Today (June 23) is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s birthday. He has consistently emphasized the importance of personal responsibility and individual self-improvement instead of government-enforced “social justice,” which always backfires. Contrast that with the manifesto of Monday's shooter in Montreal.
Firstly, I want to quote Justice Thomas, who has always attributed his early moral and religious development to his grandfather, whom he called "Daddy." Thomas's "Daddy" raised him and gave him many simple but powerful pieces of advice, the sort of advice that used to be generational wisdom, but which is sorely lacking in modern Western society. In his book My Grandfather's Son, his autobiography, Thomas wrote:
I began to suspect that Daddy had been right all along: The only hope I had of changing the world was to change myself first. I thought of the many times that he and I had delivered fresh-picked farm produce to one of our elderly relatives. On such occasions he never failed to remind me that if we hadn’t worked so hard to grow it, we wouldn’t be able to give it to those who needed help.
Hard work, individual initiative, and responsibility to help one’s neighbors were all once admired American traits. Even in Canada in the colonial days, the settlers would have acted similarly. But the deranged Montreal Commie who killed a police officer and a local Jewish man before dying in a shootout on June 22 believed in none of these virtues.
Seth Hatfield demanded that someone else — whether the government or Communist activists or powerful businessmen — transform the whole world to make his personal life better. And when all of his uninformed and irrational griping about capitalism, white people, women, and the Jews did not in fact lead to the entire world changing, Hatfield murdered strangers and got himself killed.
Related: Deadly Montreal Shooter Hated Capitalism, Women, White Men, and Jews
Hatfield's lengthy manifesto, published on Rebel News, is a historically ignorant, misogynistic, antisemitic, racist, socialist screed. Hatfield was reportedly a philosophy college student and committed his deadly crime in a Jewish-heavy section of Montreal. Hatfield mourned the fall of the Nazis and the Soviet Union, blamed capitalism and "Zionists" for the West's relationship crisis, and bashed Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He also asserted that tall white men have dating advantages, indicated that capitalism was a plot to reserve women for a small "clique" of powerful men, and blamed his loneliness on women whom capitalistic propaganda conditioned. It is not clear what ethnicity Hatfield was. An image is circulating online that appears to show a Hispanic (therefore, white) man, but it seems no official source has confirmed this as being truly a picture of Hatfield.
The main point, however, is that Hatfield took no responsibility for his personal misery. True, elites have spent years undermining marriage and sexual morality, but in actuality that pernicious influence came from Marxists, the very people whom Hatfield idolized. But every generation has to face a major crisis or a set of negative circumstances that place them at certain disadvantages. The key part is how each individual faces those obstacles and overcomes them.
Hatfield accepted no personal agency or responsibility. Instead of changing himself in order to begin changing the world, as Thomas advised, Hatfield demanded that the world change without even considering if he could change himself. And that is precisely why Hatfield was so bitter and unhappy, so lonely and crazy, that he ended up becoming a murderer.
