County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Mayor Londond Breed centerSan Francisco Mayor London Breed
Many of our debates are vastly off-kilter. It begins with hugely consequential things. Republicans seem intent on foisting Donald Trump on the country again. The Democrats are focused on making a shambles of our country. The former makes the latter more likely. The abhorrent DJT is simply too ugly a face for the GOP to succeed among a national electorate.
It doesn’t stop there. The so-called solutions have the maturity and depth of understanding of locker room humor. Trumpkins insinuate that the country needs a Tasmanian Devil (of Looney Tunes fame) to fight, fight anyone, anyone coming from any direction, making enemies of friends. The Dems and their fellow cultural revolutionaries (their inspiration: Mao), after creating swaths of wreckage from their cuckoo ideas, want the help of people, who they have habitually tarred, to clean up their mess.
For the revolutionaries in power, more cops to reverse the doom loop of places like San Franscisco is much less feasible of an option after years of decriminalizing criminality and the branding of cops as racists. What they just don’t get is the fact that once the slide is initiated, like an avalanche, it’s awfully hard to stop. This class of revolutionary ruler is emotionally and mentally ill-equipped to address the situation.
The carnage is glaringly obvious to all. Type “doom loop” and/or “San Francisco” in YouTube’s search field and you’ll see. The list of major retailers abandoning the city is too well-known to require mention here. The two largest downtown hoteliers prefer foreclosure to continuing operations among the filth and crime. The iconic Westfield Mall has discovered a similar affection for foreclosure. San Francisco is the donkey party’s policies taken to their logical conclusion.
Mayor London Breed quipped in support of additional funding for public safety, “San Francisco must be a safe and just city for all”, and her fellow-travelling potentates on the Board of Supervisors responded with an additional $60 million in funding for the Police Department and 220 more officers. I don’t know what 220 more cops will be able to accomplish for residents, under the guise of the same ravenous Red Guards who created the situation, except spend a whole lot more money for more uniforms, training, equipment, and compensation with little real power to do anything to clear the public spaces. What high-quality candidate for SFPD recruitment would be willing to step into that minefield?
My guess is, if the same clowns are running the show, that things might marginally improve, but “marginally improve” is a bit like “marginally mugged”. It’s still going to be horrible, and managers responsible for many employees will recommend Zooming (stay home) if at all possible, instead of running the gauntlet.
A view of the troubling walk to the entrance of the San Francisco’s Federal Building
And that includes federal employees at the downtown federal building. HHS Assistant Secretary for Administration Cheryl R. Campbell issued the following advisory to SF district managers earlier this month, “In light of the conditions at the (Federal Building) we recommend employees … maximize the use of telework for the foreseeable future.” Even with the added cops, any return to the office workstation won’t survive the next assault.
Nancy Pelosi’s well-publicized pleas won’t matter squat if the people in charge fundamentally still think like her. That’s the crux of the matter: the critical mass of politics in San Francisco is infatuated with the power of the state to create Shangri-la and the view of the world through the lens of systemic victimization. So long as that sticks between the ears, decline becomes more than an option. It’s a perpetual reality.
Ideas matter, and boy do they matter. The clowns in San Francisco City Hall just don’t get it.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “HOW SAN FRANCISCO BECAME A FAILED CITY”, Nellie Bowles, The Atlantic, June 8, 2022, at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/
* “Federal workers in San Francisco told to work remotely ‘for the foreseeable future’ because local crime is so bad”, Chris Morris, Fortune Magazine, August 14, 2023, at https://fortune.com/2023/08/14/remote-work-federal-workers-san-francisco-work-from-home-crime-drugs/
I have no plans to ever return to California for a visit or otherwise, absent a necessity involving a dear friend or relative. Every visit after my relocation to Montana has only reminded me of the reasons for my departure in the first place, and it’s only gotten worse.
Concerns for the state of my birth are not limited to me. Traditional Democrats of many generations, such as the Alioto family of San Francisco, are shocked by the descent of their city into lawlessness. They have yet, though, to come to grips with San Francisco being the canary in the coal mine. Large swaths of the state are sliding into the same dystopia. The problem is more than San Francisco.
For Angela Alioto, ex-member of the SF Board of Supervisors and Board president and daughter of the famous two-term mayor Joseph Alioto, she exclaimed that “It’s not my city” in a recent interview. You can watch it below. Pay close attention to her description of the near-death experience of a retired SF Fire Commissioner confronting violent homeless drug addicts on the request of his elderly mother just below her window and doorstep. He was more than assaulted. He was maimed with a crowbar and left with probable brain damage.
Not every city in the state has fallen into such despair, but they all experience the decay to some extent. Filth and mayhem, like smog, seldom respects boundary lines on a map. One thing’s for sure: no Californian can escape the state’s predilection to decriminalize various social pathologies, remove vagrancy laws off the books, tax and regulate their residents to high heaven, expunge entire criminal statutes through flagrant non-enforcement, etc., etc. When a person is more likely to face hard time for driving an unsmogged car than repeated smash-and-grabs, you know that a majority of the state’s electorate has edged closer to delusional.
Californians won’t get a better run state until a more well-balanced electorate shows up. One must face up to the fact that this state of affairs wasn’t an accident. It was voted into office. Please grab a cup of coffee and watch the interview. It might influence your decision to pay a visit to the City by the Bay.
RogerG
Watch it here:
* If you have difficulty viewing the video, that’s because it went “private”. It happened after I initially linked it on Facebook.
Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)
Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating. Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.
Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade. Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it. Nature isn’t doing it to us. We are doing it to ourselves. The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears. A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism. Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it. It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.
This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts. To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution. Sound familiar? Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below). We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups. For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list. Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba. It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.
The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America. Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before. We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome. The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper. The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls. Who’d want to live there? Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century. The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th. Other similarly weakened urban places suffered. People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses. It’s the beginning of feudalism.
Feudalism is returning. Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism. In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.
Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall. Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”. It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos. Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding. Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .
As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year. According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.” The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks. Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).
These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway. Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.
Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.
The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet. Get out! But these are democracies – surprise! The corruption is democratic. People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible? It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by. I know, it’s hard to believe. But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.
Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools. People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense. Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel. It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares. And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom. Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom. Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).
A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys. Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue. Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion. Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future. In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution. The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed. And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.
Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution. The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors. The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917. The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.
Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot. The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor. San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.
If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses. Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late. Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools. A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.
The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates. Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards. It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks. We’ve got a lot to worry about. And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization. At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.
RogerG
Read more here:
* BLM’s mission statement included the following:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” It’s straight out of the writings of Karl Marx, nothing unusual for the self-professed Marxism of BLM’s founders of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.
From the Wayback Machine Archive, Black Lives Matter: “What We Believe”, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
* “Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing crime”, Jordan Valinsky, CNN, 4/11/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whole-foods-closes-san-francisco-flagship-store-after-one-year-citing-crime/ar-AA19IDPH
* If you’re interested, here’s a local San Francisco newscast about people getting out during the Covid shutdown: “On The Move: San Francisco residents on the move during the COVID-19 economic downturn” at
Police officers walk through the crime scene the day after a mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Ill., July 5, 2022. (Photo: Cheney Orr/Reuters)
Biden’s poll numbers are in the toilet. The celebrity-activist base of the Democratic Party screams at White House operatives in Zoom sessions to do something about the coming red wave in November. They complain that Biden seems mentally adrift, the administration is slow, the messaging is off – which is true to some degree. But here’s the kicker: their problems have little to do with presentation but has everything to do with the message itself.
What ties the crowd on the left together is a fanatical belief in government’s ability to accomplish anything. Thus, we have the peddling of the $5-trillion Build Back Better in an economy heating up after COVID, inflation, shortages, a full-frontal assault on affordable energy, ending wars in catastrophe, crime spiking all over, schools as lefty indoctrination centers amidst plummeting test scores, and a childish and obsessive campaign to eliminate inequalities in socio-economic numbers (statistical disparities). The problem is not the form of message presentation. It’s the message! Ideas certainly have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences.
The Highland Park shooting is a case study in the error of following false political gods. It didn’t take long for the bright stars of the Illinois political firmament – Gov. Pritzker and the state’s two Senators – to blame the gun. So, they trot out the banal litany of rhetoric about “gun violence”, “assault weapons”, “weapons of war”, and high-capacity magazines while they ignore their own culpability. Yes, culpability: their responsibility for not enforcing their own laws or recognizing that many of their go-to ideas are pointless.
The new so-called “bipartisan” federal gun control law parallels much in Illinois state law. Illinois has a comprehensive red flag law, a gun ownership permit system, universal background checks, bans on straw purchases, and a prohibition on conceal carry at most public gatherings. Highland Park chimes in with their bans on “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines”. The state and town are covered in gun laws, and none of it stopped the killer’s rampage.
And where did all of this end up? The killer still purchased his gun, in spite of documented run-ins with police, a red flag law, and a robust list of prohibitions in the state’s gun-purchase check system. The streets of Chicago would remind anyone of Baghdad at the height of the insurrection in 2003. 15 people were murdered in the city on the day of the Highland Park shooting. Other Democrat-run fiefdoms with similar Byzantine entanglements of gun laws have become war zones. 2022 has already witnessed “250 murders in Philadelphia, 175 murders in Los Angeles, and 102 murders in Washington, D.C.” (see below for source)
The reason for the progressive failure is something that never crossed the mind of the participants of the Zoom call between Biden hirelings and the party’s high-profile activists. It is the simple fact that laws must be faithfully executed (in the words of the US Constitution) before they become real. It’s the human factor. With Democrat governance comes permissive law enforcement, particularly in the form of non-prosecution, selective prosecution, or reduced prosecution. Honestly, it could be that their favorite gun laws can’t be enforced without running afoul of their other cherished ideals, like reduced incarceration rates. Regardless, we end up in the same place: urban hellscapes.
In the end, the miscreant in Highland Park still got his hand on a gun for a sniper’s nest to kill July 4th revelers. Pritzker and company should first examine their own derelictions before they harass the general public with more laws that they’ll fail to enforce or won’t make any difference.
Simply passing a law and then a retreat to their uptown soiree and exclusive gated community won’t cut it. For me, passing laws that they refuse to enforce is grounds for impeachment. Are you listening people of Illinois?
Recalled San Francisco DA Chesa BoudinSan Francisco poop map
Early morning Wednesday (6/8/22), a California man was arrested with weaponry and break-in tools to assault Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his home. Surprised?
Tuesday (6/7/22), San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin was recalled (i.e., removed from office) by a vote of the people in the city. Much of the city’s disorder, filth, and crime wave was attributed to him and his platform of “restorative justice” and “ending the carceral state”, which meant that he claimed the power to pick the laws that he was going to enforce and not enforce, and how.
What do these two incidents have in common? Both of them are indications of the lawlessness of the Left and its institutional avatar, the Democratic Party.
Lawlessness doesn’t stop at Boudin or a failed assassin. We’ve known for quite some time that public tirades by public figures purposefully instigate the unhinged. They’re invitations to lawlessness. Maxine Waters, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and others of the donkey party’s hierarchy have incited campaigns of intimidation of those who disagree with them. No wonder that in 2017 a Bernie Sanders supporter, James T. Hodgkinson, marched onto an Alexandria, Va., baseball field and shot five Republican congressmen. No wonder that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mitch McConnell, and Ted Cruz couldn’t enjoy a family meal at a DC area restaurant without facing a mob’s verbal fulminations. No wonder that 2020 would be known as The Year of Living Dangerously when America’s urban centers were turned into stage sets for Escape from New York or Escape from Los Angeles (to continue the movie metaphor). And Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by an assassin for daring to think that abortion is a matter for the states and not DC potentates.
Nicholas John Roske (l) arrested for preparing to assault Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his home.
Ironically, and quite a hoot as well, it’s the Democrats who are blindly wedded to the idea of law as cure-all. Think about it: have poverty, pass a law to spend money. Have school problems, pass a law to spray more money their way. Have “gun violence”, pass a law. And problem solved, or so they think. Though, it must be admitted, they’re great about spending money but not so great about enforcement. So, we end up with inflation, bloated budgets, and a breakdown of civilization.
Take their response to the Uvalde shooting. They trot out their prepackaged, 30-year-old talking points. It’s chock full of the same gun bans, regulations, and onslaughts on business. For them, it’s a simple matter of passing a law and then meeting after work for libations. Their great for “universal background checks”, for instance, but violations of the existing checks are rarely prosecuted. I suspect that it’s because either prosecutions would create more serious injustices – which says a lot about the inherent wisdom of the law – or a good chunk of the perps don’t fit the preferred profile: too many “people of color”, too few people without color.
A 2017 GAO report on the status of the federal government’s background check system found massive non-enforcement. Of the 112,000 documented cases of prohibited buyers stopped by the system, only 12,700 were even investigated, and of that number, 12 were prosecuted. Pass a law, spend money to set up the system, hire the personnel, and then don’t bring the miscreants to court. Surely, there must be more than 12 of the 112,000 deserving of a date before a judge.
Law without enforcement is no law at all. There exists a law that bans intimidation in the administration of justice, like what is happening on the sidewalks and streets outside the homes of six Supreme Court justices. The use of anything but the law in the provision of justice is expressly banned in 18 U.S. Code, Section 1507. Unlike most of the 1,000-plus-page gibberish that frequently emanates out of the Democratic caucus, this law is unmistakably clear:
“Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”
For the constitutionally dense, 1507 is the statutory means to implement the Constitution’s equal protection and due process clauses. Look them up. Nowhere do public demonstrations have a role in their application.
Why does AG Garland refuse to enforce 1507? Simple, it’s politics. The Dems demand a particular result in an abortion case before the Court and are willing to turn a blind eye to the law. In effect, 18 U.S. Code, Section 1507 just disappeared from the federal code. It’s been relegated to the same purgatory where you’ll find many federal, state, and local provisions on rioting, public indecency, theft, burglary, assault and battery, sentencing guidelines and laws, etc., etc. Garland and local DA’s like George Gascon and Chesa Boudin see themselves as mini-legislatures to make and unmake statute as they please. It’s grotesque, and so are our streets and public spaces.
Lawlessness appears to be a key Democratic Party doctrine.
RogerG
*Read Kevin D. Williamson’s excellent piece on the federal background check system.
2015 meeting of the American Historical Association.
Thomas Piketty, an academic apostle of the Left, once crowed in 2016 of the increasing correlation of higher educational attainment and the tendency to vote Democratic: high school graduates 44%, Bachelor degrees 51%, Masters 70%, and PhD degrees 76%. Does this mean that smarter people vote for the Democrats? Hogwash. The gap between smartness and possession of degrees has not been greater than in our time.
It’s fair to say that degrees and certificates in many cases just paper over human failings. We are still prone to unexamined and purely fashionable beliefs, an overwhelming desire to win at any cost, the penchant to make facts fit predetermined conclusions, and let hubris cloud our vision. Nothing much has changed for many of us after many years of schooling. Today, we have many such highly educated ideologues circulating amongst us.
It’s not necessarily a sign of brilliance to almost uniformly take crass positions on highly contentious issues. It heralds, if anything, a blind deference to peer group pressure. Not exactly evidence of high intellectual acumen. Abortion is one issue that brings to light a kind of organized intellectual debasement among the highly papered.
Justice Harry Blackmun (r), author of the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is before the Supreme Court. The case has attracted amicus briefs like flies to a feed lot. Stepping into the fracas is the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians in support of the Roe decision and abortion as a right. That wasn’t the first time. In 1989, 400 of them displayed their pro-abortion bona fides in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services.
Strange thing, though, these doyens of historical truth based their position on a falsehood in the original Roe v. Wade decision that was allowed to marinate and pass into their “consensus”. The fallacy stems from the uncritical adoption of the historical exegesis of a lawyer and abortion activist, Cyril Means, Jr., back in 1973. Means contended that abortion was a common-law liberty before the 19th century. He mangled primary sources, such as Samuel Farr’s 1787 medical treatise, to make it sound like abortion was an acceptable practice back then. Instead, his source, Farr, makes the opposite point if Means had only turned a few more pages: “. . . unborn embryos . . . may be supposed indeed from the time of conception, to be living animated beings, there is no doubt but the destruction of them ought to be considered a capital crime.” Historians, of all people, should know better but these didn’t. Apparently, professional integrity must not be allowed to get in the way of prejudices.*
The issue has always been fraught with an emotional tug-of-war between the unborn child and the mother in distress, but it’s very probable that the practice was nonetheless condemned going back centuries. Scholars have uncovered indictments in the 13th century for the killing of unborn children. In 1602, a woman in Surrey, England, was indicted for ingesting poison to kill the “child in her womb”. Many such examples exist in the historical record.
One cause for the confusion has much to do with state of knowledge, or lack thereof at the time, of the embryo (discovered in 1827 and the beginning of embryology) and pregnancy in general which led to the complicated picture in regards to early pregnancy abortions. There were muddled attempts in a few instances at determining when the baby was “alive”, using the arcane language of the “quickening”. Remember, this was a time when medicine was under the sway of Aristotle’s four humors (body fluids). Confederate general Stonewall Jackson was said to ride into battle during the Civil War with one arm raised to keep the fluids in balance. Still, it’s fair to say that abortion has always been considered at least an “inchoate felony” in the common law. The “inchoate” part is tied to the limited pre-natal understanding of the era.
The four humors in a medieval text.
It’s scandalous that professional historians have become so ahistorical. It’s equally scandalous that legal experts are willing to use deceit to establish far-reaching precedents. An example is the factual fraud in Mapp v. Ohio in 1961. The SCOTUS decision extended the exclusionary rule (Weeks v. US, 1914) to state court cases. After Mapp, the most violent perps – these are 90% plus tried in state courts – have a new legal weapon in their arsenal to take a walk.
The legal chicanery revolved around the belated claim of a lack of a valid search warrant. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court under the false assertion that there was no search warrant. A simple examination of past issues of the Cleveland Plain Dealer establish beyond doubt that a valid search warrant was issued to enter the apartment of Dollree Mapp whose boyfriend was a bombing suspect (later convicted). She was charged with the possession of obscene materials as a consequence of the search. Authorities couldn’t locate the warrant during the legal proceedings in her case, but that wasn’t unusual in the era before photocopying. At most, there might be one or two extra carbonized paper copies in a dank basement file room where decay was rampant. Anyway, it wasn’t thought to be relevant since the operative legal principle was that evidence was considered valid no matter how it got to the court if it had a bearing on the case.
Formal portrait of members of the United States Supreme Court,Washington DC, 1962. Pictured are, front row, from left, Justice Tom C Clark, Justice Hugo L Black, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice William O Douglas, and Justice John M Harlan; back row, from left, Justice Byron R White, Justice William J Brennan Jr, Justice Potter Stewart, and Justice Arthur J Goldberg.
Ohio was blindsided late in the game by the defense assertion of no valid search warrant and a call for the Court to apply the exclusionary rule in state jurisprudence. If it was understood to be a point of contention earlier in the process, more stringent efforts at storing and retrieving these documents would have been made. The Court took the side of Mapp: no warrant, no allowable evidence, perp takes a walk. Now, with its application in state courts, where the overwhelming number of violent suspects are tried, the rule is extended to a suspected serial killer as much as a porn enthusiast. And to think that it all rests on an untruth. So much for the integrity of the titans of the law.
Even in cases when the Court reaches the right conclusion, oftentimes the reasoning is littered with drivel. More than that, these decisions sometimes show the degree to which our judicial aristocrats get sucked into vogueish patterns of thought. A classic in how to meander in junk thought but end in the right place is 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education. To bolster their argument that racial segregation was unconstitutional, they resorted to the bag of tricks of ideologically charged social science researchers.
The married research team of Mamie and Kenneth Clark, MA student in psychology and CCNY prof respectively, conducted experiments that allegedly proved that black children were mentally and emotionally scarred to a greater degree by segregation. As proof, they conducted studies such as the famous doll test. A small group of children were given dolls of different skin and hair colors. The doll of the lighter shade was preferred by all children, including the black children. Based on these preferences and answers to follow-up questions, the Clarks concluded that black children were traumatized with self-hatred. They further asserted that it was more acute among black children in segregated environments such as segregated schools. The test’s claims were cited in Earl Warren’s majority opinion.
The Clarks’ doll experiment.The Clarks’ doll test with Kenneth Clark in the background.
Since that time, the failings of the experiment were laid bare. Everything from the small sampling to the biases of the researchers to the conclusions drawn from the children’s responses has drawn fire. Yet, there it was; a highly questionable study lassoed into the judgment of the most eminent jurists. The simple thought that crusading academics might not be the most reliable wasn’t a serious enough matter to avoid using them. Right conclusion in the decision, but a perplexing path to get there.
Later, the dam broke on using social science studies as a substitute and supplement to the law in judges’ decisions. The Coleman Report of 1966 proved to be a rich source to order forced busing, a court takeover of the management of the school districts in a region (St. Louis), and all sorts of incessant court and federal meddling in local schools. Earl Warren’s majority opinion in Brown set the precedent for incorporating activism, disguised as chic research, rather than the law, its text and history, into a court’s rulings. What’s next, filling court vacancies from the ranks of Harvard’s African and African-American Studies Department?
We are not well-served by the upper crust in many of our professions, our so-called best and brightest. Historians are ahistorical. The crème de la crème of the legal profession doesn’t hesitate to practice deceit to achieve the desired end. Shoddy social science studies are ingested into rulings that impact everyone in ways large and small. Maybe a civilization’s state of health is reflected in the state of health of its elites. Now that’s serious food for thought.
RogerG
*Read here: “The Corruption of History”, Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review, Nov. 29, 2021.
Jessie Smollett (l) with Robin Roberts of ABC News on GMA in February of 2019.
After Jussie Smollett’s arrest and her on-air interview with him, Robin Roberts said, “It’s [his arest] a setback for race relations, homophobia, MAGA supporters – the fingers were pointed at them [MAGA supporters].” She added, “I cannot think of another case where there’s this anger on so many sides, and you can understand why there would be.”
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Some like to say racism is systemic. Well, so can fallacies. In fact, today, systemic falsehoods are far more real and far more dangerous than any mythical resurgence of the Klan.
Three stories tell the tale of systemic falsehoods: two in America and one in Germany, all in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The first, chronologically, occurred in October 1938 after the Nazi government ordered its initial expulsion of German Jews. One of those was the Grynszpan family who had a son living in Paris with an uncle, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan. A week later, Herschel walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot to death German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. After it, the virulent Jew-hatred of the Nazi Party would take to the streets throughout Germany in the organized assaults on Jews on 9-10 November called Kristallnacht, thus inaugurating the Holocaust. An excuse presented itself to implement a key part of the National Socialist revolutionary program and thought. Their revolutionary racism was solely based on a systemic falsehood, and millions would end up dead.
Henry Grynszpan (l) and Ernst vom Rath
The second happened in America in 1955. It was the lynching and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till by a white mob in Mississippi in August 1955. The scurrilous racism in the minds of some Southern whites of the tarring of all Blacks with a dollop of depravity is much more than a systemic racism. It’s a systemic falsehood.
Emmett Till
But a systemic racism in the Jim Crow South of 1955 would be matched later by a systemic falsehood for today’s revolutionaries in Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Inc., and the Democratic Party. Yes, they’re revolutionaries. For them, it’s forever Jim Crow in America, the better to overturn the “system” (revolution), not just reform it or even acknowledge the improvements. Germany’s National Socialists exploited one killing to carry out millions; today’s left-wing zealots do the same (with Michael Brown, George Floyd, whoever). Yet, facts on the ground don’t match their hype, but that won’t stop the torching of America’s cities nor the falsehood’s infiltration of the classroom, the donkey party, Congress, and the Biden administration.
The third incident is Jussie Smollett. He peddled the falsehood of an alleged assault by fictitious Maga supporters in 2018. A patently false story, now proven in court, would, in the ensuing years, help perpetuate the falsehood of ever-present systemic racism as if nothing has changed since 1955. For the disciples of this false catechism, our landscape was, is, and will be forever littered with Emmett Tills and Bull Connors. The fiction penetrated all channels of news and entertainment from the classroom to 30 Rock (NBC headquarters). Our cosseted cultural elites peddled the lie and “systemic racism” entered the lexicon as a fact, when it is no such thing – not any truer than the Big Lie was for the goons torching synagogues in 1938.
Jussie’s Smollett’s booking photograph after he turned himself into Chicago police on charges of filing a false police report.
Smollett got away with it for 3 years because our cultural avatars were predisposed to believe the lie due to the monotone influences in their cultural and educational bubbles. For a couple of years, they propagated Smollett’s lie until evidence of the hoax came to light and then they went silent. Smollett’s December 9 conviction on five counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report puts all those in the media who helped him peddle the lie in the dock alongside him. His desire to concoct the hoax and their desire to push it exposed a systemic gullibility stemming from a deeply embedded systemic falsehood: it’s forever Jim Crow in America. For this crowd, the nation is forever guilty.
Ideas have consequences, and so does this one. Crime is spiking all over America. Amazingly, some have contorted logic to blame the cops. In their muddled minds, police lack legitimacy in the eyes of the public and so crime is transformed into a form of protest. People perceive racist cops and feel justified in performing mayhem according to this flight of fancy.
It’s nonsense. Perception is key. Views about policing are too often guided by the media’s it-leads-if-it bleeds philosophy, only tailored to fit the popular systemic racism/racist cop scenario. No wonder Americans – left, right, and center – in various polls and studies (one by the Skeptic Research Center) have an exaggerated view of police shootings of unarmed black men, by a factor of 50.
What do you expect would happen after the public is fed a steady stream of the rare but viral videos of a shooting? Part of the blame lies with a media eager to validate their prejudices, and part is attributed to millions carrying in the palms of their hands a video camera. The public is armed with the things, social media spreads them at light speed, and media mavens cull them for the confirmation of their biases. Would we be a more balanced people without the things and the instantaneous social media hookups? Interesting question.
Smollett with the Obamas
All the while, branding cops as racist isn’t exactly a booster to recruitment and retention. Who wants to join a profession that might bankrupt you in lawsuits or land you in prison, and/or tar you as a uniformed mob looking for more Emmett Tills to kill? In a great skedaddle, cops are leaving and recruits are scant. There are fewer people to man the cruisers and telephones, walk the beat, and investigate crime. Nationwide, the Police Executive Research Forum in June reported midsized departments showing a 26% drop in hiring and large ones recording a 36% fall, some with a 50% drop in applicants. The total number of sworn officers dropped from 720,000 in 2013 to 690,000 in 2018, and the slide continues.
Retirements are up, way up. Deep blue bastions are particularly feeling the pinch. The Chicago force experienced a 30% retirement increase in 2020 (560) from the previous year. Portland, that lefty playground, saw 117 (and counting) officers leave since July of 2020. The men in NYC blue, under the radical Bill de Blasio, saw 2,600 officers vacate their positions. The story is the same across the country. Amputated budgets (“defund the police”) and a dispirited force don’t make for public safety.
A little-known truth: fewer cops mean more crime. There’s a stronger correlation between these two criteria than the more popular one in elite circles of the lack of respect for cops leading to an epidemic of murders, torchings, robberies, and beatings. Using 911 calls as the metric, studies show that high-profile police killings don’t affect the number of calls (studies by Harvard’s Michael Zoorob, Tanaya Devi, and Roland Fryer in 2020), the exact opposite of what you’d expect if there was a general disgust with cops. Not surprisingly, after all the budget cuts, lambastings by media hogs, force draw-downs and stand-downs, and a disheartened rank-and-file, mayhem has returned. Everyone not enthralled by stupidity has recognized since creation of the London police force in the 19th century that more cops mean safer streets.
So, we’ve come to this pass: Can we trust any longer an elite so enraptured to systemic falsehoods? In the end, we’ll have nowhere to turn. Remember, they’re the same people who want to take your guns. Now, they want to take your cops.
Darrell Brooks’ SUV racing through the Waukesha Christmas parade.Victims on the ground in the wake of his passage.
Why the 2020 summer of riots, the chronic indulgence of violence and behavioral ugliness in our cities, the Rittenhouse trial, Waukesha, et al? Equity, baby, Equity.
Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers), a godfather of Equity lingo: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination”.
Ibram X. KendiAlabama Gov. George Wallace standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama defying a federal court order in 1963.
Is Kendi’s governing principle that much different from George Wallace’s in 1963 when Wallace said, “. . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever”? Segregation, discrimination, they both draw distinctions based on melanin count, genitalia, bed partner, and many combinations thereof. And put an end to equality before the law. Think of Kendi as a black John C. Calhoun, the figurehead of a new discrimination.
Kendi (born in 1982) is proof that the caricature of the muddle-headed millennial is more than a caricature, and an embarrassment to the generational many who aren’t. Kendi’s goof-thought is hidden behind the façade of Equity. It’s wordplay. To this guy and his fellow delusionals, Equity is code for anger over things not turning out equal across the demography. The Equity word is cover for forced equality of outcome through blatant discrimination.
Calhoun, an unacknowledged Kendi mentor, has his mental fingerprints all over Equity. It found its way into the bloodstream of the past and present Democratic Party, back to LBJ, and the Biden administration in the form of militant affirmative action executive orders and banal press briefings. Remember “affirmative action”? In case you forgot, it conferred advantages to a gaggle of new honorees, the hackneyed “historically oppressed”. The camel’s nose poked under the tent.
It remained somewhat innocuous so long as it was restricted to government employment, contracting, and college admissions. Certainly, it was grossly unfair for anyone falling on the wrong side of the genital/color divide, but the ill-effects didn’t end up threatening your life. Not true now.
The forced leveling spread to criminal justice. Since crime stats aren’t equal across the color spectrum, they must be made to be equal, like the effort in admissions and employment. So, gambits such as refusals to prosecute, passage of no-cash bail laws, approval of propositions to lower a plethora of crimes to misdemeanors (California’s Prop 47), etc., sent a green light to miscreants everywhere. Equity suddenly became dangerous.
Kyle Rittenhouse brought into court for his trial in 2021.
These Equity enthusiasts are really into profiles. Kyle Rittenhouse was tossed into the Equity meat grinder because he clicked the bigoted bullet-pointed traits reserved for the vile by the ladies on The View: he’s white, male, and carried an “assault” rifle. Equity demanded that the immense resources of the state of Wisconsin be thrown at a 17-year-old because he fit the Equity industry’s enemy sketch. Self-defense be damned, the industry’s brain trust will rebrand it racist. The goal isn’t justice; it’s Equity in the form of a conviction and hard time. Think of this new age of lynching as a morality play for the self-anointed with a white guy in the noose this time. Everyone is expected to feel better, except, of course, the white guy in the dock.
If Equity requires that we must get a white guy no matter what, it also demands that we rebrand riots as “mostly peaceful protests” to herd all of society kicking and screaming to Equity. Tell that to David Dorn in St. Louis who was murdered by “mostly peaceful protesters”. Public authorities ordered police to withdraw and stand down; bail funds were established for looters and arsonists; DA’s refused to prosecute the hoodlums; and governors rejected requests for national guardsmen to restore order.
The murderer of David Dorn during the St. Louis riots.Retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn.
Once more, riots and mayhem – er, “peaceful protests” – are rebranded as noble endeavors to instill Equity. Tell that to a local businessperson – many are of the “other” – who must now stand before their life’s work in smoldering ruins.
People flee, and not just from California, as Equity’s disorder reigns. Corporate retail giants such as Walgreens and Target – and other paragons of the corporate woke – suddenly realized that “woke” looting, boarded up doors and windows, and smash-and-grab mobs aren’t healthy for the bottom line. That model of Equity rule, San Francisco, and playground for mob-shoplifting, has seen Walgreens close 22 stores. Target and Safeway cut hours to limit their exposure to Equity’s rampant revenge. Need I mention the recent mob assaults on Nordstrom and Louis Vuitton? Equity carries costs way beyond the price tag for gauzy corporate rainbow ads.
The real-world effects of Equity cause capital to look for the exits. For goons and lowlifes, Equity also supplements a widened exit door with a revolving one in the criminal justice system. The Equity logic (or illogic) demands that we can’t have too many convictions of one color. Turn ‘em loose, but bloody incidents inconveniently arise. Prime example: Darrell Brooks of Waukesha Christmas parade fame. After plowing through the Dancing Grannies, bands, and spectators, it came to light that this guy made “career” a functioning modifier attached to “criminal”.
The Brooks rap sheet extends back to 1999 and through a variety of violent interactions with others. It includes a lust for underaged girls and an outstanding warrant for his arrest. His savage history and penchant for jumping bail didn’t stop the Milwaukee DA, John Chisholm, from lowering his bail to $1,000 for using his weapon of choice, his SUV, on his girlfriend. A couple of weeks later, he showed up at the Christmas parade.
John Chisholm, Milwaukee DA, reduced bail to $1,000 for Darrell Brooks (r) before Brooks drove his vehicle into the Waukesha Christmas parade.
Chisholm (D) is a unique piece of work. He’s the DA who went after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) and his staff in 2010 for rumors of illegal campaign coordination between Walker’s campaign and supportive PAC’s. Ironically, the insinuation is equally at home with Democrats. The fishing expedition uncovered nothing and was only closed this year. (Read about the case here)
Apparently, not a word was raised about the cozy relationship between Chisholm and his teachers’ union activist wife. In the heady days of 2010, Walker was trying to bring to heel the uncontrollable teachers’ unions and succeeded – a necessity that should be on the front burner of parents in California and Loudon County. The whole affair stinks of politics and shows Chisholm to be a swimmer in the currents of fashionable Democratic Party belief. Brooks’ easy release fits neatly into the Party’s Equity zealotry. Anyway, Brooks was out in the public to commit a mass casualty event thanks to the indulgence of Chisholm’s office.
See, Equity is an amorphous concept that can cover everything from race-conscious hiring and admissions to giving multiple opportunities for thugs to destroy our livelihoods and kill us. Equity should join communism on the ash heap of history but, alas, it is thriving in blue America. If Equity comes to your state and locality, move!
Florida authorities serving a search warrant on her apartment for her theft of confidential data and equipment.Rebekah Jones booking photo, January 2021. She was booked for hacking the state’s computer system and stealing the confidential files of thousands of Floridians.
If our debate over criminal justice reform centers on a cessation of prisons being prep schools for more violent hoodlums and the reintegration of convicts back into society, I am in whole-hearted agreement. However, the argument frequently strays into the dark territory of repealing three strikes or decriminalization. The Rebekah Jones story illustrates the problem in taking this path.
To put it succinctly, the overwhelming mass of suspects had many run-ins with the criminal justice system before they actually landed their first felony conviction on the scoreboard. Take for instance the aforementioned Rebekah Jones, the person at the center of efforts to defame Florida Governor DeSantis’s COVID-response record. She’s a real piece of work.
Let’s start with a couple of things that she kept out of her application for employment with the Florida Department of Health. In Louisiana in 2018, she agreed to a pre-trial intervention program to avoid conviction for “battery of a police officer”. Prior to that, she evaded a 2017 conviction in Florida for “criminal mischief” by entering into a deferred-prosecution agreement. And that’s not all.
The public record on Rebekah Jones is chock-full of other nefarious stunts. An ex-boyfriend acquired a restraining order on her for damaging his car and the harassment of his mother. She was fired from a position with Florida State University for having sex with a student and lying about her criminal record. A stalking case against her in Florida is currently under investigation. She couldn’t restrain herself from texting pics of her ex-boyfriend’s genitals. This girl has a track record of little self-restraint, and it shows. Boy does it show.
Right now, Rebekah Jones is the darling of the left. They see her as their avatar to bring down their Dark Lord, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. This episode only proves the degree that politics poisons the well. She’s given a free pass for a long trail of abusive behavior right up to her being canned on May 12, 2020. How many others on the dock are actually facing DA’s and judges who are fed up with having the same person appear before them over and over again, like Rebekah Jones?
The Left ought to choose their friends more wisely. And reform activists should be careful before they succeed in unleashing troubled people back into our neighborhoods before we know the whole story. We, and they, will get more than what we bargained for.
You can read about Rebekah Jones in Charles C. W. Cooke’s excellent piece in National Review.
