The Pentland Problem

How group stupidity invariably seizes defeat from the jaws of victory.

If you haven’t seen the video of Jonathan Pentland shouting at a young black man called Deandre then you should. It’s a fairly good indicator of the state of the nation. It lays bare some of the obvious racial problems that have been quietly percolating in US society for a while.

In the video, Jonathan Pentland, who shouts at people for a living, becomes all alpha-male and bullish about the neighbourhood and his property. Unsurprisingly his go-to approach for removing someone he didn’t want near his property was to go and shout at him.

Half the people who read this are going to expect me to defend Pentland. The received wisdom of the liberal left that Pentland is the embodiment of all evil. I want to bang some heads together.

Heads up. Neither side is going to like this article.

Are you going to defend Pentland?

Not my job. I don’t have all the facts. Like the vast majority of people on the planet, I don’t have any idea of the circumstances surrounding the video. Are there mitigating circumstances? Maybe.

Does it matter? No, not really.

I train social workers in de-escalation techniques and I can think of a billion different and better ways I could’ve handled that situation. I could’ve escorted Deandre out of the neighbourhood and made him feel honoured to be leaving.

Whether you think it’s morally right or wrong to ask people to leave a particular area because of their colour of their skin is a different question. My position is it isn’t morally defensible. When you say such things you get into all sorts of trouble when you argue ‘safe spaces’ are segregation by the back door.

Perhaps Pentland was trying to enforce a racially segregated safe space for his family. A contrarian bastard like might argue that he might’ve been. The difference between ‘Apartheid’ and ‘Safe Space’ is largely a semantic one.

I digress. I knew I would.

What I’m saying is there was no need for Pentland to pull on his big-boy pants and go all Silverback Gorilla. It was unwarranted, it was fuelled by his own stupidity. I imagine that sort of communication strategy works in all the armed forces — it’s one of the reasons I’ve never had the inclination to join one.

Whatever else Pentland has got going for him, strategic thinking isn’t on his side. His behaviour was stupid, reckless and steeped in the sort of racism I’ve become accustomed to seeing in the US. This was an entirely avoidable situation of Pentland’s own design.

Such a gorilla in a human suit needs to know you can’t push people around and smash their phone because you’ve invented a reason they can’t be near your house. That’s assault. And guess what, that’s what he was charged with. Good. Write the bastard up and fine him.

Now you can argue that the use of film and social media in this instance brought public awareness to the situation. This may have helped the police expedite the process and charge Pentland. Would this case have been shuffled away never to surface without the helpful intervention of social media?

Y’know what? Maybe. I think the US police force has a underpinning racial bias that could’ve made this go away quite easily. Public scrutiny via social media makes me uncomfortable because it pushes society into a dystopian future I don’t like the look or sound of.

But that’s my feelings… and the lives of BIPOC are very much at stake in cases like this. My discomfort does not trump their safety. If what is needed is public pressure and wider public scrutiny to ensure equity, then so be it. Pentland should be, and has been, charged.

I’m not going to defend the guy, that’s what his lawyers will do.

So we’re going to leave it there?

No. I’m always centre-ground and I’m absolutely furious. We almost had a win. So close. We almost managed to throw together some semblance of social justice. We very nearly got the balance right.

Then I read the article on Medium. You know the one, it was top-of-the-charts all day yesterday. The angry rhetoric contained within was super popular. It concluded Pentland was a piece-of-shit human being and he deserved everything that was coming to him.

Heavy on the ‘preach’ and ‘this guy deserves to die’. Everything that was coming to him had already come. He’d been charged. Uh oh, I thought… whatever social justice had been achieved was about to be well and truly ballsed-up.

It took less than a day.

See…society was on the cusp of a group of BIPOC coming out onto the street to tell a positive story about how the police helped them readdress the balance of a social injustice. It was an easy win.

They took footage of a man allegedly assaulting someone. The footage was used as evidence to secure a conviction of a white man being a racist and assaulting a black man with no provocation. It was an open goal.

We were mere weeks away from a court-mandated restorative justice order. One, in my fictional utopia, where Jonathan Pentland meets up with Deandre to apologise. We were hypothetical months from Pentland reflecting on his behaviour and Deandre getting a sincere apology. They could’ve taught a practical course about anti-racism together.

We were so damn close.

And then the reckless idiots started showing up at Pentland’s house. They moved from legal justice to mob justice like that’s the logical step. They tried to change gear from first to fifth in the stick-shift range-rover of progress.

And what happens when you go from first to fifth? A lot of noise and your engine falls out. You stall. That’s what idiots do, they stall things. In this case, they’ve managed to stall social progress (again!).

Instead of carving a neat win and giving everyone a simple learning situation — it’s going to escalate into a tornado of self-defeating idiocy.

Social justice via groupthink has all diplomatic skill of a coked-up rhino.

You seem pretty angry?

How much of an idiot do you have to be to attack a house with two young children in it? I don’t work in PR but I can tell you that having to remove a family from their house because a mob has formed on the doorstep does not make for good optics.

I imagine that sort of thing is covered on day one of PR school. There’s probably a colourful poster in the common room with a big list of things not to do under any circumstances. Hounding a young family out of their house will be on there, next to shooting endangered species and posing with their corpses on Facebook.

The mob thing, that’s what you’ve managed to do here. You’ve taken a situation with ONE guilty person. Pentland. You’ve doubled down and added additional guilty people. Vandalism is still a crime even if you think you’ve got the moral high-ground.

Ah-ha! You’ll tell me. Maybe the police were waiting for someone to push over a garden gnome or kick a mailbox so they could overreact and order a helicopter evacuation. That’s how a racist police works, nudge-nudge wink-wink.

Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. But if that’s the case it’s a really good argument for why NOBODY should’ve gone within ten miles of Pentland’s house. If you’ve even looked at a BLM post in the last two years, you needed to be miles away and doing something else.

That street should’ve been deserted. Instead you showed up and started chanting ‘No Justice, No Peace’.

You may as well have given out vouchers to Conservative pundits telling them they could take turns to punch liberals. You took the crystal clear waters of legal justice and you muddied them with your own faecal groupthink.

Who the hell runs the woke strategy department, General Custar?

You got some basic things right. You understand what a liberal tolerant society looks like. It doesn’t look like Pentland. You’ve identified him as part of the problem and you’re absolutely correct. Have a biscuit. He needed to be called out and he needed to be prosecuted — and that was happening. We were so close!

A liberal society is one that tolerates people as long as they do no harm. That’s what Jonathan Pentland needed to learn. Deandre was doing no harm by being black and in the neighbourhood — Pentland’s racism showed and he will be punished.

The time for this sort of behaviour has gone.

Upon viewing it you could’ve preached classic liberalism… you could’ve said he’s entitled to be a racist bigot as long as he doesn’t act on that belief. When his thoughts stray into action then, and only then, do we need a legal process to intervene. That’s what we have laws for and we should apply them with equity.

Such a position is a viable one to take and one I’d advise you to think on. You’re entitled to be as angry as you like about Jonathan Pentland, but as soon as you cross into doing harm and threatening his family and his property. You’re done. The support of classic liberals washes away.

A liberal society doesn’t look like your Orwellian hellscape either. Crowds of angry people fuelled by moral relativism and lacking facts showing up to shout slogans at houses. Don’t you see this takes something simple and complicates it? Don’t you see how the game is played by now?

Sometimes I wonder whose side you’re really on.

You got high as kites on your own self-indulgent brand of justice and you clutched defeat from the jaws of victory. If your echo chamber told you to piss in your own coffee and drink it, would you?

This is why the centre-ground position is so important because it contains reasonable people. Any reasonable person can see that Pentland’s actions were fuelled by racism and unacceptable.

Any reasonable person would support Pentland’s arrest and subsequent prosecution. A reasonable person could believe social media involvement is a necessary evil. I drew such a conclusion myself. I don’t like it but I’m prepared to live with it.

But reasonable people have limits.

No reasonable person is ever going to conclude you should show up at someone’s house chanting slogans then throw things through the windows. No reasonable person is going to endorse mob justice off the back of a clip you’ve seen on Youtube. No reasonable person is going to approve behaviour that sees children evacuated from their family home by police officers.

They won’t do that because they’re reasonable people and you aren’t being reasonable.

You went on a self-righteous crusade and created another pyrrhic victory for social justice. In your rabid quest to enforce a tolerant society by any means possible, you’ve managed to flip an unpleasant racist into a victim and provided a rallying call for the right wing.

You had all the necessary ingredients for the cake of a good outcome. You threw the eggs at the wall, folded the butter into your own clothes and sneezed in the flour. You had the promise of doing something just and moral for once — you made an absolute mess like the philosophical toddlers you are.

All because you don’t understand what being liberal really entails

Something similar?