Gabby Petito: Missing "Missing White Woman Syndrome" Syndrome, in woke era

Partisan polarization from the left half of society over the past 10 years, particularly from the media, entertainment, and academia sectors, has made it impossible for there to be unifying figures in popular awareness.

In the benign category, there have been no more It Girls after Jennifer Lawrence's heyday of the early 2010s. As wokeness accelerated after that point, the culture-making sectors went on an Ayn Randian "strike of the creative class" by refusing to produce another such non-partisan, non-politicized girl for all types of people to admire. There will never be another such unifying positive figure for the rest of our crumbling empire's history.

As a corollary, I doubt the cultural sectors will produce another Manic Pixie Dream Girl for the current restless warm-up phase of the 15-year excitement cycle, even though we are due for one, akin to the late 2000s. But that was before the polarization really set in. Imagine them trying to produce another All-American earthly guardian angel in the mold of Julia Roberts or Anne Hathaway...

Then there is the morbid side of popular figures, such as those who go missing, get kidnapped, or even murdered. Feeling for their plight can unify the audience, who may react as though they were all neighbors of a closely knit community, and are grieving for someone near and dear to them. It's a media creation, of course, but it does serve the same purpose of cultural unification behind a focal figure.

The recent disappearance and murder of Gabby Petito, a popular YouTuber who had been documenting her travels around national parks with her boyfriend Brian Laundrie (the suspected murderer), shows how fragmented the nation has become since the last period of quasi-unity, during the 2000s.

Back then, it seemed like every few months there was a high-profile case of a girl or woman who had gone missing, with foul play suspected, causing a broad spectrum of Americans to bond over their concern for those particular individuals — and by extension, all the ones you don't hear about in the media. Elizabeth Smart, Natalee Holloway, Laci Peterson, Madeleine McCann, the daughter of Casey Anthony, and so on and so forth.

But as polarization took off during the 2010s, this form of media coverage — and the social psychological phenomenon of unified bonding over their plight — became derided by the culture-makers as "Missing White Woman Syndrome". Suddenly the media had to stop covering such incidents, and the mass of Americans were supposed to stop caring about them and bonding over them. The point was to prevent unification, and accelerate atomization.

It was the proto-woke bloggers who planted the seeds of callous atomization during the 2000s, contemporaneous with the media coverage and social bonding. E.g., Jezebel began their sustained whining about these topics from the mid-2000s onward. But even a slightly more mainstream blog like Slate or Salon only began demanding atomization on this matter in the 2010s. Ditto for more mainstream outlets like the NYT, who put out one item in 2005, but who discussed it primarily during the 2010s.

Seriously, name any such high-profile case from the entire past decade. I tried to, and they all came from the late 2000s. Entries in a list on some specialist webpage do not count, only examples famous enough to have left an imprint on popular awareness.

Gabby Petito will fit this pattern as well — no national unification over discussing the case, its angles, its relevance for the future, or anything like that. Most coverage will be at the meta level, i.e. why you should feel ashamed for trying to talk to others about the case, and the media ought to drop it ASAP. And if you absolutely must take part in a conversation about it, make sure that it's confined to a partisan-approved sub-culture, not across a broad spectrum of the population.

I used to write extensively about the aspects of a rising-crime vs. falling-crime society, from 2009 to 2012, and there was rarely a partisan angle to it — from my side or the readers. There were plenty of liberals and progs who were into that material, especially since I was non-partisan and went to great lengths to debunk the dumbass conservative ideas about what causes crime rates to rise or fall as they did during the last wave.

I stopped making it my focus because I had exhausted most of my ideas, not because I felt pressured to not cover a suddenly verboten topic. But if I had kept at it, I would have surely lost a fair amount of liberal interest, since in the 2010s the only discourse about crime is why crimes against white victims don't matter, and only police brutality against black people matters.

You can't even talk about Jeffrey Dahmer anymore, even though many of that serial killer's victims were black, because he was not a cop and therefore his story DOES NOT COMPUTE in the era of abolishing the police. Also, he was gay, and you can't mention that gays are highly over-represented among serial killers. Homosexuals being "just like us" was one of the most heavily promoted propaganda campaigns of the decade of wokeness.

What did the libtards in the culture industry do, for their part? Their initial complaints were framed as though they were going to start covering non-white victims even more, whether in the interest of journalistic accuracy, or trying to get a majority-white country to bond over concern for non-white victims. But they never bothered trying with that — it was just a blatant rationalization for dismissing coverage of the white victims.

So not only were there no unifying white missing persons victims during the 2010s — the culture-makers refused to cover and promote a single non-white missing persons figure instead. The goal was to prevent unification regardless of who the focal figure was, and to accelerate atomization.

CNN et al. are currently whining about the lack of coverage of non-white victims, even though they control the narrative machine and could start covering black missing girls any time they wanted. Their Ayn Randian strike of refusing to provide nationally unifying coverage has only intensified and solidified over the past decade. They will only cover black victims if it can split the nation apart, as with calls to defund the police in the wake of over-blown footage of police brutality. Even then, they refuse to cover white victims of police brutality, which would serve to unify the nation against excessive force by cops.

How can we tell this relates to partisan polarization, and not merely to a call to end coverage of crime entirely? Well, in case you were asleep during the late 2010s, there was non-stop coverage of crimes and harassment, real or alleged, against white female victims — the Me Too panic.

Why did the media, entertainment, and academia sectors not dismiss Me Too as "Molested White Woman Syndrome"? The round-the-clock coverage, the social bonding among the audience, all of it perfectly mirroring the Missing White Woman Syndrome of the 2000s. Because the victims of the 2000s were All-American or conservative-coded (from Utah, Mississippi, North Dakota; devoted wife / mother; coverage by Deep Southerner Nancy Grace), regardless of whether they were personally conservative, moderate, or liberal. Whereas the victims paraded by Me Too were liberal-coded (from the bicoastal bubble, working in media, entertainment, academia).

Thus, the creatives' Ayn Randian strike was a form of war against their rivals. Eliminate conservative-coded women from being objects of concern and unification, promote only liberal women as such focal figures. As with Ayn Rand, this was not rugged individualism, but a coordinated collectivism anchored within a certain sector of society (the aspiring elites of the culture-making industry). Collective power for Team Us, atomization for the rest of you scum.

Unlike the victims of the 2000s, however, the liberal victims of the 2010s were not very sympathetic. First, they were mostly stories of submitting to the casting couch process, and only a few having been actually raped. And secondly, liberals in the 2010s made it clear they were opposed to being All-American and wanted to blow up the nation. So the movement only unified the liberal half of society, contrary to the national unity produced by the vaguely conservative victims of the 2000s.

The typical Mormon girl of the Bush years did not run around screaming for the blue states to be literally nuked, for the breadbasket states to cut off the blue coastal states from the nation's food supply, or any of the rest of the nakedly eliminationist rhetoric (and occasional action) coming from the libtards during the 2010s and today.

Unify the nation's culture with This One Weird Trick...

To wrap things up, where does Gabby Petito fall within this partisan polarization? Lazy observers may see her Italian surname, and her Long Island, NY home, and conclude that she hails from a progressive Democrat stronghold. But in fact, she's from Suffolk County — the one furthest away from New York City, and which voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, despite voting Democrat fairly reliably before then.

And my pioneering article on the ethnic composition of the anti-woke left makes it clear that Italian-Americans are very much not flaming libtards. Wokeness is about incorporating newly conquered tribes into the imperial elite, and Ellis Islanders are old news in that regard. Only the Ashkenazi Jews managed to climb up into the elite ranks alongside the WASPs. All the others have been left to fend for themselves, as newer immigrant groups have become the elites' target for expanding their sphere of influence by giving them a seat at the elite table.

By now, I think even the lazy morons in the media have intuited that Italian-Americans are more like Staten Island and the Jersey Shore, regardless of where else they may live. So they likely understand that Gabby Petito is Deplorable-coded, probably has a Trump-supporter uncle, bla bla bla, and therefore all the more reason to memory-hole her story, lest the nation unify around an unclean soul.