Blake consults The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) for this statistics: less than 13 percent of white students attend a school where a majority of students are black.
Stop and reflect on the absurdity of this factoid. Blacks are only around 13 percent of the US population. How would one propose substantially raising the percentage of whites going to majority black schools when blacks are not even the largest minority in America? Go ahead. Try to work out the math in your head.
Speaking of minorities, perhaps blacks might ask how it came to pass that they were demoted from the largest minority in America—while disproportionally relegated to impoverished neighborhoods in progressive-run cities. Maybe they should look into why the jobs blacks used to do are now occupied by members of the new largest minority. Whose policies accomplished that? (Hints: New Deal, Great Society).
CNN is all in on painting whites as racists, describing even white liberals as “dangerous” (we know they have assumed all along that conservatives are). Are whites dangerous because the neighborhoods where they are the majority do better on such key social metrics as education, health and well being, crime and violence, and entrepreneurial activities?
Why is the situation of racial inequality always pitched as a zero-sum game? “Unless more White people are willing to give up something to change the racial makeup of where they live and send their children to school, there will be no true racial awakening in America.” Give up what?
Civil War, Reconstruction, Civil Rights—these weren’t moments of “true racial awakening”? Who sneaked those three Amendments into the Constitution? How did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 happen? Did it happen?
Once more we see the work of antiracist ideology in erasing collective memory of American progress in race relations.
Why, if we are promoting racially-integrated communities and schools, do progressives push divisive identity politics? Who is it that teaches our children and tells their parents to see race first and persons second? Who is it that defines? (See the chart below.) Western norms and values, individualism and industriousness, as “white culture”? Who is it that systemically glosses over the chief determinant of life chances—social class.
Chart appearing on the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, subsequently taken down after a query from Newsweek.
If we want integration (and, of course, we do), then we need to get back to the ethics of humanism and the politics of social class. Stop saying colorblindness is “racist.” Stop demanding group rights over individual rights. Stop perpetuating the myth that individuals are meaningfully subdivided by race. Stop racially essentializing culture.
There are no laws stopping black people from living in majority white neighborhoods and sending their children to majority white schools. So knock off this nonsense about white people having to give up something for the sake of justice as if they are the cause of inequality and poverty in America.
Look instead at the structure of capital ownership and control. Determine which group actually controls the way life happens in a society run by corporations.
White people don’t run things. That’s not how it works. This is not an apartheid system. We got rid of that more than fifty years ago.
Welcome to “Double Throw Down Thursday” (not really a thing, but for today’s blog, what the hell). Trump has managed to get the establishment twice worked up in a week. First, HUD Secretary of Ben Carson is changing housing policy and Trump likes it. Then Trump suggests delaying the 2020 election. The latter tweet comes just in time to distract the public over the shit show put on by House Democrats during the testimony of Attorney General William Barr. Sometimes Trump can’t get out his own way. Okay, a lot of times he can’t get out of his own way. Let’s begin with the “call” to postpone the 2020 presidential election.
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
Media darling Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, recently said that we could get back to some normalcy by the end of the year. He’s excited about the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine that uses novel technology to (hopefully—profitably) provoke immunity in people against a virus that well more than 99 percent of people survive. In his tweet, amid the constraints of a pandemic, Trump is asking a question about timing. I don’t agree with delaying the election. I do have a problem with universal mail-in voting. But I remind readers that, when Wisconsin governor Tony Evers actually called for a delay in voting (I opposed this move, for the record), progressives lined up behind him. Then they hurled insults at Republicans for rebuffing Evers’ call.
The spate of news stories about Trump wondering out loud whether a delay in the election should be considered given the pandemic and the problems with universal mail-in voting (loss of national solidarity, not being able to conduct on-the-spot exit polling useful for detecting voter fraud, and other things—see NPR’s recent article on how mail-in voting is fraught with problems) are written in a sensationalistic manner to leave the impression that the president aims to establish a fascist dictatorship. My Facebook newsfeed is chockfull of panic over Trump’s pending fascist dictatorship. Mission accomplished.
Here’s the BBC’s take. I should say “takes.” Note the different headlines. The BBC changed the headline after at first “misrepresenting” the president’s tweet. That the BBC did this is important since its reach is global. Bring on the panic.
The BBC’s edited headlineThe BBC headline before it was edited
Here’s more fake news from CNN: “Trump Floats Delaying Election Despite Lack of Authority to Do So.” Maybe this is just a badly worded headline. Is it referring to Trump’s lack of authority to delay the election or his lack of authority to ask whether the nation ought to consider a delay given the pandemic? But can we really be charitable with CNN given its clearly established pattern of Trump-bashing?
According to the story, “Trump has no authority to delay an election, and the Constitution gives Congress the power to set the date for voting. Lawmakers from both parties said almost immediately there was no likelihood the election would be delayed.” There you go. As CNN itself notes, Congress sets the vote. This is a constitutional republic that has stood for more than two centuries. It has survived civil war and world war. Republicans quickly pushed back against the idea. No problem. We can move on.
Not so fast. “Trump’s message provides an opening—long feared by Democrats—that both he and his supporters might refuse to accept the presidential results.” Only Democrats are allowed to refuse to accept the results of a presidential election (see Gore v Bush 2000). But wait, what does this have to do with delaying an election? When Evers called for postponing the election in Wisconsin, did that tell us that he was prepared to refuse to accept the results of the election when it was actually held? (See also Republicans openly challenge Trump’s tweet on delaying election.)
The frenzy over Trump’s tweet is nothing new. The hysteria began the day Trump was elected. Today’s freak-out is yet another instantiation of the globalist-corporatist effort pushed by the establishment media and the Democratic Party to undermine the legitimacy of a democratically-elected presidency by spreading fear, ginning up public outrage, and fomenting “popular” resistance to imaginary and misrepresented things. The panic presumes Trump is a fascist. The panic reinforces that presumption.
Round and round we go. Chicken Littles are running amok on my Facebook newsfeed. A segment of the population has become addicted to cortisol. And I am trying very hard to not to slide into misanthropy. But I digress….
This is a not merely a double standard on the progressive side. Progressives are projecting onto Trump their irrational beliefs about this president and the current situation. At the same time, many of the same people who think Trump will postpone an election—or refuse to accept the results of the election—in order to establish a fascist dictatorship embrace a regressive tribalist countermovement endeavoring to undermine democratic-republican institutions and restrict civil liberties and rights. The real extremism in America today is Antifa and Black Lives Matter, groups tearing down and blowing up stuff to convince Americans to abolish the police and dismantle the nuclear family.
I get why marketers use social media to determine attitude and desire. As a sociologist, I have before me a detailed ethnographic record from which I can distill worldviews. After more than a decade of observation, I conclude that the people who think Trump is a fascist are mostly the same people who think that the chaos in our cities is “peaceful protest,” equate speech and even silence to “violence,” while opposing the deployment of law enforcement to quell actual violence, call for the shuttering businesses and forcing everybody into PPE, clamor to see everybody by force or shame jabbed with vaccines using novel technology, reject therapeutics not endorsed by big pharmaceutical companies who have captured our regulatory agencies, call for keeping our children homebound and away from their peers and teachers, and push globalization and mass immigration at the expense of American families (who should be dismantled anyway along with their “privileges”).
If you examine these attitudes closely you, too, will probably see an overarching ideology at work. Progressives express a loss of faith in the institutions of Western civilization that they themselves have sown with their rhetoric and actions. We are seeing a self-fulfilling prophecy at work. Progressives sow discord over imaginary or hyped up threats and then cry “fascism” when patriots stand up to them and rise to defend the republic. All this is managed by a vast propaganda apparatus. It’s a project.
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…Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!
We see more of this in the fallout over the resent HUD decision. Grace Panetta, columnist for The Business Insider (and granddaughter of life-long Democratic operative Leon Panetta), put the spin on this one to make Trump out to be a white supremacist stoking racist fears.
Last Thursday, HUD Secretary Ben Carson (himself a frequent target of outrage and ridicule by progressives) announced that his office would rescind the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation that required state and local governments seeking federal housing funding to collect data on demographics and living conditions and, importantly, to show that they were not perpetuating racial discrimination. Trump voiced support for the change in the tweets above.
Housing advocates immediate criticized the rule change claiming that it would allow discriminatory housing practices. For example, the National Low Income Housing Coalition said the rule change “represents a complete retreat from efforts to undo historic, government-driven patterns of housing discrimination and segregation throughout the US” and would “allow communities to ignore the essential racial desegregation obligations of fair housing law.”
Panetta writes, “Wednesday’s tweets were among Trump’s most explicit overtures to white fear and grievance in his bid to win back suburban voters who have been staunchly repudiating the GOP since he took office.” This move comes, she notes, amid evidence that Biden is beating Trump among white, college-educated, and suburban voters. Trump’s alleged strategy is to scare white voters over Biden’s housing plans, namely that said policies would make their neighborhoods less safe and desirable. Panetta cites this tweet in support of her accusation:
The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better! https://t.co/1NzbR57Oe6
Panetta tells the readers of Business Insider that many observers find Trump’s references to “suburban housewives” and his linking Biden with crime and disorder in the suburbs “appear to stem from an outdated view of suburbs as almost completely occupied by wealthy white people who are fearful of crime and distrustful of diversity in their communities.” The article points to a PEW survey indicating that “today’s suburbs are far more racially and economically diverse than those of the mid-to-late 20th century, when ‘white flight’ propelled many white Americans to flee urban areas for suburbs.” (You can read about these developments here, as well.)
Why does Panetta and her ilk assume Trump is playing to white suburban fears of yesteryear rather than to the diverse suburban fears that exist today? Are black and brown suburbanites unconcerned about the effect of low income housing on property values and the problems of crime? (There is, after all, an association.) Or is it only white people who are concerned about property values and crime? Remember, Trump is making a major play for black and brown votes in his reelection strategies. Panetta is not only making assumptions about Trump’s intent; she is assuming that low income housing and criminality is a function of black and brown people and she does this in the face of the PEW survey she has right in front of her.
When Panetta quotes Paul Waldman’s July 21 op-ed in The Washington Postthat “the idea that Biden wants to ‘destroy the suburbs’ makes no sense,” that this idea is “only coherent if you think that an increase in racial diversity would ‘destroy’ the suburbs, which means that the suburbs only exist if they’re all-white,” she is along with Waldman assuming Trump is talking about the problem of racial diversity and not about the impact of low income housing on property values and the problem of criminality. Again, why assume this? Why assume that the only threat to property and person in suburbs is from racial minorities—many of whom now live in the suburbs?
Waldman calls Trump’s rhetoric race-baiting. But who is actually doing the race-baiting? Why does low income housing and crime always have to be about black and brown people? Why is concern for these problems only to be found among whites who are then accused of racism for expressing it? Could the concern be about social class and economics?
Panetta and Waldman and others feel comfortable broadly generalizing about race relations while avoiding the class question because they operate from the premise that the president is a white supremacist and that fear of crime can be reduced to race. They are in the media elite bubble. Indeed, they are so committed to the presumptions of the hegemony in which they imbibe that, without any reflection or self-doubt, and without any evidence, they attribute to the president motives that are not apparent.
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People really have to stop freaking out every time Trump tweets something. Folks are being played. Not by Trump. By the people who want you to panic over populism. How would it be possible that Trump could just stay in office beyond his term or bend the Constitution to his ends? It’s incredible that he’s stayed in office this long given the efforts of the deep state to drive him out. Law enforcement would walk into the White House and perp walk the man out. There’s no Mussolini or Hitler moment in our future. Not from Trump, at least.
If you want to understand the real power dynamics in the world read C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy, Inc., David Korten’s When Corporations Rule the Earth, Bill Robinson’s Promoting Polyarchy, Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism.
Trump and the populists worldwide are outsiders to the globalist-corporatist order. We should be so lucky that they could have a lasting impact of things (we might get back our republic and our liberties). Indeed, why you are conditioned to freak out about Trump is to push you into the arms of the nexus of world historical power: the network of transnational corporations working hand in hand with the Chinese Communist Party.
You are being played and I only wish you’d feel a bit more shame about that instead of the self-righteous bullshit you keep slinging.
The conservatism before Donald Trump was neoliberal and neoconservative. The New Right forged under Reagan fell away very quickly (and was really ever only strategic and largely cosmetic). Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are subservient to corporate governance and transnationalism. This explains the remarkable continuity from George H.W. Bush through Barack Obama—privatization, regime change and endless wars, the trade deals, enabling CCP imperialism, the woke progressive takeover of the culture industry and administrative state apparatus, mass immigration. The two-party system has operated during this people via the social logic of globalist-corporatism.
In opposition to the politics and policies of establishment Republicans, Trump—and one sees this, as well, in Great Britain with Brexit and the recent blowout of Labor by Conservatives—represents a return to nationalist populism, reflecting the yearning of working people in the US and the UK to get the keys to their country back. Populism has the potential to bring working people of all stripes together to blunt the effects of globalization. It has already achieved quite a bit.
Its success is why we see an unprecedented effort, facilitated by neoconservatives in the Republican establishment, for example John Bolton, whose philosophy roots in Cold War progressivism, to delegitimize a sitting president. Trump represents a real problem to the denationalizing project that progressives and globalists have been pushing for decades. If Trump is turned out of office, the establishment believes, it will be able to get the project back on track. As I have blogged about, this explains Russiagate and the impeachment over the Ukraine affair.
Biden and the return of the neoliberal/neoconservative establishment to full power would be very bad news for working people and the future of liberal democracy across the trans-Atlantic system. On the other hand, it would be very good news for the Party of Davos and the Chinese Communist Party. These are the forces that are feeding Antifa and Black Lives Matter with both money and ideas. Western civilization is at a crossroads. The establishment project to do in Trump and populism should deeply concern rank-and-file conservatives. But really it should concern all of us who care about liberty and democracy.
There is a rhetoric advanced by establishment Republicans and their rank-and-file supporters that attempts to isolate Trump, painting as a demagogue who stands alone against reason. This rhetoric is profoundly elitist. We see it in the claims that Trump makes policy with an eye towards reelection, as if doing what the people would deem worthy of casting a vote for a sitting president is somehow contrary to the national interest. In fact, it is contrary to the interests of the globalists who can’t wait to get back in the drivers seat. The elite are attempting to disappear tens of millions of people. The “deplorables” Clinton dismissively called them. That’s what they elite think of workers in the heartland.
Those of us on the left shouldn’t speak that way about working people not because it’s condescending (it is), but because it denies reality. The states Trump took from the Democrat column were blue collar states. Voters knew what they were doing: they were rejecting the neoliberalism and neoconservatism that degraded their communities and undermined their livelihoods and squandered and spilled treasure and blood. Workers in Great Britain knew what they were doing when they voted in the Conservatives.
Illustration: Craig Stephens
Workers and small business owners knew what they were doing when they rejected all those many establishment Republicans who tried to take down Trump during the primaries. There was a reason he blew away the entire field: he made an argument that resonated with the people. He didn’t regurgitate establishment talking points or hesitate before fear of media framing. He spoke frankly about the decline of America and, in unapologetic terms, about its greatness.
For those who say Trump stands for nothing but himself, I have followed Trump’s career for decades and he definitely stands for something other than himself. He has been remarkably consistent in what he stands for, in fact. He and those around him present a coherent set of policies and offer a clear direction for America to move in. They mean to—and already have on many fronts—re-shore industry, end regime change and endless wars, restore public order and economic security to working class communities, and marginalize the People’s Republic of China. Trump’s personal interests and his vision of the national interests coincide. He doesn’t stand up there alone. This is a movement. And it’s trans-Atlantic in character. We see populism on the rise throughout the Western hemisphere. It’s catching fire in China, as well. All of this has the globalists terrified.
People are distracted by the tweeting. I get it. Trump says outlandish things. He trolls people. I don’t pay attention to all that, frankly. One has to look for the signal in the noise, as Steven Bannon is fond of saying.
In the final analysis, you don’t judge persons, policies, or nations by what they think or say of themselves. You judge them by what they do and what they accomplish. The neoliberal/neoconservative consensus had its chance. We saw what the managed decline of the American republic and Western civilization has wrought for the people. The people won’t long survive more of that.
I am not a Trump supporter. I am a supporter of the populist mood that has swept hundreds of millions of people across the world into an emerging resistance movement against the transnational project to denationalize the West and replace Enlightenment values of liberty and democracy with those of bureaucracy and technocracy. Trump did not start the resistance movement. He is a manifestation of it. It will survive his presidency. At the same time, his administration has become something of a bulwark against the forces of globalization. I do not, therefore, dread his reelection.
I want public schools to reopen. There are real emotional and psychological costs to children stuck at home and in front of screens. Opportunities to acquire crucial knowledge and skill sets are being cut off—knowledge and skills that cannot be transmitted virtually. Social interactions necessary for normal cognitive and personal development are constrained, indeed deformed, by remote learning. We are told that a novel virus presents a challenge to reopening. Otherwise, it would be business-as-usual.
But business-as-usual is a problem in itself. Indeed, more concerning than the effects of COVID-19 is the degree of wokeness in progressive social programming and the expectation that children and young adults, as well as staff and teachers, will embrace social justice doctrines surrounding race and gender. Children and young adults are conditioned to be hyper-judgmental and hyper-sensitive. Others are ostracized for being born a certain way and on that account taught to self-loathe, to feel ashamed for things they could not possibly have done, to apologize for the wrongdoings of others, even including corpses.
Indoctrinating youth with the language of theoretical antagonisms developed by cloistered academics, limited by disciplinary matrices, moving in abstract conceptual worlds, and justified in their motivation by artificial entitlement and esteem, antagonisms pushed by an odious grievance industry grasping for unearned things, a sophisticated language painting some children and young adults as racist and sexist on the basis of color of their skin and their anatomy, while teaching others that they are the victims of oppression and trauma and deserving of special rights on account of these, all the while nourishing the worst personality disorders of narcissism and sociopathy, the fruits of which we are seeing playing out on the city streets of America and Europe today—the consequences of all this will in the long run prove far worse than any wrought by SARS-CoV-2.
I am sympathetic to those parents who are reluctant or who refuse to send their children into a totalizing environment that commands their attention for the better part of their waking hours five days a week and sometimes more. I oppose in principle vouchers for religious schools, but at the same time I can see that it is unfair to allow some parents with means to shield their children from progressive indoctrination while effectively compelling those with little ability to exercise choice to send their children back into this environment. I am sympathetic with taxpayers who wonder why their resources are being marshaled to fund programming that runs down the very culture that has allowed so many of them to have a good life.
For those of us who do continue to allow these institutions access to our children, we need to do a better job of arming students emotionally and intellectually to resist indoctrination and to challenge teachers on the things they say—and to not permit the exercise of disagreeable speech to be suppressed under the guise of discipline. Parents should periodically debrief their children to learn what it is that they’re “learning” and to address teachers and administrators directly with their concerns.
How did this happen? That is a long story beyond the scope of this essay. But the bottom line is that schools should not be teaching quasi-religious notions. It is not the place of administrators, staff, and teachers to disseminate social justice doctrine. As a parent, I would never tell the children of other parents how their children are supposed to think of themselves or think of others beyond treating persons as individuals and on the basis of behavior and character. To be sure, I have a problem with parents who fill their children’s heads with such hateful and divisive nonsense. Teaching children to judge people on the basis of race and gender under cover of such progressive rhetoric as “antiracism” is insidious. I would never presume to humiliate or shame a child or a young adult because of her or his phenotypic characteristics. But to have partisan interests reflected in public education in order to reinforce the obnoxious teachings of a segment of the population only doubles down on the problem.
I see the effects of the programming in the acquiescence of my colleagues in higher education to ideological struggle sessions cloaked in such Orwellian language as “diversity and equity training,” their equanimity prepared by their socialization in the institution of public education. As part of this structure, I feel a special burden to speak up about the direction it has taken. I am moreover, as a sociologist, acutely aware of the subtle forces that coerce education professionals to participate in reproducing that structure.
Public education is shot through with subversive political projects of this sort. Public schools should not, for example, insist that children and young adults tolerate exclusive and oppressive religious doctrines, such as those teachings imposing modesty dress on girls or condemning homosexuality, as merely “other cultural practices.” It is not the purpose of public education to validate any given ideology or deform a person’s ability to distinguish right from wrong by invalidating ordinary moral judgment as “ethnocentric.” In cultural terms, public schools have only to uphold the liberal values of autonomy, creativity, equality, free thought and expression, humanism, individualism, and secularism to do the right thing. For these are the values that allow persons the chance to manifest more fully the human right to self-actualization.
I expect some will find this essay insulting. Offense-taking does not negate facts and experiences. I remind the audience that I am the son of teachers and a teacher myself. I have children in public schools. My wife is a education professional. I study pedagogy and have reviewed the curricular materials of public schools and, more than once, spoken up about them. I confess, I should speak up more frequently and more vociferously than I have. So here we are. (Moreover, it is a shame that the best criticisms of the problem come not from the left but from the right. See There Is No Apolitical Classroom, The Silence of the School Reformers, and Woke History Is Making Big Inroads in America’s High Schools.)
I recognize that many teachers disseminate propaganda handed down to them from on high. But here staff and teachers have an important role to play by challenging their administration over content or in practice avoiding transmitting the worst aspects of woke programming. Teachers should not wait for parents to probe their children for information in order to intervene. Teachers know better than anyone how reluctant parents can be to challenge authority. Teachers have a responsibility to not harm children with programming that can cause distress, engender guilt, or stigmatize.
The problem of indoctrination in education runs deep. The unraveling of the Enlightenment that woke ideology advances (postmodernism, poststructuralism, and all the rest of it) is part of a project reflecting decades of managed decline of Western civilization by corporate power and its functionaries in the culture industry and the administrative apparatus. These insidious notions are the result of a long march through our institutions by those who mean to undermine the values of personal and popular sovereignty that mark Western civilization as the pinnacle of world-historical development.
The goal of the project is obvious in its effects. And that’s why we have to confront the problem. And why we have to confront it now. We risk losing everything that has made our societies just and successful. Those who desire to fundamentally change Western society know how important it is to get at our children. It is our civic duty to protect them from it.
Early in the interview shared below, Coleman Hughes notes the huge wealth gap between Jews and Protestants and the fact that hardly anybody is interested in that matter. Indeed, if a person is interested in the wealth gap between Jews and Protestants he is viewed with suspicion. Is there not at least a whiff of antisemitism when a Protestant is interested in why Jews as a group do so much better than Protestants do as a group?
Coleman Hughes a fellow and contributing editor at City Journal.
We can push Hughes’ premise a bit more. If the person interested in the question argues that the reason there is such a gap is because the Jews have organized a system of institutions and organizations and occupy influential positions within this system that allows them as a group to amass privilege over time and accumulate a disproportionate share of the wealth, what social scientists call “cumulative advantages,” then the suggestion becomes an indication of antisemitism. Sounds conspiratorial, no? Does the explanation have the Jewish plan of control in hand? Are there laws on the books that protect and advance the ability of Jews to manipulate society in such a fashion? No? It’s just the way the system works? Jewish power is built into the DNA of society, is that the claim?
An imaginative Protestant seeking to blame Jews for his situation could certainly construct an elaborate theory about dynamics and structures in Western history that explain this disparity. Social science provides jargon for the construction of all manner of abstract things and “social facts” supposed to work forces on people. But I think we all know what that theory would be called in this case and what would happen to the person who advanced it.
It would remove all doubt about the question of antisemitism if the person pushing the theory of Jewish privilege and supremacy demands on the basis of his theory the reorganization of society to redistribute the wealth held by Jews to Protestants.
Yet it is not merely okay for blacks and their “allies” to blame whites for the wealth gap between their respective groups; it is expected. Those who object to antiracism are treated with the same scorn as a Protestant who wonders why Jews as a group are so much better off are than Protestants. Ibram X Kendi, Director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, whose theory of “antiracism” makes all whites who do not agree with him racist, tells us that it is racist to oppose reparations. Kendi is celebrated on the left and by the establishment media.
Ibram X Kendi, Director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research
The antiracist standpoints normalizes anti-white racism. Whereas a Protestant runs the risk of being accused of antisemitism for asking why Jews are so well off as a group, the black person demanding reparations from white people for something their distant ancestors may or may not have done is bravely seeking the justice due him. This expression is given a lot of leeway. Some black nationalists even pull Jews into the scope of their theory of the black-white wealth gap and, unlike the white Protestant who would be crucified for doing such a thing, are able to maintain associations with groups like Black Lives Matter, darlings of the establishment, without much scrutiny. How dare white people tell black people which oracles to consult, right? As if criticizing rabid antisemites like Louis Farrakhan should be avoided because some black people wish to sidestep vile and potentially embarrassing and hypocritical associations.
Even though the demand for reparations is made in a society that abolished slavery more than 150 years ago—even though the demand is made for blacks whose ancestors were never exploited and oppressed by the structures theorized to still disadvantage blacks after so many decades—even though some who will get reparations are descended from tribes who sold the ancestors of other black people into slavery—the characterization of all whites as privileged and collectively profiting from skin color and guilty of an intergenerational sin is viewed as a noble cause. White privilege rhetoric blames an entire race of people for the situation of blacks as a group. Blood guilt, rightly never tolerated in explanations of Jewish affluence and status, has become the prevailing theory of racial disparities and, moreover, the policy ground upon which racial equity is to be achieved.
To be sure, there was racial slavery in the United States. This is a historical fact. And that fact does have something to do with the development of post-slavery America. If you feel the need to point that out (which in my experience many people do), then you are missing Hughes’ point. Hughes need not ponder the substance of the Jewish question for a second for his point to work. One does not need to spend any time working out odious theories about Jewish affluence. It is for this reason that reparations is such an unhealthy obsession: it is driven by race prejudice. The hatred and loathing of white people has become so severe—paradoxically increasing in the wake of the elimination of actual structures privileging white people—that whites are now expected to self-hate and self-loathe in ritual confession. The truth is the opposite of what Kendi writes in his Atlantic article: it is advocacy for reparations that is racist. This should be obvious. But we are in an era where people are easily manipulated by feelings of guilt installed by antiracist programming. One cannot safely assume people see through the deception.
More than 150 medical experts, nurses, scientists, and teachers have signed a letter to political leaders urging them to shut down society and start over to contain the coronavirus pandemic. The letter was organized by PRIG, or the Public Interest Research Group, a network of non-profit organizations with the goal of politically change American in a progressive direction. Envisioned by that notorious scold Ralph Nader in 1971, PRIG recruits its activist army mostly from colleges and universities.
“Right now we are on a path to lose more than 200,000 American lives by November 1st,” the letter asserts, “Yet, in many states people can drink in bars, get a haircut, eat inside a restaurant, get a tattoo, get a massage, and do myriad other normal, pleasant, but non-essential activities.”
Of course, all the “normal” and “pleasant” activities people engage are essential for the survival of the bars, hair salons, restaurants, tattoo parlors, and all the other businesses that make our communities vibrant and prosperous and the dreams of entrepreneurs come true. The “normal” and the “pleasant” are also essential for health emotional and psychological states, access to which is rapidly dwindling for our children.
“Continuing on the path we’re on now will result in widespread suffering and death,” the letter warns on apocalyptic tones. “And for what?” For all those things that PRIG designates “nonessential.” And for more than that. To not sink the economy even deeper into depression and all the suffering that calamity entails. For the sake of the “normal” and the “pleasant.”
What the letter signers recommend is insanity. They demand enough daily testing to tag everyone with flu-like symptoms and an army of contact tracers to track all current cases. They demand the shuttering of all nonessential businesses. Restaurants should only provide take-out service. People should only leave their apartments and houses to obtain food and medicine or fresh air and exercise. Governments should mandate masks in all situations and ban interstate travel.
In other words, society should not longer be free and open and citizens should be forced into strict rules of obedience to demands articulated in a letter by medical experts, nurses, scientists, and teachers with the correct opinion.
The Authoritarian Revolution
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Last night, I listened to a virtual debate about mandatory masks at the board of supervisors in the country where I live. It became obvious early on that the logic given to rationalize mandatory mask wearing to combat the coronavirus could be easily retooled to rationalize mandatory vaccination. “We do this not for our own protection, which is admittedly a personal choice,” the argument went, “but for the protection of others.” The same argument could also be marshaled for rationalizing the same mandates for combatting the spread of influenza viruses, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, and other coronaviruses, all of which are lethal and crippling.
But if we apply the logic of masks and vaccines and quarantine for SARS-CoV-2 to other things—and people should wonder why we don’t—then the good life will be increasingly difficult to come by. And that’s just fine in the opinion of an increasing number of our fellow countrymen.
What the scolds don’t tell you is that tens of thousands of people die every week from all sorts of causes. They die from heart attacks, strokes, chronic respiratory conditions, cancer, automobile accident, alcoholism, drug overdoses—it is a list too long to review here. Normal weekly deaths in the United States average around 60,000. That is a lot of death. And a lot of that death is preventable. If we shut down society, banned cars, forced people to eat only certain foods, banned a range of chemicals, strictly prohibited alcohol and drugs, etcetera, we could drastically reduce the rates of death and disease. Of course, we don’t do a lot that. We determined a long time ago that the good life comes with risks. But for how long?
We are on a dark path towards an authoritarian society. Our governments are normalizing germophobia—the pathological fear of microbes. Authorities and activists are pathologizing healthy people, teaching citizens that their fellow humans are by default diseased and dangerous. Creating fear and suspicious are important elements in establishing an authoritarian order. The panicked animal seeks the sheltering arms of the parens patriae. While this doctrine has its place—most obviously in the necessity of public safety—a new attitude seeks the totalitarian expansion of state power to curtail the “normal” and “pleasant” activities of healthy people.
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The pandemic is occurring at the same time pundits and politicians are telling us that white people are racist and that their racism infects Western culture and law. Indeed, racism is in the Western DNA. Paradoxically, the free people of the West are told they have no right to except to be safe from criminals in their homes and their communities. Public safety is a racial privilege, a luxury white people do not deserve (black and brown people are collateral damage). Of course, the police will enforce the mask mandate—and the vaccine mandate when it’s finally handed down. Civilians throwing avocados at fellow shoppers without masks won’t get the job done. The contradiction is understood in light of a new ethic: criminal deviancy is allowed, even encouraged, while liberty is criminalized.
What explains this contradiction? Western culture is the source of democracy, humanism, individualism, liberalism, republicanism, and secularism. The ethics of civil liberties and human rights began there and spread throughout the world—where they are met with resistance from authoritarian forces. Now the West must resist its diminishment at the hands of a new authoritarian force: corporate power.
By reducing the West to white supremacy and rejecting it on this basis, under the cover of mass hysteria and for the sake of personal and exclusive opulence, a global power elite is dismantling the foundations of freedom, progress, and justice. They are removing the obstacles to total control of human life. The People’s Republic of China and the Islamic sharia are not condemned for their totalitarianisms, but held up as solutions to the problems of the free and open society. Democratic systems, with their respect for personal sovereignty and choice, are in decline everywhere. Manufactured crisis is a gun to put a wounded Enlightenment out of its misery.
What lies at the end of this dark authoritarian path is global neofeudalism. Western values emancipated large segments of humanity from the old feudalism, elevating individuals from the lowly status of serf, servant, slave, and subject to that of citizen. Freed from the oppressions of the tribe and traditional social arrangements, autonomous persons constituted a sovereign people granted control over their destinies and expected to take responsibility for their actions. Western man now find himself being retribalized and returned to serfdom—a new serfdom with a new king: the transnational corporation.
I am getting questions about the text beneath my name on my Facebook profile. It reads: “Teacher, musician, humanist, democrat, feminist, libertarian, republican, socialist, skeptic, infidel.” I cannot be all those things, people are telling me. I am even being told this by people who are not even my friends on Facebook (people are checking out my Facebook page).
I presume that teacher, musician, humanist, feminist, skeptic, and infidel is not what screws people up. By infidel I mean that I stand outside any religious system. I am an atheist. The rest is clear enough, I think. I will nonetheless discuss my understanding of these terms in a moment. It is the democrat, libertarian, republican, and socialist tags that gets people, so let’s begin with these
Democracy is a political system in which individuals enjoy collective power to determine the things that directly affect them. A democrat is a person who advocates for a substantial degree of political and social equality of people. In ancient Greece, the demos was constituted by the ordinary citizens in a city-state. My democracy advocates for the widest scope of popular sovereignty possible that does not interfere with personal sovereignty.
This is where my libertarianism comes in. A libertarian is a person who advances a political and moral philosophy emphasizing personal sovereignty. The focus is on freedom and autonomy. Libertarians are concerned with defending individualism, choice, and voluntarism. Libertarianism is a political philosophy articulating traditional liberal values: free thought and speech, freedom of association and assembly, and secularism or religious liberty (freedom of and freedom from religion). A libertarian is concerned with principled defense of civil liberties and individual rights. Defending liberty is an important piece of democratic republicanism wherein public and personal rights are balanced in a manner enlarging and deepening freedom and self-actualization. The US Bill of Rights is the paradigm of the libertarian conception of liberty.
A republican is a person who advocates for the establishment and preservation of a republic, that is a representative form of government comprised of citizens (as opposed to absolutism over the subject). The republicanism I advance is democratic and libertarian one: a government founded on a constitution with a bill of rights shaped by the pragmatism of common law. I embrace popular sovereignty for citizens with constitutional protections extended to all persons residing within the juridical boundaries of the republic. A republican rejects inherited authority, such as an hereditary monarch.
I identify as a democratic republican. A democratic republican is a person who believes in popular sovereignty with limited government with respect to individual liberty and protection of civil rights. That I am a humanist follows from this. I am also on this account a liberal and a secularist. I am a feminist because I believe in the equality of individuals.
Please note that the tag is small “d” democrat. It does not refer to Democrat, as in the Democratic Party. If I had meant to indicate that I would have capitalized the word. Same with republican. I am not referring to political parties but to political philosophies. I support neither of the two major parties currently running the United States. The political parties who go by these names do a very poor job of reflecting the political philosophies from which their names are derived. They have become organs of corporatist and globalist forces. They undermine popular sovereignty and work technocratically not democratically. Our democratic-republican system is in danger of being canceled by bureaucratic-corporate power.
I do realize that the socialism part is confusing. This is because of the pervasive character of bourgeois ideology in capitalist societies. Socialism refers to a type of economic system wherein workers and communities have substantial control over and collectively benefit from the means of production. Those who produce goods and services own and control the means of their production for the good of themselves and their families and ultimately their communities. Socialism does not negate democracy (it may in fact enlarge it), republicanism (republic governments can exist with socialist economics), or libertarianism (there is no inherent reason why collective ownership and benefit limit individual freedom—these may actually expand opportunities to be freer).
Of course, socialism can appear with association with a variety of types of government arrangements. It can exist in an authoritarian political and legal framework in which the state controls the means of production. Or it can appear in a democratic-republic wherein the workers enjoy a substantial degree of control over the means of production. Because I am a democrat, my socialism is democratic socialism operating within the framework of a secular republic wherein citizens are empowered to make these determinations. Because I am a humanist, economic decisions citizens make are informed by reason and science. Because I am a libertarian, individuals are free to determine what they will do with their share of the social product with due consideration for the rights of others.
Okay. I said I would define the other terms.
I mentioned this several times. Humanism is a scientific and ethical worldview emphasizing human agency and human rights. Humanism is an epistemological stance eschewing dogma and superstition for evidence and critical thinking. I am also a Marxist and some assert that the mature Marx was an anti-humanist. It is beyond the purpose of this blog to get into this (I address this elsewhere), but I do not agree Marx was anti-humanist. Indeed, Marx’s advocacy for the full emancipation via social revolution of humanity from the alienating conditions of segmented social arrangements is quintessentially humanist in substance; alienation is unfreedom, and therefore a distortion of species being.
Feminism is politics advocating sexual equality and opposing patriarchal organization of communities. A feminist affirms the right of girls and women to exist as autonomous individuals and not subordinates to men or the norms of masculinity. A feminist holds special regard for the unique character of women and for this reason staunchly defends personal sovereignty, bodily integrity, and reproductive freedom.
An infidel is a person who does not believe in religion or who holds a religious view different from the one his accuser holds. I am the first sort, usually defined, given the intensity of my infidelity, as antitheism. An antitheist is more than an atheist—either the type of atheist who has insufficient reason to believe religious claims or the type of atheist who knows the claims of religion are false on reasonable grounds—but rather a person who finds religion objectionable. I tolerate religious belief because I am a libertarian. For the same reason, I oppose the imposition of religion.
Skepticism is a rational attitude towards truth claims, the default position of which is doubting the truth of any significant claim without compelling evidence or reason. Knowledge is verified belief or information. This does not mean that knowledge is fixed and eternal. It means that knowledge is based on facts gathered and studied via rigorous methodology with a readiness to consider contrary evidence (disconfirmation). Skepticism means that discovery and the dialectic informs consciousness; if one encounters facts or argument that cast doubt on what he believes, and if he can no longer sustain his belief using reason (not ideology), then he modifies or abandon that belief. A key aspect of skepticism is charity in argument, that is working through contrary claims with an open mind.
Nothing in my tag line contradicts anything else in my tag line. The confusion represents an inadequate understanding of political theory and, really, a lack of creativity in thinking about political possibility. My mind changes on matters of substance. But the principles identified in my tag line have been my guiding principles for decades.
This is not a civil right movement. This is a violent countermovement against freedom and progress (see The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones). The federal government has to step in and stop this. Enough is enough. All the so-called leftist who support this? People, please. You made the wrong choice of comrades. Wake up. You let something confuse you and you don’t have your head on straight. Shake yourself out of the fog you’re in.
“Wall of Moms” between law enforcement and rioters in Portland
The question is not whether federal troops ought to intervene in situations occurring in the states. If this were true, the only place the federal government could appear is in the District of Columbia (and progressives have a problem even with that—because Trump is president). It is bizarre, frankly, to see progressives make the “states rights” argument. What do they think about President Eisenhower’s intervention in Little Rock, Arkansas when Orval Faubus used military force to stifle the right of black people to attend school with whites? We are first and foremost citizens of the United States of America. Arkansas blacks were right to expect that the federal government would defend their rights because their rights applied to all people regardless of the color of their skin. (See Fake News, Executive Power, and the Anti-Working Class Character of Street Crime.)
I am reading progressives on the matter of Portland and they sound like the far-right wing-nuts who, during the 1990s, characterized the ATF, the FBI, and other federal officers as “jackbooted thugs.” Remember that? These reactionaries claimed that the federal government was a fascistic entity depriving them of their rights. Their concerns of course fell on the deaf ears of progressives. But Waco wasn’t wrong because the feds intervened. Waco was wrong because the feds acted stupidly and recklessly. Same thing in Portland.
What we are seeing from the left is not judgment based on principle and the rule of law in a democratic republic, but panicked knee-jerking when the rule of law is applied a particular group with whom they agree. For progressives, smashing right-wingers is a beautiful thing—even when the protests are peaceful. Just the presence of conservatives and right-wingers is violence in the progressive’s eyes. They abhor the “deplorables,” white they adore Antifa for punching them in the face. When the cause they support involves arson, looting, and physical violence, then law enforcement is supposed to stand down because that mob is justified. It is an utterly contemptible double standard.
“Protestors” on the run in Portland
These progressive voices like to think of themselves as on the left, but as a lifelong left-winger, the double standard just isn’t working for me. As Marx explains, “laws are in no way repressive measures against freedom, any more than the law of gravity is a repressive measure against motion, because while, as the law of gravitation, it governs the eternal motions of the celestial bodies, as the law of falling it kills me if I violate it and want to dance in the air. Laws are rather the positive, clear, universal norms in which freedom has acquired an impersonal, theoretical existence independent of the arbitrariness of the individual.” He writes, “A statute book is a people’s bible of freedom.”
Marx was not an anarchist (neither am I).
For Marx, reason—the natural law, which for Marx is human rights, found in the objective potential of species-being—is realized in positive laws that establish the conditions for freedom (positive and negative), which has at its base security. Marx was an advocate of socialism because he wanted to improve the life chances for people. People cannot be free under conditions of anarchy because under conditions of anarchy there is no rule of law.
When E.P. Thompson embraced the rule of law in Whigs and Hunters, he was attacked by many on the left for deviating from Marxism. They did not grasp Thompson’s point that leaders disregarding the rule of law—which Ted Wheeler, Mayor of Portland, is guilty of—are a menace to freedom. Thompson meant to contrast the lawless leader from leaders constrained by the rule of law. Thompson understood that in any complex social system, the law is a necessary institution. Wheeler is not above the law. The mob he is advocating for is not above the law.
Progressives do not represent working people. They mean to disorganize the left with identity politics and postmodern thinking. They seek group rights not human rights, which are necessarily individual rights. Whatever Trump’s thinking is for intervening, the effect of his actions is pro-working class.
The just-minded don’t break laws unless they absolutely have to and this requires a legitimate cause. The mob in our streets is illegitimate. Their claims are objectively wrong. This is not a civil rights movement. It is a countermovement against progress. It is reactionary.
Civil disobedience to one side, there is no justification for destruction, plunder, and violence. Citizens have the right to expect that the government will intervene to protect them (see The States Rights Fallacy; Portland and the Rule of Law). If Wheeler fails to do that, then the federal government has to step it.
I am posting to my blog an annotated script to my recent podcast/vlog on the myth of anti-black bias in police shootings. I provide references to all the sources I reference in that blog.
I also report a casualty in the moral panic over police shootings, the “voluntary” retraction of one of the many pieces of research I cited (which was announced after I recorded my podcast). The authors did something wonderful in their retraction letter: they cited even more research that supports my thesis—research going back to 1977. That extends the body of research back in time another decade. We now have 43 years of research countering the Black Lives Matter narrative. Amid the pressure to retract their findings (the reasons for which are absurd) the researchers did so with Galilean defiance. My guess is that it was better to voluntarily retract and draw attention to the letter than have the journal retract. I have not talked to the authors, so I cannot say for sure.
I do worry that the attacks on scholars will be expanded to include others. But here’s the deal: the research is out there, and no amount of official sanctioning will diminish the power of the facts and the analysis. These findings are as certain as anything can be in the social sciences. The question is really: who do you believe? Black Lives Matter, Democrats, and the corporate media? Or the social scientists and public health researchers who have actually examined the evidence using the most sophisticated methods to date? I know who I believe.
Jeremy Peters’ July 14, 2020 The New York Times story “Asked About Black Americans Killed by Police, Trump Says, ‘So Are White People’,” is an example of the scientific impoverishment of the mainstream media, many of which carried similar stories. Peter’s claim that, in his answer, “The president rejected the fact that Black people suffer disproportionately from police brutality.” This characterization misrepresents the president’s comment.
Peters did get the scoop. The question was put to Trump by Catherine Herridge of CBS News: “Why are African-Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?” It is a very poor question. Why is the question not about everybody who dies at the hands of law enforcement? If police brutality is a problem, then should we not be concerns about all the victims? Why would Trump reinforce the attempt to portray the victims of lethal police-civilian encounters as all or mostly black? The question disappears the white victims of lethal police violence. Moreover, the questioner doesn’t seem to recognize that she can easily answer her own question: because police confront violent offenders who are often armed and engaged in violence or are resisting in a manner that threatens the safety of the officer or others, it follows that black males are more likely on a proportional basis to fit that description.
“What a terrible question to ask,” Trump responded. Indeed. “So are white people,” he added. “More white people, by the way.” The public is not supposed to know this or think about this. The media scrambled to confuse Trump’s point.
Peters writes: “Statistics show that while more white Americans are killed by the police over all, people of color are killed at higher rates. A federal study that examined lethal force used by the police from 2009 to 2012 found that a majority of victims were white, but the victims were disproportionately Black. Black people had a fatality rate at the hands of police officers that was 2.8 times as high as that of white people.”
So, right off the bat, we have to note that Peters confirms Trump is right: “more white Americans are killed by police”; “a majority of victims are white.” What did Trump say? In as many words, just that. That’s the buried lede: Trump is right: police kill many more whites than blacks every year. But this would mean that Black Lives Matter operates on a false premise and that does not advance the agenda of delegitimizing the police function in America.
Let’s look at the last three complete years. I am using data from Statista. The data conflate race with ethnicity. White and black are racial categories. Hispanic designates an ethnicity. Most Hispanics are racially white. According to the 2010 census, 53% of Hispanics identified as white, whereas, in 2013, only 2.5% of Hispanics identified as black. However, I will not adjust the numbers in light of this since I do not know how the Hispanics in these numbers identified. There are also quite a few victims for whom either race or ethnicity is unknown, so we will have to put those aside.
Number of people shot to death by the police in the United States from 2017 to 2020, by race
For 2017, leaving out those of unknown race or ethnicity, 903 persons were shot by the police. Of those, nearly a quarter were black. Whites were just over half of all those shot by police. Let’s stop and reflect on that: more than twice as many whites were shot and killed by the police than were blacks. There is a pattern. Check it out. In 2018, just over a quarter percent of those shot by the police were black. Whites, again, were just more than half of all those shot by police. In 2019, around 30 percent of those shot by the police were black. Whites were nearly half of all those shot by the police.
Over the three-year period 1,226 whites were killed by the police in contrast to 667 blacks killed by the police. Overall, blacks were just over a quarter of those killed during this period, whereas whites were almost half of those killed by the police at 49 percent. Trump is correct. More white people than black people are shot and killed by the police. Trump is not right by a little. He is right by a lot. I realize this information is mind blowing for those who have not studied the facts, but it is documented in every study of lethal police-civilian encounters. The police kill many more whites every year than they do blacks.
One objection to these facts is that, plainly, there are more whites in America than there are blacks. The objection means to drag the argument only to the ground of proportionalities. Peters points out that “people of color” are killed at higher rates. Crucially, he notes, the victims are disproportionately black. This means that, relative to population, blacks are more likely to be shot by the police.
The overrepresentation of blacks in police shootings becomes a racial disparity that is assumed to be explained by systemic racism. Disparities are prima facia evidence of discrimination. An inequality presumes an inequity. We hear this argument all the time. However, the inference is faulty, and I want to illustrate why before blowing it up with facts and the large literature showing that patterns of lethal police-civilian encounters cannot be explained by systemic racism.
We know that 96 percent of those killed by the police are men (I calculated this from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report). We do not infer from this that lethal police-civilian encounters result from systemic misandry (dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men). Why not? The reason men are overrepresented among shooting victims is obvious: men are overrepresented among those whom police confront as violent offenders, often armed and engaged in violence or resisting in a manner that threatens the safety of the officer or others. This is so obvious that nobody cares to even look at the data showing men are overrepresented in violent or otherwise serious criminal offending.
The police do not go out looking for civilians to murder. They respond to crime. That’s their job. If a person puts himself in confrontation with a police officer, and he is a serious offender, armed and representing a threat to officers, then he is at greater risk of being shot by the police.
It follows that, if black males are more likely that white males to put themselves in this position, then it follows that they are greater risk of being shot by the police compared to whites. As I said earlier, we could infer from the facts than blacks are shot and killed disproportionately that they are overrepresented in those criminal activities that put them at higher risk of being killed. Why would one automatically assume the disparity is explained by racist cops?
The facts bear all this out—and any serious journalist who is prepared to ask the question should study the facts. Black males are responsible for more than half of all homicides and half of all robberies in the United States, two of the most serious violent crimes recorded by the FBI. Black males are responsible for 30 percent of robberies and 30 percent of aggravated assaults. Blacks males are only six percent of the population. (Uniform Crime Report, FBI)
In other words, a small proportion of the US population is responsible for a large proportion of the most serious violent offenses in America. It should be obvious from the facts of black overrepresentation in serious and violent crime that police are more likely to interact with blacks with a greater proportional likelihood of a lethal outcome than police are whites.
It is striking, though, that even with this stark overrepresentation in serious crime, the police still kill more than twice as many whites as blacks every year.
What Peters is doing in misrepresenting the president’s point is plug another data point in the alleged continuum of Trump’s racism. The objective is not only to mischaracterize the president’s comments. It is also to confuse the public over the reality of lethal police-civilian encounters, the very reality Trump is alerting the public to.
My analysis is backed up by scientific research looking specifically at the role context and crime rates play in lethal police-civilian encounters. The evidence is clear. There is no systemic racism in lethal police-civilian encounters. In fact, there isn’t much evidence for it in the criminal justice system at large.
We have known this for more than thirty years. William Wilbanks, in The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, published way back in 1987, produced a comprehensive survey of contemporary research studies, searching for evidence of discrimination by police, prosecutors, judges, and prison and parole officers. Among the specific areas considered in his analysis are provisions of counsel, police deployment, use of deadly force, bail decisions, plea bargaining, sentencing patterns, and inmate classification and discipline. Wilbanks finds that, although individual cases of racial prejudice and discrimination do occur in the system, there is insufficient evidence to support a charge of systematic racism against blacks in the criminal justice system. Wilbanks summarizes: “At every point, from arrest to parole, there is little or no evidence of an overall racial effect.”
Robert Sampson and Janet L. Lauritsen, in a comprehensive review of studies of the criminal justice system, “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States,”published in the pages of Crime and Justice in 1997, find “little evidence that racial disparities result from systematic, overt bias.”
Heather Mac Donald’s 2016 book The War on Cops, yet another comprehensive review of the evidence, finds no evidence of racially biased policing.
Roland Fryer, in “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2018, but available in 2016, finds no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account when turning his attention to the most extreme use of force, i.e. officer-involved shootings.
Joseph Cesario and colleagues, reported in 2018, in “Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016,” published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, that, adjusting for crime, no systematic evidence of anti-black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects. The authors conclude that, when analyzing all shootings, that exposure to police, given crime rate differences, accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for blacks.
Charles Menifield and colleagues find, in “Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects?” published in Public Administration Review in 2019, that white officers appear to be no more likely to use lethal force against minorities than nonwhite officers. The pushback here is the argument that it is the racism endemic in policing that turns black cops into racist killers. In other words, black cops are racists against other blacks.
In “Disparity does not mean bias: making sense of observed racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings with multiple benchmarks,” published in Journal of Crime and Justice, in 2019, Brandon Tregle and colleagues, when focusing on violent crime arrests or weapons offense arrests, find that blacks appear less likely to be fatally shot by police officers.
David Johnson and colleagues, in “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” in the pages of the 2019 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, find that it is the rate of violent crime, not the race of the officer, that determines the race dynamic of police shootings. What Johnson is speaking to, as was Cesario, is the “exposure hypothesis,” serious criminal activity increases the likelihood of officer-civilian interaction and this influences the frequency of policing shootings. As do Tregle and colleagues, Johnson and associates find that, taking crime rates into account, the bias in shootings appears to be against whites.
After producing my podcast, Johnson and Colleagues voluntarily retracted their article. Here part of what they said in their retraction explanation: “Although our data and statistical approach were valid to estimate the question we actually tested (the race of civilians fatally shot by police), given continued misuse of the article (e.g., MacDonald, 2020) we felt the right decision was to retract the article rather than publish further corrections.”
In the era of cancel culture, we should approach the voluntary character of the retraction with caution. The researchers were assailed not for the actual research, which concerned officer characteristics related to the race of civilians fatally shot by police, but for the impression critics claimed the paper conveyed that it said something about racial disparities in the probability of being shot. In other words, the conclusion was politically incorrect. The authors had issues a clarification about the matter. Apparently a clarification wasn’t good enough. They were to suffer the humiliation of a retraction.
You will note the MaDonald 2019 and 2020 references in the retraction. Indeed, they are front and center. These are references to Heather MacDonald’s essay “False testimony,” for the City Journal (Manhattan Institute), and op-ed “The myth of systemic police racism,” published in The Wall Street Journal. That the authors highlighted these particular “misuses” of their article by the much maligned author of The War on Cops suggests the character of the pressure that was put on the researchers to retract their article. MacDonald is the scourge of the Black Lives Matter countermovement against public safety. Her open defense of law enforcement and criticism of race identiarianism has made her the witch at the center of the moral panic.
That the retraction was forced by politics is furthermore suggested by this passage in the retraction statement: “Relative to the proportion of Black civilians in the U.S., Black Americans are shot more than we would expect. However, relative to various proxies for the propor- tion of Black civilians who commit violent crime, Black Americans are not shot more than we would expect. This has been consistently shown for the majority of fatal shootings (90-95%) where the citizen shot is an immediate threat to an officer or other citizen (Cesario et al., 2019; Fyfe, 1980; Goff et al., 2016; Inn et al., 1977; Tregle et al., 2019; Worrall et al., 2020), though some evidence has been presented that racial bias may be present in the remaining types of shootings (Ross et al., in press). The lack of racial disparities once violent crime rates are taken into account has also been shown in papers using more complex analytic approaches than proportion comparisons (Fryer, 2016; Mentch, 2020).”
In this passage, the authors are essentially telling readers that, while their article was being used in ways their critics did not like, the inference that systemic racism is not found in research controlling for relevant factors is nonetheless correct. All the more shameful that they claim that clarification was insufficient, in my view. However, at the same time, the passage alerts readers to research dating back to 1977 that supports the inference they were alleged to have conveyed. This list is quite helpful to readers, but only if they note it and follow up. Here are the full references to the research they cite: Andres Inn and associates’ 1977 “The effects of suspect race and situation hazard on police officer shooting behavior,” in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology; James Fyfe’s 1980 “Geographic correlates of police shooting: A microanalysis,” in Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency; Phillip Goff and associates’ 2016 “The science of justice: Race, arrests, and police use of force,” Center for Policing Equity; Lucas Mentch’s 2020 “On racial disparities in recent fatal police shootings,” Statistics and Public Policy; John Worrall and associates’ 2020 “The effect of suspect race on police officers’ decisions to draw their weapons,” Justice Quarterly. These references only strengthen the thesis of my podcast, so I appreciate the care the researchers took in their retraction letter.
Katelyn Jetelina and associates, in “Dissecting the Complexities of the Relationship Between Police Officer–Civilian Race/Ethnicity Dyads and Less-Than-Lethal Use of Force,” published in the American Journal of Public Healthin 2017, find that, when controlling for other factors, the observed significant relationships between race/ethnicity dyads and use of force dissipated.
We have to be honest here. The cause of Black Lives Matter is not informed by science. The media and fellow travelers either do not know the evidence or they carry on in the face of the evidence.
Ex-cop Reddit Hudson said in a Vox article in 2016, “Racism is woven into the fabric of our nation. At no time in our history has there been a national consensus that everyone should be equally valued in all areas of life.”
The first sentence is an evil metaphor. It’s like saying racism is in our DNA. If racism is woven into the fabric of the nation or in our DNA the only option is to throw away the fabric or kill the organism—i.e. dismantle or destroy the country. The second sentence is false. There is a national consensus that everyone should be equally valued in all areas of life. Nothing could be more obvious that that. It is also obvious that there are people who hate America and want to dismantle or destroy it.
Finally, when Joseph Cesario says “not being involved in criminal activity is far and away the best way to not be shot by the police,” many will have a knee-jerk response. They will hear this as “blaming the victim.” As I have written about in my blog, “blaming the victim” is a terrible way to characterize the perpetrators of criminal violence who strike terror in the residents of our most vulnerable communities. This is the pathology of left-idealism, an ideology that heroizes the criminal as the pitiable monster of unjust social structures.
More fear mongering on the left. I am referring to the chaos in Portland, Oregon. The “rebellion” is in its seventh week of chaos. The federal government has moved to quell the mob while the corporate media amplifies the hysteria. We see the establishment media on the side of those attempting to overturn our republic. Progressives are describing the intervention as “authoritarian” and “fascist.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called the officers “stormtroopers” and accused them of “kidnapping protestors.” The Washington Post documented a single person who was arrested, briefly detained, and released. The officers followed procedures, drove him to the federal courthouse and then released him.
Federal law enforcement officers in Portland, Oregon
When we see leftist mob violence in Portland or other cities it is useful to ask what we would expect of the federal government if the authorities of a southern city or state stood by while white supremacist mobs rioted and perpetrated acts of violence on citizens. Would we expect the federal government to step in and do the job local law enforcements are failing or unwilling to do? Or would we condemn the federal government for intervening? No doubt progressives would howl if the government failed to bring the hammer down on white supremacists. In fact they do (U.S. Law Enforcement Failed to See the Threat of White Nationalism).
If I consistently adhere to principle the answer to the question is yes—whatever the ideological persuasion. I called for federal intervention in Black Lives Matter/Antifa riots back in May (The Riotous Left is on the Wrong Side of Democracy and Justice) and followed up with an blog about in June (Fake News, Executive Power, and the Anti-Working Class Character of Street Crime). I also called for federal intervention in the Cliven Bundy case, calling that situation an insurrection (see The Cliven Bundy Case and State Power; see also The States Rights Fallacy). My problem with the tragedy at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas was not not that the federal government intervened. It was how the intervention was conducted. I do not have a problem with DHS or the National Guard stepping in when local law enforcement cannot do its job. And, in the present case of Portland, federal officers are protecting federal buildings and officers.
The riots in Portland, Oregon have devastated the city
Something needs to be done. Riots, vandalism, arson—these are not legitimate acts of protest. Just because you may agree with the protestors and don’t like Trump or the police is no reason to disregard the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Unlawful acts of violence and property destruction are not protected speech or expression by the First Amendment. The First Amendment guarantees citizens’ right to peaceably assemble. It does not give people permission to engage in insurrection, terrorism, or criminal violence.
Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters. These Trump/Barr tactics designed to eliminate any accountability are absolutely unacceptable in America, and must end. pic.twitter.com/PE4YfZ9Vqd
— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) July 16, 2020
The Constitution makes clear that the federal government—the supreme law of the land—has the authority to execute the laws of the Union, repel invasion, and suppress insurrection. It doesn’t matter whether you and I agree over what the insurrection is about or who the insurrectionists are. The government does not take a side against the people. It’s obligation is to uphold the rule of law. The Constitution guarantees a republican government to all citizens. It must step in in the face of failure or unwillingness to uphold the rule of law—especially when the republic is threatened.
Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf said in a statement a couple of days ago, “The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city. Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it.” The statement continues, “Instead of addressing violent criminals in their communities, local and state leaders are instead focusing on placing blame on law enforcement and requesting fewer officers in their community. This failed response has only emboldened the violent mob as it escalates violence day after day.” The statement then goes on to detail a list of violent actions by the mob since May 29. The list of criminal actions is extensive. Portland has a problem. The city leaders either don’t know how to control criminal violence or choose not to. Under these circumstances, the federal government is obliged to step in.
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler
I want to make this clear: I am a defender of the Constitution and the US Republic. I don’t care whether it’s antifascists or fascists or whatever. If people are perpetrating criminal violence, they need to be dealt with. If the federal government is interfering with lawful and peaceful protests, then I will of course condemn those actions. If the federal government is upholding the right of citizens to be free from violence and property destruction, and if proper criminal procedures are following in doing so, I will refrain from criticizing them. If there are cases where they do not correctly follow procedure, this does not necessarily condemn the overall action.
For the record, I do not agree with the motives of the insurrectionists. We are in the midsts of a campaign to delegitimize law enforcement and, more broadly, our republic. Violent anarchists or other rebels are subverting law and order. This is a regressive countermovement. To be sure, anarchists and others have the right to peaceably assemble and protest. But when their actions cross over into insurrection, terrorism, and criminal violence, I see no alternative but for a government sworn to uphold the Constitution to intervene in a lawful fashion. How the cops are dressed or what sorts of the vehicles they drive around in is irrelevant.
I will continue to closely follow these developments. But the federal government moving to suppress this insurrection is part of what I meant when I made the slogan “enough is enough” my Facebook cover. Federal intervention is long overdue.
Officer Jackson talks about being a black police officer working at the demonstrations in Portland, Oregon. pic.twitter.com/ZtIjQ7AMaO
freedom and reason 