Serial killer chic and the lies of the administrative state (UPDATED)

It is one of the perverse ironies of our age that the popular interest in serial killers was driven, in part, by the FBI. The Bureau, in a real sense, served as a press agent for these perverse monsters.

The serial killer “menace” was hyped by the FBI at a time when its mission was shrinking and its reputation was in tatters. At just that moment, the FBI discovered a new threat to America and its children.

As the FBI told it, dozens, maybe over a hundred, relentless killers roamed our highways and stalked our neighborhoods. They crossed state lines which made it almost impossible for local police to stop them. They were smart amd could evade conventional police work.

Fortunately, America had an organization that was ready, willing, and able to take on this scourge. The Federal Bureau of Investigation could operate nationally, their labs were cutting edge, their computers would make linkage blindness a thing of the past.

Best of all, they even had an elite cadre – the Behavioral Science Unit – that had made a special study of this type of criminal. The Bureau, it seemed, was the only law enforcement agency in the country with serial killer experts.

How fortuitous.

As Phillip Jenkins noted in Using Murder “the FBI was in effect making a power grab, claiming jurisdiction over crimes which were beyond its legal scope, and this could only be achieved by presenting the offenders as itinerant, and therefore violating state boundaries.” In doing so they were doing what they had always done. In the 1930s it was “automobile bandits” and kidnappers. Then Nazi spies, then Russian spies.

Times changed but the song remained the same. The FBI was always ready to hype any menace and jump on any bandwagon if that led to bigger budgets and more power for the Bureau.

Quite literally the FBI wrote the template for the growth of the administrative state. Hoover and the DOJ saw the war on John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd as a means of promoting the New Deal and the benefits of federal power.

The War on Crime would become a centerpiece of Roosevelt's push to centralize many facets of American government. It would be a focal point of his State of the Union Address in January. Thus a little known bureau of the Justice Department became a cutting edge of Roosevelt's New Deal policies. If Hoover and his neophyte agents could defeat "name brand" gangsters, it would be immediate and tangible evidence of the new Deal's worth.

The image of the serial killer that the Feds crafted in the 1980s was adopted by fiction writers and journalists alike. This is not surprising; public relations and image management have always been a core competence of the FBI. It may be the thing it does best.

"A typical reporter on deadline calls a couple of people and slaps something into the paper the next day."
--Scott Shane (New York Times reporter)

Journalists writing against deadline needed experts and statistics to write their stories. The FBI had a near monopoly on both. In the 1980s and 1990s there were almost no outside experts who could challenge the official orthodoxy.

For novelists and screenwriters like Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs), the Bureau offered access, a chance to add verisimilitude to stories, the opportunity to suggest that a work of the imagination was laden with inside dope and closely-held secrets. Most importantly, the “mindhunters” of the BSU had already crafted their histories in a fiction-friendly form.

Philip Jenkins:

The experts who gained the widest acceptance did so not because of their academic credentials, but because of their personal narratives of traveling to the heart of darkness that is the mind of the 'monster among us'. This is the language of shamanism rather than psychology.

This created an odd, even perverse dynamic. The BSU could make itself look good by exaggerating the skill, cunning, and intelligence of the criminal.

It takes a special kind of hero to catch catch genius criminals like Hannibal Lector....

Only a few brave souls have dared to point out several obvious but often ignored facts.

Like the fact that the FBI has an abysmal record catching actual serial killers. Or even identifying that a serial killer is at work. Or that most serial killers do not roam across state lines but instead operate close to home.

The killers, when finally caught, never live up to the FBI-created image. BTK was evil but no genius and Samuel Little was a small time criminal.

The press is rarely interested for more than a day when a criminal profile turns out to be radically wrong. (Remember the wild goose chase for a white man in a white van during the DC sniper spree?)

A reporter on the FBI beat runs great risks delving into these sorts of questions. Life is easier if the FBI takes your calls.

In 1992 Robert Ressler, one of the first of the FBI's “Mindhunters” warned America that the serial killer menace would turn our streets into a real life “Clockwork Orange”. When, instead, murder rates fell for over two decades, he was never asked to explain his failed prediction. It wasn't as if the press did not have the opportunity-- he gave interviews as he toured to promote his string of books on his heroic fight against human monsters.

FBI profilers are still treated as uniquely skilled experts even though their record in catching actual serial killers is weak. Luck still plays a larger role than FBI expertise. DNA has been the game changer not the pseudoscience of the BSU.

Thus, the press becomes an enabler of the bureaucracy. It eagerly hypes the panics that lead to large budget and more laws. It is much less interested in assessing the performance of the agencies on an on-going basis. The watchdog can be turned into a lap dog with a little access and a good narrative.

Hoover blazed a trail, not just for the FBI but for all the ambitious federal bureaucrats who came after him.

UPDATE (12/5/22): There is a new biography of Hoover out. Eli Lake interviewed the autho for his podcast.

The author highlights that Hoover's FBI was the avatar for the ideal of progressivism: power in the hands of dispassionate experts who were beyond the control of politicians.

Hoover believed in the administrative state—in the power of independent bureaucrats.

The New Criterion has a lengthy and insightful review of the book:

Federal foes

The trouble with True Crime: Assassins and serial killers

While history ignores the assassin, justice at least has it that no assassin can become more famous than his victim. By way of proof, who can recall, off-hand, the identities of those who killed Thomas à Becket, or Mahatma Gandhi?

Brian McConnell, The History of Assassination

It is good that this is so. We should remember and celebrate builders , not destroyers. That seems to be a very basic requirement for a healthy society.

David Gelernter:

What matters is our communal response to the crime. Evil is easy, good is hard, temptation is a given; therefore, a healthy society talks to itself.

Such ritual denunciations strengthen our good inclinations and help us suppress our bad ones. We need to hear them, and hear good acts praised, too. We need to hear the crowd (hear ourselves) praising good and denouncing evil.

So what should we make of popular true crime? Here, the victims are almost forgotten and nearly nameless. The killer is the star, often gifted with a headline-grabbing nom de guerre which adds a touch of unearned glamour to their infamy.

Simone Weil:

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

Popular true crime follows popular fiction. Mindhunter is Silence of the Lambs with a patina of history and a large dose of truthiness.

We draw so many of our ideas about the world from what we see in the mass media and mass culture. One of the most disturbing aspects of this is the manner in which serial killers are often glorified and glamorized--through a process in which they are depicted as Super Males, even Supermen....Dr. Hannibal Lecter bears no resemblance to the defective, limited, unfeeling, and ungifted persons who are the overwhelming majority of multiple killers.

Elliott Leyton, Hunting Humans

Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy are dead and yet they are the stars of movies and streaming documentaries. They are celebrities in the truest sense of the word.

Aaron Haspel:

In an age of almost unimaginable abundance, celebrity is the last scarce good. Is it any wonder that people pursue it, and proximity to it, so assiduously?

We know that for some killers posthumous celebrity is something they think about (The media's vile calculus: If it bleeds, it leads and leads to more blood .) More than one serial killer was willing to risk capture in order to grab press attention and notoriety.

Is this good for society? Or does it suppress the social immune system Gelernter writes about?

A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham's law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended.

Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It

This is way, way worse than Watergate

Media Silent As Christopher Steele ‘Hero’ ‘Spymaster’ Narrative Crumbles

It became a well-worn talking point that Steele was considered credible because of his excellent work for the FBI on FIFA corruption. In fact, that’s what the FBI told the secret spy court that granted warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. They said Steele’s prior reporting had been “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.”

It wasn’t true. Steele’s prior handling agent at the bureau told Inspector General Horowitz that he would have never approved such a description of Steele’s work, since most of his prior work had not been corroborated and none of it had ever been used in criminal proceedings.

Journalist who fell for the Steele/Fusion GPS con should have taken a lesson from Sir John Keegan:

As defence correspondent, then defence editor of The Daily Telegraph, i decided that entanglement with intelligence organisations was unwise, having concluded, by that stage of my life, through reading, conversation and a little personal observation, that anyone who mingled in the intelligence world, in the belief that he could make use of contacts thus made, would more probably be made use of, to his disadvantage. I continue to believe that to be the case.

 Intelligence in War

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Mueller and Comey failed egregiously

Sir Vernon Kell, the first head of Britain Security Service (MI5) believed that counter-espionage officers needed the following characteristics:

Freedom from strong personal or political prejudices or interest; an accurate and sympathetic judgment of human character, motives and psychology, and of the relative significance, importance and urgency of current events and duties in their bearing on major British interests.

In no way shape or form does this describe the men and women who launched Crossfire Hurricane, the Midyear Review, and persecution of Maria Butina.

Instead we see an intense partisan commitment and a completely unbalanced rage at Trump.

A mostly forgotten infamous crime

In the late summer of 1914 Europe’s march toward war dominated the front pages of American newspapers. Then, for a few weeks, they competed for reader attention with news of a shocking crime in rural Wisconsin. The butler at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin studio killed seven people using fire and a hatchet. It was the worst case of mass murder in Wisconsin history.

Wright was already winning fame as an innovative architect. He became infamous when he deserted his wife and family to establish Taliesin with his married mistress Mamah Borthwick. The murder victims included Borthwick and her two children aged 11 and 9.

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The crime was cold-blooded and premeditated. Julian Carlton, the butler, had hidden clothes in the brush near Taliesin indicating that he planned to escape after the crime. When that proved impossible, he drank hydrochloric acid in an attempt to commit suicide. (He had purchased tha acid one week before the attack, another indication of preplanning.)

Carleton died several weeks after his arrest so there was no trial. He never offered an explanation for his crimes. The two workmen who survived his rampage could offer little information: nothing seemed amiss as he served them lunch just before he locked them in the dining room and set it ablaze with gasoline. The killer’s wife claimed that he had become increasingly paranoid at rural Taliesin and was eager to move back to Chicago.

William Drennan lays out the facts and eschews excess speculation in his account of the crime. The Carletons were actually due to leave their jobs before the end of August. Instead, Julian slaughtered seven people and wounded two others. Three of the victims were children. Discerning “reasons” for such actions risks justifying evil.

In the course of his research, Drennan discovered that most accounts of the murders were riddled with errors. He offers a bit of useful advice for anyone writing history:

Some things we think we have right we do not: errors in fact, once reduced to print or circulated in the oral tradition, become picked up by subsequent inquirerers and repeated endlessly, accreting layers of undue credibility with each retelling.

The author also makes the interesting point that the murders changed Wright’s architecture. Where Taliesin was open with windows that captured views of the rural landscape, his next designs were more compact and almost fortress-like. Drennan also deserves credit for never forgetting that Frank Lloyd Wright was not the only one who suffered a grievous loss on 15 August 1914. William Weston was a foreman at Taliesin. Not only was he badly wounded in the attack, Carleton also murdered his 13 year old son Ernest who was working with his father that day. Then there is the tragic figure of Edwin Cheney. He had sent his only two children to Wisconsin to visit their mother only a little time before. Now they were dead. In a cruel twist of fate he had to share the train ride from Chicago with Wright.

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All the good stuff Helter Skelter had to leave out

Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS chronicles a twenty year odyssey to make sense of the Manson Familiy murders. The author’s journey began with a simple assignment to write a 5,000 word retrospective on how the killings changed Hollywood. That story would fall by the wayside as his research led him on a long and winding road: unanswered questions, Hollywood secrets, the power of The Narrative, and proprietorial misconduct.

O’Neill had surprisingly good instincts for a guy who profiled celebrities and covered the entertainment industry. When he read Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter he quickly spotted the gaps in logic and weak factual underpinnings of the prosecutor’s case. As he interviewed friends of the victims and pored over documents he ended up with more questions than answers.

So he kept digging. But what really drove him onward were his interviews with Bugliosi himself. The ex-prosecutor was thin-skinned, arrogant, defensive, and eventually threatening.

Like a good journalist in a movie O’Neill had to find out what Bugliosi was hiding.

Because life is seldom like a movie, O’Neill never finds his ANSWER -- the single simple explanation for why an ex-con who had gathered in a bunch of young runaways and throwaways decided to launch a murder spree. (Almost no one, not O’Neill, not the cops, not even Bugliosi, really believed the Beatle/race war/apocalypse scenario presented at the trial.)

In the course of his research, he went down many, many rabbit holes. These often led him to undisclosed and under-reported facts. But none of them led him to a neat, simple explanation.

Perhaps he came close to an answer early on in his investigation:

I realized just how flimsy the Helter Skelter motive was. Its unforgettable grandiosity may have hidden a more prosaic truth: that a few rich guys had gotten in over their heads with an unstable ex-con.

This calls to mind Steve Sailer’s recent observation about Manson and Hollywood:

Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was much appreciated within the entertainment industry for portraying Manson as an LSD-crazed apocalyptic avenger. Bugliosi’s masterful job of making Manson seem like the ultimate outsider sidetracked the question of why a lowlife jailbird like Manson had become something of an insider at the best parties in the Hollywood Hills.

Why exactly did Manson know so many important people in showbiz? The answer was the same as for why Jeffrey Epstein knew so many important people in politics: He had access to jailbait girls.

Without all the Helter Skelter stuff, Manson would seem less like the Antichrist and more like an ambitious pimp, an ex-con who was adept at chatting up runaway girls fresh off the Greyhound bus.

In the end, O’Neill sees connection between Manson and all the conventional boogie men of the left-wing Cold War narrative: COINTELPRO, MK/ULTRA, CHAOS, PHOENIX. He accepts even the most far-fetched variations of the Conspiracy Theorist view of the JFK assassination. This makes CHAOS a intensely interesting book which is ultimately unsatisfying. Ironically, his own attempt at a Grand Unifying Theory suffers from the same weaknesses he found in Helter Skelter.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Related:

Sometimes history isn't forgotten -- it's buried

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The Charles Manson series we deserve

This could be a great Netflix series

In the course of reviewing Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Steve Sailer pulls back the curtains a bit:

Tarantino Punches the Damn Dirty Hippies

Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was much appreciated within the entertainment industry for portraying Manson as an LSD-crazed apocalyptic avenger. Bugliosi’s masterful job of making Manson seem like the ultimate outsider sidetracked the question of why a lowlife jailbird like Manson had become something of an insider at the best parties in the Hollywood Hills.

Why exactly did Manson know so many important people in showbiz? The answer was the same as for why Jeffrey Epstein knew so many important people in politics: He had access to jailbait girls.

Without all the Helter Skelter stuff, Manson would seem less like the Antichrist and more like an ambitious pimp, an ex-con who was adept at chatting up runaway girls fresh off the Greyhound bus.

Worth noting that the image of Manson as the acid-drenched Anti-Christ has persisted for half a century. Such is the power of the Narrative when self-interest, laziness, and ideological commitment coincide.

Here’s a throw-away passage that should be the premise for an epic revisionist streaming series:

In Philip Marlowe detective novels, murder investigations tend to turn over a lot of rocks and shine embarrassing lights on what’s underneath. The Manson case could similarly have dented the reputations of numerous celebrities who had nothing to do with the killings, but who had plenty of other secrets they didn’t want exposed.

For example, Tate’s husband Roman Polanski, Hollywood’s hottest director, fingered John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas as a possible killer because Polanski, like much of the entertainment industry, had been sleeping with Phillips’ wife Michelle.

And we all know that Polanski and Phillips had other dark secrets separate from the murder of Sharon Tate.

A Raymond Chandler story set in the Age of Aquarius. Mean streets and the mansions of New Hollywood. In the hands of a good director and with the right cast, this would be an instant classic.

Related:

Breaking news without excuses

Intense media scrutiny is reserved for Enemies of the Party

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A searing look at a wrongful conviction

This podcast revisits an old case which resulted in a gross miscarriage of justice:

UPDATE: ANGELA “MISCHELLE” LAWLESS

The last half is a searing, raw interview with Josh Kezar who was sent to prison for a crime he did not commit.

Cases like this are a useful reminder that the legal system, like all bureaucracies, is "a giant mechanism operated by pygmies."

A perfectly legal miscarriage of justice

An incredible two-part podcast from Generation Why

Who Killed Jerry Tobias? Part 1 - 311

Who Killed Jerry Tobias? Part 2 - 312

As suspicious death triggers a bizarre circus as five innocent men are jailed on the word of a drug-addled mentally-ill woman.

Warning: Listening will almost certainly raise you blood-pressure.

In his book An Innocent Man John Grisham wrote:

The journey also exposed me to the world of wrongful convictions. Something that I, even as a former lawyer, had never spent much time thinking about. This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it. Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same-- bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors.

I’ve blogged quite a bit about similar cases and related issues. What is disheartening is that no matter how many exonerations occur, we never see any serious effort to reform the system. The police, prosecutors and judges who created the mess never face any serious consequences. The public never demands meaningful reform. Journalists never learn any lessons and continue to cover criminal cases in a the same way year after year.

Related:

Criminal justice and the Rosenhan Experiment

Novelists and Rosenhan

They trusted the experts

Richard Jewell

We owe Salem an apology

An Attorney-General walks into a jail - in handcuffs

A complete crap-show and the media is in the middle of it.

The Backstory: How Kathleen Kane became the 'architect of her own ruin'

This podcast is informative on multiple levels:

Porn, leaks and petty politics

Kane went from a dark horse in the 2012 Democratic primary to rising star in the party (she drew more votes than Barack Obama in the 2012 general election) to star of a reality version of "Orange is the New Black." All this in less than six years.

To make everything even more twisted, the prime agent of her downfall was a fellow democrat-the DA in Philadelphia - who is himself now in jail for corruption while in office.

Until her indictment, the she waged a vendetta against critics and former aides in the press thanks to journalists who were willing to use unnamed sources in frontpage articles.

The Clinton's make an appearance in the story but not in the Narrative

Kane owed her rapid rise to her status as a Friend of Bill and former campaign worker for Hilary. Bill Clinton came to campaign for her in 2012 and most observers credit that with boosting her to the top of a crowded primary field.

The Clinton-connection has been memory-holed. Inconvenient to the various Narratives in play in this the Current Year.

The Penn State triangulation

In her campaign, Kane pulled off a neat trick of triangulation worthy of the Clintons.

In 2012 the Jerry Sandusky scandal and the Penn State's connection to it was an all-consuming story here in the commonwealth. Her predecessor as AG, Tom Corbett, had overseen the investigation that brought the scandal to light. Corbett was the sitting governor and a Republican.

By carefully tailoring her message, Kane managed to appeal to two completely separate groups of voters. To PSU alums and supporters of Joe Paterno she seemed to suggest that Corbett had engaged in a vendetta against the university and the legendary coach. To the haters of Penn State and the hard left, she suggested that Corbett had been slow to move against Sandusky because he was a Republican, and, hence un-Woke and corrupt.

It was a neat trick. Kane, for all her failings and weakneses, was a adept campaigner

Why "media ethics" is a joke - "We don't care about the felony or abuse of power if it helps us sell newspapers."

As mentioned, Kane's vendettas were played out on the pages of the newspapers. She is in jail today because she leaked grand jury testimony to a Philadelphia paper in an attempt to discredit a critic.

NB: That paper is still proud of the fact that they never revealed their source EVEN WHEN IT WAS CLEAR THAT THAT SOURCE WAS PROBABLY WORKING ON BEHALF OF THE COMMONWEALTH'S ATTORNEY GENERAL AND WAS BREAKING THE LAW.

In short, to get the story they agreed to ignore the crimes that put Kane in a jail cell.

How many other felonies are covered-up so journalists can make money and win prizes?

As noted here many moons ago:

A reliable and trustworthy source is someone willing to break trust with his or her colleagues and betray the confidences of their friends.

Or as army intelligence officer Col. Stuart A. Herrington wrote:

In the unique world occupied by our media colleagues, trusted government civil servants who betray sensitive information are First Amendment heroes.

Related:

Why 'investigative journalism' is problematic

Feet of clay and heads of stone

' . . . chance favors only the prepared mind.'

The LAPD set out to catch one serial killer, and inadvertently caught a different one.

How LAPD's "Closers" Nabbed the Westside Rapist

The police were using a DNA dragnet to find the Grim Sleeper. In so doing, they caught John Floyd Thomas aka The Westside Rapist.

Theories crumble, but good observations never fade.

Harlow Shapley (astronomer)

The big break in the case came because a detective took special care to collect and preserve trace evidence in case forensic science ever began using DNA to solve crimes. He did this long before such evidence had ever been used in court.

Then a crucial coincidence occurred, the kind of thing that would give Harry Bosch pause: It was 1976, and Manchester saw a magazine article about the science of DNA technology. “It was something pretty new,” Manchester says today. In fact, most cops then relied on crime-scene analysis as rudimentary as grade-school math: spraying Luminol to locate fingerprints, and identifying blood types and groups.

Influenced by the fascinating magazine piece, Manchester did something odd for those times: He insisted that the Los Angeles County autopsy technicians save as much human detritus and trace evidence found at the McKeown crime scene as possible. His unusual request would prove instrumental in solving the dust-gathering case, retrieved from a police evidence shelf by Bengtson and his partner Vivian Flores three decades later.

This is another serial killer who does not fit the popular image. Time and again on TV and in movies we’ve seen a cop or a profiler harangue their boss or other authority figure:

This guy is out there. He’s killed before. He will kill again, and he will keep on killing until somebody stops him.

The cinematic predator either won’t stop because he is arrogant or he can’t stop because he has an overwhelming compulsion to kill. An orgy of violence builds until the brave and brilliant hero (or heroine) finally brings the killer to justice.

Yet, in the last decade we’ve seen something completely different. Killers like the Grim Sleeper, BTK, or the Golden State Killer all have gone on long hiatuses or stopped killing completely.

A prolific yet almost forgotten serial killer

A really informative 2 part podcast from True Crime Garage

The Candyman

Dean Corll, for a variety of reasons, is not nearly as well known as the Zodiac Killer or Ted Bundy. Yet he ranks as one of the most sadistic and prolific serial killers in US history.

This article by Skip Hollandsworth is one of the best pieces of reporting I've ever read.

The Lost Boys

Novelists and Rosenhan

Charles Dickens:

[The police] took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract idea from the circumstances.

Great Expectations

Arthur Conan Doyle

The trouble, however, with all police prosecutions is that, having once got what they imagine to be their man, they are not very open to any line of investigation which might lead to other conclusions. Everything that will not fit into the official theory is liable to be excluded.

The Case of Oscar Slater

Related:

Criminal justice and the Rosenhan Experiment

Rosenhan revisited: The persistence of error and the impotence of facts

Rosenhan redux

Revisiting the Hanssen case

Rosenhan revisited, again

They trusted the experts

When justice loses to Social Justice

The Netflix series “The Keepers” has brought attention to the unsolved murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik. In all the commentary on the series and the case I’ve not seen any mention of one particularly salient fact: Sister Cathy’s murder is less likely to be solved because it occurred in Maryland.

In the Free State the politicians surrendered to the SJWs and rejected useful crime solving tools.

Familial DNA testing has already led to the capture of killers who have long eluded justice. It was instrumental in identifying Lonnie Franklin, Jr. as the Grim Sleeper serial killer in Los Angeles.

Maryland has made it illegal for police to use it.

THE USE OF FAMILIAL DNA EVIDENCE IN CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS IN MARYLAND

Maryland and the District of Columbia are the only United States jurisdictions that have banned the use of familial DNA searches in investigations and prosecutions.5 Maryland was the first jurisdiction to pass the ban in 2008, followed by the District of Columbia. Conversely, California, New York, Colorado, Florida, and Virginia have adopted laws to allow limited use of familial DNA investigations. Many other states allow familial searches without legislative imprimatur.

So why has Maryland outlawed the use of familial DNA when so many other jurisdictions are moving towards the use of familial DNA searching? Maryland's movement to ban familial DNA searches was led by Stephen B. Mercer, then in private practice and now the Chief of the Forensics Division of the Maryland Office of the Public Defender.

Don’t confuse us with the facts

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

I’ve written before about the role respected experts played in the ritual child abuse panic of the 1980s and 1990s. (cf. “They trusted the experts") At the heart of many of these cases were “victims” who “recovered” suppressed memories with the help of therapists. These new “memories” then were recounted in court where judges and juries accepted them as conclusive evidence.

Eventually courts came to realize that recovered memories were dangerously problematic. Serious scholars destroyed what little scientific support the concept once had. Most of the convictions were overturned.

It seemed that rationality had reasserted itself.

I ran across this Weekly Standard article from 2003 which struck exactly that optimistic note:

The End of a Delusion

AT THE END of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud--ever anxious to present an overarching, universal explanation for mental unrest--suggested that "repressed memories" of childhood sexual abuse are a common cause of adult mental disorders.

He quickly abandoned the idea (replacing it with the concept of infantile sexuality) when he saw that it harmed rather than helped his patients. But such ideas seem to have lives of their own, and a hundred years after Freud first proposed it, the idea of repressed memories rose again in new and even gaudier clothing. Grown beyond Freud's unadorned view of domestic misconduct, it came to include beliefs that many of these sexual traumas--which the troubled patients' shocked minds had repressed--took place during Satanic rituals and experiments aboard alien spacecraft.

It is today almost impossible to understand how anyone ever believed this absurd and ridiculous notion, but it was less than a decade ago that the idea was flourishing in America. The American psychiatric and psychological establishment bears a shame that will be hard ever to wash away. Thousands of patients--thousands of sick, damaged people who had come to medical professionals for help--were destructively misdirected into trolling through their pasts in search of hidden sexual trauma. By the late 1980s, wards and clinics in university psychiatric departments, eminent hospitals, and even the National Institute of Mental Health were devoted to uncovering these repressed memories.

The craze for this psychiatric madness was never universal, and, to their credit, some theorists and practicing psychiatrists resisted the practices and ideas in what Frederick Crews aptly dubbed the "memory wars." The importance of Richard J. McNally's new book "Remembering Trauma" lies not just in the superb and definitive survey McNally makes of the history of repressed memories, but also in what the book stands for: "Remembering Trauma" is the monument built to mark the end of the memory wars. The repressed-memory diagnosis has finally been repressed.

RTWT

Sadly, there are no final victories in the war between rational thought and pseudoscience. Oprah, after all, did more than anyone to promote the Recovered Memory movement and now our cultural elite want to make her president.

Oprah 2020? @davidzurawik says Winfrey's Golden Globes speech addressed a "moral vacuum in leadership. This country really wants to hear someone speak about morality in the White House" https://t.co/EPUuDwATDh

— Reliable Sources (@ReliableSources) January 14, 2018

Or take the Netflix series “the Keepers” which was nominated for an Emmy in the Documentary category. Ostensibly about the unsolved murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik in Baltimore in 1969, it devotes much of its running time to horrific stories of sexual abuse suffered by students at Keough High School. The perpetrators were an organized ring which included priests, policemen, and other powerful men in the city.

“The Keepers” wants us to believe that Sister Cathy was murdered because she was going to expose the abuse. Her murder is unsolved, of course, because the perpetrators of the abuse included powerful figures who could quash the investigation.

And at the center of the revelations are witnesses who came forward after undergoing recovered memory therapy.

The Dangerously Misleading Narrative Of "The Keepers"

Or, to put it another way, the critics and pundits lavished praise on a TV series that depends solely on pseudoscience for its grand narrative and emotional punch.

Emmys get it so right for once with nomination for 'The Keepers' as best documentary series. https://t.co/sD2Hx4ZuNo

— David Zurawik (@davidzurawik) July 14, 2017

They even persist in their praise when physical evidence undercuts the narrative.

Exhumed priest’s DNA doesn’t match evidence in case of ‘Sister Cathy’ slaying from 1969

Some might wonder why the MSM showed such vigor in refuting the conspiracy theories about Comet Ping Pong and Pizzagate and yet heaped praise on a TV series that was based on similar conspiracy theories and speculation.

But remember. They are “elite” and expert so shut up and listen.

They trusted the experts

Alan Jacobs looks at a new book on the Satanic ritual abuse scandals of the 1980s and early 1990s:

structures of presumption: case studies

As Jacobs notes:

We don’t hear many claims these days that day-care workers, or anyone else, are forcing children to participate in Satanic rituals. But reading Beck’s narrative, I couldn’t help reflecting on the ways in which certain structures of presumption that drove that “moral panic” thirty years ago are still in place and still having massive social effects just in somewhat different contexts.

He bravely points out that while the MSM doesn’t fall for Satanic ritual abuse claims anymore, there are parallels to current media obsessions:

The precise logic I have outlined above is at work today in two prominent venues, sexual assault cases on college campuses and the increasingly widespread diagnoses of gender dysphoria among young people. Just as child abuse is real and tragic and often in the past was diminished or ignored so too with sexual assault and profound gender dysphoria. But as Beck’s narrative shows, attempts to correct past neglect can go wildly, destructively awry; and the “structures of presumption” I have laid out above make it virtually impossible to have a reasonable discussion of how to assess claims that have immense consequences for human lives.

To that list I would add a third:the MSM-promoted hysteria which fueled Black Lives Matter and their agitprop narratives.

Three quick points:

1. The ritual abuse panic was just an extreme example of the Rosenhan problem in criminal investigations. When an investigator or prosecutor makes up their mind their theories are immune to falsification.

Criminal justice and the Rosenhan experiment

Rosenhan II

Rosenhan redux

Revisiting the Hanssen case

2.) The abuse panic and the related popularization of “recovered memories” exposed modern psychology as a pseudoscientific cesspit. Frederick Crews demolished its intellectual foundations in the NYRB. Those essays and the resulting correspondence make for exhilarating reading.

3. The panic did not express itself in unthinking, proto-Trumpian lynch mobs. Instead, the damage was done by “experts”: police investigators, journalists, social workers, lawyers, psychologists.

Forgotten witch hunts

Note that very few of these “experts” paid a professional or personal price for the lives they ruined. They had no skin in the game. This sort of makes one think that an awful lot of media-approved experts qualify for Intellectual-Yet-Idiot status.

Looking forward to reading this book

What do Don Imus and SAE have in common?

Each were at the center of a media firestorm which came at a suspiciously convenient time for the MSM

Emmanuel Goldstein is always a red herring

Remember that the Imus scandal happened right after the Duke hoax fell completely apart. But the Imus story was SO IMPORTANT that the MSM did not have time to discuss the mistakes they made in Durham or the lies they told about the lacrosse players. As i wrote at the time:

One story allows talking heads parade their noble moral sensibility in front of the cameras. The other one highlights their intellectual shortcomings and moral corruption. Which one is filling the airwaves?

See also here.

And it is worth noting, that hateful speech by media figures (both before and after the Imus imbroglio) did not elicit the same around the clock talking head outrage:

Some one owes Don Imus and Nancy Reagan an apology

So now, the most important story in the world is the crude antics of some frat boys on a bus.

Awfully convenient that the SAE story "broke" just after the media-generated hoax in Ferguson, Misouri came crashing down around their heads.

What do you mean “we”, writer man?

Ron Rosenbaum in Slate:

Why America Loves Serial Killers
They give us an alibi for our murderous culture.

Don't turn away: Serial killers are America's alibi, and every time you pay your 12 bucks for another serial-killer movie or put one on your Netflix queue, you're feeding the beast.

You're an accomplice. In making serial killers giggly, kitschy chic, we're all accomplices.

From 2005:

The glamorization of evil is one least attractive features of our age. For my money, Silence of the Lambs was an obscene book and movie for precisely this reason.

From 2008:

I'm not a big fan of the slasher/serial killer horror genre. It's partly a matter of philosophy, part cultural inheritance.

A college friend once summed up the moral of the Friday the 13th series as "you can't kill the boogie man." At the time that struck me as an accurate assessment which meant the movies were profoundly nihilistic.

The glorification of sadism is repugnant, and, in itself, is a deal-breaker. These movies also have little appeal because i find it impossible to identify with the victims and their contrived helplessness. The "plots" require too much suspension of belief for any student of Col. Jeff Cooper.

Can't kill the boogie man? Yes we can!

From 2003:

Figures like Holmes or Peter Wimsey are fictional and bear little resemblance to real detectives. But they are hyper-realistic compared to the serial killers in modern thrillers. Writers like Thomas Harris have turned the detectives into somewhat intelligent bureaucrats while making the killer the one endowed with the rare mind. Philip Marlowe is only the " personification of an attitude, the exaggeration of a possibility;" Hannibal Lector bears no resemblance to real serial killers. He is the personification of an impossibility as a criminal, but the perfect example of moral rot as an "artistic" creation.

This post by Ace explains why True Detective struck such a nerve and why it was a breath of fresh air on American TV:

The show ultimately was, as Pizzolato said, not about the serial killer at all, but about the two men, Hart and Cohle, and their long, rocky relationship with one another.

And it's about mystery. The serial killer plot is a pretext to explore mystery -- and evil -- and philosophy -- and sex -- and all the rest of it, but in the end, the show was about the mystery and muddle of life. Not about some Hannibal Lecter-like supercriminal and his lunatic beliefs.

In the end, he wasn't the interesting one; the heroes were the interesting ones.

Easy way for reporters to be less stupid

If the MSM would spend 20 minutes with Michael Bane or Massad Ayoob, they would sound less stupid when it comes to Second Amendment and self-defense issues.

On this podcast Bane clearly explains why the Colorado gun laws were/are a direct threat to the rights of honest gun-owners.

Downrange Radio #306

As I listened to it, I was reminded of Mark Steyn's point that in our current criminal juatice system "the process is the punishment".

Ayoob, one of the pre-eminent experts on self-defense, has several great posts on Ferguson and the shooting of Michael Brown. They start here:

Ferguson Part 1

Related

Who are you going to believe?