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.
Snip.
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.
Snip.
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.
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.
Snip.
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.
The Atlantic publishes a “power” story of how a police shooting scarred the writer as a young girl. Tiny problem: It never happened.
Job numbers boom! Ghislaine Maxwell captured! CHOP chopped! It’s your Friday before Independence Day LinkSwarm!
4.8 million jobs added in June, blowing away all estimates. This is what keeps Democratic strategists up at night: Between lockdowns and riots, they’ve done everything they can to kill the Trump economy, and the Trump economy refuses to die.
Hillary Clinton today after hearing of the news that Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, there is a reason Epsteined is trending right now. pic.twitter.com/SrGorHPigu
Speaking of the intelligence community, here’s why that Russian bounty story was crap. And all your liberal Facebook friends shared it because they don’t care whether a story is true or not, as long as it hurts Trump. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
It is not transcendentally stupid for the alleged anti-racism rioters to destroy a Lincoln statue, though, to normal people, it looks like the act of drooling morons. Now, a good number of these cesspeople are drooling morons, but that does not change the fact that trashing POTUS #16’s statuary is brilliant.
They have confused their targets – us – by casting off the constraints of coherence.
Oh wait, you thought that these folks were trying to make a point about racism being bad. And you thought, because that’s how those of us who weren’t raised on Instatwitbook, soy, and critical race theory, that if you point out that something is unreasonable then that will cause the person you were instructing to rethink it. After all, trashing some Honest Abe totem in order to illustrate how racism is double-plus-ungood is about a “12” on the 1-10 scale of unreasonability. And yet, you can point that out all day and they don’t care.
In fact, they laugh at you for doing so.
It’s not about making sense. It never was. It’s about making you kneel.
If you look at everything that is going on, the one common denominator is that every action the woke insurgents take is designed to strip you of your ability to defend your interests, or property, or rights, or life. The idea is to leave you utterly vulnerable, totally exposed, at which point they can do with you as they see fit. The nicer ones will merely reeducate you then demand humiliating submission and tribute. History (and their social media feed) teach that others will happily murder you. Doubt me? Just ask your local kulak.
Stripping you of defenses takes many forms. One form is defunding and abolishing the police. Oh, someone will be wielding force in society. It just won’t be people accountable to or inclined to protect you. Another form is literally stripping you of your defenses. Why is gun control such a fetish for these creeps? Because you with a gun have the ability to not just say “no” but to exact a price from those who wish to compel a “yes.” So, of course, they want to eliminate your ability to have weapons, but they also want to eliminate, as a practical matter, your ability to use them to protect yourself.
Look at what happened when the pink polo shirt gun guy quite reasonably grabbed his AR-15 as the savages descended on his property and the cops were AWOL. St. Louis’s Soros-bought DA – who last month released all the arrested rioters – threatened to prosecute him. The media is slandering him too. A pack of jackals threatened his property, his family, and even his dog, and he’s the bad guy for not showing his belly? You see the same fake furor every time some citizen has his car surrounded by a feeding frenzy of scumbags and plows through them to escape. Ignore that the slime are now shooting people they try to trap. The idea is to make you give up instead of fight back because if you fight back, the law comes down on you instead of the criminals.
Soros really is a shrewd investor.
The law – and the law generally says you can reasonably defend your life and property (please consult your local laws for specifics and get proper training) – means nothing if corrupt Democrats ignore the crimes of leftists and prosecute normals who dare resist the Blue Terror, which is kind of the point. You thought you could rely on the law and on the government to protect you. Nope. And now you can’t protect yourself either.
And then there’s reason. That’s a defense too. You can use reason, make arguments, present evidence, and convince people. Not if making sense is beside the point.
You cannot reason with these people. Forget trying to convince them. You are not going to talk them out of their quest for power over you by deploying bourgeois conceits like “facts” and “evidence.” Yet so many of us see what’s happening and still take to Twitter or (increasingly) Parler to point out the sheer ridiculousness of the enemy’s latest antics. But these actions are not ridiculous. They are tactically genius. Instead of confronting an impenetrable defense, they just scuttle around it and attack into our rear.
Forget the bizarre and evil concept of national original sin that is the malignant idea that America is built upon “systemic racism.” America’s true systemic flaw, arising at the time of those miserable progressives of yesteryear and continuing up through the miserable progressives of this rotten year, is what we now call “liberalism.”
Oh, it’s not classical liberalism, with its concern for expanding economic and personal rights – you know, individual liberty. The current inverted mutation of liberalism is all about constricting economic and personal rights and forcing individuals into collective boxes where their individuality is subsumed into an easily exploited and manipulated conformist whole. Want to test out this hypothesis? Look through the endless woke tweets of your favorite hack journalist, pinko pol, or Hollywood half-wit, or even go up to some self-described liberal in your own life, and see if you can find one iota of deviation from any of the approved liberal dogma. Good luck. You won’t find a smidgeon of nonconformity. You won’t detect a molecule of dissent. These people are the Borg, if the Borg worked in a giant space coffee house, had Bernie stickers on their spaceships, and could not do a push-up. You can’t reason with them – appealing to reason is futile.
Systemic liberalism is the real poison in America’s veins, not the fanciful notion pushed by bigots, charlatans, and demagogues, that the American enterprise is dedicated to invidious discrimination on the basis of race.
Left-wing activist and former Bernie Sanders surrogate Shaun King is among the most visible faces of the Black Lives Matter movement. The former Daily Kos blogger is also one of its prominent fundraisers: In 2017, King founded a political action committee—the Real Justice PAC—with an eye toward driving criminal-justice reform across the country using the same mass mobilization techniques employed by the Sanders campaign.
But over the past 15 months, the Real Justice PAC, staffed by a number of left-wing activists, has funneled a quarter of the money it has brought in back to companies linked to PAC leaders.
Since January of 2019, the PAC has cut dozens of checks totaling more than $460,000 to three political consultancy firms linked to PAC employees. The PAC’s data strategist, Jin Ding, and its treasurer, Becky Bond, manage two of them: Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC. The third—Middle Seat Consulting—was cofounded by one of the PAC’s original leaders, Hector Sigala.
“There are legal and ethical ways to have people in leadership positions at an organization also serve as vendors to the same organization,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a money-in-politics watchdog, told the Washington Free Beacon. “But these relationships properly raise questions, especially for a group whose leaders include someone like Shaun King, who has repeatedly been accused of enriching himself improperly.”
“For 501(c)(3) charities, the IRS actually prohibits what’s called ‘private inurement’ or excessive benefit to an individual from the organization’s coffers,” Walter said. “Real Justice PAC isn’t a nonprofit overseen by the IRS but a PAC overseen by the Federal Election Commission, which so far as I know doesn’t have such a strict regulation. Still, groups like Real Justice that routinely criticize their opponents for things like ‘dark money’ influence—should be prepared to defend practices that let leaders write checks to their own for-profit consultancies.”
Ding, the PAC’s technology strategist, is registered as the manager for the California-based Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC in the firms’ state filings. Social Practice received nearly $250,000 from Real Justice PAC this cycle for campaign consulting and digital services. Bernal Alto, which dissolved earlier this year, was paid $20,000 for consulting and organizing services. Bond, a cofounder of the PAC and former senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, is also listed as a manager for both companies. Progressive digital firm Middle Seat Consulting, which was cofounded by Sigala, received $193,000 from the PAC for advertising services.
Seattle’s lawless CHAZ/CHOP zone finally demolished not due to all the murders, but because the scumbag protestors approached the mayor’s house. We can’t have the rabble bothering the more equal pigs!
Slowly but surely, all the Social Justice rioters are being brought to actual justice: 44 scumbags arrested in Scottsdale.
The antifa ringleader of the attempt to pull over the Andrew jackson statue was also arrested. “Jason Charter was arrested at his home by the FBI and U.S. Park Police on Thursday morning and charged with destruction of federal property.”
Our ruling class: “Peter Newell was the former co-ordinator of the Association for the Protection of All Children charity. The 77-year-old from Wood Green, north London, was sentenced last month at Blackfriars Crown Court. He admitted five indecent and serious sexual assaults on a child under 16.”
Wary of closer Indo-American ties, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece Global Times news outlet published editorials cautioning India from involving itself in U.S.-China tensions and serving as an American pawn against China. Picking up on this notion, Brookings scholar Tanvi Madan believes closer India-U.S. ties triggered the border standoff, with Beijing intending to show India its rightful place.
Instead, China’s deadly actions might have achieved exactly the opposite—cementing New Delhi’s strategic tilt towards Washington.
Hey @tiktok_us, why do you paste from my clipboard every time I type a LETTER in your comment box? Shout out to iOS 14 for shining a light on this HUGE invasion of privacy. inb4 they say it was a "bug" pic.twitter.com/MHv10PmzZS
And it’s not just Tik-Tok! “Other news apps caught red-handed: ABC News, Al Jazeera English, CBC News, CBS News, CNBC, Fox News, News Break, NPR, ntv Nachrichten, Reuters, Russia Today, Stern Nachrichten, The Economist, and Vice News.”
“Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows.” Absent other corroborative samples from that timeframe, I would guess it’s a case of sample contamination or a false positive. Still: a data point.
Will the hard left actually succeed in defunding the police in Minneapolis? They’re sure going to try, but voters can put a stop to this nonsense:
The Minneapolis City Council on Friday unanimously advanced a proposal to change the city charter to allow the police department to be dismantled, following widespread criticism of law enforcement over the killing of George Floyd.
The 12-0 vote is just the first step in a process that faces significant bureaucratic obstacles to make the November ballot, where the city’s voters would have the final say. It also comes amid a spate of recent shootings in Minnesota’s largest city that have heightened many citizens’ concerns about talk of dismantling the department.
The proposed amendment, which would replace the police department with a new “Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention” that has yet to be fully defined, next goes to a policy committee and to the city’s Charter Commission for a formal review, at which point citizens and city officials can weigh in.
What do you want to be that, if it passes, the Minneapolis crime rate will sore and all the money spent on the “Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention” will disappear into the pockets of radical “community activists” and the Democratic Party?
But: “Minneapolis council members who voted to dismantle the police use private security.” Of course. Some animals are more equal than others.
Hopefully voters will reject the proposal and vote in some city council members who aren’t hard left toadies. But keep in mind that Democrats control all of Minneapolis and most of Minnesota’s government (Republicans hold a one seat edge in the senate), which would suggest that the prognosis for full recovery from this Social Justice Warrior infection is grim.
If they do succeed in defunding, countless innocent people are going to die for the sins of one police officer.
She seems nice: “Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead essayist on New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, wrote a letter to the editor in Notre Dame’s The Observer stating that ‘the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.'” (Hat tip: Sean Davis.)
Theoretical phsyicist Dr. Stephen Hsu forced to resign VP position after bogus accusations of sexism and racism:
“The attacks attempt to depict me as a racist and sexist, using short video clips out of context, and also by misrepresenting the content of some of my blog posts. A cursory inspection reveals bad faith in their presentation,” Hsu posted on June 12. “The accusations are entirely false — I am neither racist or sexist.”
“The Twitter mobs want to suppress scientific work that they find objectionable. What is really at stake: academic freedom, open discussion of important ideas, scientific inquiry. All are imperiled and all must be defended.”
Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) and the first black billionaire, mocked Cancel Culture and the “borderline anarchists” who topple statues and monuments, claiming that black people “laugh” at the white people engaging in such violence. Even when white liberals topple a Confederate statue, Johnson insisted, “black people don’t give a damn.”
“Look, the people who are basically tearing down statues, trying to make a statement are basically borderline anarchists, the way I look at it,” Johnson told Fox News on Wednesday. “They really have no agenda other than the idea we’re going to topple a statue.”
The first black billionaire, who has called for $14 trillion in reparations payments to descendants of slavery, argued that vandalism and attacks on statues do not help the black community.
“It’s not going to give a kid whose parents can’t afford college money to go to college. It’s not going to close the labor gap between what white workers are paid and what black workers are paid. And it’s not going to take people off welfare or food stamps,” Johnson insisted.
He insisted that the rioters tearing down statues “have the mistaken assumption that black people are sitting around cheering for them saying, ‘Oh, my God, look at these white people. They’re doing something so important to us. They’re taking down the statue of a Civil War general who fought for the South.’”
“You know, black people, in my opinion, black people laugh at white people who do this the same way we laugh at white people who say we got to take off the TV shows,” Johnson added. He said these attempts to purge American culture of supposedly offensive monuments and media are “tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on a racial Titanic.”
“It absolutely means nothing,” the BET founder insisted.
“White Americans seem to think that if they just do sort of emotionally or drastic things that black people are going to say, ‘Oh my God, white people love us because they took down a statue of Stonewall Jackson.’ Frankly, black people don’t give a damn,” he quipped.
Know who else isn’t impressed with Social Justice Warriors? Muhammad Ali’s son.
“Don’t bust up s**t, don’t trash the place,” Ali Jr. told the Post. “You can peacefully protest. My father would have said, ‘They ain’t nothing but devils.’ My father said, ‘all lives matter.'”
With regard to the Black Lives Matter movement specifically, Ali Jr. said he believes BLM is “racist” — and his father would have, too.
“I think it’s racist,” he said. “It’s not just black lives matter, white lives matter, Chinese lives matter, all lives matter, everybody’s life matters. God loves everyone — he never singled anyone out. Killing is wrong no matter who it is.”
“It’s pitting black people against everyone else. It starts racial things to happen; I hate that,” he added of the BLM movement.
Communist China has decided it must crush Hong Kong because it knows the city presents an information-streaming ethnic, geographic, political and ideological alternative to the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian police state.
The CCP police state promises China’s citizens prosperity’s material goodies — cellphones, electric cars — in exchange for silently accepting communist dictates no matter how harsh and malign. Hong Kong, however, is not a promise. It is an existing democratic example of 21st-century Chinese prosperity.
Why add “information streaming”? Despite the best efforts of the CCP’s censors, cyberbullies, digital surveillance brigades and police threats, what happens in Hong Kong doesn’t stay in Hong Kong. Information about Hong Kong’s political, economic, social and cultural vitality manages to spread throughout mainland China.
The Chinese people also know Beijing lied about the COVID-19/Wuhan virus. The virus originated in China. Only former Obama administration media flacks argue otherwise. The CCP may have tried, but it failed to control human-to-human stories of mourning families. In February and March, the Chinese people knew why demand for funeral urns had spiked in the Hubei province.
The preceding four paragraphs sketch the domestic political threat the CCP confronts. Tiananmen Square proves the CCP sees this threat as a war.
The CCP cannot answer this question: How long can the prosperous tyranny continue to survive trading smartphones and quality American pork for political subservience by the roughly 400 million people in China’s quasi-middle class?
Snip.
Recent economic news suggests China is teetering. A China-EU investment and trade deal has snagged. Bloomberg reported defaults “in all sectors” of China’s offshore bond market have exceeded $4 billion, double that during the same period of 2019. First-quarter 2020 percentage profits, capital expenditures and retail sales may be the lowest since the 1990s.
Big Picture: The goodie-producing economic engine that braces the CCP’s domestic political strategy needs international markets. China’s domestic economy can’t sustain it.
CCP international aggression magnifies the vulnerabilities. Recent vile aggression abounds.
States with the least restrictions on their citizens’ movements and businesses due to the CCP Virus pandemic have the lowest death rates on average from the disease that prompted a national lockdown beginning in mid-March, according to a new study.
Conversely, the most restrictive states show higher death rates on average from the disease known as COVID-19 caused by the CCP virus and originating in late 2019 in China.
You know all that “Wuhan Coronavirus is overwhelming Houston hospitals!” panic? Yeah, not so much. (Hat tip: Aaron Glenn.)
More on the subject:
Here's what's going on with plenty of availability of general beds, too.#Texas has 2nd most recoveries in nation & 2nd lowest case fatality rate. @DavidBalatHC#Texas is responsibly phasing out shutdown, but some are spreading fear & wanting people locked down. #txlegepic.twitter.com/VeuSm3fM3W
Tesla is said to be in negotiation with Travis County, Texas, home to the state capital, Austin, for property tax abatements on what is said to be up to a $25 billion investment bringing up to 30,000 jobs to the region. Since Texas collects most of its taxes through property taxes, abatements are often offered as an incentive for industry to locate in the state and can be worth millions.
The proposed Tesla gigafactory in Austin would build the company’s new Cybertruck electric pickup and serve as a second site to build the Model Y SUV.
I’d never heard of Wirecard before last week, but evidently CEO Markus Braun resigned over some massive financial shenanigans that involved missing billions.
A few writers you’ve never heard of: “How dare J. K. Rowling question the sacred trans movement by saying there are two sexes! You must drop her immediately and send your staff for ‘reeducation!'” Literary agency: “Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! That’s funny! There’s the door!”
I know, two Rogan interviews in less than a week. Is it my fault he gets really good guests?
For this one, he interviews Second Amendment advocate (and former NRA host) Colion Noir.
Some takeaways:
“There is a subversive group in this country that wants to topple the structure of the United States so that they can gain power, because they think they can rule better. And a lot of those people are Marxists.” You don’t say.
“Black Lives Matter the sentiment, I can get down with. Black Lives Matter the organization, I cannot…the founder of Black Lives Matter said they’re trained Marxists.”
“Black Lives Matter has become this all encompassing umbrella of LGBTQ and some other stuff, aspects of antifa, and the whole communist/socialist aspects of politics creeping into that as well.”
“They’re wolves hiding among sheep.”
Noir says he’s shadowbanned on Instagram.
Rogan mentions The Seven Five, a documentary about police corruption in New York in the 1970s that was already on our to-be-watched list.
Rogan: “Who’s gonna be a cop now?”
Rogan: “In Santa Monica, they have police, but they were told to stand down. They were told to stand there while people were looting.”
Here’s the Bugs Bunny segment they talk about some 24 minutes in, where Elmer Fudd’s shotgun has been replaced with a scythe:
#BlackLivesMatters is a radical Marxist organization dedicated to destroying every American institution that stands in the way of achieving total power for the radical left. The fact that it has gotten as far as it has toward achieving that goal is a testament to both the deep pockets of its shadowy financial backers and the all-powerful sway the idea of white guilt has over liberal minds. Nominally rational liberals have been fooled into falling for a bait-and-switch where they think their dollars and pledges of support are actually going toward reducing police brutality rather than bankrolling a radical Marxist agenda.
Black Lives Matter as a movement represents the hopes and dreams of leftist organizers who shared with us that, until now, they had never felt such a sense of hope and excitement that their goal – as one operative put it, “total social upheaval,” and “systemic change” – could be realized in their lifetime. From veteran agitators like the Weather Underground’s Bill Ayers to a new crop of social-media-wielding female and LGBTQ leaders, Black Lives Matter is encapsulating the hopes and dreams of multiple generations of progressives in a way, they say, no movement has before.
The three female founders of the movement have made it clear, and the message has seeded itself as far down the chain as the operatives we spoke with, that Black Lives Matter is the vessel through which all progressive causes can flow. LGBTQ, illegal immigration, abortion, and countless other causes are simmering just beneath the public face of the focus on police violence. Even police violence flows neatly, according to Black Lives Matter, into economic violence – wage issues, workers rights . . . The panoply of leftist groups come together under this banner.
Cop Hate is critical and central to BLM’s strategy, because by vilifying the police, by portraying individual officers and departments in general as racist, despite clear evidence refuting “systemic” charges, it will achieve the objective of harming the principle of the rule of law. That is vital. And when that happens, the Left will strike and strike hard, and in many places, strike with impunity. Also from the report’s introduction:
Black Lives Matter presents an alternative view of the American story, rooted in Marxism and one that thrives on encouraging division. Many have criticized its avoidance of facts about bias in policing — facts that would directly counter the Black Lives Matter narrative. Nevertheless, it has captured the nation’s attention through its use of social-media and cameras but also by recruiting the young Americans who will fi ll the streets with their presence and engage the public’s interest with their fervor.
If Black Lives Matter succeeds, it will have reengineered the minds of America to view our system, our history, and our future, through the lens of division and hate. In its dishonest weakening of public trust in the police officer, the representative of law and order and equality before the law, Black Lives Matter weakens the very foundations of our country.
To counter this advance, marketers of freedom must understand why they are losing mindshare to the left’s Black Lives Matter ideology if they are to effectively counter their messages and rebuild demand for our principles.
The beauty, if you will, of BLM’s Cop Hate strategy is that it gives protestors actual foes, living and breathing, precincts, fat, juicy targets, as opposed to faceless programs or inert principles:
The police, as representatives of the state, must be messaged as exemplifying the Black Lives Matter framing by being themselves oppressive and racist.
Focusing vitriol against law enforcement officers is way to translate a political ideology (Marxism) into a tangible enemy that adherents can picture, encounter, and target. By seeking out stories of potential (founded and unfounded) injustices perpetrated by police and encouraging mass outrage in reaction to them, BLM is able to channel the emotion their message fosters against an enemy people can see. . . .
Snip.
Key to BLM’s strategy is suppressing free speech and dissent, by means of force and intimidation if necessary. And so it has come to pass that if you stand on the sidewalk to oppose a protest, you will get a concrete shake bounced off your head, (the assailant will not be charged) and a tweet of repute will result in a pink slip. The Orwellian media — a force multiplier for BLM’s messaging — seems not to notice the suppression of free-speech rights. Heck, they don’t see riots and fires before their cameras. From the report (again, keep in mind it was written in 2016):
The Black Lives Matter movement is wholly against dissent and freedom of speech and their success rests upon the silencing of dissent, but they are savvy enough to accomplish this through other means than solely legal. First, Black Lives Matter has created an atmosphere where forces more emotionally compelling than “truth-seeking” encourage fealty through the threatened stigma of being an outsider, and discourage diversity of opinion. Through our research, we found that both the Activists and the Allies were united by the fear of being ostracized from the left’s cultural community and clung to the community they were provided by publicly supporting Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter frequently uses shows of force – either by seeking them from university administrators or through aggressive demonstrations – to silence dissent, as well. Activists recounted to us that they found it appropriate to ask administrators to step in and stop perceived “hate speech,” although they considered themselves to be supporters of free speech. Finally, by portraying criticism of their cause as an attempt to stifle their speech, they in effect demand freedom from criticism.
Remember how Bret Weinstein talked about how these tactics were used in college. He also talked about the Maoist brainwashing nature of their tactics: The target is made to admit one obvious thing (“the United States is not perfect”), and then once they have given in to that, is pressured to agree to increasingly radical statements. For #BlackLivesMatters, this starts with a true statement (“police brutality exists”), which then leads directly to a false premise (“police are murdering black Americans at a high rate”) so that each statistically rare incident can be hyped to produce riots.
BLM happily self-identifies as a neo-Marxist movement with various far left objectives, including defunding the police (an evolution of the [Black] Panther position of public open-carry to control the police), to dismantling capitalism and the patriarchal system, disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure, seeking reparations from slavery to redistribute wealth and via various offshoot appeals, to raise money to bail black prisoners awaiting trial. The notion of seizing control of the apportionment of capital, dismantling the frameworks of society and neutralising and undermining law enforcement are not just Marxist, but anarchic.
And if that’s not enough, how about from #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Patrice Cullors?
What do the people providing financial and organizational backing want? Very possibly different things. I’m sure that ActBlue, the Democratic Party fundraising arm collecting money for them, see it as a means of harvesting donations. And we’ve already talked about George Soros’ backing of them. Stacey Lennox notes how they fit into something called the Momentum Community, which cites #BlackLivesMatter, the Dream Movement, and Occupy Wall Street:
All have clear Marxist aims that have significant overlap. What we are seeing is a group of affinity-based organizations around issues such as climate or some immutable characteristic such as race that all advocate for the same collectivist policies. And these policies have very little to do with the organizing principle of the not-for-profits involved. Momentum is pretty transparent about this.
Lennox suggests that the #BlackLivesMatter/antifa riots we’re seeing now are just a dry run to de-legitimize a successful Trump’s reelection with cries of voter suppression.
#BlackLivesMatters is far more concerned with overthrowing capitalism than actually improving the lives of black Americans.
So what did it take to turn spineless lefty Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler into a law-and-order guy? Trying to create an “autonomous zone” on his own street. “By 1 a.m., elaborate barricades had been erected. But in the early hours of Thursday morning, police moved into the area, declaring it an unlawful assembly. Portland Police estimated about 50 people were in the area when they dispersed the autonomous zone.”
It’s certainly frustrating to watch a pack of reeking leftist scumbags declare a portion of an American city an “autonomous zone” – what is it with Democrats and their secession fetish? – but do not get frustrated because Donald Trump has not sent the 101st Airborne in to powerwash the human grunge from Seattle’s feces-bedecked streets.
That’s what the Democrats want. And Trump – a better strategic thinker than all the media geniuses, hack politicians, and Afghan War-losing generals who cry about him – is not only not going to give them the victory they crave. He’s going to jam their cheesy plan down their throats.
The libs’ plan to win in November corresponds to Trump’s plan to crush them yet again. Skeptical? Consider this. In the five years since he rode down that escalator bringin’ hell with him, how many times have they come at Trump and won? Zero. He’s spent half a decade on the edge of doom and he’s still here. Why would you think that the walls are suddenly closing in now? You shouldn’t.
Let’s understand the strategic scenario. The long-term strategic objective of the leftists is to turn the United States into Venezuela, and they want to be Maduro. The major strategic objective that will put them in position to do so is victory in the November elections. Everything happening right now is part of their overall strategy to achieve that objective. But what kind of operation are they using to achieve that objective? There are two types of operations relevant here – kinetic and information. A kinetic operation is actual warfare. It’s violence designed to defeat the enemy and cause his surrender by either physically destroying him or occupying his territory and compelling surrender. An information operation is designed to affect the perceptions, and thereby the actions, of the target. Kinetic ops tend to do something to the enemy; and info op tends to get the target to do something to himself.
Elections are usually information operations. They attempt to build a narrative and play on perceptions and cause the target to take the action that will lead to victory. That is, get the target (the electorate) vote for the candidate the info operator wants elected.
Okay, so what is the 2020 elections, with the rioting, vandalism, violence and occupations?
This still an information operation, not a kinetic one.
They want to convince us we are powerless, that everyone else supports their commie agenda, that we cannot win. Their tactics are designed to create that impression and crush our morale. These include the 24/7 media hype, the outright media lies, the movie stars with their dumb PSAs, the staged statue attacks, the corporate solidarity proclamations, the social media cancellations, and the craven kneeling by people who are supposed to stand up for us. But another tactic, familiar to any student of insurgencies, is to provoke an overreaction by those in power in order to undermine its moral authority. They want is to make us (including the president) think this is a kinetic operation, and get our side to make fundamental strategic errors by failing to recognize the true nature of the threat. They hope that such a mismatch between perception and reality will then lead to gravely damaging blunders. One of those would be Trump succumbing to his legit frustration and sending in a bunch of federal troops to crack skulls in Seattle.
Defining this insurgency as a kinetic operation supports the leftists’ information operation goal of making Americans perceive the situation as out of control, of there being chaos, and of making the election of Grandpa Badfinger being the only thing that will resolve the situation. But there is no kinetic situation to resolve – at least none that is strategically significant in a kinetic sense. Despite the hype, the protests may have involved a peak of 2 million people across the country – out of 330 million. That’s nothing kinetically; it’s significant informationally because it is pushed by so many cultural influencers. The scurvy scumbags of Antifa hold essentially no ground except the turf they are physically standing on at the moment, and that is minuscule. Even the hilarious Road Warrior Republic of Seattle is not even a rounding error of a rounding error in terms of US territory. It’s significant only in the context of an information operation.
Many of us cons are furious that Trump is “doing nothing.” This is the wrong thing to think. Trump is only doing nothing if this is a kinetic operation; because this is an information operation, not going kinetic (sending in the troops) is doing something. And in fact, Trump is employing the law enforcement component of his kinetic assets by having the feds wait and arrest Antifa types after the protests end, and hitting them with hardcore federal rioting-related charges. Previously, they would get ticketed and released; now, looking at a five-to-ten stretch, the lawyers their daddies hired to get these sunshine anarchists out of their beefs are going to be advising them to roll over so they can start back up at Cornell in September and not at Leavenworth.
Who benefits then from our national nervous breakdown that never seems to end?
It is the globalist elites who still govern most of our society today, despite the invasion of Donald Trump.
And those elites wish to continue that rule through what they fervently hope will come as the outcome of these demonstrations—more government control, particularly government control that helps them.
They have seen it done elsewhere with results they might want to emulate, at least until recently.
Call it China Envy.
The Chinese Communist Party has, over the years, found a way to regulate their society to an extraordinary degree via a form of communism that maximizes profits and power for those (party) elites while holding the masses largely at bay.
No wonder our elites are jealous.
People call ours “globalists” but they’re not really global. They’re selectively global, but actually just greedy and power-hungry, like the ChiComs.
Whether planned or not, or partially planned, the current confluence of catastrophes has offered them an opportunity to advance their cause against their natural adversary, Mr. Trump.
In macro, that is the landscape of election 2020—the globalist elites represented, for the moment anyway, by Joe Biden versus the American people, represented by Donald Trump.
Many of those American people, heavily influenced by the media and repelled by the president’s rhetoric, do not realize that he is representing them, but he is. Ignorant, often willfully, they oppose him tooth and nail.
An equal number, or possibly larger, as the one million plus requesting tickets to his Tulsa rally indicates, supports Mr. Trump.
We are in the midst of a Battle Royale for the soul of our nation, whether it remains more or less the democratic republic the Founders envisioned or becomes an Americanized version of what has been evolved by the CCP.
If the latter, ironically, then such groups as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa will be kicked to the curb once victory has been achieved and secured.
It’s always the same thing: Our newspapers are full of intense interest in Harvard’s admissions standards but have very little to say about New York City’s dropout rate. People can’t help being fascinated with themselves and their peers. If you want to know what is on the minds of the leaders of the American ruling class, it’s no secret. They’ll tell you, if you ask — and if you don’t.
George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.
Oh, but they got James Bennet, the opinion editor at the New York Times. And surely that is something? It is, indeed, a very useful illustration of the E-Class vs. S-Class divide. Bennet was fired after purportedly endangering the lives of black Times staffers — a charge no mentally normal adult actually takes seriously — by publishing a guest column about the riots and the Insurrection Act by Senator Tom Cotton. The campaign to end Bennet did not come from America’s poor black communities as the workers of the world looked up, stunned, from page A24 of the New York Times — the venom came straight and undiluted from 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y., with Bennet’s underlings and juniors more or less putting him on an ice floe and pushing him out to sea.
Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. Big Caitlyn is getting paid. Affluent white women are the main E-Class beneficiaries of the current headhunting project to clear a little room at the top, just as they have historically been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, contracting set-asides, and other programs to help out the poor disenfranchised Georgetown alumni out there in the cold and dark.
“Police, Fire Reportedly Refused to Respond to Crime in Progress in Seattle’s Breakaway CHOP.” “This is where ‘defund the police’ will lead not just in Seattle, but wherever it’s thoughtlessly implemented. Probably not all the way to the segregationist, secessionist CHOP, but to crime-ridden streets into which police and fire are more circumspect about intervening.”
these riots and their associated melodrama might most accurately be called the Nov. 3 riots. It’s the prospect of the election, especially the possibility that President Donald Trump will be reelected, which provides the fuel for the current hysteria.
But Simon is right. A solid majority of voters are disgusted by what they see. There is a large overdraft on the country’s budget of white guilt. Expect a foreclosure on the account Nov. 3. Yes, yes, the situation is fluid and a week, as Harold Wilson once observed, is a long time in politics. But a biopsy of the body politic in mid-June 2020 doesn’t bode well for the old man in the basement or scriptwriters Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
The longer this madness continues, the more likely it is that the president will enjoy a victory of historic proportions.
Another caveat about all those “Oh my God, Wuhan coronavirus cases are spiking in Florida,” etc. stories, take a look at these statistics. Assuming they’re accurate (a big assumption), new cases are going up (not spiking per se), but deaths are going down. It really looks like cases aren’t spiking, we’re just detecting milder and milder cases of it thanks to widespread testing.
Instead of #BlackLivesMatters, how about actually defending black lives? “National African American Gun Association (NAAGA) Membership Grows as Members Purchase Ammo in Record Numbers.” Good. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
Good news in a sea of bad: Austin Police Chief Brian Manley is not getting the axe. Finally, a scalp the radical left didn’t take.
Antifa members arrested in Austin for looting. “Lisa Hogan, Samuel Miller, and Skye Elder were arrested last week and charged with various state jail felonies after they smashed into a boarded-up Target, destroyed and ripped out surveillance cameras, and looted the store, stealing and damaging over $20,000 in property.” The mugshot:
Exactly the sort of Antifa winners you would expect to loot a Target
Chuck-E-Cheese files for bankruptcy. When they had to make it on the quality of their food, they were doomed…
Also filing for bankruptcy: 24 Hour Fitness. Hard to make a living when the government outlaws your business model. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Rocket fuel storage facility explosion in #China, the air catches fire before the explosion, the orange smoke is a clear indication of rocket fuel. The Shockwave shatters the glass of the nearby textile mill. You will not find this story on Chinese "news"
In 2012, a young Florida man named Trayvon Martin became a cause célèbre after he attacked a man named George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Martin in self-defense. Zimmerman was found not guilty of second-degree murder, but the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged from the killing lives on. You might’ve heard about it on the news recently.
Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, is running for county commissioner in Florida and says she disagrees with demands to defund the police that some have called for in the wake of George Floyd’s death, according to the Guardian…
Fulton has kept a close eye on the protests over the death of George Floyd — her son’s death helping spark the Black Lives Matter movement — and told the Guardian she doesn’t agree with calls to “defund the police…”
“I think we need more police,” she said. “We need police with better standards, and police with better ethics and better work habits…”
Amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, riots, looting, and calls to defund the police, a Harvard economist has found that proactive policing saves black lives.
“Defunding the police is not a solution and could cost thousands of black lives,” Roland Fryer told The College Fix in an interview about his latest research.
“I think the streets are talking and we should listen. People are frustrated,” he continued in the email. He sympathizes with frustration at “big racial differences” in educational achievement, life expectancy and “almost every part of life.”
The youngest African-American professor to receive tenure in Harvard history, Fryer uses a data-driven approach on fraught social issues.
He made waves four years ago with his research on use-of-force incidents by race. It found that black suspects were less likely to be shot by police than white suspects.
His new research is similarly controversial in the media. In a Manhattan Institute video late last month, Fryer exclaimed that he encountered an “absolute refusal to grapple with the data” from the media and “insistence” that he should not publicize it.
Referring to a reporter whom he showed the research, Fryer told The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley: “I thought the person might sit with the numbers for a bit and go, ‘Damn, a thousand lives. That’s a lot.’”
It’s a repeat of the controversy over his 2016 paper on police use of force. Though that research “didn’t find racial bias in shootings,” he told Riley, it “did find very large racial differences in lower level uses of force.”
Unless you’ve lived in an inner-city, or ghetto (as we called it back in the day), you honestly can’t imagine what life is like.
During the mid-80s, I spent two years working and living in the inner-city of Milwaukee. My world revolved around 6th and Wisconsin and 35th and Highland (look it up) years before the violent crime decrease of the 90s. On top of that, during the insane 70s, I went to an inner-city school, Jackie Robinson Middle School, on 37th and Fond Du Lac (look it up).
You can write off my experience because I’m a white boy, but my neighbors weren’t white, and during the 80s, my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, wasn’t white, and yet we were all suffering under the same government oppression — the inescapable, suffocating oppression of living in a high crime area.
Believe me, racism was the least of anyone’s problems…
All I can tell you is this… Living in a high crime area is like living in a world where vampires rule. You better be home and behind a locked door before the sun goes down. You might not hang garlic and crucifixes, but you do hang bars on your windows (and hope you don’t have to escape a fire) and install multiple locks on your doors, and you choose the suffocating heat over the cool but dangerous breeze of an open window.
Walking to your car after work when it’s dark (especially for a woman) is a daily dread.
Walking those two or three blocks home after work in the dark from the bus stop (especially for a woman) is a literal act of bravery.
I know what it’s like to come home to find my apartment robbed, to have my car stolen, to get assaulted after turning over my wallet. I know what it’s like to have a drug gang squat in the vacancy down the hall. I know what it’s like to get a panicked call from the woman you love because she’s trapped at work, at a retail store, where a street gang just walked in and announced it was taking over.
And I know how all of this ensures you forever tread water. You can’t get a better job in a nicer area because now you have no car to get to work. You can’t save money to get out, because now all your stuff’s been stolen and you have to replace it. You can’t get a better paying job because the crime long ago scared away the kind of employer who might offer such an opportunity. You live hand-to-mouth, a gerbil on a wheel, so there’s no way to save for the first month, last month, and security deposit on a nicer, safer place.
Yes, we finally got out. It took a measly $900 loan (that took me 15 months to pay back), but lemme tell you, that’s no way to live. There’s nothing romantic about poverty, and when criminals reign, it’s a literal dystopia.
Looking back, even though my skin color made me the racial minority, I don’t ever remember race being an issue with any of my coworkers or neighbors. We were all in it together.
But back to the corruption…
This system is put in place by design, to keep people down, to keep them from becoming a complacent member of the middle class. And if you care enough to take a good look around, to study past and present history, it is a system put in place by Democrats to keep the people who live in these predominantly black neighborhoods poor, angry, desperate, and huddled.
While traditional policing implies deputized professionals enforcing laws passed by the legitimate representatives and—it is to be hoped—duty-bound to respect individual rights, Community Armed Defense rejects the individual rights upon which the U.S. system is built in favor of the collective communal “rights” of identity politics. It exists not to uphold law, but to enforce the “political demands” of favored groups.
The image of a volunteer fire department but with guns may suit the anarchist ethos, but in fact Community Self-Defense is about establishing revolutionary shadow governance.
Far from simply providing armed enforcement, the term covers a full panoply of activities, providing all manner of services traditionally provided by the government—from food banks and co-op gardens to housing and medical clinics.
This may seem overly ambitious. But for the revolutionary insurgent it is just good policy. And as a tactic, it works. From the Taliban to FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) to the Mexican drug cartels, the language may be different but the model is the same. Create instability, force out the government, and finally replace it. Reports from Seattle suggest that, already, groups are “requesting” $500 per business owner to help support “community protection and security.”
In areas where the logic of revolutionary politics is operative, those who can provide services and a sense of stability, even for a fee, reign. Whether they were the ones who caused the instability to begin with is immaterial. In revolutionary periods, groups that demonstrate even a modest ability to perform this function should not be underestimated.
Attempts to abolish police, including the most recent Seattle Autonomous Zone, may seem risible. They are likely to be short-lived and collapse upon themselves as revolutionary ardor wanes. But they provide a short-term proof of concept, a propaganda victory, and justification for future efforts. Abolition of the police—whether by groups like Antifa, or through elected radical city councils—is now officially on the menu. The establishment of Community Self-Defense and its standards of collective group rights will represent a kind of de facto regime change.
Have Democrats finally realized they’ve plopped the boiling frog into revolution too quickly, or will victimhood identity politics drag them into the same electoral defeats that breakdowns in law and order have delivered in the past?
