Derek Chauvin and officers subduing George Floyd on May 25, 2020.
The Derek Chauvin/George Floyd affair may have more than a casual resemblance to the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown matters. The earlier instances appeared on first blush, after they’ve been hastily processed through our biased media mill, to be the actions of Klansmen in uniform or racist vigilantes (George Zimmerman). But wait, if earlier episodes are any indication, more information comes tumbling out later to put the situation in a different light. Such may be at least partially true in the George Floyd case.
Here are a few things to keep in mind about Chauvin/Floyd:
(1) Floyd was intoxicated on fentanyl and methamphetamine while also suffering from 2 heart conditions. Both substances were present as per toxicology reports.
(2) There are 2 gaps in the body-cam record prior to Floyd being handcuffed and Chauvin’s eventual subduing of Floyd on the ground. Minnesota AG Ellison’s report quickly passes over the gaps.
(3) Floyd both actively and passively resisted arrest.
(4) The officers at the scene expressed concerns about a condition called “excited delirium syndrome” (ExDS) on the part of Floyd. It’s a condition that is recognized in professional psychiatric manuals and in Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) policy. The condition can be lethal for suspect and officer. The policy calls for restraint of the suspect in a manner similar to the one used.
(5) Floyd claimed he couldn’t breathe long before Chauvin placed his knee on the back of his neck. Besides, the remaining video shows Floyd turning his neck under Chauvin’s knee. This circumstance raises questions about lethality due to asphyxiation.
(6) Floyd didn’t live a life according to the Boy Scout oath. He had a history of criminal convictions. While such a past isn’t dispositive in this particular case, it sheds light on a distressing factor in today’s America: namely, social pathologies aren’t neatly distributed according to a group’s proportion of the population. A large number of criminal activities leads to a large number of run-ins with police and increases the chances of injury from the criminal activity or police efforts to bring the suspect into custody. Being law-abiding has its health benefits.
Does any of this exonerate the officers? It’s hard to tell at this point. All I know is that I smell a rat. The hive of race demagogues is ever-ready to pounce, riot, pillage, destroy, hurt others, and kill. The sad history of lynching has never left us. Only in this case, the targets are the cops.
Before you attempt to hang somebody, make sure that you have the story right.
Are we about to enter a dark age? If so, it’s a weird one. The one that came upon the Roman Empire had the courtesy of suffering from some exogenous forces – you know, the invading Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, the Hun, etc. If true for us, we will have thought ourselves into our own decline. Yes, merely thinking ourselves into civilizational descent. For instance, we have convinced ourselves that the spiel coming out of the mouths of Rev. Al Sharpton and rabble is somehow acceptable … instead of, more accurately, being the canary in the coal mine. To no surprise, and with the sanction of our cultural gatekeepers, the Napoleon of Freddy’s Fashion Mart (Harlem riot, 1995) has added funerals to his itinerary to embolden the wrecking.
Rev. Al Sharpton at the time of the Harlem riot at Freddy’s Fashion Mart.
Al Sharpton was at the pulpit in The Fountain of Praise church in Houston one Tuesday (6/9) to deliver the eulogy for George Floyd. In many ways the performance was the typical race-baiting Al with a few more scriptural references to make the screed go down easier. He mentioned the presence of whites in the protests and disturbances following the death of George Floyd to create the illusion of a popular unity behind Al’s huckster road show. His warped cosmology hasn’t changed since the lynching epidemic of the late 19th century. For him, it’s 1890 Georgia forever.
Bodies of three men lynched in Habersham County, Georgia, on May 17, 1892
The inclusion of whites in the hubbub swirling around Floyd’s death isn’t so much a confirmation of Sharpton’s grand assumptions but the sign of something more troubling. If for Al the KKK never subsided, so they never left the imagination of the Left of all skin tones and hair textures. The same people who founded the Students for a Democratic Society (1962), shut down San Francisco State University (1968), and turned other campuses five decades ago into a cheap knockoff of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror are of the same ilk as the ones who freely roam the streets of Portland, intimidate college deans, desecrate monuments, exploit a singular incident-gone-viral, and gin up riots and pandemonium in our cities.
Al, this isn’t unity on display. It’s the recycling of an insidious view, one in which you, Al, have ridden to ignominy: American civilization is reduced to group oppression and deserving of a complete revolution. Al, in your fevered imagination, everything in that history and way of life is distorted to fit the plot line.
Suburban moms, you may not like Trump, but these folks are coming for you and your kids. The same system that put you in your 3 bedroom/2 bath ranch house is about to be upended if Al and company have their way. They aren’t alone in their efforts. Many of our cultural and economic institutions have been witting and unwitting co-conspirators in the enterprise. Other pundits have rightly mentioned the social homogenization that has taken place among our elites. It’s true. The people running big corporations have more in common with the denizens of a faculty lounge than the average worker scurrying about trying to find daycare for their kids. The same circumstances that gave us the college snowflake also gave us Jeff Bezos (Princeton), Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard), David Taylor (Procter and Gamble CEO, Duke), Sam McMillon (Walmart CEO, U. of Arkansas), Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO, Stanford), Tim Cook (Apple CEO, Auburn/Duke), Bob Chapek (Disney CEO, Michigan State University), etc.
Their backgrounds might even mirror your own. Al Sharpton preaches the same story of mankind that is embedded in the heads of the Fortune 500, as they benefitted from legacy college admissions and cavorted through their undergraduate coursework of racial/ethnic/”the other” identitarianism. They have the seeds of deringolade sown into them in the same manner as Sharpton fed the embryo to the congregants of The Fountain of Praise church.
If you, suburban moms, think that you can insulate your lids from it by escaping to a better neighborhood, you are fooling yourself. I can vouch, as a 30-year teaching veteran, for the mental smog’s presence in nearly all K-12 schools, public or private.
Suburban moms, to be honest, you weren’t immune either. Your kids and the rest of us are and were immersed in the same old post-60’s ideological brine. The new wrinkle for today is the mainstreaming of the extremist. The Marxism and race militancy of Black Lives Matter has the stamp of approval from nearly everything patronized by your kids – Nike, Apple, Walmart, Disney, Netflix – and this after the kids get 6 hours per day of the same invective in their school down the street. Just think, mom, your dream of them going to college, if realized, will only encase the insinuations deeper into their minds.
College students melt down at a Ben Shapiro talk on campus.
And it’s more than one race-baiting non-profit such as Black Lives Matter. We have to think in terms of networks since funds and personnel in such groups flows like spilt milk on a countertop. If Black Lives Matter leaves a sour aftertaste in the mouth of a suburban do-it-yourselfer, Amazon can hide their rope-selling (to borrow Lenin’s memorable phrase) by laundering its donations through other members of the web.
Amazon will shovel $10 million to Black Lives Matter, the Equal Justice Initiative, and ACLU – not exactly residents in the Republican Party tent. Is there any doubt where they will line up in November? Apple CEO, Tim Cook, proclaimed, “That painful past [racist] is still present today — not only in the form of violence, but in the everyday experience of deeply rooted discrimination.” For Cook, like Al Sharpton, it’s 1890 Georgia forever. He promptly announced payday for the hive of race panderers including the Equal Justice Initiative and nondescript others in the “Black and Brown community”. Others like Coca Cola and Nike promise more cash awards to fight the nebulous “systemic racism”.
The scam of “systemic racism” proves useful for these gullible sycophants of modern race demagogues because they won’t be expected to prove it, because they can’t prove it. No one can. It’s so vague as to be absolutely unprovable, and thus a practical tool for revolution. If you can’t find open racists – there are too few to justify torching a civilization – simply shift the blame to a shadowy “system”. In the end, the money spigot will be cranked wide open to bankroll new hordes of marauders who will leave behind an empty husk of a once great civilization.
Militancy and revolution hide behind imprecise and fungible boilerplate like “systemic racism” and “social justice”. The tags function like magical incantations: what was once repulsive all of a sudden becomes righteous under these airy abstractions. Riots, mob rule, beatings, and ignorant defacement tramps the country. Ruin stalks in their wake.
What happens when the last bastions of authority for public order – the police – are smeared as a class? “Defund” and “abolish” are attached to the institution? Who’s doing it? To be sure, the advocates wouldn’t be caught dead at a Republican coffee klatch … if the firebrands weren’t accorded the opportunity to shout and spray spittle into the faces of the attendees. The wards of the Democratic Party are countenancing the spectacle, providing legal and political cover. With no exceptions, the urban scenes of the worst of the outrages have been ruled by Democrats for decades, or more. They have drifted more Left as the sweet center of the party has normalized Bernie Sanders and The Squad (AOC, et al). Flipping the bird and f-bombs are an accepted part of the stage antics at deep blue-state Democratic Party conventions (California circa 2017). Now it’s kneeling (ostensibly for Floyd but in reality, a “go” signal for thugs) and handcuffs for police – not for looters and rioters, mind you – by congressional Democrats.
The middle finger to Trump at California Democratic Party convention in 2017.Kneeling Democratic Party leadership in the capitol.
This isn’t the first time that the Democratic Party has been associated with overturning the Constitution. Remember the slavocracy of the old South and the copperheads up north in the middle of the 19th century? Remember the Civil War’s 2% death toll? Remember Jim Crow? These were Democrats back then. Today, many Democrat-run cities and states are actively seeking to nullify federal immigration law – a replay of South Carolina’s nullification of the tariff law in 1832. The party’s leadership openly pushes the central planning and inherent totalitarianism in Medicare for All and The Green New Deal. Our Constitution will be made as witless as the one in Venezuela.
Democrat governors, mayors, and city councils are the ones who abandoned large swaths of their cities to the mob and put their residents at the mercy of the rabble. They are the ones who want to slash or eliminate police department budgets at a time of widespread anarchy. NYC no longer has a plainclothes division. LA’s mayor is shuffling funds from law enforcement to the very groups who have been cheer-leading the chaos. Minneapolis is going for the whole enchilada: a complete repeal of the police department.
And now, their DC comrades are advancing something akin to a police-free future – maybe not in an overt manner, but at least a noticeable facsimile after they’ve made the job of cop exponentially more dangerous and financially ruinous. Who’d want to take the job? You’d have to be insane.
Former police officer David Dorn killed by rioters in St. Louis, June 2, 2020.Dzenan Camovic, 20, allegedly stabbed a cop on anti-looting patrols in Brooklyn in the neck on Wednesday, June 3, 2020, around midnight. Following a confrontation with police, two other cops were shot in the hand and arm. Camovic was shot eight times and is in critical condition. (Daily Mail)
For the general law-abiding public, get a gun and hunker down in your home. If the electricity still flows and your tv functions, you can watch from your couch marauding hordes defile a couple of centuries of glory and human advancement. If the citizens of Rome in the 5th century had live streaming, they would have been able to view the Roman Forum of Augustus’s time turn into the one of today – a pile of mostly rubble. Come November, suburban moms, you’ll have the opportunity to contribute to a replay of that history. If today’s polls are any indication of November’s outcome, Americans of all stripes will get to relive the sacking of Rome by Alaric, king of the Visigoths, in 410 AD. Only this time, we will have done it to ourselves.
The sacking of Rome by the Visigoths under King Alaric in 410 AD. Look familiar?
Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Arkansas) and the New York Times.An NYPD police car burns as protesters clash with police during a march against the death of George Floyd in Brooklyn, N.Y., May 30, 2020. (photo: Jeenah Moon/Reuters)
Tom Cotton, Arkansas senator, recently ignited the younger scribblers in the New York Times’s newsroom into paroxysms of rage for daring to present a view that counters their settled and stunted worldview. What’s so outrageous in offering up the option of using troops to quell insurrection-style riots across the country? Then again, the young journos emanated from college, today’s colleges.
A sizeable portion of the populace is expected to go to college, but these places of “higher” (maybe “lower” or “lesser” are more accurate adjectives) learning have been petri dishes for years for the nurturing of skin color, genitalia, sex-changing, bedroom-mate, colonization hyper-sensitivities. Huge blocks of the college catalogue are more than just the inculcation of oppression, oppression everywhere. The newly minted oppression departments and their courses are considered by many a college dean to be replacements for the classics. The traditional academic core, for what remains of it, is no refuge since it is riddled with the oppression-palooza. There’s no escape once you step foot on the campus. The stuff seeps down to K-12.
As a 30-year veteran of the classroom, I can testify to the looniness of it all. Long ago, rigor was removed from the curriculum as race, sex, gender, class consciousness filled the void. Think of it as Marxism for hipsters.
I’m reminded of Hitler’s PR guy, Joseph Goebbels, and his big lie theory.
Undated photo of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of propaganda, delivering a speech. (Bengt von zur Muehlen/Yad Vashem Photo Archive)
The idea has two parts: the often-repeated big lie itself and the necessity of suppressing dissenting views to preserve the lie. Here is the full Goebbels quote:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
So, the first part of the task is accomplished with the 80-year-long marination of the population in the fable of the unceasing oppression of workers, the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, women, and the whole host of the nondescript “other” – everyone LGBTQ and interracial and intersexual and intersectional and everywhere the twain shall meet – from age 5 to death. The second part of the Goebbels program is actively underway, and has been for quite some time. Try and present a word of caution and you’ll be inundated with the charge of racism. There will be no place left for you in polite company.
The smothering of free thought isn’t limited to the schools. Mandatory sheltering-in-place has made your home no refuge from the mental miasma. Speaking of a captured audience. You need not go to college to get the balderdash. Bazos and his Amazon Prime caliphate will bring to you Black Lives Matter dogmas with race-conscious banner offerings at the top of Amazon’s Prime’s home page under a title emblazoned with “Black Lives Matter”.
Big tech and its gazillions in cash and omnipresent reach are fully onboard as they penetrate into every hand and home. Lenin’s quip about rope-sellers (the rich will sell us the rope to hang them) comes to mind. Colleges go up in flames, and so do urban streets; the Fortune 500 is aiding and abetting; our media are the revolution’s propaganda arm; and law enforcement are dirty words.
What’s up with this? Well, we need to look no further than the prevalence of a fashionable philosophy. It’s a view of life with tentacles in a sea of demonstrable falsehoods, akin to Goebbels’s manufactured truth. The shoddy myth story surrounding Michael Brown and race-stats contorted into pseudo-scientific proof are invoked to make the unreal look real. Need everything boil down to the imaginings of identity-based oppression, oppression everywhere? Our world has gone insane as we are beset by a real virus and a pervasive, virus-like twisting of the mind. The old aphorism of education being the key to success is made into gibberish as education is no longer education, as commonly understood.
It’s interesting to speculate on the possible relationship between turning the population into 3-month shut-ins and the outbursts of violence in our cities. The tie is more complex than the easy task of disproving the nonsense coming out of the mouths of those running the show in the newest third world state – the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) – smack dab in the middle of Seattle. Heather McDonald’s myth-busting work on the subject has been stellar.
The Black Lives Matter/Antifa gang is predicated on a simple assumption: Blacks as a class are as oppressed today as they were in the days of slavery and Jim Crow. Trotted out as proof are numbers in relation to the target group’s proportion of the overall population. The media repeat the inanities over and over again. However, actual social conditions and behavior don’t correspond to the Census Bureau’s percentages for race and ethnicity. 13% of the population shouldn’t be expected to mean 13% of murders, 13% of robberies, 13% of dropouts, 13% of out-of-wedlock births, 13% of drug use, 13% of gang activity, 13% of single-parent families, 13% of …. According to the woke directorate coming out of our colleges and into our institutions, any upward deviation away from the norm is due to racism … or one of many other of the “isms” bouncing around.
Speaking of jumping to conclusions, this rivals Evel Knieval’s (stuntman extraordinaire, 1938-2007) anticipated-but-never-performed leap across the Grand Canyon.
Evel Knievel’s plan for his jump (unsuccessful) across the Snake River Canyon in Idaho, 1974.
It’s a fallacy bordering on self-delusion, a politically convenient self-delusion.
It’s like they put their heads in a box and prevent anything else from interfering with their tunnel vision. Take for example something as simple as traffic stops, leading to the banality of “driving while black”. No attempt is made to correlate stops with racial breakdowns of driving behavior and time of day on the road. Plus, at night when the charge of systemic police racism is mostly made, how can an officer determine race from behind and through tainted windows at 30 feet? The accusation won’t survive a sufficient degree of adult analysis.
And, for sure, those other social conditions aren’t hitched to the racial distributions either. Could those other social conditions – chaotic homes in the grip of out-of-wedlock births (75% of black births), single-parenthood, substance abuse, unstable and frequent romantic relationships in front of the kids, etc. – have greater explanatory power for inordinate black run-ins with the police than the charge of Klansmen in uniform? Race is not a determinant of behavior, but upbringing is. And upbringing stats don’t align with population proportionality.
These are hard truths than cannot be easily explained away. Nonetheless, we are expected by our so-called “enlightened betters” to function as a society on this mountain of deceit. Sadly, the real victims of this crusade into absurdity are the many upstanding black citizens who unfairly wear the stain of the underlying reality. They get lumped into the same category by seasoned cabbies of all races, and maybe too many cops of all races. The War on Poverty came to help but left in its wake the devastation of some of our most vulnerable: people who were chained into slavery, suffered under Jim Crow, endured the lynching epidemic, locked into perpetual serfdom, and then were enticed by the glitter of government mammon. To be fair, the allure has afflicted all groups. But the most impacted were the most historically victimized, and victimized in ways not emanating from the bullhorns of those manning the barricades of CHAZ.
A gathering on Wednesday in the Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill, where protesters have established an “autonomous zone.” (photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)
Indeed, we have created for ourselves a world without reason and are living the consequences.
Red Guards — high school and university students — wave copies of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book during a parade in June 1966 in Beijing’s streets at the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution. (photo: Jean Vincent/AFP)Scenes from a Black Lives Matter rally and march in Falls Church, Va., June 4, 2020. (Staff Photo by Jay Westcott, Tyson’s Reporter)
Prologue
Many things in the present resemble the past. They are not exact replicas for sure, but they have enough in common to make us aware of the existence of human nature. Yes, recurring instances prove our commonness since our creation and/or evolution. The scenes on the streets of our cities circa 2020 strikingly approximate the blind fury of the young that was ignited by Mao in China from 1966-76, something called the Cultural Revolution. The mob personality, the participants’ ages, the modes of behavior, all fitted to a revolutionary cause, transcends group titles and the calendar.
Mao’s Red Guards and Black Lives Matter/Antifa occupy the same category in group genus.
The Return of the Red Guards, Episode 1
We are in a very critical moment in our country’s history. The unthinkable is gaining currency. Namely, the sources of stability, legitimacy, security, and decency are coming under assault. Mobs and protest movements are spreading throughout the country to destroy some of our most critical institutions as they ride on a current of provable falsehoods. Right now, the target are police departments. Violent lunatics are in charge of the streets with chants of “Abolish the police” and “Defund the police”. History provides examples of the horror. From 1966 to 1976 – for ten years – Mao unleashed the zealous young to rid the country of any vestiges, real or imagined, overwhelmingly imaginary, of the fuzzy sin of counter-revolution. Defacing the country’s history was all the rage. Assaults and public humiliations were common.
Sound familiar? Look to your tv screen. We have our own Red Guards rampaging through downtowns and neighborhoods as they destroy any symbol of “oppression”. Public humiliations proliferate like the one inflicted on Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey. Mitt Romney disgraced himself by lending legitimacy to the lie with his presence in a Black Lives Matter (BLM) march. They have captured an entire political party, the Democratic Party. It’s shameful and a harbinger of more evils to come.
The video below will introduce you to the reality of Mao’s Red Guards. As you watch, notice the similarities between what racked Red China for a decade and American cities of 2020. More videos will follow, including the public humiliation of Mayor Jacob Frey.
The Return of the Red Guards, Episode 2
Here are more people who participated in Mao’s monstrosity. Notice the Red Guards’s attempt to expunge elements of the past. Notice the fervor and public humiliations. We are replaying a tumult that set China back for decades. The same could be in store for us.
The Return of the Red Guards, Episode 3
After humiliating himself at the alter of the god of “systemic racism” with a confession of his own “privilege”, Mayor Jacob Frey ended up not earning any street cred with the Red Guards 2.0. When he couldn’t, and shouldn’t, commit to abolishing the city’s police department, he was demeaned out of the horde with shouts, cursing, and boos.
To placate the radical left in their party, the Dem leadership in Congress promises “reform” of the police. It won’t matter if their efforts are just tinkering around the edges. Even minor moves to satisfy the Red Guards will send the signal of reward. To borrow a phrase, what gets rewarded gets repeated. Brace yourself for more havoc in our cities, if not now, in the not-too-distant future.
Epilogue
Many things become possible – and horrifying – in a setting of intense, excitable crowds with animated and demagogic firebrands. The goal of this social swarm is the all too common “burn it all down”. The only problem is, the eradication of the old is replaced by systemic thuggery. Systemic thuggery is real, as folks in Russia, Germany, Italy, China, North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, et al, can attest. In contrast, systemic racism is a ghost for ideological gangsters to continually resurrect to generate disorder. And make no mistake about it, for these malcontents, disorder is their path to power.
Oscar Wilde was famous for having written, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”. Come to think of it, I agree. A super-majority on the Minneapolis City Council – 9 of 13 – are in favor of bringing the plot of the “The Purge” to their fair city by abolishing the police department. More than that, they are anxious to become the next Detroit. When did ruin become so fashionable?
If you’ll recall, the story of the “The Purge” centers on a legal holiday for criminal pandemonium once a year. Kudos to creator/screenwriter James DeMonaco for being so prescient.
The predicate for our current sanctioned anarchy was the sin of commission by one Minneapolis cop as three others performed a sin of omission for not interceding in the killing of George Floyd. All four are charged, but legal action against the four is left in the dust as the video goes viral and the ever-present hair-trigger mob gets another opportunity to display their militant bonafides. The issue has been nationalized and internationalized. It’s no longer the misbehavior of four people but the purported misbehavior of nearly everyone not black – and black too if they don’t hold the prescribed views – and all cops everywhere, no matter the skin hue. It’s a singular incident to feed the “woke” mill.
The officers charged in the killing of George Floyd.
Activists disguised as elected officials, fully marinated in the secular doctrine of perpetual victimhood, have announced their push for nihilism. If you thought that Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland couldn’t be placed in the nonfiction section, read this encounter between CNN’s Alisyn Camerota and Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender.
Alisyn Camerota (l) and Lisa Bender.
Camerota (I paraphrase): Are you saying that you want to dismantle the police department, that you want a “police-free” future? Bender: “Yeah, and you know a lot of us were asked if can you imagine a future without police back in 2017 when we were running for office. And I answered ‘yes’ to that question. To me that future is a long way away and it would take an enormous amount of investment in things that we know work to keep people safe.” Camerota pressed (I paraphrase): What if my home was broken into in the middle of the night? Who would I call? Bender: “Yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors. And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege.”
Besides the wallowing in the mental maturity of a 6-year-old, Bender escapes into cloudy abstractions. These are abstractions without clear definition and therefore not provable, but they don’t have to be in order to be useful in the crusade. One is “systemic racism” (or “institutional”) and the other is “privilege”. The words are thrown about like magical incantations. Just using the words, they believe, will unveil a hidden gnosis to “woke” initiates. And it’s on this basis that public policy is concocted. Amazing.
So, Bender and eight of her comrades on the Minneapolis City Council are in a rush to ape Detroit. Chronic disorder and violence aren’t a selling point to any city’s chamber of commerce. Bender’s recipe of things that “we know work” – the free stuff and counseling galore pumped into the inner city – won’t stem the chaos and won’t stem the desire of anyone (black, white, or otherwise) with even the most meager means to skedaddle. Bender and her colleagues are Jim Joneses dispensing Kool-Aid.
Their model is Detroit, whether they realize it or not. The 1960’s riots were amphetamines for the huge exodus of whites and blacks. Detroit, like many other cities experiencing riots and high crime, violated the diversity god by becoming more monochromatic – overwhelmingly black and poor. From 1950 to 2010 (the last census), the white cohort in the city plummeted from 1.5 million to 75,000. As others have written, median incomes of black families tanked in the city because the middle-class ones fled. Sure, the self-immolation of the Big Three didn’t help, and there’s always a symbiosis between social and economic conditions, but you can’t call barbarity on the streets a harbinger of growth. It matters little whether you are white or black or a millennial or hipster if your kids were forced into a gang initiation or if one of your roommates was beat to a pulp for his wallet. Graffiti and crack houses don’t make for good neighborhood cohesion.
Abandoned home in a neighborhood of abandoned homes in Dertoit.
The scene was repeated in Watts, Chicago, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Newark, Atlanta, the South Bronx, etc. Bender and company are a clan of Dorothies prancing down the yellow brick road, the road to a bombed-out city.
*Demonstrators push against a police car after rioting erupted in a crowd of 1,500 in the Los Angeles area of Watts in this file photo taken August 12, 1965. (AP Photo/File)
In an earlier post, I suggested, “Get out of the cities”. If history is any indication, you will. More than that, get a gun and hold it dear. Call it your Bender gun.
Protesters gather around after setting fire to the entrance of a police station as demonstrations continue after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., May 28, 2020. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
It’s everywhere. The story of America is reduced to “systemic racism” to such an extent that the chants of Black Lives Matter are made mainstream. Logging onto my Facebook page confronted me with “Act Against Racial Injustice: We stand with the Black community and against racism. Together we can support causes working towards racial justice and equality.” Going to the Bing search engine brought out the announcement, “We stand in solidarity with the Black community and all those working toward racial equality. A message from our CEO.” At least the techies are all in for a campaign against the alleged pervasiveness of racism.
The headliner for an email from CEO Satya Nadella to Microsoft employees.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
And then we have the New York Times weighing in with “The 1619 Project”. It’s an unadulterated attempt to boil the story of America down to racism. The tale is directed at the kiddies in K-12 curricula from the screed’s website. So, the kids get a bald-faced version ladled on top of what they receive daily from intellectually corrupted teachers, textbooks, and supplemental materials. The story is the same: Racism persists everywhere in an overt/covert and individual/institutional manner. To keep the story rolling, it’s better for the cause that the supposed threat be imprecise, vague, hidden, and forever true no matter what.
Sen. Tom Cotton penned an op-ed to the New York Times on the entirely reasonable option to use federal troops to quell our current wave of riots. The Constitution, The Insurrection Act, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Little Rock during Eisenhower’s White House residency are testament to its feasibility and legality. It’s an entirely different question to ask whether this is the time for it. In my view, we are getting there. Still, the reaction in the Times’s newsroom was open rebellion. The woke crowd in their work stalls had their sensitivities enflamed and threatened mass resignation.
But is the story of endemic racism true? Color me skeptical. Maybe you too.
Andrew C. McCarthy’s article in National Review Online, “The ‘Institutional Racism’ Canard”, puts lie to the charge. His case is strong. Quoting Heather McDonald, “a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”
Andrew C. McCarthy
There’s more. A quarter of unarmed suspects killed by police are black, even though blacks make up 13% of the population. An argument for the Left? No. The lawlessness of many of our urban neighborhoods is illustrative of the fact that blacks compose 53% of murders and 60% of robberies. They have many more run-ins with the cops and a much higher potential to fall into the killed-by-police category. And the victims are overwhelmingly black and so are the ones reporting the crimes. It’s amazing that the number is “only” – but still sad – 9 unarmed blacks killed in contrast to 19 whites in 2019. The whole story that the marchers and rioters are bull-horning is manufactured.
Why does the story have resonance? In military parlance, the ground has been prepared. Decades of K-18 victimhood is extracting a price in combustible cities and hijacked minds. The matriculants filter into Fortune 500 boardrooms, cultural institutions, journalism, the arts, and everywhere people occupy positions of influence.
Undeniably, most impactful factor is the philosophical bias in the schools.
One person (David Bahnsen) even speculated on the role of colleges and universities in making California left wing from top to bottom and in and out. The more pervasive the campuses, the more pervasive the ideology. This circumstance might partially explain the uncompromising leftward tilt of the state.
Other blue states may periodically vote a split ballot: an occasional Republican for governor or mayor and Dems down-ballot (Mass., N.Y., N.J., Maryland for instance). Colleges are present in these states but not so wall-to-wall as in the Golden State. 115 community colleges exist in the state with 1 out of 4 community college pupils in the U.S. attending one in California. 119 4-year colleges and universities of a variety of shapes and sizes exist in the state, including the massive 33 public ones of over 670,000 full-time enrollees. No state has the capacity to disseminate leftist thinking as does California. There’s no corner of the state to escape the culture-smog. It penetrates everywhere and a super-majority of the electorate.
Students of UC Berkeley.
All kinds of nonsense and maliciousness sprouts in the pervasive academically-influenced soil of California. New and novel ways to repeal the Second Amendment in the state; outlawing separate boy/girl toy isles in a store; attempts to ban any alternative to the government schools; ham-handed efforts to force abortion and the LGBTQ agenda onto religious organizations and their social mission; environmental central planning; declaring war on preexisting and longstanding industries in favor of a destructive utopia; the nullification of federal immigration law; and the scare story of racism, racism everywhere, are taken seriously in this peculiar hothouse.
Do we need any more proof of the damage caused by the deformation of learning in our schools? Build more colleges in your state in this day and age and watch your politics go to hell. Real reform that moves us away from the precipice of perpetual victimhood, riots, falsehoods, and malignant crusades begins with the real reform of our schools. An unchallenged and malicious ideology shouldn’t be allowed to take root and then undermine the state and nation. This is no demand for the rule of another monolithic ideology, but rather a call for balance. Now that’s real reform.
The cry of “throw the bums out” begins with a focus on those in critical public agencies in education and the teacher-training colleges. Stop the madness by going to the source.
“Until I know this sure uncertainty, I’ll entertain the offered fallacy.” (William Shakespeare, “The Comedy of Errors”)
Electron microscope at the University of Bath, UK.
I can’t leave the subject of the coronavirus alone; riots and “defunding” the police be damned. Everything about the virus says so much about ourselves and our current state of affairs.
An image of the new coronavirus taken with an electron microscope. (photo: U.S. National Institutes of Health/AP)
“COVID-19 Is Not the Flu”, so stipulates the title of John McCormack’s piece in the May 18 edition of National Review. It’s the primary assumption that drives most everything that has been written and said on the subject of our current contagion, the coronavirus. Hugh Hewitt, another of the center/right commentariat, is fond of prefacing some of his remarks on his radio show with “in the year of plague”. Is the sickness a “plague” and is it “not the flu”? Honestly, I don’t know, and neither do they, and neither does much of the army of others who have contributed to the widely publicized tale about the virus. They claim a confidence that is unwarranted.
The storyline on the contagion is its proclaimed near-apocalyptic threat to civilization, so much so that we have come close to ending society. Thus, we are required to live a life of imitation and strangeness: an ersatz sociability through a mask, distance, digitization, and no touching; a dangerous fiddling with people’s livelihoods through arbitrary edicts of “essential” and “nonessential”; and the unwitting deputization of a horde of unthinking scolds.
I stand corrected. The unthinking scolds are thinking, but they could be reasoning from a host of unexamined assumptions.
One unexamined assumption occurred to me as I was reading McCormack’s essay. His comments were composed at a time of what could be referred to, in hindsight, as high hysteria. While in this public state-of-mind, nothing, as far as I am aware, has been written or said on the possibility of the distorting effects of focusing so many resources on this virus that comparisons with other pestilences are impossible. The distorting effects contribute to an emotional and socio-political environment that then corrupts the raw data. The rationale becomes the equivalent of a house of cards but is sold as rock solid.
The field of physics presents an excellent illustration. Scientists have long been aware of the possible impact of their detection methods on the object of their interest. The mere act of observation can alter the nature of it and distort their findings. As a result, they must be constantly conscious of this “observer effect”. Are our public policy experts, political leaders, and punditry class mindful of it in areas beyond science? Given what I’ve seen, heard, and read, I kinda doubt it.
I’ll use McCormack’s piece to lay out the conventional explanation for the gravity of this virus. His argument that it isn’t the flu, and shouldn’t be treated like it is, relies on an analysis that probably suffers from the observer effect. The observer in this case would be the public and private entities with a singular laser focus on this thing. No sickness has ever drawn this much attention in recent times. The final public and private bill for our reaction to this contagion hasn’t been finalized. As of today, the federal government has pumped trillions upon trillions of dollars into relief and treatments. The Federal Reserve will inject $1.5 trillion to finance the response. How quaint for Sen. Everett Dirksen to opine in 1933, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” We have to add a zero to keep up with the numbers rolling out of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
A few trillion dollars of observer makes for one mammoth potential for distortion.
In addition, the states have thrown another billions, if not trillions, into the kitty. California’s governor Gavin Newson estimated in April that the initial drain on the state’s treasury will amount to $7 billion (We’re still in Dirksen land), with more billions by the end of the year. Many states have seen their fiscal ledgers tip into the red, maybe way into the red. The word “bankruptcy” now applies to more than the businesses that they have driven into insolvency with their loose labeling of “nonessential”.
The upshot: all this activity has generated more data on this contagion than any other. To make the case that this candidate for mayhem is worse than prior ones, McCormack trots out the numbers for H1N1 of 61 million infections and 12,500 deaths over 12 months. The death toll for the flu season of 2018-19 runs about 34,200, he says. How do we know that these numbers were a product of a run-of-the-mill “good enough” as opposed to the frantic hyperactivity for corona? The difference in response between the culprits colors the numbers to such an extent that they could become incomparable.
In the earlier instances, the beginning and end dates for the infection might be more casually agreed upon. In quite another, contact tracing is conducted with all the intensity of Nazis ferreting out those with the “poisoned” blood of the Jews. The start/finish is pushed further and further out as more and more attention is devoted to it. The difference in the intensity of scrutiny creates a classic apples and oranges fallacy. Like isn’t compared with like.
Then, overreaction feeds more overreaction. Borrowing from science once again, we have now created a system feedback loop of frenzy feeding into more frenzy. Our collection and analysis of feverishly acquired data doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It occurs in an atmosphere of fear and doom.
It’s likely that the overhanging sense of dread will stampede governments into monumental actions that will culminate in subsidizing moral hazard in the realm of data collection. The money for defraying the costs of the epidemic will reward the promiscuous assignment of cases to the coronavirus category. The numbers are corrupted. The situation produces grossly uneven numbers depending on an official’s susceptibility to the corruption.
Macomb County, Mich., Chief Medical Examiner Daniel Spitz in April was quoted as saying, “I think a lot of clinicians are putting that condition (COVID-19) on death certificates when it might not be accurate because they died with coronavirus and not of coronavirus.” In addition, “Are they [the coronavirus death numbers] entirely accurate? No. Are people dying of it? Absolutely. Are people dying of other things and coronavirus is maybe getting credit? Yeah, probably.” Numbers get inflated in a surrounding climate of subsidized frenzy.
The shear volume and intensity of observation warps our perception of reality. It makes more difficult the useful the sort of comparisons which are critical for ascertaining the magnitude of the threat. The more we peer into a contagion, the more we make those numbers incomparably unique.
All of us are observers who have been made more obsessive about this disease by a world of extraordinary connectivity. We know in an instant what is happening anywhere. If our government is drawn to a particular happenstance, it’s ferocity of activity will combine with our own to disfigure our judgment. I can only wish that our chattering classes were as aware of this humbling aspect of our nature.
A man poses for a photo in the parking lot of a AutoZone store in Minneapolis in May of 2020. (photo: Carlos Gonzalez/AP)
And, I might add, get out of any deep blue state.
In an earlier post, I mentioned the odd reality of the government requiring everyone to be masked. Now we have it! Rioters in cities across the country are masked as they pillage, burn, loot, maul bystanders, and hunt down cops. It’s doubly difficult now to do any facial recognition to bring to justice any of the miscreants.
Masked or unmasked, if you live in any of the liberally governed American cities, and if those cities reside in a deep blue state, get out and get out now. The governing classes in these places are moving to cripple the thin blue line. Once the line has been reduced to a wispy strand, you can’t even get a gun to defend yourself, family, and property. A ten-day waiting period awaits you in California … and the purchase could very well be rejected by Commissar Becerra (California AG) anyway. New York City dictates a city permit to own a handgun, and if you have the patience of Job and get one, don’t dare take it out of the safe. If you happen to defend yourself with it, you’ll experience the full force of the law, something not to be applied to a mauler and pillager of the innocent public.
38-year police veteran, police captain, and police chief, David Dorn, was murdered helping to defend a friend’s business from rioters.A Las Vegas police officer was shot and critically injured late Monday as police attempted to take protesters into custody. He was identified Tuesday afternoon as 29-year-old Shay Mikalonis.
This comes at a time when the activist base of the Democratic Party cries for the defunding of the police. They say, “If you want an AR-15, join the police.” Well, there won’t be much of a police force to seek employment, and you still won’t have anything to defend yourself. Absent a cop and gun, prepare to prostate yourself before the mob. If that is an unappealing prospect, move!
LA mayor Garcetti announced today a $150 million cut in the LAPD’s budget. His message for the residents of LA is simple: you had better wear a mask as you get pummeled by the mob.
I don’t know what else to tell you. In other similarly governed nations, people risk dangerous deserts and the Florida Straits to escape the chaos of the drug cartels, MS-13, and the workers’ paradises. You have ample company.
Cuban refugees fleeing to Florida in a raft, August 24, 1994.
A protester runs past burning cars and buildings on Chicago Avenue, Saturday, May 30, 2020, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Ross Douthat, no admirer of Donald Trump, has penned an op-ed for the New York Times that is a clear warning to left/progressives to watch out (see below). If they soft pedal the violence, they may face a similar backlash as in 1968 when Nixon won a close election on a wave of the “silent majority”. Then, in my view, Douthat goes off the rails when he predicts Biden is better positioned than Trump to win in 2020.
Ross Douthat
Anyway, the crime spike in Obama’s last years in office, the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, the current conflagrations in our cities, and the screeches coming out of a much more radical Democratic Party should be dire warnings to any Democrat of longstanding.
Demonstrators stand in the middle of West Florissant as they react to tear gas fired by police during ongoing protests in reaction to the shooting of teenager Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, August 18, 2014. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)
Sure, as others have noticed, Trump’s mouth is his own worst enemy. He grates against the sensibilities of the vast middle of the electorate. His rhetorical mannerisms can frequently upset an otherwise judicious message. Thus, he makes his reelection tougher by the day.
But, no matter Trump’s faults, they don’t take place in a vacuum. The center of today’s Democratic Party has moved ever closer to the SDS’s Port Huron Statement of 1962. It’s a radical party that is morphing into a revolutionary one.
A little backgrounder is necessary. For those who’ve either forgotten or were never taught, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is a direct descendant of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society of 1905. Here’s the genealogy: Intercollegiate Socialist Society > League for Industrial Democracy > Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) > Students for a Democratic Society.
The SDS national council meeting, 1963; Tom Hayden at far left. (Photograph: C Clark Kissinger)
No red-baiting here. People who would be comfortable in the SDS – Bernie and his bros, and the dominating activist base in deep blue states – are in the driver’s seat of the party. The Port Huron Statement – the constitution of the 60’s radical left – could very well be the party’s 2020 platform, with concessions to the lunacy of identity politics. How repellent would that be to middle class voters just wanting to get back to work and their kids in school? Do I have to answer?
Biden can’t run from that. Biden can be made into a comforting figure for the general election but he can’t run from the party who chose him. The duty of the Republican Party in the fall campaign would be to make Biden and the Democrats more indefensible than Trump’s tweets. The radical and preening Squad is one thing, but burning cities threatening to spread to the suburbs, and the spawning of a crime wave from no-bail and non-prosecution policies may do to the Dem Party what happened to them from 1968 onward. When a party cements a reputation as a threat to civil order, they’re in trouble … big trouble.
California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton leads a “F***k Donald Trump” chant at the California Democratic Party Convention in May of 2017.
Trump’s greatest ally is his opponents. Douthat underestimates the moral corruption of the Democrat side of the political equation.
Protesters run away when police move forward near the White House during a protest over the death of George Floyd in Washington D.C., the United States, on May 30, 2020. Demonstrations and riots have spread to cities across the United States after a video went viral of George Floyd being suffocated to death by a white police officer in the midwest U.S. state of Minnesota on May 25. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
Right now, riots and General Flynn are competing with the epidemic for headline news space. All of them can only be reasonably processed by taking a breath and waiting for pertinent facts to arise and a cooling-off period to assess the situation in an adult fashion. Understanding the George Floyd case will take more serious and steady minds than those possessed by Democrat firebrands and a crowd of urbanites-turned-street-thugs. We’re quickly coming to realize for the umpteenth time that it doesn’t take much for chaotic home lives to become chaotic streets.
On the Flynn front, the suave Obama may turn out to be what he was all along: a smooth-talking community organizer who made the upper echelons of the federal government an arm of his Democratic Party. Bad news for General Flynn and the 2016 victor over Obama’s anointed successor. It’s only beginning to tumble out. Frequently, first impressions are wrong in love and headlines.
Former U.S. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn departs U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., December 1, 2017. (REUTERS/Jonathan ErnsC)
It’s no less true about the virus shipped to us from China. The reaction of our “better” people was lackadaisical at first and then immediately went to Nigel Tufnel’s (Spinal Tap) “11”. I have long suspected that big decisions were made on very little evidence, and much of that false.
A good deal of the reaction depends on where you sit, as I’ve said before. Our media central nervous system centers in New York City and runs up and down the Bos-Wash spinal cord, the most densely packed region in the country. .2% of New York’s population was killed by the bug. The inhibitions to a surrender of the mind to raw emotions was dramatically lowered by simply looking out the window (or, more properly, the “window” of our many connected devices). Can you really say that the view wouldn’t overwhelm a person’s rational calculus?
Sure, the same can be said of someone living in a lightly affected region, like my Montana. Both perspectives are probably wrong, but can we ignore the reality that more facts have emerged and more alternative voices have had a chance to weigh in? The virus is contagious and not nearly as lethal as Oxford’s crystal ball gazing that gave us 2.2 million deaths. The disease has trended downward from the Black Death apocalypse to something just above flu season.
The common cold.
I can’t help but wonder that the huge numbers of infected are at least partially a result of the massive total war approach for dealing with this particular candidate for mayhem. We know more about the reach of this virus than probably any of the more recent varietals of flu, including the strange strains of fall 2019. We have always been swimming around in a sea of pathogens. That won’t change when this culprit fades. By concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, we exaggerate its relative magnitude. Great and highly focused efforts inherently distort perspective.
The 100,000 deaths figure demands reexamination. Not that the number is wrong (even though it can be contested from a number of angles) but we have no reliable comparison with other infectious diseases because they were never accorded this level of rectal examination.
The trigger for this piece was the discovery on the CDC website of a “case fatality rate” (CFR) of 0.26% for corona (thanks Robert Verbruggen). That contrasts with the run-of-the-mill CFR ranging from 0.5 to 1.0. What’s up with that? Another example of the downward progression of the disease’s lethality.
Are we about to experience another round of disappointment for those panting for the next “Moral Equivalent of War” so as to stampede us into the Green New Deal or a woke utopia? Ignoring the ski slope fall in the actuality of a cataclysm, some still act as if the mirage of the March state-of-play has magically become as true today as it was false back then. They are as stuck in the past as Bernie Sanders and AOC are wallowing in their long-dead Scandinavian socialism. AOC’s “Scandinavia” has the same totemic value for her as the use of “selfish” and “reckless” by today’s wannabe authoritarians.
Was it all worth it? You now, the shutdowns, shelter-in-place, masks, social distancing; the loss of 10-25% of small businesses; the movement of millions of workers from the workplace to unemployment; the rise in depression, suicides, domestic violence, and substance abuse; the release of “nonviolent” inmates to “nonviolently” prey on their neighbors; and the damage to the health care of anyone not suffering from a fever and pneumonia. And let’s not forget the destruction of social life by the loss of grandma’s hugs, big-family dinners, the social bonding of the handshake, antiseptic romance through a mask, and human interaction reduced to a digital image on a screen. We may as well go all-in for sex-bots and any motorized version of a person in grey hair.
She’s a model … James with Harmony in The Sex Robots Are Coming. James is among the protagonists of The Sex Robots Are Coming, an investigation into the development of animatronic, AI-enabled silicone sexbots, and part of Rise of the Robots season on British tv.
More of the same is likely to come. These geniuses have yet to distinguish this contagion from any prior, contemporaneous, or future one. If the strangulation of society is justified for this rapidly declining threat, buckle up for the next fall/winter. As some addicts have said, taking the first hit of coke makes it easier to snort the next line, and the next, and the next, and ….
I am not sure if we are careening toward Orwell’s Oceania or Huxley’s World State. Either way, I’d hate to see the books moved from fiction to nonfiction on the Amazon website.
