Entitled…

Did anyone see the footage of a Texas woman who on entering a bank refused to wear a mask? She was removed by police officers in handcuffs. What was telling was her rhetoric. She said that the police were taking away her human rights, called on others in the bank to assist stating that this was ‘police brutality right here people’ to which she got a resounding ‘No, no its not’ from other customers. One has to wonder could she not have been removed without being handcuffed, but one aspect of that last was her complaint that the bank was a ‘public space’.

I thought that very intriguing, that she would consider perhaps one of the quintessentially private spaces as something other than it was, a space that moreover is subject to strict control up to and including the use of lethal force to maintain its functional integrity. Yet for her the lobby of a bank is a space that is hers, that she has every right to do as she pleases with no consideration or regard for others. This is a fascinating inversion of previous conservative tropes about business places – a sort of libertarian attitude that is actually at odds with what libertarians of the right supposedly would feel (and it sits curiously with the culture wars fought by the right over whether private businesses have an obligation to bake cakes for LGBTQ people). Or perhaps this is where libertarianism itself reaches its limits – any philosophy that has such a limited sense of the common good is sooner or later going to find people who essentially argue that their self-interest trumps quite literally everything else.

And we see a curious echo of this too in the insurrection in January where many of those who entered the Capitol spoke of how this was ‘their’ building. It was also telling to hear the mother of the so-called Q-Shaman saying much the same on media outlets about her son’s entry to that building as if this argument was either logical or reasonable. And as someone on the QAnon Anonymous podcast put it, that argument wouldn’t go far at Fort Knox or any US military base. Or indeed a public library after hours or a Federal building. The list is endless. But the lack of logic is self-evident.

Or perhaps the sheer inconsistency of all this, private spaces regarded as public, public as open to anyone at any time and to any acts carried out within them really speaks of the inchoate nature of those who are involved, that this is no formal ideology (though there are those within their diffuse ranks who have very very clear ideologies) but almost an emotional reaction and response driven by a range of factors – exhibitionism, self-interest, racism and so on. Perhaps taking these statements seriously is missing the point. The ideology of many involved is paper thin – bar clear bigotries of one sort or another, but that doesn’t really matter. Perhaps fundamentally this is about a sense of personal entitlement.