were on or touching,” and paid for it through the Citi Bike app on her phone.

As she backed it up from the docking station, a group of five people approached her and claimed the bike was theirs, he said.

“One or more individuals in that group physically pushed her bike (with her on it) back into the docking station, causing it to re-lock,” Marino said in the written statement.

One of the individuals then covered the bike’s QR code, stopping her from paying for it again so she could leave, Marino said.

“In blocking the QR code, this individual’s arm was touching my client’s pregnant stomach, a condition of which she had made them aware,” he added. “Throughout this time and for the remainder of the video, roughly five individuals were telling her to get off the bike and heckling her.”

“The fact anyone would treat another person like this is tragic, especially a visibly pregnant woman,” he said.

I missed this story when it initially broke and I’m glad I did. It’s a tough ask, but when the media reports a story, we should hear both sides, not society’s interpretation of what happened. As you’ll see, what happened to this woman, since identified as Sarah Comrie, is atrocious and utterly vile. Nobody deserves what happened to her.

Some people have suggested this was merely a dispute between two parties over who had claim to the bike which got blown out of proportion. I don’t buy that, at least the part about this being an honest misunderstanding. I believe this incident was entirely deliberate on the part of the five men. Thus far, only the woman has produced receipts proving she had legitimate claim to rent the bike:

The Bellevue Hospital employee — who was branded a “Karen” on social media afterward — rented the bike first, lawyer Justin Marino said in a statement to The Post Wednesday.

He also provided two Citi Bike receipts from May 12, which were timestamped just minutes apart.

The first receipt reviewed by The Post shows the bike being taken out before it was re-locked one minute later, which Marino said is the bike seen in the video.

The second receipt shows another bike being taken out a minute later from the same docking station and was the bike Marino said his client used to get home after being “heckled and pressured to find a new bike” by the group.

The five men, whose actions and identities have received far less interest and scrutiny in the media, have yet to produce any evidence showing they had legitimate claim to the bike. But it doesn’t matter at this point, because the damage has been done. The woman has been put on administrative leave by her employer - for what, I’m still not sure - and she’s now in hiding because of death threats. Meanwhile, those five men had nothing except to say to Comrie, “Stop fake crying,” “Your baby gonna come out retarded.” “You’re putting your stomach on my hand.”

What is this? What are people doing to each other? And why do we tolerate it, allowing people to be terrorized in public like this?

Let’s talk personal safety. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do when something like this happens. Resolving even heated disputes requires the involvement of rational actors. When someone takes a bike you’ve rented, pushes it back in to the docking station, locks it back in place, and tries to prevent you from paying for it again, they’re not trying to resolve anything - they’re trying to harm you in some fashion. If not physically, then most certainly psychologically. Some people get a thrill out of tormenting others and letting others know they have control of their lives. It’s classical predatory behavior. There’s no amount of reasoning you can do to resolve this because the whole point is to create an intractable situation.

Therefore, I have no meaningful advice to give here. I wish I did. Maybe stay calm, but I can’t blame Comrie, a pregnant woman who just got off a 12-hour hospital shift, for reacting as she did. When you’re tired and just want to get home, nobody’s going to be in the mood for nonsense. The idea it was incumbent upon her to de-escalate a situation she never instigated is blatant victim-blaming. The only reason someone would feel this way is if they thought these five harassers were the actual victims, of which there’s no evidence.

Demoralizing as it is to reckon with, but once you become someone’s target, that’s it, you’re a target. Walking away might’ve been the only alternative, but really - how many of you would do that? If you felt like you were doing nothing wrong, something you had rightful claim to was being taken from you, and no blatant threat was being presented (though I’d argue a threat was implied in this case), would your first instinct be to simply put your hands up and walk off with your tail tucked between your legs?

Very few of us are 100% coldly rational creatures like Mr. Spock from Star Trek. We’re emotional creatures and situations like the one Ms. Comrie faced trigger our fight-or-flight response, in turn triggering strong emotions. Frankly, I’d be troubled if this happened to you and your first instinct was to calmly give up and walk away, even if that would’ve been the objectively right thing to do. Imagine coming off a 12-hour shift at any job, being accosted in this fashion, and trying to be logical. You’re going to find it difficult, no matter how level-headed you think you are. Again, there are no good answers here.

Does it really need to be this complicated, though? State and society are supposed to be able to resolve incidents like these. It’s why we have civilization in place to begin with, because the alternative is barbarism and violence. Unfortunately, that’d require some higher authority, a higher principle to appeal to. Moreover, we’d all need to submit to that higher authority or agree on those higher principles. Someone who doesn’t subscribe to your moral code cannot be reasoned with. A third party, typically the state, needs to step in and resolve the situation on our behalf, but all we get from the state any longer is some empty notion of “equality.” Surely, equality before the law is a wonderful thing, but it should never get in the way of common sense, decency, and morality.

Call me illiberal for saying so, but I believe a lot of what you see today is the equality principle being taken to a literal extreme. Everyone’s so equal, everything so relative, we can never just call something “wrong.” Our laws and norms have become completely detached from any greater sense of ethics and morality because, after all, who are any of us to call the shots on what’s right or wrong? If you nor I can say so, nobody else can, not even the state.

Which leads me to the other reason this story is so repulsive: the utter indignity of it. I didn’t know we treated pregnant women like this. Most of you reading this blog are adults: was it considered acceptable to treat pregnant women, or women in general, like this growing up? The idea we treat a pregnant physician’s assistant coming off a 12-hour shift, let alone anyone, the way these five men did, then effectively perform human sacrifice in public by calling her a “racist Karen,” putting her life and livelihood in jeopardy, is unfathomable and totally uncivilized. Better yet, it’s evil. There’s no hyperbole here. There’s no justice here. Where are the protests in support of Comrie, like there are for criminals who contribute little else but disorder and mayhem? Or have we accepted this as the new normal?

Speaking of normal, I’m also surprised that, three years after the COVID-19 pandemic, its associated lockdown, and our worship of “frontline workers,” that we don’t love our healthcare workers anymore, either. Nobody’s entitled to preferential treatment by virtue of their occupation, but it’s quite ironic watching healthcare workers go from being regarded as wartime heroes back to being Jane Nobodies. Had anyone, including Black men, given a nurse a hard time like this during the pandemic, I don’t know this story would’ve generated the same level of outrage.

This is unsustainable. A society that has no sense, however arbitrary, of what’s right or wrong isn’t going to avoid conflict, but court ever-increasing levels of it. We’re seeing that unfold today. We hate the moral police, but in many ways, morality is really what resolves conflicts and prevents them from devolving into something worse. Guerrilla and insurgency warfare expert David Kilcullen emphasized in his work that predictability is strong component of stability. Even oppressive societies require some level of public buy-in and that buy-in is achieved by being consistent in the enforcement of the order. It’s when the rules get difficult to follow that trouble brews. I don’t want to live under some religious theocracy or anything like that, but having harsh order is better than none at all.

Of course, there’s no shortage of moral policemen when it comes to racism. A story that’d likely have been an afterthought at worst turned viral, yet another moral panic. As if there’s no reason whatsoever for White people to have a dispute with Black people beyond racism. I won’t get too deep into the race angle, as the character assassination Sarah Comrie endured is abhorrent, except to say this incident both is and isn’t about race. It isn’t about race because Comrie wasn’t trying to use her “White privilege” to steal from Black men, she was trying to claim what was rightfully hers to claim. It is about race, however, in that the only reason this became a major story is because of the racial disparity. The message being sent here is that Whites have no right to dispute the grievances of Blacks, no matter how irrational, unreasonable, or just plain wrong.

Nor does the story make any sense. Why would she, a pregnant woman, dare attempt to “steal” a bike from five men? And given that aforementioned racial disparity, Black men? This idea she went out of her way to give the five men a hard time makes sense only if you believe the conspiracy theory stating Whites are always looking for an excuse to trouble Blacks. Even if it were possible this was an honest dispute between the two parties, it’s become impossible to adjudicate that since the case has become unnecessarily racialized.

Finally, this case wouldn’t be what it’s turned into without the media’ complicity. Days after the incident first went viral, NBC News, among other outlets, hadn’t changed their approach to the story:

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1659491718721335297

Can the media do anything right? Or is getting things so horrendously wrong and destroying innocent peoples’ lives the point? We all know they want to be on the “right” side of the story, always, but they do understand this makes them partisan participants, not the free, independent, and objective press they dishonestly claim to everyone and themselves as being? Talk about being arsonists.

And how about Sarah Comrie’s employer, Bellevue Hospital? Imagine being so terrified of the left-wing outrage mob, they side against her and suspend her before she ever had a chance to tell her side of the story! Or maybe I’m being too hard on them - I do speak often of how powerful the “soft” totalitarian regime we all under truly is. This is a perfect example of it.

Comrie’s attorney, Justin Marino, has announced plans to file defamation suits against various media outlets. Not only do I hope she succeeds, I also hope she files a grievance against her employer, for so cowardly failing to give her a fair shake and indulging the outrage mob’s bloodlust. Employers need to pay a price for going along with the soft totalitarianism. Lastly, maybe Comrie can exact justice from those five men, as well.

The bigger issue, however, is how our country is increasingly under siege by social predators who engage in “mid-level” violence. These are acts somewhere between inevitable interpersonal conflict and outright criminal violence. They’re morally questionable, but legally in a gray zone, making them extremely difficult to navigate and resolve. The incident involving Sarah Comrie is an example: she is approached and stopped by people who claim grievance, she tries to remove herself from the situation, but is prevented from doing so. They have no evidence to qualify this grievance, but they pursue it anyway, film it, broadcast it, and allow the court of public opinion and the left-wing outrage mob settle the score on their behalf.

It’s a pretty terrifying world we already live in and that’s no exaggeration. As I said before, if someone decides to make you their target, that’s it - you’re their target and you don’t really have a say in the matter. Here’s an egregious example of mid-level violence, where a young man pranks an older man into think he’s pouring fuel onto his car to light it on fire:

https://twitter.com/RickTheTank/status/1659100705586544640

I observed that all three components of the threat triangle - means, motive, opportunity - are all present, meaning, in theory, a violence response would be justified. However, as the Twitter account explains, the incident would play out in public, the racial disparity invoked, and a firestorm, figurative and literal, would ensue as a consequence. The same way Sarah Comrie was branded a “racist Karen” and forced into hiding, the victim here would be branded an “old White racist,” and political pressure could force the hand of prosecutors to unjustly charge him.

There’s such an ugliness to it all and this social terrorism is reaching crisis levels. I call it “terrorism” because there’s nothing innocent about any of it. Pretending to set someone’s vehicle on fire or rob someone isn’t a joke. The whole idea is to make one’s victim believe it’s happening for real and to provoke a concurrent reaction from them. Worst of all, there’s a market for social terrorism. Millions get a kick out of seeing people terrorized. It’s a form of warfare, where you get to hurt someone without laying a finger on them, instead leveraging media, public sentiment, and even the state to make life miserable for them. Harming people is the point.

Some of you might think there’s a difference between what happened to Sarah Comrie and a prankster pretending to burn someone’s car. The point is that the end result is the same. The victim, in either case, gets victimized twice - first because they were unfortunate enough to be the target of someone’s ire or maliciousness, second because they refused to give in. For that, they get their name and reputation dragged through the mud, their life threatened, all while the instigator escapes any scrutiny. How’s this not terrorism?

I know I’m starting to engage in social commentary, but I don’t know how we fix this. The state refuses to, while society hasn’t only failed to, but in many cases are breeding the problem in the first place. The only solution seems to be violence, but as we’ve established time and again in these spaces, the state has all but achieved total monopoly on the legitimate use of force. At the same time, there’s always a breaking point. You cannot expect people to sit idly by forever and be willing victims. It might take a long time to reach that breaking point, but someone, somewhere along the way, will refuse to go along with it.

I’m not suggesting we’re at the risk of civil war or anything over social terrorism. I’m merely stating that nobody can expect tranquility to last forever. Even the meekest among us fight back at least once in their lives. I’ve said it before, but I’m not sure what worries me more: that a fierce backlash will come, or that it never will.

UPDATE: A woman claiming to be the sister of the young man seen in the video preventing Sarah Comrie from renting the Citi Bike has come forward, presenting a receipt showing he’d rented the bike and had it before Comrie did:

https://twitter.com/TizzyEnt/status/1661395687215439873

We’ve got issues. The receipt shows a ride that lasted between 6:33 pm and 7:19 pm - approximately 45 minutes - and there doesn’t seem to have been any activity on the bike afterwards until 7:24, which is when Sarah Comrie enters the picture and rents the bike. A minute later, her ride ends, which was probably when the man locked the bike into the dock to prevent her from using it.

So, all that’s been added to the story is that one of the five men had rented the bike prior to the incident seen on video. That’s it. The only way Comrie could’ve rented the bike is if it was available, which means it wasn’t being used by anyone, corroborated by the two receipts showing no activity on the bike between 7:19 and 7:24.

The only way the young man is the real victim in this story is if he was in the process of renting it and she pushed him aside. As I explained above, this is highly unlikely - why is a pregnant woman attempting to fight a man to use a bike when others were available? Stranger things have happened (ex. a pregnant woman committed robbery and ended up getting shot), but here, without any evidence, it just doesn’t pass the smell test.

The simplest explanation typically being the most likely, Comrie insisted on having that bike because that’s the one she rented and was now being forced off of it. Ask yourself: how many of you would simply acquiesce to the demands of strangers? On that note, why couldn’t the man have rented another bike? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, is it not?

Some commenters noted Citi Bikes can only be used for up to 30 or 45 minutes at a time, depending on your membership status, lest you incur additional charges, supposedly explaining why the the bike had become available for Comrie to rent. But this doesn’t change anything either, since once a bike has been docked, it’s no longer being used and nobody aside from the next person who rents it has a legitimate claim to it.

Assuming Comrie’s account is correct and nobody was on the bike at the time she rented it, the man cannot claim the bike just because he happened to be its last rider. The only way the man has any valid grievance here is if he was in the process of trying to rent the bike again and she prevented him from doing so, but again, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Ironically, the man’s sister only ended up proving he was the aggressor by trying to deny her access to something he had no legal right to at that moment.

I don’t think there’s any big mystery here. I think the simplest explanation really is the answer. It’s just so unfortunate the outrage mob has the ability to turn this case into something it’s not and pursue a relentless campaign of character assassination just because they feel like it.

Max Remington is a defense, military, and foreign policy writer. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentLoyalist.

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