The Amazon Nooses And The Folk Devil

I've been saying all along that we've been in a moral panic, and I think it's just about run its course. That doesn't mean we won't continue to see local outbreaks of one sort or another, but I think the country in general is George Floyded out. A current late-phase local outbreak stems from an old, pre-panic device, the noose, or as some accounts now put it, the "apparent noose". These have kept popping up over the past several decades, but they're all almost immediately discredited as hoaxes or misunderstandings.

This latest noose brouhaha is at an Amazon construction site in Windsor, CT. According to the New York Post,

Amazon halted construction at a facility in Windsor, Connecticut for the second time in as many weeks on Wednesday — after an apparent noose was found in the building for the eighth time in recent weeks.

Workers found a red rope “with a noose tied at the end” entangled in yellow electrical cables on the 5th floor of the planned fulfillment center, Windsor Police Chief Donald Melanson said at a press conference.

. . . Investigators believe the rope found Wednesday had been there for at least two weeks, since that area of the site hadn’t been worked on for that period of time.

“This one was clearly a noose,” Melanson told reporters, calling the act “unacceptable” and “a hate crime.”

Police evacuated the facility and called in the FBI, which is also investigating.

Melanson said “in all likelihood, it’s a worker” who is responsible.

The police evacuate a facility because someone finds a two-week-old knotted rope? They used to evacuate facilities for suspected anthrax powder, which always turned out to be hysteria. but at least if the powder was actually anthrax, it would justify evacuating a facility. When I was in grad school, students would call in bomb threats on the day of exams to get the classrooms evacuated, but that was only until the dean figured out that was why they were doing it and just stopped evacuating the buildings. Nobody got blown up.

Somebody needs to say get over it. The Windsor police chief is naturally terrified that if he doesn't evacuate the building and call in the FBI while denouncing the hate crime, the local race hustlers will get him fired.

But every moral panic has a folk devil. Chief Melanson identifies him: in all likelihood, it’s a worker. One of those neanderthal construction workers, of all people, and we know about those, don't we. Probably goes to Klan meetings after work. But by extension, this must clearly be a member of the plebs at large, some of whom are known to work construction.

People are getting tired of being gratuitously insulted. This is becoming manifest in numerous ways, and the smart money is beginning to bet that one way will be in the 2022 elections.

Doesn't the FBI have profilers? Those guys who look at patterns of criminal activity and decide the likely perp is between 25 and 35, male, unemployed, lives with his mother? What do you think an FBI profiler would actually come up with as a likely suspect who surreptitiously left a noose? Doesn't it almost always turn out to be the person who discovered the noose was the one who tied it in the first place? But even if it wasn't, how much money and time will the FBI spend chasing after some guy who tied a knot and left it tangled in some electrical cord?

What's the charge? What's the penalty?

At some point we'll inevitably get over it.