This site published a debate between Rafael Mangual and Lara Bazelon a while back. Personally, I've found Rafael to be one of the clearest voices on the subject of crime. His recent book Criminal Injustice was one of the most eye-opening works I've read. It makes the argument both philosophically and statistically that the notion that Black Americans are being indiscriminately murdered by the police is a myth. Criminal Injustice also proceeds to dismantle many other progressive shibboleths regarding race and crime, including the idea that people should be afraid of their interactions with the cops.
These days the police typically kill about 1,000 individuals per year. Mangual estimates that these 1,000 deaths are the result of roughly 3,000 police shootings. Given that the police make roughly 10 million arrests each year, if we assume that each of the 3,000 shootings is the result of a separate arrest, we arrive at the fact that only about 3/10,000 or 0.03% of arrests end up with an individual being shot. If a person simply does what the police say, that probability declines to virtually zero.
Note that this is the probability of an adverse encounter conditional on an actual arrest attempt. Conditional on merely an interaction with the police, the probability of an individual being shot is even lower. In 2018, over 61 million individuals reported at least one interaction with the police. The total number of police-civilian interactions each year is undoubtedly higher. The notion that Black Americans or Americans of any race should live in fear of being shot by the police is wildly hyperbolic at best.
Matt Taibbi recently participated in a debate where he highlighted the failings of the mainstream media with respect to Trump and Russiagate. I would argue that the failure of our journalistic institutions to accurately report on the situation of crime in this country is a far worse sin. The media's obsession with Trump seems silly at best. Its dissemination of misinformation regarding policing has been outright dangerous.
Much has been written about Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility, with its exhortation for white Americans to do the work of advancing racial justice. If nice white people read Rafael Mangual’s book Criminal Injustice instead and did the work of understanding the real situation of race and crime in America, I have no doubt this country would be vastly better off as a result.
Yesterday-a short clip of Brian Stelter on a a panel at Davos/WEF sitting next to a (sounded German) woman proclaiming that it was time American's accepted limited 'free speech'. Last week Texas Democrat Lee ponding the Patriot Act on the House floor. Now, this week --I believe it's Lee again-- the introduction on the House floor of a Bill asking for the criminalization of speech in the name of fighting 'white supremacy'. Also a British citizen claiming 3,300 arrests and prosecutions last year for speech and thought crimes.
I don’t remember the President 45’s tweets being mean, I found them mostly informative. The problem was the tweets didn’t suit the liberal and progressive’s narrative
Why? To destabilize and destroy local law enforcement. Why? Because if local policing can no longer keep communities safe, they can justify the need for a national police force to patrol every community in America.
WHY? is the most critical and mystifying question. The demise of policing in the US is certainly not accidental. Many of the most powerful people in the US are in Davos now crafting further totalitarian control of our lives. I doubt supporting police is on their agenda. One can only speculate how the demise of policing fits their agenda. One might suspect it has something to do with reducing safety in order to deteriorate the mental and physical health of our population. The WEF crowd is very invested in population reduction.
If something of this sort is factual, then one might ask what can serious people do to stay safe and sane. Moving to areas where policing is still strong might be the wise thing to do. And of course this is already happening.
A sea change in focus, conversation and action would help us. Instead of continuous shock and dismay at what is obviously a well planned open assault on the free people's of the world by criminal financier's (slaver's), we need direct political organization and activism. (Who, after decades of bad political, social and economic policy would have thought the Republican Party would be the way forward? ) If we have time for Substack we have time for letter writing campaign's and phone calls.
Yes, effective political pressure is the key. But I would not invest time, energy or money in a blue state. It is now best to let them stew in their juices. I only invest in my new purple state where we have a chance for positive action.
Unfortunately, all I have learned about our elections, leads me to be highly skeptical of their integrity, but at least in a more red state there may be some political power to limit the excesses of ballot harvesting, mail in ballots, Zuck bucks and tech giants' influence.
Find like-minded friends and build effective coalitions with local politicians you can put faith in if at all possible. And yes, there are very few Democrats you can trust to support the police and other security concerns.
Well written article chronicling our cities descent to hell. BLM and ACLU are race grifters and frauds. Anyone who supports anything they say is my litmus test to know they are corrupt frauds. I have moved to a safe date with excellent governance that supports their police ( Florida) blue states will rot and should rot
The reason political movements deliberately promote instability is the creation of opportunities to gain new powers in the name of restoring stability.
Well, there was that report awhile back that said the bottom quintile by SAT/IQ of college undergraduates are largely found getting degrees in Journalism or Education.
The Santos imbroglio is emblematic of the complete hollowing out of journalism by Google, Facebook & other social media. A few simple phone calls would've revealed him as a fraud, but there are almost no actual reporters capable of even that - because there is no longer an ad market to generate the funds to pay them. TWTR and organs like this one about all we have left.
I am 100% with you and would only add that Roland Fryer was also written about on "Common Sense". The Harvard Woke could not handle his findings, as a Black male, that police are less likely to use police force on blacks than whites.https://scholar.harvard.edu › ...
PDF
An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force⇤
And for writing that, Harvard went after him on another pretext, took away his institute, suspended without pay for 2 years. It's written about in a few places - one on Glen Loury's substack.
I just read it. This most import take from it is a need for better methods and better research. Most of the time that paper is equivocating garbleage I couldn't make very much sense of that manages to point in several directions at once.
CMA on steroids.
The idea to "increase the expected price of excessive force" is all well and good but I doubt the benefits would outweigh the negatives of the huge rise in paperwork and huge increase in IA cops. All I see from that is the gratuitous increase of the tail end and REMFs every other "reform", make it "better", make it more "efficient" of almost every instituion or organisation has resulted in.
Fryer might make better use of his time watching paint dry.
Apologies, but I am very familiar with that exact paper and you are representing its conclusions incorrectly.
Fryer found that there is no evidence that police are likely to use DEADLY force more often on black suspects. However, he found a robust fixed increase of use of less than deadly force on black suspects .
I appreciate the attention to detail! I may have misrepresented the conclusion but what I was getting at is that the woke folk cannot handle even these findings. Roland Fryer is a black man who is really trying to understand numbers and change outcomes in policing and education. His findings scare the far left because his data does NOT uphold their agenda. As a result he has been taken down. Real data matters!
his reputation was assassinated as a signal that heterodox views critical of the corrupt ILLIBERAL academic establishment will NOT BE TOLERATED.
the good news is that the heterodox community is now large enough, and growing quickly, that Fryer and others have a pretty robust support network and increasing numbers of colleagues that are collaborating on legitimate alternatives to the DEI/CRT "woke" insanity, such as FAIRForAll.org (a Bari Weiss project).
What would you say to yourself in ten years when you reread the above? Just type it in the form of a quote, talk to yourself in the second person, start with "You..."
Fryer's paper was years old when the MeToo movement hit. He was then suspended within six months of the MeToo movement hitting. Then he was reinstated. If Harvard wanted to cancel him for heterodox views, why bother reinstating him, why not just remove him permanently?
Whether or not the sexual harrassment allegations against him were real, the pattern is much more consistent with him being a standard MeToo target than targeted for his policing research.
I don't have the data. The cited economist has the data. On the topic, his comment is "even after accounting for a large set of controls". In my judgment, he's not likely to be so careless as to miss the confounding factor you are bringing up.
Yan - I agree with you and the logic... "If nice white people instead read Rafael Mangual’s book Criminal Injustice and did the work of understanding the real situation of race and crime in America, I have no doubt this country would be vastly better off as a result."
However, the truth is not the goal of the Grievance Industry. They make their money perpetuating the narratives. Burn Loot Murder took in over $100M and simply kept the money; not one American of African descent was help except those within BLM(eg Patrice Cullors)
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
And you left out the fact that a white cop is more likely to shoot a white person than a black person in the same situation. Reverse racism. Several statistical analysis of the data have shown this.
This finding does not necessarily indicate reverse racism. Bias against white suspects means that more of them were shot than was justified under the circumstances of the crime. There is no evidence I know of that there are a lot of unjustified shootings of white suspects by white officers included in the data. It is more likely that white officers are using appropriate levels of force with white suspects, and less than optimal levels of force with black and hispanic suspects.
White police officers are aware that if they kill a black suspect they are likely to be massively targeted by mainstream media, and to be at risk of career loss, even prison time. To reduce their chances of getting into a deadly force encounter with a black suspect, some white officers have pulled back from proactive policing in areas where black criminals do business. Black and hispanic have less cause to fear being targeted for punishment for killing black and hispanic suspects, because mainstream media are not so interested in these incidents.
It is also possible that black and hispanic suspects are less compliant and more provoking towards black and hispanic officers than they are towards white officers. Efforts have been made by some analysts of the data to compare only those incidents in which the suspects' level of compliance was equal, and the slightly higher number of black suspects killed by black and hispanic officers persisted. So, it seems more likely that the difference in use of deadly force between black and hispanic versus white officers is due more to characteristics of the officers than of the subjects.
I conclude that white officers are operating at a less than optimal level with respect to use of deadly force when black and hispanic suspects are committing violent crimes.
The slightly greater tendency of black and hispanic officers to use deadly force with black and hispanic suspects might also involve a It is also possible that there is some dynamic between black officers and black suspects that leads to escalation of use of force by the officers. One hypothesis could be that black and hispanic suspects are more likely to defy the authority of minority officers than of white officers. There are, of course, a number of other possible explanations for the small but consistent finding that more black and hispanic suspects are killed by black and hispanic officers, or by salt-and- pepper teams, than by white officers and teams.
These findings can be interpreted differently, based on whether the
That is exactly the conclusion I had arrived at and you have put it very well. I was trying to - in far less words - allude to the idea that racism is involved, but rather that it is favoring black miscreants now. Slightly.
But black and Hispanic officers are now being targeted too, as "agents of white supremacy", or other phrases that amount to "race traitor". So it might be interesting to see if that persists.
Oh yes! Racism against black officers is freely expressed by young white activists in Portland. They make the judgment that if a black person chooses that job, then they are part of the white supremacist system or that they somehow aren't "really black." As white college students they take it for granted without thinking that they are entitled to decide what jobs black people are allowed to apply for and which ones they can't. And the basis for excluding them for certain jobs is that they are too white! These young people should practice what they preach and spend more time examining their conscience for racist attitudes and behaviors!
I vote that we use Portland for a big national laboratory experiment. First, have the government buy out everyone who resides there now; buy their properties and pay them to relocate. Next, eliminate the police departments, the courts, the jails, the entire justice system. Then, invite people who want to live in a no-justice society to live there, squat in a property, take whatever they want, and just generally behave as they wish, as long as it stays in Portland. See how long it takes to destroy itself. Then rub the Left's noses in it. Literally; capture them, take them there, and forcibly rub their noses in the ashes of the burned-out buildings and the piles of excrement left on the sidewalks.
Yes - good site. And Chicago's rate isn't the worst in the US by a long shot. St. Louis, Baltimore and Detroit are all much worse, comparing rates (absolute counts divided by population). I think Chicago doesn't even make the top ten. Check out these lists:
Great comment and references. I just use that site to highlight the details found in every major city, namely and unfortunately, ~80% of violent crime is black on black in white leftist controlled areas, etc.
Once again all of this proves the rainbow, unicorn party is insane. The Dem/Socialist party with the help of the press made George Floyd out to be some kind of hero. Only the insane would do this. Floyd was a brutal thug not a hero.
The Democrat/Socialist Party made George out as a martyr. They embraced and championed BLM and ATIFA as defenders of racial justice, which they are not. They are by their own admission communist agitators, hell bent on destroying this country. The Dems made a big show of being "outraged" by the 6 Jan riot but not a peep out of them when BLM and ANTIFA burning our Dem run cities down.
Yep. KKK, Mafia, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Antifa are all the terror arm's of the democrat party throughout history. Antifa... The rise of the Nazi's were opposed by communists who called themselves anti-fascist.
It is: An international cabal of criminal financiers who rigged and destroyed 'free market's and enterprise' in the name of 'free market's and enterprise'. They compromised, subverted and infiltrated American elected political leadership while looting and gutting the American economy. Globalism is collapsing and a great re-leveling of world economics and resources is underway. The American Constitutional Republic must be destroyed to allow the imposition of totalitarian control world wide. The entirety of the bureaucratic surveillance state, BLM, you 'white surpremacist, D.E.I. commissariat, butcher those kids-destroy that school, speech/thought control, why does the MSM lie in my face etc. is a bought and paid for psyop. They're criminal thugs. Why else would the Davos boys need 5,000 armed troops to protect their meeting? Why was Brian Stetler sitting on a Davos panel discussing the necessity of the oppression of free American speech and thought with EU marionettes?
Curious: you listed a number of ways how you think these Davos masterminds are imposing to collapse society to solidify their control, yet you left out the disarming and deconstruction of women even as you listed butcher those kids. Blind spot, perhaps?
Historically, rendering the female population completely powerless is one way to ensure oppressive control. To date, the forces behind these have succeeded in disempowering and silencing women totally in ways conservatives could never have thought of in their wildest dreams. All legacy feminist organizations in the US today have been disarmed and brought to their knees. And the brilliance of their strategy is they convinced these women themselves to voluntarily lay down the swords and kiss the ring.
The killing of George Floyd was the biggest gift to the Left in decades. I believe BLM and its ilk were thrilled when he died. They had been waiting patiently for just such an event. Look at all the cash that began flowing in to them, from corporations among others competing with each other in the Woke Olympics. Talk about capitalizing on a tragedy. Now that BLM has been exposed as the grift that it is, nothing but crickets from corporate America.
Crickets not only from Corp America but from the left in general. When the Socialist held the House why didn't they investigate BLM and ANIFA? We know the answer to that.
If you want to solve the gang violence problem in Chicago (my home town), they shouldn't send in more police yet. Here how to solve the problem: Send in NRA instructors. If the gangbangers were better shots, the problem would solve itself in a matter of months - and far fewer innocent bystanders would be wounded or killed. If you've got a better short term fix - I'd love to hear it.
I don't. My son's friend Charlie Johnson was a killed of spraydom in St. Paul on graduation day in May 2021. I asked my son "WTF, how can these people not hit what they are shooting at?" After working at a mostly American of African descent nightclub as a bouncer for a couple of years he said "Dad, they don't know how or practice how to shoot." Your comment is in-bounds for sure.
Those numbers were all available at the DOJ website back during the summer of Floyd. They also show that whites and AAs are basically killed at the same rate when comparing each ethnicity’s arrest rate. The media just ignored it.
The MUNK debate was definitive. As in every question mark we pursue here on substack comment's, faced with factual reality, the propagandist's resort to name calling, lie's and innuendo. I've accepted that behind the psyop smokescreen of propagandist sycophants is a well oiled machine run by criminal financier's intent on reducing free American's to feudal servitude. I sleep better.
What an absolutely brilliant post. Roland Fryer was cancelled from Harvard for saying much the same thing Yan. I’m going to get the book before it’s cancelled - thanks for recommending.
The silencing and punishment of Roland Fryer (one of the best economic minds of our time - oh, and a black man) is one of the clearest examples of the sickening hypocrisy of the progressive left.
They don’t actually give a DAMN about “Black Lives”; whether those lives include a brilliant economist at Harvard, or the millions of people living without adequate police protection. (““Haven’t seen one damn member of Black Lives Matter patrolling the Bayview making sure police aren’t ‘hunting and killing black people.’”)
They do have danger to them, that's why the Judge has to authorize that as well. No Knocks should only be done when there is a threat of physical violence. For instance, if you are going into a drug dealers house who is known to be armed, I understand the no nock provision.
If you are executing a warrant on someone who has never been known to be armed and is running insurance scams, probably not appropriate.
"Black Lives Matters signs are everywhere, reflecting Kensington residents’ solidarity with working-class black people in cities like Richmond—even as Richmond has become less safe as a result of the changes that movement has ushered in."
Behold, the American Far Left summarized in a single sentence. Who cares if the policies actually work? What matters is the joy of virtue signalling about the noble cause.
Donna I couldn’t agree with you more. I live in Oakland but work in Orinda a mostly white upper middle class suburb just east. There are a lot of BLM flags and signs about. While the wealthy communities have proper policing and limited crime, poorer cities like Oakland suffer greatly. I’m still trying to figure out how supporting a movement that increases the amounts of victims in poor black communities helps them. When I bring this question up to people I work with I’m ostracized.
It baffles me how after everything that has been revealed about BLM and its con artist "leaders," including in the mainstream press, that anybody would still keep a BLM sign up in their yard. I would be embarrassed. It's equivalent to displaying an Enron sign, or Lance Armstrong sign, or Bernie Madoff sign, or Bill Cosby sign, or name any other disgraced party. What does it take for liberals to finally cop to what a sham this "organization" is?
Hey, at least I take comfort in knowing I never gave this hate group one red cent. I knew from the get-go what they were about, and it's not black lives.
I now live in a very wealthy town in the Bay Area where all of those blm signs, science matters and love is here signs are located. I laugh everytime I walk by them. If they truly believed in that they would buy a house in a different town, save 66% on their mortgage for a similar house. Instead they choose to live in a city that has almost zero African Americans or Hispanics….
I used to live on the leftiest-of-the-lefty north side of Chicago, and I also would inwardly sneer every time I walked by the "Hate Has No Home Here" and similar type signs in the yards of houses I would never be able to afford. I call them "I'm better than you" signs. The implication being that if you have no such sign like they do, then you are a "hater." I used to think, why do you need to broadcast that? It should be a given that you have no "hate," you shouldn't have to announce that fact.
Now I live in a more normal place in a purple state, where such signs are very few and far between. You can still find them here and there, but they're not so in-your-face. They are equaled or outnumbered by "Back the Blue" and patriotic signs, and unlike Chicago, people proudly display support for Republican candidates without fear.
As a member of the left (though registered independent), let me say that there is a huge difference between progressives and most of the left. You might have missed it in the article, but Biden's play called for adding police. Most of us on the left want better policing and if it takes more cops, that's fine. We also want to root out the problematic cops and law enforcement sorts, who often believe they can get away with murder (see the murders in Aubery case in Georgia and the case in S. Carolina where the cop murdered a man, then planted a gun on him as examples not mentioned in this piece).
Unfortunately, the progressive left is ascending. They are often fact-free and filled with righteous anger. If you want to smear progressives, go for it. They've earned it. Their ignorance and arrogance form a dangerous combination, and it is harming a lot of people, including cops and civilians. Sadly, its taken hold on campuses and in district attorney's offices. Corporations donate to BLM because their employees need it, even if BLM organization is awful and harmful. DEI is a disaster. And yet, its happening.
Lately some old school liberals would pop up here and there insisting the "progressives" or "woke" or whatever you want to call them are "not really left" and "not really liberal". If you still think you are the "real left" and "real liberals", you haven't been paying attention. You're like the last monarch in the castle issuing edicts to your courtiers who don't know how to break the news to you that the new regime outside your four walls already secured power and the army's sworn allegiance, and they're about to come kick you out to exile if you're lucky or send you to the guillotine if you're not. Whatever classical definition of left or liberal means, you are no longer the "left". The term has been redefined by these forces you call "progressives". Much like how they've redefined "woman". And there's nothing you can do about it. You can stomp your feet and hold your breath till your face turns blue, but you still won't get your definition back. The sooner you come to terms with it, and realize the left has left you, the less time you'll waste fixating on a pointless fight that only you care about. I tell you this as a former liberal myself. What you are today is politically homeless.
Biden can get away with calling for adding police because everyone else left and right knows he was just making an empty political promise and he was full of shit when he said that. Only you actually believed him. He's the POTUS, he's got nothing to do with hiring, running and managing police forces. But you backing more police? In today's political spectrum that makes you a conservative, and one step away from MAGA/alt_right in the eyes of the left.
@QX, bravo! If I could like this comment a thousand times, I would. You read my own brain. The Biden example is ridiculous. It's hollow and empty posturing after he and his entire party spent the better part of a year disparaging and demoralizing the same police that he now wants to hire back. Too little, too late. I too am sick of liberals insisting, "this does not represent me or what I believe ... But I'm still a Liberal! And I still vote Democrat!" It's called denial. It's also called willful ignorance. And it's also called gaslighting.
Not so long ago I would have described myself as a liberal-leaning, Democrat-voting moderate Independent. That would be utterly absurd now. No moderate can any longer vote for the Democratic party and call themselves moderate with a straight face, unless they are completely uneducated and uninformed.
Zeke, thanks for sharing your perspective. There is insanity at both extremes - far right and far left. After the last election, I realized I was in a Republican bubble and determined to begin reading commentary from sensible people on the other side of the aisle. I started by reading Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, and that led me to The Free Press.
Right? Bet those white liberal sign-owners would never even consider living in communities like Richmond that they profess "solidarity" with. I have lived in neighborhoods that my more liberal friends balked at even visiting, let alone living in. Hypocrites, all.
For sure. A lot of social problems we see today started under the Obama administration.
I remember the atmosphere at the time. If you had strong feelings against the Obama administration’s policies, it wasn’t because you had heart-felt, thought-out and (hopefully) reasonable objections. No, no, no, it’s because you’re a racist.
We see the same thing today with any issue regarding American blacks: if you’re concerned about the incredibly high homicide and abortion rates in the black community, then it has to be because of racism (not abortions, though, those are sacrosanct). Otherwise... you’re a racist.
I agree. That's where the chill over debate began. You couldn't dare say a word against any of Obama's policies for fear of being labelled a racist. It was a brilliant way of silencing any and all opposition.
"If you had strong feelings against the Obama administration’s policies... it’s because you’re a racist".
“Progressive” policies, whether they be non-policing, bail "reform", union run “education”, inflationary pressures exacerbated by their war on fossil fuels… demonstrably affect minorities in adverse ways, which for most people would fit the definition of racist. The curious thing is that Republicans never label democrat proponents as racists. Maybe most of them are just too stupid to make the argument.
I once worked for a lawyer who boasted about low crime in his neighborhood by prefacing “It’s an all white neighborhood” and he referred to Justice Clarence Thomas as “worse than an Uncle Tom”, but when I would mention something like the crisis at the border, it either went: A: it’s not really happening. That’s just Fox News propaganda or B: our nation is made of immigrants, why are you opposed to black/brown people coming in to the country?
To be clear, I was referring to the milquetoast, country club republicans like Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney who go on the Sunday talk shows and allow punks like Chuck Todd accuse them and all republicans of being racists, homophobes, misogynists, blah, blah, blah and simply turn the other cheek.
The political polarization this country is currently experiencing can be directly traced back to Obama's presidency. (And I voted for him in '08.) If you look at American society pre-2009 and post-2015, there is a marked and dramatic difference. Before that, everything was not instantly racialized the way it is now (except by the few usual suspects, e.g. Jackson/Sharpton). There was no "cancel culture." Comedians could tell actual jokes. Everyone could define man and woman.
Part of it may be attributed to the emergence of social media, it's true. But Obama left the country more racially divided than it had ever been--and this while being the first black president! He was supposed to usher in a "post-racial" society.
I think it's hilarious when people blame Trump for polarizing us. No, Trump was a consequence of it, not the cause. Voting for Obama remains the worst political decision I've ever made.
"The political polarization this country is currently experiencing can be directly traced back to Obama's presidency."
This is true, but it's a total fallacy to then conclude that the polarization is Obama's fault when the fact of the matter is that the very specter of a Black commander-in-chief, which is something we've simply never seen before in America, is the source of the polarization (along with the surging popularity of social media and politically biased mainstream news outlets). It has nothing to do with his ideological leanings or partisan affiliation; had Condoleeza Rice or Larry Elder been America's first Black president, we'd still be living in a profoundly more race-concious, politically polarized United States for the simple fact that all high-profile racial incidents involving Black Americans would be filtered through the novel reality of a Black president, thus burdening him/her with the unique responsibility of providing an unofficial official take of such incidents from a racialized, or Black, perspective. That guarantees that whatever is said is going to piss off half the country, especially due to biased social and mainstream media coverage which is primarily designed to push people's buttons to keep the well-oiled and profitable outrage machine going. Your opinion of the president's public stances on matters of race would likely have been the exact opposite had Rice, Elder, Scott, etc. been America's first Black president instead of Obama and you'd probably also think all of the president's detractors were being asinine, ridiculous, childish, etc, but that wouldn't change the fact that half the country was sharply critical of such a president.
The fact of the matter is that most of the high profile racialized incidents that occurred during Obama's time in office would have been just as likely to occur had McCain or Clinton been president instead ("Gatesgate," the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, etc), but they took on a new significance with a Black American occupying the oval office and his comments carried extra weight. Now the incident involving Dr. Gates was argyably somewhat different seeing as though Obama's primary motivation for speaking up in that case seemed to be his longstanding friendship with Dr. Gates, but that didn't seem to figure into the calculus of many who fervently criticized him for his remarks from a completely racialized perspective. On the flip side, it could also be argued that certain incidents occurred in direct response to the fact of a Black American's historic presidency (e.g., the sabotage of Shirley Sherrod, the Mother Emanuel massacre, birther controversy, etc).
When it came to the incidents involving the death of a Black civilian at the hands of law enforcement that received the most media coverage, it appeared that many White conservatives in particular were angered because Obama's comments about those incidents didn't consist of unqualified praise of police and unqualified condemnation of the victims, and especially because he gave voice to the longstanding concerns of Black Americans regarding those incidents--which often went beyond the incidents themselves and went to the heart of the historic relationship between police and Black urban working-class communities in America that go all the way back to the first Great Migration at the turn of the 20th century. And for what it's worth, many of those concerns are shared by Americans of all races and ethnicities but regarding the criticism of police as tantamount to criticism of White Americans in general is quite telling in and of itself IMO.
But there are two things that those who cast Obama as essentially the second coming of Elijah Muhammad always seem to omit from these discussions: Obama's handling of his own and his family's racist detractors (of which there were entirely too many) and the nature of his speeches to predominantly Black audiences. In both cases, Obama couldn't possibly have hewn any closer to the conservative playbook. All the themes conservatives tend to highlight in such contexts-- not wallowing in victimhood, acknowledging America's progress in matters of race, advocating for greater personal and familial responsibility, promoting the value of education, etc.--were perpetual fixtures in those moments and yet he's never afforded any credit for them. As a matter of fact, several Black commentators became annoyed at what they perceived to be Obama's incessant preaching to the choir (the gospel of "respectability politics"). Of course, I don't expect conservative media platforms to have covered such incidents with anything more than a blurb since they couldn't be spun into anything more sensational and combative to keep the gears of journalistic outrage going to pad their bottom lines.
And lastly, the expectation of the nation's first Black president to be impeccable and beyond reproach in his dealings with racialized matters of importance is simply an unfair and unjust double standard any way you slice it. Black Americans have long endured some of the violent, cruelest things from politicians of all stripes throughout our nation's history, including those we've politically supported, and few (non-Blacks anyway) regard them as being truly racially divisive in a substantial way. But the first Black president, who demonstrated hesitance in wading out too far in those waters for a time (much to the chagrin of several of Obama's most faithful Black supporters), is summarily banished to historical condemnation because he made his own missteps (which didn't consist of flagrantly mischaracterizing any specific racial group in America)? Why is that?
All the anti Pōlice was started by Obama and Holder in Dallas when BLM had snipers on rooftops targeting LEOs. All it took was nothing being said by Holder and Obama other than acceptance of the attacks as a reasoned response to decades of racism. The rest is history.
And I'm surprised, Roger, that the article was written without even a casual reference to the millions of weapons circulating in Americans' holsters (open carry or not), purses, pockets, handbags, car glove compartments, under car seats, even boots..and why? Why so many guns out there?
I'm thinking that Americans, long before BLM, and long before the 'defund the police' nonsense and the Far Left Progressives, Antifa, idiotic Democratic DA's and mayors and everybody else (who's apparently 'woke') - came to the conclusion that we need to defend ourselves and that we cannot trust the police to do that anymore.
To me the very fact that Americans are resorting to self defence is testament to our declining confidence in our police to protect us. And this has been happening over many decades, not only since Obama and contrary to the article's assertion that this is a rather new phenomenon primarily borne by the media.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of the 2nd Amendment and the motivations of those who staunchly support it. The 2nd Amendment wasn't intended to protect us from our neighbors. It was designed to protect us from "enemies, foreign and domestic."
A quick google search about the tens of millions killed in disarmed nations might be an enlightening exercise for you.
Nowhere in my post is the 2nd even mentioned. I'm talking about the motivations of regular Americans who feel the need to defend themselves, not relying on the police, and buy a gun in order to do so.
Of which they probably would do if we had a 2nd Amendment or not.
I am a strong supporter of law enforcement. That does not alter the old truism (even truer now that LEOs have to second guess their every move):
Call for a cop, call for an ambulance and call for a pizza and you'll be eating pizza with the ambulance crew when the cops show up. Defending yourself is a must.
I remember how my jaw dropped when Obama declared that “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin”. So Obama was reminding us that he considers himself black? Well thanks, I knew that when I voted for him in 2008 (not in 2012!). What that really did is to tell a lot of people in this country: you’ve got more rights than others, if something bad happens to you, the president is on your side. If you’re just a boring white dude, nobody cares.
Yet another example of the dangers of the left's utopian thinking. It's almost like the 20th Century never happened... Stalin? Pol Pot? "Great Leap Forward"? Any of that ringing a bell??? Apparently not. Let's try it here, I'm sure it will work out great this time.
What’s incredibly aggravating is that anyone with a proper, honest, analytical assessment saw this coming even before Floyd.
The constant politicization allowance and lack of ownership of criminal activity is why this has happened. Until pursuit of truth and the proper probability of outcomes are in demand, it will only get worse.
I’m glad the officer addresses the incredibly difficult task of split second decisions. Law enforcement isn’t infallible, they’re human. I belief 99+% of police interactions go without issue. It’s the very small incidences captured on video that distort the work that’s properly done. It’s also the coverage of a major case that’s covered DAILY where the primary motivation is looking to second guess or find errors in the policing work. It’s absurd.
We need to address the honest expectation of what human beings can achieve in highly volatile situations. A man can fail 70% of the time hitting a baseball and be called a hall of famer. A police officer can have 20,000 positive interactions and then placed in a difficult situation and then accused of abuse of power.
This country NEEDS to have an honest conversation of what expectations of policing looks like. And for any pundit pandering for some organization to take a permanent vacation.
Kim Potter by all accounts made good decisions until one day in that split second she pulled her gun instead of her taser. She is still serving prison time. Who would want to sign up for that?
I totally agree. Then I saw on social media where people made fun of her tears and thought she should spend the rest of her life in prison. Very cruel remarks. I was flabbergasted. If only Daunte Wright had followed the police orders it is most likely Potter would not be in prison and he would be alive with the prospect of turning his life around.
I know Fox News is not everyone's cup of tea (I watch it irregularly along with many other sources), but Jesse Watters has a show (7 ET/6 CT) which features a segment showing police bodycam video of GOOD things cops do when making split-second decisions and how often they are justified in using a weapon, such as when a suspect pulls a weapon on them or won't stop advancing in a threatening manner when ordered to. Most of them are out of their minds on booze or drugs. It shows amazing restraint on the part of cops. Of course, the MSM will never show it in a million years.
Great article, but one small quibble: George Floyd was not killed by Derek Chauvin. Although Chauvin is clearly not the kind of fellow you want in uniform, channeling William Penn, right is right and wrong is wrong.
Floyd had enough fentanyl in his blood to easily kill him, even considering that his drug-addicted liver was revved up and eating drugs for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Secondly, unless I missed that day in medical school, the windpipe is on the front of the neck, not the side, where Chauvin had his knee. The technique used by Chauvin to restrain Floyd has been used countless times with no problems. Floyd was struggling to breathe because his central nervous system had little molecules blocking its nerve cells, not because he was being murdered.
This isn't true. You can 'choke' someone out by slowing/stopping blood flow to their brain as well as crushing their throat. When you see a rear naked choke in MMA, that's what's happening. Floyd likely died from this, on top of being made fragile from high levels of opioid depressing his nervous system. I still don't get people who claim he wasn't killed by Chauvin; Floyd would have gone home and passed out with a 40 in his hand if Chauvin hadn't thrown him down and leaned on his neck.
On the other hand, someone without extraordinary levels of fentanyl (and a history of related self-inflicted neurological devastation) would not have died that day.
I understand your comment on Floyd and I certainly agree that its highly unlikely he would have died had he not been on fentanyl. That said, he also wouldnt have died had he not had someone kneeling on his neck for nine minutes. Im by no means a BLM sympathizer - not one little bit. But I also just believe in truth and the truth is both Floyd's and the officer's actions led to that death. Im not comfortable absolving the officer just because Floyd was on drugs. His actions there were really reprehensible. If you have a heart at all, that was really hard to watch. It just seems to me that if youre a LEO, you probably come in contact with lots of people on drugs - its just part of the job.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. "After the fact, therefore because of the fact," or "because event Y occurred after event X, then it must have been caused by event X. The rooster crowed, then the sun rose; therefore the rooster's crowing caused the sun to rise. Logical fallacy.
Reports are that Floyd "couldn't breathe" in the cruiser, and that was why he was taken out. It wasn't claustrophobia, as he claimed - and probably thought, actually; it was because his CNS was depressed. Because Chauvin kneeled on the side of his neck does not mean that killed him. If it did, what was the mechanism?
We have one clear mechanism for death, and my Boy Bill of Occam says that the simplest explanation is the most likely. Why do we need two when one explains it, particularly in view of the fact that the second does not?
well, again, with respect, your analogy with the rooster is flawed. The one has nothing to do with the other. In the case of Floyd, it seems both actions factored into the death. Thats a completely different situation. But, let me ask you this, are you saying Floyd would have died regardless of what Chauvin did? Like, had he just been sitting on the hood of the car (obviously not a possibility given the situation but for argument's sake) he still would have died? If that is your belief, fair enough. I didnt see it that way but of course, I could be wrong. I have seen people OD on Fentanyl and that also doesnt take 9 minutes and doesnt look anything like the Floyd situation. Have you seen the dashcam footage from a few weeks ago where the officer accidently inhaled some super tiny amount of fentanyl she didnt even know was present on a dollar bill? She basically died right away (was revived) and couldnt speak. My point is just that, it seems to me, both the fentanyl and the kneeling on the throat contributed. And yes, it is significnantly harder to breath when someone kneels on the side of your neck even though that isnt where your windpipe is. Im familiar with Occam's Razor but its not always the case. If it were, we would have no use for nuance and context. In the medical field, doctors are CONSTANTLY finding out that the most likely cause of illness or pain isnt the actual cause.
You are correct; the rooster did not cause the sun to rise. In Floyd's death, we also have the situation of a likely cause and a second factor for which there is no connection except simultaneity, like our friend the rooster. Yes, Floyd would have stopped breathing regardless of Chauvin's kneeling on the SIDE of his neck. If he could talk and say "I can't breathe," his airway was open, so if one is going to postulate that the knee done the killin', then what was the mechanism by which it did that?
Whether he would have died is a separate question. One could speculate that if Chauvin had let him up and realized that he still could not breathe, Chauvin's training would have led him to the fact that he had a medical emergency on his hands, and he might have administered Narcan. But who knows what "might" have happened?
Absorption of illegal drugs is variable. Some of it is individual susceptibility; part is drug purity; part is route of administration, so I don't think one can use time in that aspect. Clearly his breathing got worse as time wore on, so without a blocked airway, why was that?
Don't get me wrong; it appears to my very limited view that Chauvin did not behave properly, but then I wasn't a cop in the rough section of Milwaukee, faced every day with Floyd types and their BS. All just a bad deal to my eye. A bad deal.
Well, I guess we just have to agree to disagree because this doesnt look anything like the other fentanyl deaths that at least I have seen. It looks to me like two compounding factors which again, is wholly and completely different that the rooster analogy. I will however say, Im not saying Floyd is an innocent victim because I think thats obviously not true. I just think you're absolving Chauvin too much, in my opinion.
The idea that Floyd died due to fentanyl was a possibility until one watched the case. The state's expert said he died neither from the neck compression nor from fentanyl. Definitely not fentanyl because one dies of fentanyl by a slowing of respiration and his breaths per minute were not slowing (by video) at time of cardiopulmonary arrest.
The expert said he died mainly from the knees in his back and poor positioning His entire left lung was collapsed meaning 50% loss of o2.
Neck compression from behind like that adds very little restriction to the airway and was mostly meaningless relative to the positioning. That's also why he could still speak.
This was so depressing I had to stop reading. Let me ask this - what progressive idea has NOT turned out badly? Their litany of failure is so drearily successful that it seems they have the reverse Midas touch - turning everything to which they minister to merde. "Defund the police" - what could possibly go wrong? Release violent sociopaths and psychopaths without bail - streets will be safer. Call drug addicted vagrants "homeless" and let them sleep on subway grates and use subway cars for toilets. And now give rein to every lunatic who wakes up thinking they're Napoleon and forcing us to address them as "General." How about calling proggies what they are - lunatics. At this point if a proggie says "good morning" (they seldom can summon the manners and grace to do so) - you know it's bedtime. Although every once in awhile, I get the feeling that the insanity is nothing but part of a plan to destroy the United States of America - the only nation that stands between liberty and the ghouls in Davos.
You are not wrong in assuming a coordinated (or at least enemy of my enemy association) between BLM, progressives and foreign entities like China who all have a vested interest in seeing the Great American Experiment burnt to the ground. Re-education and neutering of youth, dismantling of localized power (both governmental and enforcement,) dismantling of systems of religion either by progressive takeover or submission, and control of freedoms and resources (energy, food, home and car ownership) are all means of totalitarian destruction and control. None of this seems like an accident nor conspiracy theory.
It really is just that simple. Soros used BLM to drum up support for the most idiotic examples of "woke" cultural leftists (postmodern neomarxists) running for office.
Soros' long term goal is to destroy the industrial working classes, family farms/businesses and impose Neo-Feudalism (Kotkin).
Soros is just one part of a scheme by globalist financiers and digital capitalist oligarchs to destroy nation states and run the world via digital piracy.
I was all on board for calling vagrants "homeless" when that term came up in the 80s. Whatever. I was a teenager. Then it became "houseless" ... because their tent is their home, or home is where the heart is, or something ... but "homeless" was all of a sudden a rude thing to say. What? Why?
Now it's "person experiencing houslesness" because it's rude to define a person by a single attribute (which, I guess, would mean not calling a lawyer a lawyer but "a person with a law degree who has passed the bar exam in this state"?). What is it with leftists and language?
So long as they keep playing around with language, they won't have to do anything actually useful to help those they purport to care about. Their "activism" only go as far as their keyboards where they bring forth changes in social media spaces. So changes for all practical purposes are limited to language changes.
Also, the rate this is going, language will be so diluted that he disadvantaged will no longer have any words left to convey why they're in positions of disadvantages. When we learn someone is homeless, most of us feel sympathy at least and a desire to find a solution to help. But when we hear minced words like "person experiencing houselessness", wtf is it some guy temporarily staying in an Airbnb because he couldn't find the right apartment after separating from his wife or some gal moving to another state for a new job and haven't found a place to live yet?
Gotta give it to the wokes. They're making all societal problems disappear by redefining them out of existence.
Wow. This is a great comment. Thank you. It makes more sense to me now. Not just the language shift but my anger and where it’s coming from. I’ve thought a lot about my comment and what to really means to me, to who I am as a person. This helps. Thank you.
In Seattle, during the pandemic lockdowns, BLM protestors were allowed to conduct illegal protests of the police on the i-5 highway in open defiance of the law and of pandemic restrictions. Seattle's city officials, rather than clearing the protests, assigned police to shut down the highway entrances to allow people to illegally protest them.
This ended when a college student from Africa took the off-ramp onto the highway and hit two protestors on accident, killing one and permanently crippling the other.
Twitter posted a bird's eye view of the accident and declared it a murder by Trump supporters. The story spread internationally as proof of Trump's deadly hate speech, and Seattle subsequently unfurled giant banners to BLM from their skyscrapers.
In the same week, in my neighborhood of Bothell, a young police officer was shot dead during a routine traffic stop. Outside of Bothell, nobody cared.
That police officers are leaving the service is not surprise. To be law enforcement was never the nicest job, hours are long, pays is mediocre, stress in risk are high. Put people wanted to serve and protect their communities, and took pride in their job. Also communities respected and valued their police officers.
Today, honestly you need to be crazy to want to become police officer in many metropolitan areas in US (Portland, LA, Seattle, NYC, DC to name some). Hours are worse than ever before, crime is booming, streets are effectively not safe, but the worst of all, thanks to MSM and politicians large part of population are treating Police Officers as root of all problems and criminals victims of the system. This leads that this part of population elects politicians that implement laws that further make law enforcement impossible. Since many public prosecutors have became woke, entire policing has become Sisyphus work, where police arrests criminals, for those just to be released by some progressive prosecutor next day.
No wonder moral is low and nobody wants the job, when large part of politicians and MSM is constantly calling you racist, white supremacist for simply trying to enforce laws that those same politicians implemented.
Yes there are issues in police, lack of training, over militarization, unions that protect bad cops, but for every bad one there are 100 good, who do their job with pride.
Sadly this demonization of police will just make things worse in long run, because less and less people will be willing to serve, crime will go more and more up, making job even less attractive than it is now. This wont affect elites in Martha's Vineyard, Manhattan or parts of Silicone Valley, they will just pay private security and not worry. Its middle class and lower classes that will suffer the most, because they will be left on mercy of criminals (what is already happening)
George Floyd was not murdered. Let's start there. If Chauvin's appeal is ignored, what self-respecting human being would become a police officer? Frothing-at-the-mouth pitchforkers ran out into the streets burning shit down in response to a video with MISSING PIECES. Floyd laid himself on the ground after ingesting the rest of his drug wad. He'd done this before. That "knee on the neck" was a sanctioned restraint against excited delirium. Perps claim that they "can't breathe" all the time. Floyd is the first person -- and perhaps the only person -- who had COVID but didn't die of COVID. If anything -- one could call it manslaughter. But it sure as hell wasn't murder and that this was decided by the jury -- to protect themselves -- is nothing short of tragic for us all.
Now only the real thugs and racists and what have you would dare become police officers. All those morally panicked USEFUL IDIOTS made their racist dreams come true.
And even worse -- when I tried explaining to people why Chauvin had his knee on Floyd's SHOULDER, and that there were pieces missing in the video (if you watch it in its entirety you'd see how polite and almost deferentially they were treating Floyd -- so I am even more baffled beyond belief at the outcome of this trial) THEY WOULD GET UPSET AND START SCREAMING AT ME....like irrational little babies...
If this is the state of our so-called "educated class..." -- and our judicial system....and yes, the media is at fault, but even so: our "educators" are tyrannical ideologues who do not teach their charges to do the damned research.
When Floyd was in the back of the cop car trying to get out, he literally said, "pin me to the ground." He claimed he had claustrophobia and could not remain in the car.
It frightens me that any jury could claim there is no reasonable doubt of murder.
They were frightened for their own safety, and I get it. But the fact that they came back with murder, meaning they believe Chauvin INTENDED to kill him in front of all those witnesses while also being VIDEOTAPED, frightens the shit out of me. Will transcend LEOs in no time. What lynch mob sacrifice will be next?
Oh yes, there was that. What white cop would have stood there, intentionally murdering a black man, with a crowd of people holding up their cameras to it? And to think millions of people failed to see that chills me to the core.
The mission statement of "Black Lives Matter" openly stated that they were a communist revolutionary movement dedicated to overthrowing the culture of the USA. They took it off their website in 2020 when hundreds of millions of dollars of private and corporate money flowed in.
When Cubans protested their communist government in 2020, inspired by the protests in the USA, BLM released a statement in support of the whiter communist government rather than the Afrolatin protestors. The protests ended very badly for many of those black people. They did not receive millions of dollars of luxury properties.
BLM was never about the welfare of black people, and they've done nothing to restrain black on black violence in the years since their political victory. Instead, there are more black crime victims than before, and DEI officers positioned in every institution in the USA.
This is what a communist cultural revolution looks like from the inside. And so many people are afraid to push back, lest they be denounced by the revolutionaries as the terrible "r" word.
I left policing in Georgia (patrol officer in a county police department) back in 2019 after five and a half years of it. The job was sprinkled with good times and bad times, humor and horror. I’m glad it was something I got to do, but in the end, I didn’t want my family subjected to the whims of Twitter in the event I had to take action due to someone else’s poor choices. Maybe if it was just me, it would have been different.
I’ve shared this article before, but I think it compliments today’s post quite well and is worth a glance.
I wonder how many police officers retired or were terminated because they didn’t want the jab. Didn’t Ron DeSantis offer jobs to out of state police officers fired for not complying?
Florida under DeSantis is just roaring. Prosperity, safety, happiness all up like rockets, and people from Leftist states pouring in. One of the best examples of competition in action Now, if he can dismantle the "education" monopoly and get some real competition there, too....
The lies told about the occupation of police officer are among the most glaring and obvious of the “new order” progressives. In this new order, we don’t trust local police, we don’t trust our religious leaders, they’ve infiltrated our respected doctors and universities: just trust the federal government and shut up. Those who believe that in order to create an equitable future and redistribute wealth the existing structures must be burnt down, are doing a smashing job. Nothing in this piece is news nor shocking this many years into this nonsense, where progressives collide with China toward their mutual goal of the destruction of the US, but these individual stories must be told until the silent majority wake up and demand their basic rights of safety. We should respect and reward our officers, like our military, who shoulder the burden of our freedom and safety, anything less is a crime.
I’d guess those twelve murders in a few days in Richmond and Oakland were all blacks. Congrats regressives, you’ve made black lives hell, almost as if they really don’t matter.
The left, doing what they’ve done since reconstruction, the KKK, Jim Crow and now BLM, hollowing out our major cities. Performing systemic racism along with planned unparenthood.
This site published a debate between Rafael Mangual and Lara Bazelon a while back. Personally, I've found Rafael to be one of the clearest voices on the subject of crime. His recent book Criminal Injustice was one of the most eye-opening works I've read. It makes the argument both philosophically and statistically that the notion that Black Americans are being indiscriminately murdered by the police is a myth. Criminal Injustice also proceeds to dismantle many other progressive shibboleths regarding race and crime, including the idea that people should be afraid of their interactions with the cops.
These days the police typically kill about 1,000 individuals per year. Mangual estimates that these 1,000 deaths are the result of roughly 3,000 police shootings. Given that the police make roughly 10 million arrests each year, if we assume that each of the 3,000 shootings is the result of a separate arrest, we arrive at the fact that only about 3/10,000 or 0.03% of arrests end up with an individual being shot. If a person simply does what the police say, that probability declines to virtually zero.
Note that this is the probability of an adverse encounter conditional on an actual arrest attempt. Conditional on merely an interaction with the police, the probability of an individual being shot is even lower. In 2018, over 61 million individuals reported at least one interaction with the police. The total number of police-civilian interactions each year is undoubtedly higher. The notion that Black Americans or Americans of any race should live in fear of being shot by the police is wildly hyperbolic at best.
Matt Taibbi recently participated in a debate where he highlighted the failings of the mainstream media with respect to Trump and Russiagate. I would argue that the failure of our journalistic institutions to accurately report on the situation of crime in this country is a far worse sin. The media's obsession with Trump seems silly at best. Its dissemination of misinformation regarding policing has been outright dangerous.
Much has been written about Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility, with its exhortation for white Americans to do the work of advancing racial justice. If nice white people read Rafael Mangual’s book Criminal Injustice instead and did the work of understanding the real situation of race and crime in America, I have no doubt this country would be vastly better off as a result.
Silly you. Introducing facts? Please, stick to the "narrative" or we'll call you mean names.
Well, at least you aren't threatening mean tweets. That could get you impeached and your house raided by the Stasi.
Yesterday-a short clip of Brian Stelter on a a panel at Davos/WEF sitting next to a (sounded German) woman proclaiming that it was time American's accepted limited 'free speech'. Last week Texas Democrat Lee ponding the Patriot Act on the House floor. Now, this week --I believe it's Lee again-- the introduction on the House floor of a Bill asking for the criminalization of speech in the name of fighting 'white supremacy'. Also a British citizen claiming 3,300 arrests and prosecutions last year for speech and thought crimes.
I don’t remember the President 45’s tweets being mean, I found them mostly informative. The problem was the tweets didn’t suit the liberal and progressive’s narrative
b0t
Are you a S0r0z b0t or an Alex Jones bot?
I guess I need to compile a database of morons, retards and lunatics in the comment section of this substack to keep all the trolls straight,
#IDIOTFILES
Don't you need to get back to the Alex Jones troll farm to help organize another terrorist attack on election officials?
R T = RETARDED TROLL
R T = RETARDED TROLL
R T = RETARDED TROLL
R T = RETARDED TROLL
R T = RETARDED TROLL
R T = RETARDED TROLL
R T = RETARDED TROLL
R T = RETARDED TROLL
R T = RETARDED TROLL
R T = RETARDED TROLL
He lost me after that bizarre debate. But I couldnt vote for the imbecile either. Disenfranchized.
Nope RT I respectfully disagree
What some see as a failure of American journalism, others see as a deliberate campaign of lies and propaganda.
Can it be both?
b0t
If deliberate, why ?
I agree with you, because it is the only logical explanation. Journalists (political operatives) are not stupid.
Why? To destabilize and destroy local law enforcement. Why? Because if local policing can no longer keep communities safe, they can justify the need for a national police force to patrol every community in America.
I agree.
Just like a new and improved military which will follow the progressive ways, and make sure that we the citizens obey. 😳
Bingo
WHY? is the most critical and mystifying question. The demise of policing in the US is certainly not accidental. Many of the most powerful people in the US are in Davos now crafting further totalitarian control of our lives. I doubt supporting police is on their agenda. One can only speculate how the demise of policing fits their agenda. One might suspect it has something to do with reducing safety in order to deteriorate the mental and physical health of our population. The WEF crowd is very invested in population reduction.
If something of this sort is factual, then one might ask what can serious people do to stay safe and sane. Moving to areas where policing is still strong might be the wise thing to do. And of course this is already happening.
A sea change in focus, conversation and action would help us. Instead of continuous shock and dismay at what is obviously a well planned open assault on the free people's of the world by criminal financier's (slaver's), we need direct political organization and activism. (Who, after decades of bad political, social and economic policy would have thought the Republican Party would be the way forward? ) If we have time for Substack we have time for letter writing campaign's and phone calls.
Yes, effective political pressure is the key. But I would not invest time, energy or money in a blue state. It is now best to let them stew in their juices. I only invest in my new purple state where we have a chance for positive action.
Unfortunately, all I have learned about our elections, leads me to be highly skeptical of their integrity, but at least in a more red state there may be some political power to limit the excesses of ballot harvesting, mail in ballots, Zuck bucks and tech giants' influence.
Find like-minded friends and build effective coalitions with local politicians you can put faith in if at all possible. And yes, there are very few Democrats you can trust to support the police and other security concerns.
Why? That's easy. People who advocate eliminating the police and criminal justice system do so because they want to commit crimes.
Good observations, yes.
Well written article chronicling our cities descent to hell. BLM and ACLU are race grifters and frauds. Anyone who supports anything they say is my litmus test to know they are corrupt frauds. I have moved to a safe date with excellent governance that supports their police ( Florida) blue states will rot and should rot
The reason political movements deliberately promote instability is the creation of opportunities to gain new powers in the name of restoring stability.
Yes, but a different stability then previously.
Why? The ability to seize, arrest, incarcerate and proclaim CITIZEN'S of the AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC terrorist's.
Well, there was that report awhile back that said the bottom quintile by SAT/IQ of college undergraduates are largely found getting degrees in Journalism or Education.
When I was in school, the J students were the ones who went to parties on week nights.
🤣😂🤣😂
I believe it’s called mind meld.
Vulcan mind meld ?
They wish!
Katy Tur? C'mon.
There's a reason they're Journalism majors..............
The Santos imbroglio is emblematic of the complete hollowing out of journalism by Google, Facebook & other social media. A few simple phone calls would've revealed him as a fraud, but there are almost no actual reporters capable of even that - because there is no longer an ad market to generate the funds to pay them. TWTR and organs like this one about all we have left.
The two are not inconsistent.
I would phrase it differently. Santos and the incompetent media deserve each other.
I am 100% with you and would only add that Roland Fryer was also written about on "Common Sense". The Harvard Woke could not handle his findings, as a Black male, that police are less likely to use police force on blacks than whites.https://scholar.harvard.edu › ...
PDF
An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force⇤
And for writing that, Harvard went after him on another pretext, took away his institute, suspended without pay for 2 years. It's written about in a few places - one on Glen Loury's substack.
I just read it. This most import take from it is a need for better methods and better research. Most of the time that paper is equivocating garbleage I couldn't make very much sense of that manages to point in several directions at once.
CMA on steroids.
The idea to "increase the expected price of excessive force" is all well and good but I doubt the benefits would outweigh the negatives of the huge rise in paperwork and huge increase in IA cops. All I see from that is the gratuitous increase of the tail end and REMFs every other "reform", make it "better", make it more "efficient" of almost every instituion or organisation has resulted in.
Fryer might make better use of his time watching paint dry.
Apologies, but I am very familiar with that exact paper and you are representing its conclusions incorrectly.
Fryer found that there is no evidence that police are likely to use DEADLY force more often on black suspects. However, he found a robust fixed increase of use of less than deadly force on black suspects .
I appreciate the attention to detail! I may have misrepresented the conclusion but what I was getting at is that the woke folk cannot handle even these findings. Roland Fryer is a black man who is really trying to understand numbers and change outcomes in policing and education. His findings scare the far left because his data does NOT uphold their agenda. As a result he has been taken down. Real data matters!
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/7/7/fryer-returns-from-suspension/
"return from suspension" is mostly meaningless.
his reputation was assassinated as a signal that heterodox views critical of the corrupt ILLIBERAL academic establishment will NOT BE TOLERATED.
the good news is that the heterodox community is now large enough, and growing quickly, that Fryer and others have a pretty robust support network and increasing numbers of colleagues that are collaborating on legitimate alternatives to the DEI/CRT "woke" insanity, such as FAIRForAll.org (a Bari Weiss project).
What would you say to yourself in ten years when you reread the above? Just type it in the form of a quote, talk to yourself in the second person, start with "You..."
He shouldn't need to be reinstated to begin with. That said, I am happy that he was. Who knows now if he will pursue the same type of data. Just sad!
Fryer's paper was years old when the MeToo movement hit. He was then suspended within six months of the MeToo movement hitting. Then he was reinstated. If Harvard wanted to cancel him for heterodox views, why bother reinstating him, why not just remove him permanently?
Whether or not the sexual harrassment allegations against him were real, the pattern is much more consistent with him being a standard MeToo target than targeted for his policing research.
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-roland-fryer
Useful video on this case.
But a better question is what does the totality of e.pierce's commentary amount to?
And "less than deadly force" correlates to high-crime areas, usually low-income gang-saturated areas.
Or, do you have statistics showing that middle and upper class black suburban neighborhoods are crime ridden and violent too?
I don't have the data. The cited economist has the data. On the topic, his comment is "even after accounting for a large set of controls". In my judgment, he's not likely to be so careless as to miss the confounding factor you are bringing up.
Why not? People miss stuff all the time when researching complex issues in social science.
You could always look at other sources that have done extensive research over a long period of time, such as:
hwfo.substack.com
Whose commentary is your favorite; and what does your commentary consist of?
A well written and cogent response, thank you.
Yan - I agree with you and the logic... "If nice white people instead read Rafael Mangual’s book Criminal Injustice and did the work of understanding the real situation of race and crime in America, I have no doubt this country would be vastly better off as a result."
However, the truth is not the goal of the Grievance Industry. They make their money perpetuating the narratives. Burn Loot Murder took in over $100M and simply kept the money; not one American of African descent was help except those within BLM(eg Patrice Cullors)
Yes, sanctioned theft is what it was.
Those words could characterize virtually EVERYTHING supported by the government. Will start using them more frequently.
b0t
Nope, completely alive and thrilled to not be an environmental lobbyist on the Left Coast...
You just exposed your brainwashing and intellectual incoherence, as well as your ignorant, reactionary ideology.
-----
https://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/45197-im-convinced-that-the-whole-national-review-is-a-cia-operation-murray-rothbard
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
And you left out the fact that a white cop is more likely to shoot a white person than a black person in the same situation. Reverse racism. Several statistical analysis of the data have shown this.
This finding does not necessarily indicate reverse racism. Bias against white suspects means that more of them were shot than was justified under the circumstances of the crime. There is no evidence I know of that there are a lot of unjustified shootings of white suspects by white officers included in the data. It is more likely that white officers are using appropriate levels of force with white suspects, and less than optimal levels of force with black and hispanic suspects.
White police officers are aware that if they kill a black suspect they are likely to be massively targeted by mainstream media, and to be at risk of career loss, even prison time. To reduce their chances of getting into a deadly force encounter with a black suspect, some white officers have pulled back from proactive policing in areas where black criminals do business. Black and hispanic have less cause to fear being targeted for punishment for killing black and hispanic suspects, because mainstream media are not so interested in these incidents.
It is also possible that black and hispanic suspects are less compliant and more provoking towards black and hispanic officers than they are towards white officers. Efforts have been made by some analysts of the data to compare only those incidents in which the suspects' level of compliance was equal, and the slightly higher number of black suspects killed by black and hispanic officers persisted. So, it seems more likely that the difference in use of deadly force between black and hispanic versus white officers is due more to characteristics of the officers than of the subjects.
I conclude that white officers are operating at a less than optimal level with respect to use of deadly force when black and hispanic suspects are committing violent crimes.
The slightly greater tendency of black and hispanic officers to use deadly force with black and hispanic suspects might also involve a It is also possible that there is some dynamic between black officers and black suspects that leads to escalation of use of force by the officers. One hypothesis could be that black and hispanic suspects are more likely to defy the authority of minority officers than of white officers. There are, of course, a number of other possible explanations for the small but consistent finding that more black and hispanic suspects are killed by black and hispanic officers, or by salt-and- pepper teams, than by white officers and teams.
These findings can be interpreted differently, based on whether the
That is exactly the conclusion I had arrived at and you have put it very well. I was trying to - in far less words - allude to the idea that racism is involved, but rather that it is favoring black miscreants now. Slightly.
But black and Hispanic officers are now being targeted too, as "agents of white supremacy", or other phrases that amount to "race traitor". So it might be interesting to see if that persists.
Oh yes! Racism against black officers is freely expressed by young white activists in Portland. They make the judgment that if a black person chooses that job, then they are part of the white supremacist system or that they somehow aren't "really black." As white college students they take it for granted without thinking that they are entitled to decide what jobs black people are allowed to apply for and which ones they can't. And the basis for excluding them for certain jobs is that they are too white! These young people should practice what they preach and spend more time examining their conscience for racist attitudes and behaviors!
I vote that we use Portland for a big national laboratory experiment. First, have the government buy out everyone who resides there now; buy their properties and pay them to relocate. Next, eliminate the police departments, the courts, the jails, the entire justice system. Then, invite people who want to live in a no-justice society to live there, squat in a property, take whatever they want, and just generally behave as they wish, as long as it stays in Portland. See how long it takes to destroy itself. Then rub the Left's noses in it. Literally; capture them, take them there, and forcibly rub their noses in the ashes of the burned-out buildings and the piles of excrement left on the sidewalks.
Just before I read this post I was thinking that maybe Mr. Musk could come up with something on Mars.
All you need to do is review this site and it is not a joke although Chicago's political class is: heyjackass.com
Yes - good site. And Chicago's rate isn't the worst in the US by a long shot. St. Louis, Baltimore and Detroit are all much worse, comparing rates (absolute counts divided by population). I think Chicago doesn't even make the top ten. Check out these lists:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rate
Great comment and references. I just use that site to highlight the details found in every major city, namely and unfortunately, ~80% of violent crime is black on black in white leftist controlled areas, etc.
Once again all of this proves the rainbow, unicorn party is insane. The Dem/Socialist party with the help of the press made George Floyd out to be some kind of hero. Only the insane would do this. Floyd was a brutal thug not a hero.
The Democrat/Socialist Party made George out as a martyr. They embraced and championed BLM and ATIFA as defenders of racial justice, which they are not. They are by their own admission communist agitators, hell bent on destroying this country. The Dems made a big show of being "outraged" by the 6 Jan riot but not a peep out of them when BLM and ANTIFA burning our Dem run cities down.
Yep. KKK, Mafia, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Antifa are all the terror arm's of the democrat party throughout history. Antifa... The rise of the Nazi's were opposed by communists who called themselves anti-fascist.
It is: An international cabal of criminal financiers who rigged and destroyed 'free market's and enterprise' in the name of 'free market's and enterprise'. They compromised, subverted and infiltrated American elected political leadership while looting and gutting the American economy. Globalism is collapsing and a great re-leveling of world economics and resources is underway. The American Constitutional Republic must be destroyed to allow the imposition of totalitarian control world wide. The entirety of the bureaucratic surveillance state, BLM, you 'white surpremacist, D.E.I. commissariat, butcher those kids-destroy that school, speech/thought control, why does the MSM lie in my face etc. is a bought and paid for psyop. They're criminal thugs. Why else would the Davos boys need 5,000 armed troops to protect their meeting? Why was Brian Stetler sitting on a Davos panel discussing the necessity of the oppression of free American speech and thought with EU marionettes?
Excellent post.
Curious: you listed a number of ways how you think these Davos masterminds are imposing to collapse society to solidify their control, yet you left out the disarming and deconstruction of women even as you listed butcher those kids. Blind spot, perhaps?
Historically, rendering the female population completely powerless is one way to ensure oppressive control. To date, the forces behind these have succeeded in disempowering and silencing women totally in ways conservatives could never have thought of in their wildest dreams. All legacy feminist organizations in the US today have been disarmed and brought to their knees. And the brilliance of their strategy is they convinced these women themselves to voluntarily lay down the swords and kiss the ring.
The killing of George Floyd was the biggest gift to the Left in decades. I believe BLM and its ilk were thrilled when he died. They had been waiting patiently for just such an event. Look at all the cash that began flowing in to them, from corporations among others competing with each other in the Woke Olympics. Talk about capitalizing on a tragedy. Now that BLM has been exposed as the grift that it is, nothing but crickets from corporate America.
Crickets not only from Corp America but from the left in general. When the Socialist held the House why didn't they investigate BLM and ANIFA? We know the answer to that.
Dem/Socialist is actually global financiers and digital capitalists (media-tech oligarchs).
They don't want actual "socialism" (except as a meaningless veneer) they want postmodern NEO-FEUDALISM (a corporate-state).
If you want to solve the gang violence problem in Chicago (my home town), they shouldn't send in more police yet. Here how to solve the problem: Send in NRA instructors. If the gangbangers were better shots, the problem would solve itself in a matter of months - and far fewer innocent bystanders would be wounded or killed. If you've got a better short term fix - I'd love to hear it.
I don't. My son's friend Charlie Johnson was a killed of spraydom in St. Paul on graduation day in May 2021. I asked my son "WTF, how can these people not hit what they are shooting at?" After working at a mostly American of African descent nightclub as a bouncer for a couple of years he said "Dad, they don't know how or practice how to shoot." Your comment is in-bounds for sure.
Media malpractice, yes.
"Presstitutes" and "Whorespondents" (as seen on Taibbi's substack?)
Political operatives.
yep, "Presstitutes" and "Whorespondents"
😂😂
Those numbers were all available at the DOJ website back during the summer of Floyd. They also show that whites and AAs are basically killed at the same rate when comparing each ethnicity’s arrest rate. The media just ignored it.
Well said. And that Matt Taibbi debate (Musk Debates)- everyone should spend an hour to watch it. It was amazing to see
Munk debate, yes. Douglas Murray and taibbi embarrassed Malcolm gladwell and won the most convincing victory the debate had ever seen
The MUNK debate was definitive. As in every question mark we pursue here on substack comment's, faced with factual reality, the propagandist's resort to name calling, lie's and innuendo. I've accepted that behind the psyop smokescreen of propagandist sycophants is a well oiled machine run by criminal financier's intent on reducing free American's to feudal servitude. I sleep better.
💯 🎯 Well written and so true today.
How about a link?
What an absolutely brilliant post. Roland Fryer was cancelled from Harvard for saying much the same thing Yan. I’m going to get the book before it’s cancelled - thanks for recommending.
The silencing and punishment of Roland Fryer (one of the best economic minds of our time - oh, and a black man) is one of the clearest examples of the sickening hypocrisy of the progressive left.
They don’t actually give a DAMN about “Black Lives”; whether those lives include a brilliant economist at Harvard, or the millions of people living without adequate police protection. (““Haven’t seen one damn member of Black Lives Matter patrolling the Bayview making sure police aren’t ‘hunting and killing black people.’”)
BLM on a roll especially with the current Administration, don’t expect much to change with that organization especially when the $$$ are pouring in.
Don't you need to get back to the Alex Jones troll farm to help organize another terrorist attack on election officials?
Impeach Biden.
And important doctrinal element of policing is taking control.
The progressive mantra regarding the activities of police recklessly denies this key element of effective incident management.
And gives repeat offenders alot more repeats.
So basically way more people would die if police gave booster shots instead of arresting people.
Exactly
Only if we had aLOT more police.
With my limited expertise I do feel that “no knock” warrants are a dangerous procedure.
They do have danger to them, that's why the Judge has to authorize that as well. No Knocks should only be done when there is a threat of physical violence. For instance, if you are going into a drug dealers house who is known to be armed, I understand the no nock provision.
If you are executing a warrant on someone who has never been known to be armed and is running insurance scams, probably not appropriate.
and yet you fall into the trap of the "B" not Americans who are black
"Black Lives Matters signs are everywhere, reflecting Kensington residents’ solidarity with working-class black people in cities like Richmond—even as Richmond has become less safe as a result of the changes that movement has ushered in."
Behold, the American Far Left summarized in a single sentence. Who cares if the policies actually work? What matters is the joy of virtue signalling about the noble cause.
Donna I couldn’t agree with you more. I live in Oakland but work in Orinda a mostly white upper middle class suburb just east. There are a lot of BLM flags and signs about. While the wealthy communities have proper policing and limited crime, poorer cities like Oakland suffer greatly. I’m still trying to figure out how supporting a movement that increases the amounts of victims in poor black communities helps them. When I bring this question up to people I work with I’m ostracized.
It baffles me how after everything that has been revealed about BLM and its con artist "leaders," including in the mainstream press, that anybody would still keep a BLM sign up in their yard. I would be embarrassed. It's equivalent to displaying an Enron sign, or Lance Armstrong sign, or Bernie Madoff sign, or Bill Cosby sign, or name any other disgraced party. What does it take for liberals to finally cop to what a sham this "organization" is?
Hey, at least I take comfort in knowing I never gave this hate group one red cent. I knew from the get-go what they were about, and it's not black lives.
Soros paid a lot of money for that group of cargo cult zombies.
I now live in a very wealthy town in the Bay Area where all of those blm signs, science matters and love is here signs are located. I laugh everytime I walk by them. If they truly believed in that they would buy a house in a different town, save 66% on their mortgage for a similar house. Instead they choose to live in a city that has almost zero African Americans or Hispanics….
....hence the need for virtue signalling...to substitute for actual virtue.
We have a winner!! Perfectly said Donna!!
I used to live on the leftiest-of-the-lefty north side of Chicago, and I also would inwardly sneer every time I walked by the "Hate Has No Home Here" and similar type signs in the yards of houses I would never be able to afford. I call them "I'm better than you" signs. The implication being that if you have no such sign like they do, then you are a "hater." I used to think, why do you need to broadcast that? It should be a given that you have no "hate," you shouldn't have to announce that fact.
Now I live in a more normal place in a purple state, where such signs are very few and far between. You can still find them here and there, but they're not so in-your-face. They are equaled or outnumbered by "Back the Blue" and patriotic signs, and unlike Chicago, people proudly display support for Republican candidates without fear.
For my birthday, my friends gave me a yard sign that said “generic virtue signal” and I put it in my front yard. Felt really good.
Hilarious!
As a member of the left (though registered independent), let me say that there is a huge difference between progressives and most of the left. You might have missed it in the article, but Biden's play called for adding police. Most of us on the left want better policing and if it takes more cops, that's fine. We also want to root out the problematic cops and law enforcement sorts, who often believe they can get away with murder (see the murders in Aubery case in Georgia and the case in S. Carolina where the cop murdered a man, then planted a gun on him as examples not mentioned in this piece).
Unfortunately, the progressive left is ascending. They are often fact-free and filled with righteous anger. If you want to smear progressives, go for it. They've earned it. Their ignorance and arrogance form a dangerous combination, and it is harming a lot of people, including cops and civilians. Sadly, its taken hold on campuses and in district attorney's offices. Corporations donate to BLM because their employees need it, even if BLM organization is awful and harmful. DEI is a disaster. And yet, its happening.
Lately some old school liberals would pop up here and there insisting the "progressives" or "woke" or whatever you want to call them are "not really left" and "not really liberal". If you still think you are the "real left" and "real liberals", you haven't been paying attention. You're like the last monarch in the castle issuing edicts to your courtiers who don't know how to break the news to you that the new regime outside your four walls already secured power and the army's sworn allegiance, and they're about to come kick you out to exile if you're lucky or send you to the guillotine if you're not. Whatever classical definition of left or liberal means, you are no longer the "left". The term has been redefined by these forces you call "progressives". Much like how they've redefined "woman". And there's nothing you can do about it. You can stomp your feet and hold your breath till your face turns blue, but you still won't get your definition back. The sooner you come to terms with it, and realize the left has left you, the less time you'll waste fixating on a pointless fight that only you care about. I tell you this as a former liberal myself. What you are today is politically homeless.
Biden can get away with calling for adding police because everyone else left and right knows he was just making an empty political promise and he was full of shit when he said that. Only you actually believed him. He's the POTUS, he's got nothing to do with hiring, running and managing police forces. But you backing more police? In today's political spectrum that makes you a conservative, and one step away from MAGA/alt_right in the eyes of the left.
@QX, bravo! If I could like this comment a thousand times, I would. You read my own brain. The Biden example is ridiculous. It's hollow and empty posturing after he and his entire party spent the better part of a year disparaging and demoralizing the same police that he now wants to hire back. Too little, too late. I too am sick of liberals insisting, "this does not represent me or what I believe ... But I'm still a Liberal! And I still vote Democrat!" It's called denial. It's also called willful ignorance. And it's also called gaslighting.
Not so long ago I would have described myself as a liberal-leaning, Democrat-voting moderate Independent. That would be utterly absurd now. No moderate can any longer vote for the Democratic party and call themselves moderate with a straight face, unless they are completely uneducated and uninformed.
Zeke, thanks for sharing your perspective. There is insanity at both extremes - far right and far left. After the last election, I realized I was in a Republican bubble and determined to begin reading commentary from sensible people on the other side of the aisle. I started by reading Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, and that led me to The Free Press.
How do you define the "left", other than it NOT being "progressive" (by which I assume you mean "woke")?
Are you moderate-left?
A hard-core classical Marxists/socialist that still believes in class struggle like Adolph Reed?
Thanks in advance.
Right? Bet those white liberal sign-owners would never even consider living in communities like Richmond that they profess "solidarity" with. I have lived in neighborhoods that my more liberal friends balked at even visiting, let alone living in. Hypocrites, all.
I’m surprised this article could be written without a passing mention of Obama’s part in vilifying the police.
For sure. A lot of social problems we see today started under the Obama administration.
I remember the atmosphere at the time. If you had strong feelings against the Obama administration’s policies, it wasn’t because you had heart-felt, thought-out and (hopefully) reasonable objections. No, no, no, it’s because you’re a racist.
We see the same thing today with any issue regarding American blacks: if you’re concerned about the incredibly high homicide and abortion rates in the black community, then it has to be because of racism (not abortions, though, those are sacrosanct). Otherwise... you’re a racist.
I agree. That's where the chill over debate began. You couldn't dare say a word against any of Obama's policies for fear of being labelled a racist. It was a brilliant way of silencing any and all opposition.
Try embracing the term. It makes them go crazy.
When “racist” was redefined to mean “doesn’t agree with Obama” I chose to accept the new definition. After all, I didn’t.
People who scream “racist!” don’t know what to do when one replies, “okay, now that you’ve gotten that off your chest may we move on to the facts?”
Yes, I still have friends that support Obama’s position on JCPOA and when I disagree, I am a racist.
Racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, xenophobic, anti-science, anti-fat bias....I could do this all day.
I would use the word diabolical instead of brilliant.
"If you had strong feelings against the Obama administration’s policies... it’s because you’re a racist".
“Progressive” policies, whether they be non-policing, bail "reform", union run “education”, inflationary pressures exacerbated by their war on fossil fuels… demonstrably affect minorities in adverse ways, which for most people would fit the definition of racist. The curious thing is that Republicans never label democrat proponents as racists. Maybe most of them are just too stupid to make the argument.
I once worked for a lawyer who boasted about low crime in his neighborhood by prefacing “It’s an all white neighborhood” and he referred to Justice Clarence Thomas as “worse than an Uncle Tom”, but when I would mention something like the crisis at the border, it either went: A: it’s not really happening. That’s just Fox News propaganda or B: our nation is made of immigrants, why are you opposed to black/brown people coming in to the country?
There’s no reasoning with such stuff as that
They all have the same talking points, don't they? It's like they all consult the same manual or something.
I understand your frustration. Some people choose to live in a bubble filled with preconceived notions, until reality smacks them in the head.
I frequently label Democrats as racists. Then again, I'm a small-l libertarian independent.
To be clear, I was referring to the milquetoast, country club republicans like Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney who go on the Sunday talk shows and allow punks like Chuck Todd accuse them and all republicans of being racists, homophobes, misogynists, blah, blah, blah and simply turn the other cheek.
I'm so sick of these spineless jellyfish. It's time to go on the offensive and take the fight to THEM.
The political polarization this country is currently experiencing can be directly traced back to Obama's presidency. (And I voted for him in '08.) If you look at American society pre-2009 and post-2015, there is a marked and dramatic difference. Before that, everything was not instantly racialized the way it is now (except by the few usual suspects, e.g. Jackson/Sharpton). There was no "cancel culture." Comedians could tell actual jokes. Everyone could define man and woman.
Part of it may be attributed to the emergence of social media, it's true. But Obama left the country more racially divided than it had ever been--and this while being the first black president! He was supposed to usher in a "post-racial" society.
I think it's hilarious when people blame Trump for polarizing us. No, Trump was a consequence of it, not the cause. Voting for Obama remains the worst political decision I've ever made.
"The political polarization this country is currently experiencing can be directly traced back to Obama's presidency."
This is true, but it's a total fallacy to then conclude that the polarization is Obama's fault when the fact of the matter is that the very specter of a Black commander-in-chief, which is something we've simply never seen before in America, is the source of the polarization (along with the surging popularity of social media and politically biased mainstream news outlets). It has nothing to do with his ideological leanings or partisan affiliation; had Condoleeza Rice or Larry Elder been America's first Black president, we'd still be living in a profoundly more race-concious, politically polarized United States for the simple fact that all high-profile racial incidents involving Black Americans would be filtered through the novel reality of a Black president, thus burdening him/her with the unique responsibility of providing an unofficial official take of such incidents from a racialized, or Black, perspective. That guarantees that whatever is said is going to piss off half the country, especially due to biased social and mainstream media coverage which is primarily designed to push people's buttons to keep the well-oiled and profitable outrage machine going. Your opinion of the president's public stances on matters of race would likely have been the exact opposite had Rice, Elder, Scott, etc. been America's first Black president instead of Obama and you'd probably also think all of the president's detractors were being asinine, ridiculous, childish, etc, but that wouldn't change the fact that half the country was sharply critical of such a president.
The fact of the matter is that most of the high profile racialized incidents that occurred during Obama's time in office would have been just as likely to occur had McCain or Clinton been president instead ("Gatesgate," the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, etc), but they took on a new significance with a Black American occupying the oval office and his comments carried extra weight. Now the incident involving Dr. Gates was argyably somewhat different seeing as though Obama's primary motivation for speaking up in that case seemed to be his longstanding friendship with Dr. Gates, but that didn't seem to figure into the calculus of many who fervently criticized him for his remarks from a completely racialized perspective. On the flip side, it could also be argued that certain incidents occurred in direct response to the fact of a Black American's historic presidency (e.g., the sabotage of Shirley Sherrod, the Mother Emanuel massacre, birther controversy, etc).
When it came to the incidents involving the death of a Black civilian at the hands of law enforcement that received the most media coverage, it appeared that many White conservatives in particular were angered because Obama's comments about those incidents didn't consist of unqualified praise of police and unqualified condemnation of the victims, and especially because he gave voice to the longstanding concerns of Black Americans regarding those incidents--which often went beyond the incidents themselves and went to the heart of the historic relationship between police and Black urban working-class communities in America that go all the way back to the first Great Migration at the turn of the 20th century. And for what it's worth, many of those concerns are shared by Americans of all races and ethnicities but regarding the criticism of police as tantamount to criticism of White Americans in general is quite telling in and of itself IMO.
But there are two things that those who cast Obama as essentially the second coming of Elijah Muhammad always seem to omit from these discussions: Obama's handling of his own and his family's racist detractors (of which there were entirely too many) and the nature of his speeches to predominantly Black audiences. In both cases, Obama couldn't possibly have hewn any closer to the conservative playbook. All the themes conservatives tend to highlight in such contexts-- not wallowing in victimhood, acknowledging America's progress in matters of race, advocating for greater personal and familial responsibility, promoting the value of education, etc.--were perpetual fixtures in those moments and yet he's never afforded any credit for them. As a matter of fact, several Black commentators became annoyed at what they perceived to be Obama's incessant preaching to the choir (the gospel of "respectability politics"). Of course, I don't expect conservative media platforms to have covered such incidents with anything more than a blurb since they couldn't be spun into anything more sensational and combative to keep the gears of journalistic outrage going to pad their bottom lines.
And lastly, the expectation of the nation's first Black president to be impeccable and beyond reproach in his dealings with racialized matters of importance is simply an unfair and unjust double standard any way you slice it. Black Americans have long endured some of the violent, cruelest things from politicians of all stripes throughout our nation's history, including those we've politically supported, and few (non-Blacks anyway) regard them as being truly racially divisive in a substantial way. But the first Black president, who demonstrated hesitance in wading out too far in those waters for a time (much to the chagrin of several of Obama's most faithful Black supporters), is summarily banished to historical condemnation because he made his own missteps (which didn't consist of flagrantly mischaracterizing any specific racial group in America)? Why is that?
All the anti Pōlice was started by Obama and Holder in Dallas when BLM had snipers on rooftops targeting LEOs. All it took was nothing being said by Holder and Obama other than acceptance of the attacks as a reasoned response to decades of racism. The rest is history.
Biden's most recent attack on the police is also a stunning example of antipolice https://nypost.com/2023/01/17/joe-bidens-divisive-cop-tirade-is-his-new-battle-with-facts/
Yes, my thoughts as well.
Obama struck one of the first matches in this inferno.
And I'm surprised, Roger, that the article was written without even a casual reference to the millions of weapons circulating in Americans' holsters (open carry or not), purses, pockets, handbags, car glove compartments, under car seats, even boots..and why? Why so many guns out there?
I'm thinking that Americans, long before BLM, and long before the 'defund the police' nonsense and the Far Left Progressives, Antifa, idiotic Democratic DA's and mayors and everybody else (who's apparently 'woke') - came to the conclusion that we need to defend ourselves and that we cannot trust the police to do that anymore.
To me the very fact that Americans are resorting to self defence is testament to our declining confidence in our police to protect us. And this has been happening over many decades, not only since Obama and contrary to the article's assertion that this is a rather new phenomenon primarily borne by the media.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of the 2nd Amendment and the motivations of those who staunchly support it. The 2nd Amendment wasn't intended to protect us from our neighbors. It was designed to protect us from "enemies, foreign and domestic."
A quick google search about the tens of millions killed in disarmed nations might be an enlightening exercise for you.
2A was intended to legalize "well regulated" militias.
But it is somewhat incoherent, and has been interpreted in various ways.
The Constitution has very specific language about how insurrections are to be stopped.
The Constitution is no way encourages insurrections, on the contrary.
Agreed. The 2nd has been interpreted in various ways by various Courts in various eras. Incoherent is a good way to describe it.
I am not writing about the 2nd Amendment, Donna.
Nowhere in my post is the 2nd even mentioned. I'm talking about the motivations of regular Americans who feel the need to defend themselves, not relying on the police, and buy a gun in order to do so.
Of which they probably would do if we had a 2nd Amendment or not.
I am a strong supporter of law enforcement. That does not alter the old truism (even truer now that LEOs have to second guess their every move):
Call for a cop, call for an ambulance and call for a pizza and you'll be eating pizza with the ambulance crew when the cops show up. Defending yourself is a must.
I don't call 911. I call Colt 1911.
What year was it that the Supreme Court decided that cops have NO OBLIGATION to protect citizens?
Seems like it was around that same time I started hearing the truism, "When seconds count, the cops are only minutes away."
I remember how my jaw dropped when Obama declared that “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin”. So Obama was reminding us that he considers himself black? Well thanks, I knew that when I voted for him in 2008 (not in 2012!). What that really did is to tell a lot of people in this country: you’ve got more rights than others, if something bad happens to you, the president is on your side. If you’re just a boring white dude, nobody cares.
Yet another example of the dangers of the left's utopian thinking. It's almost like the 20th Century never happened... Stalin? Pol Pot? "Great Leap Forward"? Any of that ringing a bell??? Apparently not. Let's try it here, I'm sure it will work out great this time.
Apparently we have to go through the 1970s again because this time it's different.
DING DING DING! Comment of the day!!!
I have a leftist family member who firmly believes that all the monstrosities of the 20th century were caused by "excessive individualism".
Yes; Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, they were such champions of "individualism," weren't they? LMAO!!!
What’s incredibly aggravating is that anyone with a proper, honest, analytical assessment saw this coming even before Floyd.
The constant politicization allowance and lack of ownership of criminal activity is why this has happened. Until pursuit of truth and the proper probability of outcomes are in demand, it will only get worse.
I’m glad the officer addresses the incredibly difficult task of split second decisions. Law enforcement isn’t infallible, they’re human. I belief 99+% of police interactions go without issue. It’s the very small incidences captured on video that distort the work that’s properly done. It’s also the coverage of a major case that’s covered DAILY where the primary motivation is looking to second guess or find errors in the policing work. It’s absurd.
We need to address the honest expectation of what human beings can achieve in highly volatile situations. A man can fail 70% of the time hitting a baseball and be called a hall of famer. A police officer can have 20,000 positive interactions and then placed in a difficult situation and then accused of abuse of power.
This country NEEDS to have an honest conversation of what expectations of policing looks like. And for any pundit pandering for some organization to take a permanent vacation.
Kim Potter by all accounts made good decisions until one day in that split second she pulled her gun instead of her taser. She is still serving prison time. Who would want to sign up for that?
Politics.
The Kim Potter case was heart breaking all around.
I totally agree. Then I saw on social media where people made fun of her tears and thought she should spend the rest of her life in prison. Very cruel remarks. I was flabbergasted. If only Daunte Wright had followed the police orders it is most likely Potter would not be in prison and he would be alive with the prospect of turning his life around.
Add to your already excellent point that the Hall of Fame baseball player was probably making more than $40k per year.
I know Fox News is not everyone's cup of tea (I watch it irregularly along with many other sources), but Jesse Watters has a show (7 ET/6 CT) which features a segment showing police bodycam video of GOOD things cops do when making split-second decisions and how often they are justified in using a weapon, such as when a suspect pulls a weapon on them or won't stop advancing in a threatening manner when ordered to. Most of them are out of their minds on booze or drugs. It shows amazing restraint on the part of cops. Of course, the MSM will never show it in a million years.
Great article, but one small quibble: George Floyd was not killed by Derek Chauvin. Although Chauvin is clearly not the kind of fellow you want in uniform, channeling William Penn, right is right and wrong is wrong.
Floyd had enough fentanyl in his blood to easily kill him, even considering that his drug-addicted liver was revved up and eating drugs for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Secondly, unless I missed that day in medical school, the windpipe is on the front of the neck, not the side, where Chauvin had his knee. The technique used by Chauvin to restrain Floyd has been used countless times with no problems. Floyd was struggling to breathe because his central nervous system had little molecules blocking its nerve cells, not because he was being murdered.
That’s the part of the incident that blew my mind.
I told my husband, “if someone is in fact choking another, the one being choked literally cannot talk for nine minutes. It’s not possible.”
This isn't true. You can 'choke' someone out by slowing/stopping blood flow to their brain as well as crushing their throat. When you see a rear naked choke in MMA, that's what's happening. Floyd likely died from this, on top of being made fragile from high levels of opioid depressing his nervous system. I still don't get people who claim he wasn't killed by Chauvin; Floyd would have gone home and passed out with a 40 in his hand if Chauvin hadn't thrown him down and leaned on his neck.
On the other hand, someone without extraordinary levels of fentanyl (and a history of related self-inflicted neurological devastation) would not have died that day.
I understand your comment on Floyd and I certainly agree that its highly unlikely he would have died had he not been on fentanyl. That said, he also wouldnt have died had he not had someone kneeling on his neck for nine minutes. Im by no means a BLM sympathizer - not one little bit. But I also just believe in truth and the truth is both Floyd's and the officer's actions led to that death. Im not comfortable absolving the officer just because Floyd was on drugs. His actions there were really reprehensible. If you have a heart at all, that was really hard to watch. It just seems to me that if youre a LEO, you probably come in contact with lots of people on drugs - its just part of the job.
I know a number of LEOs who say Chauvin could’ve handled it differently and I defer to their experience.
I stand by the observation that one being choked to death will not be recorded speaking as one requires respiration in order to speak.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. "After the fact, therefore because of the fact," or "because event Y occurred after event X, then it must have been caused by event X. The rooster crowed, then the sun rose; therefore the rooster's crowing caused the sun to rise. Logical fallacy.
Reports are that Floyd "couldn't breathe" in the cruiser, and that was why he was taken out. It wasn't claustrophobia, as he claimed - and probably thought, actually; it was because his CNS was depressed. Because Chauvin kneeled on the side of his neck does not mean that killed him. If it did, what was the mechanism?
We have one clear mechanism for death, and my Boy Bill of Occam says that the simplest explanation is the most likely. Why do we need two when one explains it, particularly in view of the fact that the second does not?
well, again, with respect, your analogy with the rooster is flawed. The one has nothing to do with the other. In the case of Floyd, it seems both actions factored into the death. Thats a completely different situation. But, let me ask you this, are you saying Floyd would have died regardless of what Chauvin did? Like, had he just been sitting on the hood of the car (obviously not a possibility given the situation but for argument's sake) he still would have died? If that is your belief, fair enough. I didnt see it that way but of course, I could be wrong. I have seen people OD on Fentanyl and that also doesnt take 9 minutes and doesnt look anything like the Floyd situation. Have you seen the dashcam footage from a few weeks ago where the officer accidently inhaled some super tiny amount of fentanyl she didnt even know was present on a dollar bill? She basically died right away (was revived) and couldnt speak. My point is just that, it seems to me, both the fentanyl and the kneeling on the throat contributed. And yes, it is significnantly harder to breath when someone kneels on the side of your neck even though that isnt where your windpipe is. Im familiar with Occam's Razor but its not always the case. If it were, we would have no use for nuance and context. In the medical field, doctors are CONSTANTLY finding out that the most likely cause of illness or pain isnt the actual cause.
You are correct; the rooster did not cause the sun to rise. In Floyd's death, we also have the situation of a likely cause and a second factor for which there is no connection except simultaneity, like our friend the rooster. Yes, Floyd would have stopped breathing regardless of Chauvin's kneeling on the SIDE of his neck. If he could talk and say "I can't breathe," his airway was open, so if one is going to postulate that the knee done the killin', then what was the mechanism by which it did that?
Whether he would have died is a separate question. One could speculate that if Chauvin had let him up and realized that he still could not breathe, Chauvin's training would have led him to the fact that he had a medical emergency on his hands, and he might have administered Narcan. But who knows what "might" have happened?
Absorption of illegal drugs is variable. Some of it is individual susceptibility; part is drug purity; part is route of administration, so I don't think one can use time in that aspect. Clearly his breathing got worse as time wore on, so without a blocked airway, why was that?
Don't get me wrong; it appears to my very limited view that Chauvin did not behave properly, but then I wasn't a cop in the rough section of Milwaukee, faced every day with Floyd types and their BS. All just a bad deal to my eye. A bad deal.
Well, I guess we just have to agree to disagree because this doesnt look anything like the other fentanyl deaths that at least I have seen. It looks to me like two compounding factors which again, is wholly and completely different that the rooster analogy. I will however say, Im not saying Floyd is an innocent victim because I think thats obviously not true. I just think you're absolving Chauvin too much, in my opinion.
The idea that Floyd died due to fentanyl was a possibility until one watched the case. The state's expert said he died neither from the neck compression nor from fentanyl. Definitely not fentanyl because one dies of fentanyl by a slowing of respiration and his breaths per minute were not slowing (by video) at time of cardiopulmonary arrest.
The expert said he died mainly from the knees in his back and poor positioning His entire left lung was collapsed meaning 50% loss of o2.
Neck compression from behind like that adds very little restriction to the airway and was mostly meaningless relative to the positioning. That's also why he could still speak.
This is why I watch the trials!
Not to mention the ever popular phenomenon of JAILitis. How many SOBs and CPs do we get in handcuffs every single day?
This was so depressing I had to stop reading. Let me ask this - what progressive idea has NOT turned out badly? Their litany of failure is so drearily successful that it seems they have the reverse Midas touch - turning everything to which they minister to merde. "Defund the police" - what could possibly go wrong? Release violent sociopaths and psychopaths without bail - streets will be safer. Call drug addicted vagrants "homeless" and let them sleep on subway grates and use subway cars for toilets. And now give rein to every lunatic who wakes up thinking they're Napoleon and forcing us to address them as "General." How about calling proggies what they are - lunatics. At this point if a proggie says "good morning" (they seldom can summon the manners and grace to do so) - you know it's bedtime. Although every once in awhile, I get the feeling that the insanity is nothing but part of a plan to destroy the United States of America - the only nation that stands between liberty and the ghouls in Davos.
You are not wrong in assuming a coordinated (or at least enemy of my enemy association) between BLM, progressives and foreign entities like China who all have a vested interest in seeing the Great American Experiment burnt to the ground. Re-education and neutering of youth, dismantling of localized power (both governmental and enforcement,) dismantling of systems of religion either by progressive takeover or submission, and control of freedoms and resources (energy, food, home and car ownership) are all means of totalitarian destruction and control. None of this seems like an accident nor conspiracy theory.
BLM = Soros puppets.
It really is just that simple. Soros used BLM to drum up support for the most idiotic examples of "woke" cultural leftists (postmodern neomarxists) running for office.
Soros' long term goal is to destroy the industrial working classes, family farms/businesses and impose Neo-Feudalism (Kotkin).
Soros is just one part of a scheme by globalist financiers and digital capitalist oligarchs to destroy nation states and run the world via digital piracy.
MAKE IDIOCRACY FICTION AGAIN.
I was all on board for calling vagrants "homeless" when that term came up in the 80s. Whatever. I was a teenager. Then it became "houseless" ... because their tent is their home, or home is where the heart is, or something ... but "homeless" was all of a sudden a rude thing to say. What? Why?
Now it's "person experiencing houslesness" because it's rude to define a person by a single attribute (which, I guess, would mean not calling a lawyer a lawyer but "a person with a law degree who has passed the bar exam in this state"?). What is it with leftists and language?
I'm going back to "vagrant".
I remember when "hobo" and "bum" were acceptable....hobo even had a certain cachet
Haha, I remember bum too
So long as they keep playing around with language, they won't have to do anything actually useful to help those they purport to care about. Their "activism" only go as far as their keyboards where they bring forth changes in social media spaces. So changes for all practical purposes are limited to language changes.
Also, the rate this is going, language will be so diluted that he disadvantaged will no longer have any words left to convey why they're in positions of disadvantages. When we learn someone is homeless, most of us feel sympathy at least and a desire to find a solution to help. But when we hear minced words like "person experiencing houselessness", wtf is it some guy temporarily staying in an Airbnb because he couldn't find the right apartment after separating from his wife or some gal moving to another state for a new job and haven't found a place to live yet?
Gotta give it to the wokes. They're making all societal problems disappear by redefining them out of existence.
Wow. This is a great comment. Thank you. It makes more sense to me now. Not just the language shift but my anger and where it’s coming from. I’ve thought a lot about my comment and what to really means to me, to who I am as a person. This helps. Thank you.
Ghouls is very apt.
In Seattle, during the pandemic lockdowns, BLM protestors were allowed to conduct illegal protests of the police on the i-5 highway in open defiance of the law and of pandemic restrictions. Seattle's city officials, rather than clearing the protests, assigned police to shut down the highway entrances to allow people to illegally protest them.
This ended when a college student from Africa took the off-ramp onto the highway and hit two protestors on accident, killing one and permanently crippling the other.
Twitter posted a bird's eye view of the accident and declared it a murder by Trump supporters. The story spread internationally as proof of Trump's deadly hate speech, and Seattle subsequently unfurled giant banners to BLM from their skyscrapers.
In the same week, in my neighborhood of Bothell, a young police officer was shot dead during a routine traffic stop. Outside of Bothell, nobody cared.
I have two good friends that were Bothell PD and quit police work entirely and left the city after Shoop’s death.
That police officers are leaving the service is not surprise. To be law enforcement was never the nicest job, hours are long, pays is mediocre, stress in risk are high. Put people wanted to serve and protect their communities, and took pride in their job. Also communities respected and valued their police officers.
Today, honestly you need to be crazy to want to become police officer in many metropolitan areas in US (Portland, LA, Seattle, NYC, DC to name some). Hours are worse than ever before, crime is booming, streets are effectively not safe, but the worst of all, thanks to MSM and politicians large part of population are treating Police Officers as root of all problems and criminals victims of the system. This leads that this part of population elects politicians that implement laws that further make law enforcement impossible. Since many public prosecutors have became woke, entire policing has become Sisyphus work, where police arrests criminals, for those just to be released by some progressive prosecutor next day.
No wonder moral is low and nobody wants the job, when large part of politicians and MSM is constantly calling you racist, white supremacist for simply trying to enforce laws that those same politicians implemented.
Yes there are issues in police, lack of training, over militarization, unions that protect bad cops, but for every bad one there are 100 good, who do their job with pride.
Sadly this demonization of police will just make things worse in long run, because less and less people will be willing to serve, crime will go more and more up, making job even less attractive than it is now. This wont affect elites in Martha's Vineyard, Manhattan or parts of Silicone Valley, they will just pay private security and not worry. Its middle class and lower classes that will suffer the most, because they will be left on mercy of criminals (what is already happening)
George Floyd was not murdered. Let's start there. If Chauvin's appeal is ignored, what self-respecting human being would become a police officer? Frothing-at-the-mouth pitchforkers ran out into the streets burning shit down in response to a video with MISSING PIECES. Floyd laid himself on the ground after ingesting the rest of his drug wad. He'd done this before. That "knee on the neck" was a sanctioned restraint against excited delirium. Perps claim that they "can't breathe" all the time. Floyd is the first person -- and perhaps the only person -- who had COVID but didn't die of COVID. If anything -- one could call it manslaughter. But it sure as hell wasn't murder and that this was decided by the jury -- to protect themselves -- is nothing short of tragic for us all.
Now only the real thugs and racists and what have you would dare become police officers. All those morally panicked USEFUL IDIOTS made their racist dreams come true.
And even worse -- when I tried explaining to people why Chauvin had his knee on Floyd's SHOULDER, and that there were pieces missing in the video (if you watch it in its entirety you'd see how polite and almost deferentially they were treating Floyd -- so I am even more baffled beyond belief at the outcome of this trial) THEY WOULD GET UPSET AND START SCREAMING AT ME....like irrational little babies...
If this is the state of our so-called "educated class..." -- and our judicial system....and yes, the media is at fault, but even so: our "educators" are tyrannical ideologues who do not teach their charges to do the damned research.
When Floyd was in the back of the cop car trying to get out, he literally said, "pin me to the ground." He claimed he had claustrophobia and could not remain in the car.
It frightens me that any jury could claim there is no reasonable doubt of murder.
They were frightened for their own safety, and I get it. But the fact that they came back with murder, meaning they believe Chauvin INTENDED to kill him in front of all those witnesses while also being VIDEOTAPED, frightens the shit out of me. Will transcend LEOs in no time. What lynch mob sacrifice will be next?
Oh yes, there was that. What white cop would have stood there, intentionally murdering a black man, with a crowd of people holding up their cameras to it? And to think millions of people failed to see that chills me to the core.
The solution to this will be robo-cops with unrelenting allegiance to the federal government.
Plus no pettichial hemorrhage or broken hiatal bone.
The mission statement of "Black Lives Matter" openly stated that they were a communist revolutionary movement dedicated to overthrowing the culture of the USA. They took it off their website in 2020 when hundreds of millions of dollars of private and corporate money flowed in.
When Cubans protested their communist government in 2020, inspired by the protests in the USA, BLM released a statement in support of the whiter communist government rather than the Afrolatin protestors. The protests ended very badly for many of those black people. They did not receive millions of dollars of luxury properties.
BLM was never about the welfare of black people, and they've done nothing to restrain black on black violence in the years since their political victory. Instead, there are more black crime victims than before, and DEI officers positioned in every institution in the USA.
This is what a communist cultural revolution looks like from the inside. And so many people are afraid to push back, lest they be denounced by the revolutionaries as the terrible "r" word.
I left policing in Georgia (patrol officer in a county police department) back in 2019 after five and a half years of it. The job was sprinkled with good times and bad times, humor and horror. I’m glad it was something I got to do, but in the end, I didn’t want my family subjected to the whims of Twitter in the event I had to take action due to someone else’s poor choices. Maybe if it was just me, it would have been different.
I’ve shared this article before, but I think it compliments today’s post quite well and is worth a glance.
https://www.police1.com/public-perception/articles/a-letter-to-the-american-public-why-you-must-decide-what-you-want-from-cops-d4qW0mL97LU0w5eX/
I wonder how many police officers retired or were terminated because they didn’t want the jab. Didn’t Ron DeSantis offer jobs to out of state police officers fired for not complying?
Florida under DeSantis is just roaring. Prosperity, safety, happiness all up like rockets, and people from Leftist states pouring in. One of the best examples of competition in action Now, if he can dismantle the "education" monopoly and get some real competition there, too....
The lies told about the occupation of police officer are among the most glaring and obvious of the “new order” progressives. In this new order, we don’t trust local police, we don’t trust our religious leaders, they’ve infiltrated our respected doctors and universities: just trust the federal government and shut up. Those who believe that in order to create an equitable future and redistribute wealth the existing structures must be burnt down, are doing a smashing job. Nothing in this piece is news nor shocking this many years into this nonsense, where progressives collide with China toward their mutual goal of the destruction of the US, but these individual stories must be told until the silent majority wake up and demand their basic rights of safety. We should respect and reward our officers, like our military, who shoulder the burden of our freedom and safety, anything less is a crime.
Remember folks, today's Democrats - everything they touch, they ruin.
Almost every single article comes back to that. There can be no possible way its coincidence over intention. NONE.
It's true, believe me. After living decades in Massachusetts I've witnessed it firsthand.
I’d guess those twelve murders in a few days in Richmond and Oakland were all blacks. Congrats regressives, you’ve made black lives hell, almost as if they really don’t matter.
The left, doing what they’ve done since reconstruction, the KKK, Jim Crow and now BLM, hollowing out our major cities. Performing systemic racism along with planned unparenthood.
You might be wrong: Richmond is now 18% black, 44% Hispanic; Oakland is 24% black, 27% Hispanic.
California's population is only 6% black overall.