Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

If Baltimore’s Democrat leaders gave $20 million of “space to destroy” in 2015, the price tag ballooned 100-fold in cities governed by the hard left in the 2020 round of urban violence.

The left and major media say the urban violence often accompanying protests following the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25 is a direct descendant of America’s past paroxysms of racial unrest. As such, the looting and arson in major cities is claimed to be the righteous child of Baltimore (2015), Ferguson (2014), Los Angeles (1992), and even the widespread riots in America’s major cities following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

But is it really? Or could it be something entirely different?

In past urban riots, a single spark ignited a mixture of anger and resentment over racial discrimination, poverty, or police brutality. When the cities burned, the damage concentrated in and around the neighborhoods of the urban poor. I witnessed this first-hand as an Army National Guard officer deployed to Los Angeles in 1992. The city was calm in the morning, and by the evening there were widespread murders with businesses being looted and burned.

In 2020, Floyd’s death appeared to trigger something different. Rather than a spark, a signal flare was sent aloft, with prepared cadres launching protests in cities across the nation often followed by violence late into the night.

Unlike Baltimore in 2015, cities like Minneapolis and Seattle featured leftwing mayors and governors, none of whom appeared interested in restoring order. This was due to those elected officials’ deep sympathy towards the protesters’ stated goals: defund the police, or, at the very least, reduce the apparent incidence of police brutality while shifting public funds out of law enforcement to more social welfare spending.

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Comparing the above factors in a multivariate regression analysis with the incidence of violence as the dependent variable shows a statistically noisy and weak link to the number of police.

Of note, considering an additional variable—the share of a city’s population with a college degree or post-graduate degree—generates an even higher correlation to violence than does police per capita, suggesting that the protests and allied rioting are not the result of a working-class movement.

But none of these factors is convincingly determinative. There was one variable that did correlate strongly to urban violence: a city’s percentage of vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. The more a city voted for Clinton, the more violence it saw in conjunction with the protests. (For the statisticians, the regression provides a significance of 0.0019 with the 2016 vote variable yielding a P-value of 0.003). The greater percentage of support for Clinton in 2016, the more likely a city was to suffer wanton destruction in connection with the “mostly peaceful” protests.

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Tellingly, out of the top ten cities for violence, looting, and arson, the average vote for Clinton was 77 percent. In the ten cities with the least destruction, Clinton won 53 percent of the vote.

That a city’s political leanings are more likely to lead to a breakdown in law and order in service of political protest shouldn’t be a surprise. In this, Seattle, with a black population of 7 percent, San Francisco (5 percent), Portland, Oregon (6 percent), and Madison, Wisconsin (7 percent) have one big thing in common with Washington D.C. and Atlanta, with black populations of 47 percent and 52 percent, respectively: They are all governed by the far-left.

Why did the leaders of the hardest-hit cities decide to give space to destroy? Some mayors saw the protest organizers as political supporters. A few may have calculated that widespread coverage of burning cities would harm President Trump’s reelection chances. And some just didn’t want the responsibility of ordering their police to restore order.

Unfortunately, it is often the case in politics and revolutions that the common people—the proletariat—are sacrificed for the movement. In this case, it will be those living in dangerous neighborhoods who will end up being murdered, robbed, raped, and extorted in greater numbers if the misguided call to “defund the police” becomes a widespread reality.

A major Los Angeles teachers union said in a research paper issued Thursday that the reopening of schools should be conditioned upon the passage of Medicare-for-All at the federal level, along with a slew of other left-wing policy staples at the state and local levels.

“It is time to take a stand against Trump’s dangerous, anti-science agenda that puts the lives of our members, our students, and our families at risk,” United Teachers Los Angeles President Cecily Myart-Cruz said in a statement unveiling the paper. “We all want to physically open schools and be back with our students, but lives hang in the balance. Safety has to be the priority. We need to get this right for our communities.”

The paper outlined a lengthy list of health and safety measures the union identified as necessary measures to ensure schools can operate safely amid the coronavirus pandemic, including robust testing, contract tracing, sterilization regimens and physical distancing in the classroom.

The union said the costs to implement the measures necessary to restart Los Angeles schools safely could exceed $250 million, funds it said would be available if “federal, state and local governments are willing to finally prioritize pupils over plutocrats.”

The UTLA called for at least $500 billion in additional federal assistance to K-12 schools, in addition to the passage of Medicare-for-All.

The union also called for California to implement both a wealth tax on unrealized capital gains for the state’s billionaires, and surtaxes on state residents that earn over $1 million a year. The UTLA estimated the two measures would bring in a combined $14.5 billion a year in tax revenues.

At the local level, the union called for the Los Angeles police to be defunded, saying “police violence is a leading cause of death and trauma for Black people, and is a serious public health and moral issue.”

The UTLA also called for a moratorium on new charter schools, saying that the charter schools already operating in the city of “double-dipping” by accepting federal CARES act funding while also receiving state funding, which did not decline amid the pandemic.

Sounds like the UTLA should be decertified…

Upon immigrating from India when I was 4, my family suffered tremendous economic hardships and cultural challenges. My father drove a taxi at night and my mom worked many menial jobs as a cook, housecleaner, barista and motel cleaner. It’s fair to say my family never had success handed to them on a silver platter. But more than a decade post-immigration, we have found our footing in Western society, with my dad making nearly six figures operating his own software company.

Rising from poverty to economic prosperity is a common narrative for immigrants from all backgrounds in the West. For example, after the communist takeover of Cuba in 1959, many refugees fled to America, leaving most of their wealth behind and having to start from the bottom. But by 1990, second-generation Cuban Americans were twice as likely to earn an annual salary of $50,000 than non-Hispanic whites in the United States.

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And the concept of white privilege can’t explain why several historically marginalized groups out-perform whites today. Take Japanese Americans, for example: For nearly four decades in the 20th century (1913 – 1952), this group was legally prevented from owning land and property in over a dozen American states. Moreover, 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. But by 1959, the income disparity between Japanese Americans and white Americans nearly vanished. Today, Japanese Americans outperform whites by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes, test scores and incarceration rates.

One could argue the successful stories of my family, Cuban Americans and Japanese Americans are cherry-picked cases. But whites are far from being the most dominantly successful group in Western society. A wealth of data collected in a longform Quillette analysis, shows overwhelming white underachievement relative to several minority groups among health outcomes, educational achievement, incarceration rates and economic success.

According to median household income statistics from the US Census Bureau, several minority groups substantially out-earn whites. These groups include Pakistani Americans, Lebanese Americans, South African Americans, Filipino Americans, Sri Lankan Americans and Iranian Americans (in addition to several others). Indians, the group I belong to, are the highest-earning ethnic group the census keeps track of, with almost double the household median income of whites. In Canada, several minority groups also significantly out-earn whites, including South Asian Canadians, Arab Canadians and Japanese Canadians.

Interestingly, several black immigrant groups such as Nigerians, Barbadians, Ghanaians and Trinidadians & Tobagonians have a median household income well above the American average. Ghanian Americans, to take one example, earn more than several specific white groups such as Dutch Americans, French Americans, Polish Americans, British Americans and Russian Americans. Do Ghanaians have some kind of sub-Saharan African privilege?

Nigerian Americans, meanwhile, are one of the most educated groups in America, as one Rice University survey indicates. Though they make up less than 1 percent of the black population in America, nearly 25 percent of the black student body at Harvard Business School in 2013 consisted of Nigerians. In post-bachelor education, 61 percent of Nigerian Americans over the age of 25 hold a graduate degree compared to only 32 percent for the US-born population.

These facts challenge the prevailing progressive notion that America’s institutions are built to universally favor whites and “oppress” minorities or blacks. On the whole, whatever “systemic racism” exists appears to be incredibly ineffectual, or even nonexistent, given the multitude of groups who consistently eclipse whites.