Tech Founder Maybe Up For Some Vigilante Justice, Public Hangings To Make San Francisco Great Again

Yeah, that's scary.

Michelle Tandler is a Harvard-educated businesswoman and tech founder who once interned for Dianne Feinstein, with a focus on the DREAM act. She exists in the 21st Century. Yet, Sunday, she tweeted a call for public lynchings:

"Our society seems to have become seriously complacent. 100 years ago in [San Francisco] people were publicly hung for their crimes. Often by vigilante groups that wanted to send a message. The hangings worked. Crime would plummet after a few of them. Often for many months at a time."

Wow. You can almost hear the Bernard Herrmann score. 

Twitter  

Tandler's pro-lynching argument is a classic example of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" or "after this, therefore resulting from it." It's a logical fallacy that presumes a causal relationship from otherwise unrelated sequential events. "One thing follows the other, therefore it was caused by the other." Vigilante groups publicly hanged people in San Francisco a century ago, sothat's why crime rates dropped. But Latin aside, Tandler's homicidal zeal is incredibly creepy. She's directly referring to the rise of the Klu Klux Klan in the 1920s Bay Area. They reportedly went from burning crosses to gaining power in City Hall. (More than 350 lynchings are estimated to have occurred in California between 1850 and 1935.)

Tandler goes on to ask: "What changed that the men of San Francisco went from creating vigilante groups to being afraid to even tweet about crime? What would happen if a few meth dealers were publicly hung?"

Public executions are barbaric, but even Tandler's own fascist propaganda claims that crime dropped for just a few months after each lynching. How many people does she want to string up to maintain order?

Tandler backed down from her original unhinged tweet, insisting that she wasn't calling for public hangings in her tweet that called for public hangings at the hands of vigilante mobs. She was just reading The Barbary Coast and got carried away with out-of-the box crime-prevention solutions.

However, she later put up a poll asking, "If death penalty for five drug dealers led to hundreds of dealers stopping the trade, would you support it." Don't worry! She's personally leaning toward "no," but she also can't help thinking about Singapore, where "they execute something like three drug dealers a year. They have virtually zero overdose deaths." Tandler's Twitter bio should just read: "Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc."

Singapore is not what I'd consider a free nation, but Tandler seems open to draconian criminal penalties if it keeps the streets clean.

 She wrote:  

Imagine this scenario: It's 12:30am and your dog woke you up because it needs to go to the bathroom. You walk outside and sleepily shuffle down the street in your slippers. Suddenly you spot a man, half naked with a comforter draped over him, stumbling out of the park toward you. What do you do?

I'd consider that my dog lives indoors with me, while a human being lives in filth in a damp public park. I also wouldn't expose my slippers to a city street. They are for inside.

Look, I don't want to minimize what's happening in San Francisco and other cities right now. Homelessness and the fentanyl crisis are serious issues requiring solutions more complex than that "Star Trek" episode where the utopia planet executed people for minor offenses. 

“+ Theoretically, if publicly hanging say, 5 fentanyl dealers led to saving the lives of hundreds, is it morally reasonable? + Why would most San Francisco residents view my question above as horrifying and immoral? + What do other countries do with their fentanyl dealers?”

— Michelle Tandler (@Michelle Tandler) 1681048518 

During her Easter tweetstorm — oh right, it was on Easter — she said, "Why aren't the men of San Francisco rallying together to protect our city's women and elderly from drug-induced violence?" As Dr. William Horne at Villanova University observed, Tandler's remarks eerily recall those of Rebecca Latimer Felton, a white supremacist and the first woman senator from Georgia.

Delivering a speech at a Georgian Agricultural Society meeting in 1897, Felton declared:  

When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime .... nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue----if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts — -then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.

Felton infamously advocated for the lynching of Sam Hose, who was accused of all sorts of crimes but never actually stood trial for them. Instead, a mob kidnapped and tortured him before an appreciative crowd.

TRIGGER WARNING I MEAN IT.

They cut off his ears, fingers, and genitals and plunged knives repeatedly into his body as the crowd cheered. They removed the skin from his face and doused him with kerosene. He was chained to a pine tree while the mob set his still living body on fire. The heat was so intense his veins ruptured and his eyes almost burst from their sockets. According to a journalist present, the crowd still watched with "unfeigned satisfaction" as the flames consumed Hose while he screamed, "Oh my God! Oh Jesus!"  

One white woman present thanked God for the mob. What remained of Hose was sold as souvenirs and trophies: This included his knuckles and parts of his heart and liver. This was America at the turn of the 20th Century. Felton said any "true-hearted husband or father" would have done the same to the "beast" who deserved to be put down like a dog, except the "dog is more worthy of sympathy."

Georgia Gov. Allen D. Candler blamed all Black residents for the crimes that no one bothered to legally prove Hose committed. He denounced Black people for protesting Hose's horrific murder, and just four days later, a white mob lynched another Black man, Mitchell Daniel, simply for complaining about Hose's lynching.

No, Ms. Tandler, public executions won't make white women any safer in the city. They certainly won't stop violent crime. They just appeal to humanity's worst instincts.

[ Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners In The Age Of Jim Crow / Twitter] 

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