November’s off year elections revealed that the rollback of wokeness, if not imminent, may be nearer than many had hoped. Voters rejected decisively two of wokeness’s core policy components: Defunding the police lost badly in heavily Democratic cities from Seattle to Minneapolis to Buffalo, while Republican Glenn Youngkin’s vow to curb critical race theory in Virginia schools was central to his surprise win in the blue state.

Extremist political cycles seem to have a natural lifespan. Five years passed between the storming of the Bastille and Thermidor—the arrest of Robespierre by his fellow revolutionaries, fearful that the guillotine would touch them next; another five and a national equilibrium of sorts was restored to France. A similar ten years ensued between years between Mao’s launching of the Cultural Revolution and the arrest and imprisonment of its major backers by their rivals within China’s ruling hierarchy. Neither country had meaningful elections, but they did have public opinions, which eventually shifted enough to embolden those in position to challenge the radical wave to step up and assume the risks. If one dates the onset of wokeness from 2014, which saw the sudden explosion of phrases about race, equity, and white supremacy in the prestige media, we are seven years in.

The United States has free elections, a First Amendment, and political norms which remain more or less intact, and wokeness is an ideological movement which has managed to humiliate its victims and get them fired from their jobs, not to kill them. But it is not a stretch to see in it parallels to the totalitarian movements of the past century: the preening self-righteousness of its enforcers; their seeking of forced confessions, depicted as apologies from their victims; the attempted politicization of every aspect of social life, including language; the insistence that the traditional mores of their own country are utterly debased. Never in American history has so much energy been devoted to getting people fired for expressing an opinion.

Wokeness may well advance to the point where many of its goals become as institutionalized and naturally accepted as the abolition of slavery. (Some of the woke elect left style themselves as abolitionists). More likely it will be rolled back, its practitioners and cultural preferences first widely mocked and then ignored, its victims rehabilitated and in some cases honored. November 2 marked the first hint of a real electoral pushback against wokeness; hopefully it will prove as pivotal as the battle of Midway.

* * *

The core idea of wokeness is that America and the West are essentially defined by interlocking systems of oppression, the main pillar of which is white supremacy, while secondary but important ones are the privileging of heterosexuality and of men over women. To be woke is to believe that all social life is permeated by these dominations, and that overturning them is a moral imperative. Radical leftists have held views proximate to this for over a century, but their nominal embrace by much of the establishment is a new thing.

For the woke, America’s history of slavery and segregation are at its core, more important than virtually everything else. Wokeness portrays itself as a struggle against whiteness, or white supremacy, rather than against white people themselves, a rhetorical evasion which allows white people to become the main practitioners of woke politics.

With black activism, wokeness has a somewhat contradictory relationship.

On one side it is given to displays of performative submissiveness. While fires from the George Floyd riots were still smoldering, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer led Democratic members of the House and Senate to the halls outside the congressional visitor’s gallery, where they donned kente cloth and knelt before the cameras; similar, if less striking, quasi-religious enactments continued throughout the summer. A few weeks later the New York Times announced it would henceforth capitalize black when it referred to race (white would remain lowercase) as its standard style, inevitably evoking the Bible’s capitalization of pronouns referring to the deity. Virtually every national news organization followed suit.

On the other side of wokeness is a kind of paternalism, which sees black Americans as people without much agency or control over their lives, defined by the past injuries of slavery and segregation and still burdened by chains of structural racism which are seldom specified but so pervasive that standards of achievement and conduct appropriate for other Americans must be suspended for them.

But despite its apparent dominance in corporate media and major institutions, wokeness increasingly resembles what ’60s era Maoists called a “paper tiger”; when confronted directly, as wokeness has seldom been in the past seven years, its popularity and power prove less than meets the eye.

* * *

Curiously, the response by the Terry McAuliffe campaign—to charges by his opponent that Democrats were ignoring parents and teaching CRT in schools—was to claim that there was “no critical race theory” taught in Virginia schools, that the whole issue was a racist “dog whistle” cooked up by conservative activist Christopher Rufo and others. This denial was echoed repeatedly by nearly every mainstream media outlet covering the election.

This itself was an interesting tell. Liberals generally have no reluctance to defend their beliefs or policies, whether they be the right to have an abortion, higher taxes on corporations and the rich, or worker and environmental protection laws. But on CRT they mounted no defense, just denial and obfuscation. They would explain, as to a fifth grader, that critical race theory was a high brow discipline sometimes studied in law schools, and is absolutely not something taught to Virginia elementary and high school students. As if they assumed that people wouldn’t notice that programs and curricula explicitly grounded in CRT pedagogy, endorsed officially by the nation’s largest teacher’s union, was seeping into the schools.

Why did the sophisticated, consultant heavy, and poll savvy McAuliffe campaign lie? The most plausible answer is that it understood that the substance of a critical race theory pedagogy couldn’t be defended before voters in a campaign, knew it was extremely unpopular among people of all races, and knew also that it couldn’t be disavowed, because powerful constituencies within the Democratic party, especially the National Education Association, were too heavily invested in it. When push came to shove in a tight election, the establishment left wouldn’t stand up and fight for woke pedagogy.

Woke attitudes about law enforcement fared no better. The aptly named war on cops has been building for years, generating a narrative that most American police departments have been systematically oppressing black people. Its first major significant victory came in New York, with a series of court rulings against the NYPD’s policies of proactive policing, sometimes called “stop and frisk,” in 2013. Stop and frisk had proven enormously successful in getting illegal guns and the criminals wielding them off the street, but the tactic almost invariably targeted young black men.

This made sense to those who believed police should focus their efforts on those neighborhoods plagued by a disproportionate share of illegal gun crime. But by the end of the Bloomberg mayoralty, ending proactive policing had become a liberal cause célèbre. The next year, when a black man from Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown, was killed while resisting arrest, the anti-police narrative exploded nationally, with major voices in the mainstream media giving oxygen to the idea that the nation’s police were waging a “genocidal” war against black people, that calling 911 was an effort to get black people murdered.

It was a lie of course—the number of unarmed black Americans killed by the police is small, not disproportional to the number of white people killed by the police and infinitesimal in comparison to number of black people killed by black criminals. But the sheer enormity of the lie—repeated incessantly—made it a widely accepted fact, if not a true one. If the police were indeed racist murderers as frequently portrayed, defunding police departments made a great deal of sense.

By the summer of 2020, the topic of racist policing dominated the national conversation; and left-wing candidates calling for abolition of police departments began winning democratic primaries. A month after George Floyd’s murder, Minneapolis’s City Council voted by a 9-3 margin to dismantle the police department altogether, replacing it with a social worker agency.

But it did not take long for anti-cop wave to peak. In Minneapolis, as murders surged 50 percent and the number of downtown shootings doubled, city residents mobilized against the City Council’s anti-cop campaign. In Dallas, the City Council moved to hire more cops. In New York, progressives were stunned when a former black cop running on a law-and-order platform trounced progressives in the Democratic mayoral primary, while running up impressive margins in black and Latino working class districts. On election day last November, a defund-the-police socialist who had won the Democratic primary in Buffalo lost the general election even though she was the only person on the ballot. In Minneapolis, voters rejected an abolish the police department ballot measure decisively. In very liberal Seattle, an actual Republican won the city attorney race.

A restoration of the kind of policing that cut crime rates so successfully in the 1990s won’t come quickly—much legal damage had been done to inhibit effective policing, while in many cities left-wing district attorneys, elected late in the last decade in low turnout elections and committed to not putting criminals in jail, remain in office. But a 30 percent rise in murders in 2020—the largest since records have been kept, and a surge in violent crime in nearly every major city has made defunding the police a non-starter.

These political battles over education and policing plainly originate from America’s long standing racial divisions of black and white. But they are now contested on a very different demographic playing field. After 40 years of historically high levels of immigration, the United States has a far different racial makeup than it did when Martin Luther King was assassinated. An influx of immigrants from Mexico, Latin America, Asia and the Mideast has reduced the white share of the population from over 85 percent to under 65 percent; among school children, “Anglo” white kids make up less than half.

* * *

This analysis is intuitively persuasive. It was also prominent in paleoconservative circles in the early 1990s; Peter Brimelow at National Review published essays showing the GOP shrinking to national irrelevance by the early middle of this century. To some extent it has been vindicated: California, which launched the political careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, has become a reliably one-party state and other states are moving in the same direction. On many issues, the new immigration probably has shifted the United States towards the left; certainly any kind of “old fashioned” rooted-in-land-and-tradition conservatism, including anything associated with Dixie, now has a smaller demographic base to appeal to.

But this is not the case for the particular issues that emanate from wokeness. To state the obvious, most Asian, Latino, and other non-white immigrants and their children are not that invested in black-white history and the proper negotiation of the historic wrongs white Americans have done to black Americans. The vast majority of them have lived all their American lives in a post-civil rights revolution country, where racial discrimination is carefully monitored and illegal. Their ancestors didn’t own slaves, nor fight a war to end slavery. They can’t easily be made to feel guilty about the American past, and despite great efforts by university social science departments, it is not so easy to get them to feel aggrieved by it either.

An unforeseen aspect of the wokeness phenomenon is how many new immigrants, or children of new immigrants, are playing critical roles in pushing back against it. Optimistic “immigrants are socially conservative” arguments have bandied around pro-immigration Republicans for decades (I was never one of them), but no one predicted the polemical vitality and occasional brilliance that would emerge from newer Americans as wokeness pushed into the center of the national agenda. Any list of names will leave out dozens, but those paying attention know that writers and activists as distinct in style and ideology as Andy Ngo, Wesley Yang, Zaid Jilani, Harmeet Dhillon, Sohrab Ahmari, and Melissa Chen—to pick a half dozen at random—are not only important in the pushback against wokeness, but that their arrival at the battlefield was an absolutely necessary reinforcement. Of course one could point to comparable numbers of woke leftists of recent immigrant background, but compared to their conservative counterparts they don’t seem important or agenda setting to a movement emotionally centered on black and white Americans.

Indeed, if one wanted to design a movement explicitly to alienate Asian Americans, it would be hard to improve on the woke’s agenda on law enforcement and schools. Some consequences of the war on cops and so-called “over-incarceration” were predictable: Police would retreat from proactive policing, and crime would rise. But no one foresaw that this would produce a surge in crime against Asians. The mainstream media took great pains to obfuscate the most salient aspects of this trend. Stories about it invariably mentioned former President Trump’s depiction of Covid-19 as the “China virus” so as to imply without saying that the hate crime perpetrators were white Trump supporters. Always highlighted was the horrific case of the white man who murdered several Asian massage parlor workers and others of different races on a killing spree apparently prompted by feelings of sexual guilt. But the reality is that what is experienced by many as an open season on vulnerable Asian Americans in our cities is driven by the same group that commits most American street crime.

One must assume Asian Americans know this. Last summer’s New York Times Magazine story about the murder of a Thai grandfather in San Francisco quoted his son-in-law, who had begun attending anti-Asian-hate rallies in the Bay Area and asking how many people there had been pushed or spat on, and by whom. Yes, many, was the response, always by a black person. This Times piece acknowledged, with seeming reluctance, that hate crimes against Asians were “more likely” to be committed by non-white people. A former Oakland police captain relates that suspects in anti-Asian hate crimes are almost exclusively black. In New York City, black people are six times more likely to commits hate crimes than white people, and comprise half the suspects in anti-Asian attacks. In the all too common videos of such attacks that show up on social media, the perpetrators are almost always black.

The tensions between the groups have roots which have not been systematically explored, but were evident as early as the racially incendiary 1990 boycott of Korean grocery stores in Brooklyn and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Of course, all ethnic and racial groups suffer from rising crime, and those in black neighborhoods are numerically most victimized by it. But in the past year of racial reckoning, the surge in anti-Asian hate crimes does, to say the least, complicate the woke narrative of an ascendant Rainbow coalition struggling to overcome white supremacy.

* * *

The education issue is far more direct. For years, progressive educators have railed against standardized tests as barriers to racial equity. They have won some stunning recent victories: The University of California has ceased using the SAT as means for sorting applicants, and hundreds of other colleges have followed suit.

The SAT has not been discredited as a metric for determining the likelihood of a student succeeding academically; for that it has no equal. Its problem is a political one: Standardized test results reveal with considerable precision how much of a leg up is given to black students in college admissions competition over white and especially Asian students. The frequent result is a mismatch between student and institution where black students have less developed academic skills than their classmates, with many pooling in the bottom of the class. Some of the most notorious instances of woke cancel culture deployed against truthful speech have occurred when professors who had noticed and lamented these facts were hunted down by leftist students and subsequently dismissed from their jobs.

But in terms of potential to spark a widespread disaffection, the five decades long dispute over affirmative action in college admissions will pale next to the battles over the use of standardized tests for granting admission to academically selective high schools and curricula. In the past year of racial reckoning, the use of student standardized test scores for admission has been dropped or rolled back in Lowell High School in San Francisco, the Boston Latin School, and Thomas Jefferson High school in northern Virginia. Outgoing New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio sought unsuccessfully to have the tests banned entirely for its top schools, the storied Stuyvesant and Bronx High School of Science, and is still maneuvering to reduce the percentage of students admitted to those schools by exam only. His rationale is that they aren’t sufficiently diverse—at this point more Asians pass the exams than other groups and black students do so at comparatively low rates.

Not surprisingly, Asian parents from New York to California have begun to mobilize politically and legally to combat what is quite plainly an effort to tilt a level playing field against their children. (In San Francisco their pressure has at least temporarily kept in place the exam as criterion for admission to Lowell.) In picking a fight against the exam high schools, Democratic politicians following the woke playbook have chosen to attack an institution vitally important to one of the country’s most dynamic and academically successful immigrant groups. For the first time since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, grassroots organizations of Asian parents are at odds with Democratic politicians.

Wai Wah Chin, president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, observes (in an interview on Glenn Loury’s podcast) that De Blasio and other Democrats pitch their campaign against the high performance schools in the language of representation, claiming that the student bodies of Bronx Science and Stuyvesant are not “representative” of New York. (Former New York schools chancellor Richard Carranza had gone further, warning Asian parents to back down with the menacing formulation that “no ethnic group owns admission to these schools.”) In response, Chin makes the necessary point: The kids who pass the rigorous math and verbal exams are not “representing” anyone but themselves. They have studied as individuals and take the exam as individuals, representing not a community but their own efforts. She adds that the student’s family or community might feel pride in their accomplishment; one could add that all Americans might feel proud of these incredibly successful schools. Graduates of Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech have won an extraordinary 14 Nobel Prizes in the sciences, more than many countries. Wai Wah Chin’s assertion stands directly against the racial essentialism that lies at the core of wokeness.

The issue is broader than the select exam schools which admit the cream of the student crop. There is a nationwide movement to eliminate tracking of students by ability. California, following San Francisco’s lead, is eliminating the teaching of algebra to eighth graders, which means far fewer public school students will have the opportunity to take calculus in high school. This will narrow the pipeline of students who might go on to pursue STEM majors in college and in their careers. The rationale for such changes is always the woke watchword “equity,” followed by lamentations that white and Asian students are overrepresented in advanced math courses. But of course parents of bright students want their kids to be challenged in school, and inevitably America as a whole will suffer if they are not. As one California math teacher put it, “I feel so bad for these students. We are cutting the legs of the students to make them equal to those who are not doing well in math.”

But if recent social history shows anything, it is that parents will fight harder over the education of their children than almost any issue. All over the country, parent groups are mobilizing—Asian parent groups often in the lead. As school questions emerge as hot button political issues, it will become apparent that the woke project of dumbing down schools to promote equity will fare no better than defunding the police.

* * *

Polling shows Hispanics lukewarm towards the Black Lives Matter movement, favoring it at lower rates than whites did (the question was posed at a time when support for BLM was assumed to be the only possible opinion for decent people). Latinos oppose reparations and defunding the police, core components of the woke agenda, by more than 2-1 margins. As Ruy Teixeira, a long time proponent of the view that Hispanic immigration was a key to solid Democratic majorities, recently put it, “clearly this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy.” Others noted that Hispanics are now jailed at lower rates than white Americans, and are increasingly employed in law enforcement.

Few discern specific issues for the shift, though it is unlikely that woke efforts to neuter the Spanish language with terms like “Latinx” have attracted more Latinos and Latinas to the Democrats. Might the trend continue towards transforming Hispanics into a group politically analogous to Reagan Democrats—that is, a formerly Democratic working- and middle-class constituency that now votes GOP? It seems improbable, but no one predicted that a candidate could be as tough on border enforcement as Donald Trump and experience a dramatic gain in Latino votes.

The fundamental political error of wokeness lies in its judgement about how popular a movement based on anti-whiteness is likely to be in a nation increasingly less European in ancestry. Immigrants have come to America for many reasons, but a hatred of “white supremacy” is probably nowhere near the top for the vast majority. One could easily surmise that many of them are motivated by appreciation of the very qualities wokeness either deplores or works to undermine: law and order, careers open to talents, advanced levels of science and technology—and the legal and cultural structures that make those things possible.

A passage from David Reiff’s book on Los Angeles from more than three decades ago comes to mind: In the coda of one chapter, Rieff describes a billboard for a Mexican beer, then visible in nearly every Mexican town, which touts the product as “a high class blonde,” double meaning very much intended. It played on aspiration, the kind that prompted men from Mexican small towns to decamp for Mexico City, or ultimately to Los Angeles, “the greatest blonde of all.”

One of the more provocative interpretations of the origins of the relatively new movement to bring critical race theory into the teaching of elementary and high school students was suggested, almost as an aside, by Wesley Yang. Sometime in the late 2000s or early 2010s, the left looked at Latino immigration and realized that a considerable degree of assimilation was actually happening: that the Latino working class was not drinking in the vaguely Marxist ideologies incubating in university ethnic studies departments, and that there was actually a possibility—perceived by the left as a danger—that just as (according to ethnic studies phraseology popular on the left) Irish and Italian immigrants had been “allowed to become white,” the same thing was happening to non-European immigrants as well. Critical race theory thus developed as a kind of reaction, to indoctrinate school-aged children of the new immigration into a kind of racial essentialism, to deflect them from an assimilationist path.

Yang’s suggestion would correlate with Eric Kaufmann’s argument in Whiteshift, a detailed and comprehensive study of demographic transformations and evolving racial attitudes likely to occur in the West. Intermarriage rates between white Americans and new immigrants or their children are fairly high, and over time the boundaries of whiteness will expand—American and other Western majorities won’t be exclusively white any longer, but they will have some connection to white ancestry; they will acknowledge and feel cultural ties to the traditional heroes of their nations. This may be an overly optimistic view, but recent American elections do nothing to contradict it.

* * *

It can be notoriously difficult to read accurately the tenor of one’s own times. Historians can point to many private letters of learned people written well before the darkest nights of communism and Nazism, assuring one another that the worst was certainly over and things would soon improve. Still, it strikes me that America’s liberal elite is beginning to find wokeness a bit embarrassing. What does the president of Yale really think about his diversity deans publicly threatening a law student for sending an email that used the phrase “trap house”?

The actual number of the woke remains small—perhaps 6 percent of the population, according to Pew surveys of American political attitudes. It is educated, it is mostly white, it is heavily concentrated in the media and universities. But it isn’t powerful enough to control the country if majorities are mobilized to resist it.

Overcoming wokeness will require real political will and courage, as well as legislation. At some point there will need to be a successful legal challenge to the idea that disparate income and disproportionate racial outcomes by themselves constitute sufficient evidence of racial discrimination, but that too is in the realm of the possible. As voters from New York City to Buffalo to Seattle showed without ambiguity, when wokeness is on the ballot and opposed vigorously, it loses. In activism and voting patterns, America’s most rapidly growing demographic groups are largely showing themselves indifferent or actively hostile to woke policies. If the tide is indeed turning, in a few years wokeness will be more mocked than celebrated. If not, America’s long reign as a relatively successful country will end.

theamericanconservative.com

Americans are facing a new type of crime wave that got its start in the mad liberal laboratory, where the utopian notion that going soft on criminals is going terribly awry. While threatening the traditional brick and mortar shopping experience with extinction, and making communities a living hell, the left needs to stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

Apparently unwilling to wait for Black Friday discounts, roaming gangs of young men are descending on retail outlets and pharmacies in flash mobs, clearing out the store shelves in a matter of seconds as clerks look on helplessly.

$100k in handbags stolen at a Louis Vuitton store near Chicago! pic.twitter.com/jaElFgbkWO

— Asian Crime Report (@activeasian) November 19, 2021

In one pre-Thanksgiving raid, about 90 individuals stormed a Nordstrom outlet in Walnut Creek, situated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Members of the masked mob pepper-sprayed one employee, and assaulted another with a knife before making off with an estimated $100,000 in merchandise. Many of the looters made their getaway in some 25 vehicles parked out front.

Disturbingly, as this sort of mayhem unfolds in major cities across the country, liberals seem more preoccupied with determining how to define the criminal acts.

Lorenzo Boyd, PhD, Professor of Criminal Justice & Community Policing at the University of New Haven, and a retired veteran police officer, is just one academic who seems more obsessed with semantics than digging to the root of the problem.

“Looting is a term that we typically use when people of color or urban dwellers are doing something,” Boyd remarked in an interview with ABC7 news channel. “We tend not to use that term for other people when they do the exact same thing.”

And by “other people” it is abundantly clear who Boyd is referencing.

It’s looting. Just like there were riots in Kenosha, not just protests. https://t.co/trvUHxsCHU pic.twitter.com/nmdUTg6IXT

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) November 23, 2021

Martin Reynolds, Co-executive director of the Robert C. Maynard Institute of Journalism Education, invited listeners to compare the current wave of flash mob thefts to the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, when many marginalized New Orleans residents, the majority of them Black, were labeled looters for stealing from local businesses.

“This seems like it’s an organized smash and grab robbery,” Reynold said, speaking about the current phenomenon of flash mobs. “This doesn’t seem like looting. We’re thinking of scenarios where first responders are completely overwhelmed. And folks, often may be on their own,” he said.

While both academics do make some valid points, there is a risk of liberals getting trapped in a game of semantics that eventually leads to social disaster. More on that in a moment. At the same time, the radical progressives wish to ignore the fact that the primary reason for these crimes happening at all is because they went soft on crime.

Back in 2014, the Democrats in California passed ballot initiative Proposition 47, which legislates that theft of less than $950 in merchandise is considered to be a nonviolent misdemeanor. In other words, such cases are rarely prosecuted. The repercussions of such stupidity should not have been hard to predict.

Prop. 47 led to a rise in the larceny theft rate of about 135 per 100,000 residents, an increase of close to 9 percent compared to the 2014 rate, according to a report by the Public Policy Institute of California. Police Chief David Swing, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, responded, saying that the PPIC’s conclusions “are consistent with what police chiefs across the state have seen since 2014.”

But for store owners in California and elsewhere, there is no need for special reports. The damage from the shortsighted legislation is abundantly clear.

“Theft in Walgreens’ San Francisco stores is four times the average for stores elsewhere in the country, and the chain spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle, discussing just one of the myriad casualties of Prop 47.

Experts caution use of ‘looting’ in describing rash of Bay Area smash and grabs https://t.co/dQfftRG84T

— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) November 23, 2021

Compounded with the problem of a legal system that is increasing willing to let criminals walk, a confab of writers, agitators and academics are more inclined to see the ‘poetic justice’ of young marauders clearing out stores in coordinated flash mobs.

Last year, during the street protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, a Chicago Black Lives Matter organizer called looting in the Windy City “reparation” for past crimes committed against Black people.

“I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci’s or a Macy’s or a Nike because that makes sure that that person eats,” Ariel Atkins screamed at a rally outside the South Loop police station.

“That’s a reparation,” Atkins said. “Anything they want to take, take it because these businesses have insurance.”

But even before George Floyd had become a household name, self-described agitator Vickie Osterweil had penned a book entitled, ‘In Defense of Looting,’ provided an apology for the act of looting before it was cool.

Beginning by explaining that the word comes from the Hindi, lút, which means “goods” or “spoils,” Osterweil (who wrote the book under the name ‘Willie Osterweil,’ apparently at a different stage in life) goes on to argue that the idea of property in the United States is “derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country.”

Funny how many of the oppressed and downtrodden of the world are willing to be consoled by Gucci bags, Samsung televisions and Nike tennis shoes. But I digress.

Osterweil goes off on a massively contradictory spiel, somehow equating the theft of property with liberation from the “White man’s world.”

“Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police; it gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected,” she says. “And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about — that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.

How looting and stealing could help a person “imagine a world that could be” it is difficult to imagine, but the left must do better than merely coddling and apologizing for the criminals in their midst. More than just midterms are at stake.

Was Kyle Rittenhouse carrying out a premeditated act or protecting his own life when he shot three and killed two rioters in Kenosha last year? What does the trial say about the state of the criminal justice system in the U.S.? Was the November 22^nd mass killing event in Waukesha the consequence of the Rittenhouse verdict?

Rittenhouse’s verdict of “Not-Guilty” on all counts was a moment of shock and disappointment for millions of Americans who were unaware of the facts of the case, but had instead followed mainstream media reportage which had falsely depicted the youth as a militia member and white supremacist.

Even blue-checkmarkistas on twitter were surprised to find out that the three people that 17 year old Rittenhouse had shot were not black, but instead white. Further disorientation ensued when they discovered the atrocious criminal records of the two who were killed in self-defense.

Both the UK Independent and Euronews wrongly reported that Rittenhouse had killed black protestors, for reasons unknown but quite easily inferred.

But how was the tactic of the color revolution applied to the Rittenhouse case such that the state feels obliged to transform self-defense into a so-called ‘active shooter scenario’?

If this subject was introduced into trial, as prosecutors and the defense had already both recognized this was a political case, then I believe the public may have been better situated to understand similar tactics in the future.

That future came on November 22^nd when Darrell Edward Brooks Jr. drove his red SUV into a Waukesha parade, killing at least five and injuring many others. Color tactics will be operationalized to capitalize on the horrific mass casualty event which occurred, apparently in revenge for the Rittenhouse verdict.

The BBC and other corporate media outlets were quick to dismiss the possibility of terrorism in relation to the Brooks case, where intentional homicide charges have now been filed, following the racist media bias that all black mass violence is mental health related and all white mass violence is white supremacy.

This is oddly justified in reportage by confusing terrorism for acts which must involve a group of people, entirely misrepresenting this in light of the FBI’s own categories of terrorism which include lone-acting perpetrators. Brooks was a BLM supporter and had previously made a social media post explaining how to run people over and get away with it.

But in the case of Rittenhouse, the word ‘terrorism’ was used repeatedly.

Days earlier, the Rittenhouse defense team was successful in articulating that the prosecution had not made its case. But as this case was among the most watched trials since OJ Simpson’s, it would have helped to inoculate the general public better from the likes of the Nov. 22^nd mass killing event in Waukesha.

Had the Ziminskis been brought to testify, and their phone data, emails, brought into evidence, there would have been further evidence that I believe would have shown a plan of sorts to kill one of the armed citizens should the opportunity arise.

Besides a whole list of prosecutorial misconduct throughout this trial, why were the Ziminskis not brought to testify, and how would have their testimony exposed a broader plot related to the direct use of violent mobs by the Democrat Party in that fateful year?

November 17th Trial Date. From L to R, Attorneys Richards and Chirafisi, with defendant Rittenhouse

The fact that there is even a Kyle Rittenhouse case at all is a problem in itself. The internet world is abuzz with legal experts, live streaming their YouTube and twitch accounts, with a highly granular focus on the play-by-play. And while much of this blow-by-blow misses the broader point, and in fairness it’s not really supposed to go there, the fact is that the prosecution effectively suppressed the possibility of hearing the testimony of the Ziminskis.

It was this couple, with Joshua Ziminski wielding a gun which he fired, that set off Joseph Rosenbaum to do the crazy things he was expected to do, ultimately ending his life as he lunged for the same rifle that Rittenhouse fired into him.

Images of Joshua Ziminski: left-most, holding gun at the Kenosha riots

The protests that Kyle Rittenhouse came out to protect and provide first-aid for, based on his own strong views on the 1^st amendment, at the invitation of a couple of used car lot proprietors, were in fact part of a larger color revolution tactic. The terrorism of 2020 was matched only by the Covid lockdown police state which affected and still affects far too many.

But what the internet has gotten wrong about color revolutions in relation to the U.S. case, and I say this as someone who probably first introduced to the public that this was what was happening to the country, is that color revolutions are based on real existing grievances. As should be expected, this understanding of color revolutions and that the U.S. was experiencing one, caught on like wild fire in the digital sphere. But what was twisted to fit a partisan agenda, was that color revolutions were inherently left-wing in nature.

To the neo-Nazis of Ukraine, the notion that their Maidan Square color revolution was ‘left-wing’ would be news to them. To the ultra-patriarchal theocrats who ushered in the Muslim Brotherhood agent Morsi in Egypt in the Tahir Square color revolution, this would also be big news to them. Of course I could go on and on about ultra-nationalist, chauvinist, theocratic, far-right color revolutions that Soros and the NGO industrial complex along with the U.S. deep state have pulled off, or at least tried to, because it’s my job to. What had been forgotten along the way is that Soros was a Jewish volunteer for the Nazis, who went out with his fellow Nazis and rounded up other Jews, and sickeningly remains unrepentant about this fact to this day. The recurring theme for Soros is that he is not ideological, unless that ideology is Sorosism.

Now surely one can argue that in many cases, the real existing grievances are somewhat manufactured, but hardly are they ever manufactured in a way that works against the general tendencies of human nature operating within systems that work to the benefit of some portion of the elites – say, for instance, the privatized prisons system in the U.S..

There is apparently a crisis in the criminal justice system in the U.S., one which easily fits the definition of a crisis but for one feature. Can endemic and chronic phenomenon be considered crises? Or does it just become normalized? What I have noted as particularly fascinating in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, is the polarization around the issue. Sadly, it wouldn’t be the case if the real issues were driving social attitudes.

And roughly it boils down not only to worldview and political outlook, but to information sources. The cultural revolution of wokeness as seen through the lens of Covid ‘do your part’ ritualized jabbing, is ushering in a dystopia which, oddly, we forget about just for a moment when we talk about the Kyle Rittenhouse case.

But what has gone relatively unnoticed, is that with the Kyle Rittenhouse case, we have precisely the levels of prosecutorial misconduct on open display, that have landed millions of black Americans into prisons. Yes, all Americans too, but there is some persuasive evidence that black Americans receive heavier sentences for the same precise crimes when all other factors (including priors and related charges) are included.

Kenosha riots, August 23 – September 1, 2020

The BLM protests (white riots) last year in Kenosha where Rittenhouse exercised, what he claims and appears reasonable to me to conclude as self-defense from all the evidence I’ve seen in dutifully observing a dozen days of the trial, were a reflection of the upside-down world we’re in. They were, as I’ve said of course, white riots and not black protests, and more to the point they were direct assets of the Democrat Party’s color revolution scheme that ripped the country apart in an attempt to overthrow Trump.

And what of this color revolution scheme and the Ziminskis? That’s what should be on trial.

The Ziminskis were critical to this trial, and it was a huge loss that they were excluded, I believe illegally but absolutely immorally, by the prosecutors.

As an expert both in insurgency techniques using ideology and social movements, as well as a former chief negotiator for a prominent SEIU local, and knowing the precise techniques, organizations, and individuals, I know that this aspect involving the Ziminskis was left alone by prosecutors to avoid unearthing the larger plot.

SEIU was involved deeply in this Color Revolution, SEIU’s color is purple incidentally, and the color revolution which the Transition Integrity Project hailed, has been called the Purple Revolution by adherents and critics alike.

The Ziminskis were excluded from testimony by the prosecutors, and the timing of their trial was concerted through collusion between the D.A and the courts, so that Joshua Ziminski could not be crossed. This is despite Ziminski’s intimate knowledge of the events, and that his testimony would have established coordination between his actions and Rosenbaum’s.

In other words, self-defense becomes clearer when one is attacked by two men, one armed, and the other lunging for a tackle or for the gun: it becomes a necessarily lethal encounter where self-defense is profoundly evident.

Ziminski, who goes by the alias Alex Blair, himself had a long criminal record and therefore was potentially not an SEIU staffer himself, though under such conditions as the color revolution tactic, such involvement would not be unlikely.

What would have been revealed? What evidence would have come to light? Citizens must understand that the events in Kenosha were staged by a fascist technique executed by the corporate oligarchy. Not indirectly, not systemically, but directly by organizing the riots.

It does not matter that the ideology of the professional rioters is ‘far left’. The color revolution operation is fascist in nature because the financiers are globalist corporations, and the techniques used are not mobilization of the masses against elites (as in Marxism/Anarchism), but the mobilization of a part of the population against another part of the regular population, financed by corporations.

The Ziminskis were armed field organizers or field coordinators, or had been operationalized by such, either on the SEIU payroll or through its own COPA piggy bank, and/or of the various front groups similar to if not the same as ‘Our Revolution’, ‘Our Wisconsin Revolution’. There is the Wisconsin ‘People’s Revolution’, and similar. All operate identically. Grosskreutz, whose arm was vaporized as he attempted to shoot Kyle Rittenhouse by obscuring his gun side and trying to run around him, also testified to having been an activist and sympathizer of the same organization that the Ziminskis worked for, or were operationalized by.

But the organization was not some stand-alone group, without ties to the establishment, and herein lies our point.

“Our Revolution” was a spin-off of the Bernie Sanders campaign, designed at first part to capture the ‘rage’ of the nomination being stolen from Sanders by Buttigieg/Biden.

These are organizations funded through the Soros NGO, “Democracy Alliance”, and its professional field organizers and coordinators, hired often under the title ‘community organizer’, were typically leased through SEIU. This raised countless hundreds of millions to pay for travel, legal, and housing expenses for professional agitators. Following the Buttigieg move against Sanders, “Our Revolution” was launched, but initially they pretended to be unaffiliated with the Bernie Sanders campaign.

SEIU field organizers and political directors, including Rafael Navar, worked to redirect the mass disappointment of SEIU activists and community organizers once they surrendered the DNC nomination to Biden without protest at the DNC convention.

From this, “Our Revolution” was born, its criminal aim was to introduce professional organizers into the ranks of BLM/Antifa protests during that fake, elite manufactured, year of ‘red rage’.

These professional agitators also use mentally unstable and criminal elements, like Ziminski and Rosenbaum, referred to in Marxist theory as the ‘lumpen-proletariat’, to carry out the acts of violence, arson, and even murder.

That was the real relationship between the Ziminskis, who acted as handlers for Joseph Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum was brought in by the Ziminskis or was identified on the spot earlier that day or in those days as a lunatic, and egged on to be as crazy as possible. Identifying and making assessments of community members, similarly to worksite employees in union organizing drives, is a part of the work the Ziminskis involved in.

The Ziminskis were there in the parking lot. Joshua Ziminski fired his gun, triggering or signaling to Rosenbaum to attack Kyle Rittenhouse.

It goes deeper again. The governor, DA’s office, mayor’s office, were all in collusion with the Soros front groups, to never prosecute the criminal conspiracy as they were part of it.

The Ziminskis not testifying, for ostensible reasons of the related gun-charges case that will probably be later dropped, is the central factor that would have established a prosecutorial conspiracy. No judge would have even been able to allow a trial, and would have compelled the charges on Kyle to be dropped.

In fact, it’s more than likely that Judge Bruce Schroeder is privy to politically “inadmissible” evidence, which came to him in the form of amicus curiae briefs and other data drops, which connects the dots we have discussed in the above. These may well be what Schroeder refers to in his admonishing of the prosecutors.

Nevertheless, this trial and more to come just like it, will not be over until the DNC and its SEIU foot-soldiers are put on trial for their color revolution scheme which destroyed neighborhoods and led to not only the deaths of an agitated populace, but changed the course of the 2020 election. Though Rittenhouse has been exonerated, the American people will still be subjected to destabilizing schemes carried out by the various facets of the deep state until these schemes themselves are put on trial.

By Freddie DeBOER

Ezra Klein interviews David Shor about his recent rise in visibility, his particular take on Democratic policy and messaging, and the debate over “popularism.” It also glancingly mentions Shor’s cancellation, for expressing limited and polite skepticism about the political outcomes of post-George Floyd riots.

Klein references this controversy, as he must, but it’s kept separate as a piece of flavoring for the larger argument, rather than central to the discussion that follows. (It’s framed as one of the media’s favorite “ironic” tales these days, that Shor was actually helped by being cancelled – which far from being a defense of canceling is as damning an indictment I can think of.) But I find Klein’s disposing of that story so quickly to be quite odd, as it seems totally germane to the topic of who will determine the future of the Democratic party. What could be more relevant to the conversation than pointing out that one slice of that conversation feels perfectly comfortable attempting to utterly destroy their opponents, and everyone else is too scared to condemn them for it?

If you’re unaware, Shor was canceled for accurately summarizing the contents of an academic paper. Shor made a point that he felt was important for the messaging of the Democrats. At the time the country was exploding in riots aligned with BlackLivesMatter and driven by anger over the deaths of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor. Shor linked to a paper that argued that riots have bad political consequences for Democrats. This would not seem to be particularly inflammatory; people indiscriminately burning and smashing shit has little obvious utility for the marginalized or anyone else. But Shor lost his job for tweeting that paper and agreeing with its thesis. Similarly, the Intercept’s Lee Fang was absolutely mobbed for the crime of recording an interview with a young Black man who was critical of the riots and the protest movement from which they sprang. He almost lost his job, as well.

(Here’s a fun tip for you all: if you have the power to get someone fired or otherwise ruin their life you are not a powerless, marginalized Other.)

Not that they had rebutted a particularly coherent pro-riot argument. There was little in the way of defense of riots in 2020 at all, really. Many attempted to invoke Martin Luther King in that regard, which is hilarious and bizarre concerning a man who among many other critiques of riots said that they “are not revolutionary but reactionary because they invite defeat; they offer an emotional catharsis, but they must be followed by a sense of futility,” and that close to the end of his life. (In their defense, almost no one who invokes MLK has actually read him.) But what Shor and Fang were guilty of was not of breaking with some intellectual mandate within liberalism but with speaking out of turn, with criticizing the wrong people. The difference between Shor and Fang’s criticism of the pro-riot side and the behavior of those who rose against them is that Shor and Fang never tried to destroy anyone, didn’t tweet at anyone’s boss in an attempt to get them fired, didn’t have the inclination or the power to punish those who dared to disagree with them. But those who targeted them were operating in a bizarre liberal discursive culture where, if you dress up what you’re doing in vague language about oppression, you can operate however you’d like without rebuke and attempt to ruin the life of whoever you please.

And so I return to Klein’s consideration of who will determine Democratic messaging moving forward, and I ask: how can you have a discussion about discourse and messaging, Ezra, while studiously ignoring the powerful fear of imminent social and professional destruction that you and most others in your profession live under?

This tendency to be promiscuous in enthralling elites and powerful institutions should be a clue to the fact that, despite its radical self-branding, the contemporary social justice movement fundamentally serves to empower the status quo. Effective left politics are about convincing various people who are unalike that they have a shared self-interest, that society can do best for them when we do best for others, too. That’s how you build a mass movement, by appealing to people’s sense of self-interest and showing them how they can help their neighbors while they help themselves. But because the social justice movement’s first dictate is to establish a hierarchy of suffering, and to tell those that are purported to suffer less that their problems aren’t problems, no such mass movement is coming. The social justice movement is not just incidentally antagonistic to organizing everyone and recognizing all kinds of people as worthy of our compassion and support. That antagonism is existential. When you ask many people within the movement, “what could we do to convert the white working class to our values?,” they will simply tell you that they don’t want to convert them, that they are not worthy of being a part of their movement. They would rather have targets than converts, to lose as an exclusive moral caste than win as a grubby populist coalition.

Core to understanding this moment is to realize that the vast majority of people who enforce these politics don’t actually believe in them. They don’t, that is, think that social justice politics as currently composed are healthy or just or likely to result in tangible positive change. There’s a core of true-believers who do, and there’s a group of those who profit directly from the hegemony of social justice politics in elite spaces. (The former two groups have some overlap, but it’s not a perfect circle.) There’s conservative critics, who are both the most natural targets of social justice ire and yet those the social justice movement seem least interested in targeting. There’s an island of misfit toys of left and leftish critics of social justice politics like me. And then there’s the great big mass of people who are just scared. I think Klein didn’t really connect the dots between Shor’s cancelation and the debate about how the Democrats should strategize and message because he’s afraid of facing the same tactics Shor faced. Why wade in those waters when the potential consequences are so severe, and when the upside is so limited? I’m not accusing Klein of lacking courage or integrity. I just think he’s operating within a professional culture that has established dozens of new unwritten rules in the past couple years, along with severe consequences for breaking them.

But the popularism debate is a perfect example of how progressives simply can’t have the debates they need to have when the boundaries of the debate are hemmed in by the fear of vindictive reprisals. Should the party moderate? Should the party push left? How should it accomplish either? These issues involve everyone in the Democratic coalition. The rules of the game, though, tell us that some people have to mind their Ps and Qs while others get to engage angrily, vengefully, jokingly, and immaturely, as for some bizarre reason we have carved out a total exemption to basic rules of conduct in argument within left-of-center spaces for those who claim to speak from the standpoint of “the marginalized.” Unfortunately, their grasp on who actually holds that status is a little… motivated.

They say, for example, that people who come from less privileged backgrounds – there isn’t any such ordinal scale, of course, but hang on – should have special status to dictate the future of the party. And you might imagine that this would privilege conservative and moderate Democrats, of which there are far more than you could ever imagine from Twitter. The young activist core of the progressive Democrat agenda is dominantly white; it must be, as most Americans are white and an even higher percentage of college graduates are white and the percentage of those who went to the tiny handful of elite schools that graduate the vast majority of our politically influential class is even more white. Those activists are thus overwhelmingly young and majority white and almost universally college educated and, while in some cases making bad money now, upwardly mobile and uniquely equipped to navigate the knowledge economy when they move on to getting paid, as they all inevitably will. This would seem to be a privileged class in the most obvious sense, and against them stands a lot of regular Democrat voters. Say, people with some college but no degree, Black, middle aged, middle class, and far more conservative than the average Twitter liberal, favoring “commonsense” abortion restrictions, opposed to major policing reductions, vaguely worried about deficits and taxes, and deeply skeptical about mass immigration.

So the dictate to favor the more marginalized members of the coalition leads to pursuing an agenda consonant with the values of those moderates, right? Good lord, of course not. Instead the activist class just insists that they are the marginalized voice, and if you disagree, they try to ruin your life. Black Democrats have been perhaps the most conservative element of the party since the formation of the modern Democratic coalition, but this fact is inconvenient for those who both claim to speak ex cathedra when discussing racial justice and who hold policy positions far to the left of most Black Democrats. So they just ignore the reality of who favors further-left positions among Democrats, and if you try to bring the reality to their attention, you get white men calling you a white man at best and a digital mob trying to declare you a permanent untouchable at worst. So how can we have the immensely important debates we need to have, under those conditions? In so many domains, the left-of-center is hamstrung by a punishingly narrow range of acceptable positions, a mass assumption of bad faith, and a refusal to insist that everyone play by the same rules.

These conditions leave us unable to have frank and uncomfortable conversations when we need to have them. I’ve said before that the Rolling Stone-University of Virginia rape hoax disaster could have been avoided, or so least mitigated, as many people – progressive people, feminist people, progressive feminist women – said from the jump “this isn’t right, something’s not adding up, this isn’t how it works.” The whole story was so unconvincingly operatic; a gang rape, with dozens of witnesses, as fraternity initiation ritual? That’s not remotely typical of campus sexual assault and so cinematic it seems obviously made up. A lot of people knew something didn’t add up, right from the start.

But because they were operating in an environment of omnipresent, existential personal threat, because they knew people might attempt to destroy them if they said the wrong thing, they said this privately. Publicly, they dutifully golf clapped and retweeted the story on Twitter and were good soldiers. And then of course it turned out to be a fraud, its narrative so strange and unrepresentative because it had been entirely invented by a young woman who appeared to have been suffering serious instability. Which meant that it all blew up spectacularly, handing the anti-feminist brigades a talking point they still won’t shut up about. Perhaps if the people at Rolling Stone hadn’t lived under the shadow of professional destruction for violating progressive mores, some of them would have spoken up. Perhaps if prominent online feminists had taken immediate questions about the story’s veracity seriously, they could have engaged in damage control. But no. I remember when that story came out; the sense of danger was palpable. Those are the wages of living under the constant fear of people who want to divest you of your job, your friends, your reputation, and your future: no one feels empowered to speak truth to bullshit.

Or simply return to the riot issue that Shor and Fang paid a price for. How many of the progressive people living through that period actually thought what was happening was cool, productive, justifiable, really? All of those journalists living busy little upper-middle class lives, they were actually rooting for more burning Pizza Huts? The tweedy academics? The thinktank crew, the nonprofiteers? Please. They weren’t nodding along to the videos of fires and riot police saying “yeah this is good, this is how we get justice.” They were watching people reacting to it all and saying “there is no fucking way I’m sticking my neck out on this.” They were in the rear with the gear, which is true of most people who carry water for the social justice movement – they enforce the social consensus due to fear, not zeal. And we have no idea how many conversations in progressive spaces are getting corrupted in this way, how many issues are distorted by so many participants self-censoring defensively.

Most who read this won’t believe me, but in many ways my sympathies are more with the activist progressive Democrats than with the popularists. I have been asking the Democrats to move to the left for my entire political life. The problem is not that the party has moved too far to the left, which is an abstraction that doesn’t mean much, but rather that its messaging and culture are all based on belittling the struggles of anyone who doesn’t fall into a protected identity class. I think there are issues of profound potential where smart policy and good politics could unite the interests of the moderate Democratic rank and file and the activist class. That will take political imagination that’s broader than simply reading the country’s mood and going with what’s safe. And in the simplest sense on some specific points I would rather the activists get their way than David Shor.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s the activist class, the Twitter-obsessed class, the collegiate class, the vengeful “progressive” NPCs that have poisoned the well by normalizing attempts to destroy people they disagree with. No one is saying you shouldn’t advocate for your values. You absolutely should be vocal and passionate, and you are free to invoke moral language, and you certainly don’t have to personally like the people you disagree with. But you don’t get to threaten people’s lives, which is very common in some social media spaces, and you don’t get to silence anyone, and you don’t get to dox anyone, and it’s profoundly fucked up to try and separate someone from their job in a world where you have to work to eat. That can never be an authentically progressive or left-wing action, I don’t care how righteous you think your movement is. There’s no excuse for that behavior, especially given that the people who are guilty of this are almost all perfectly empowered and socioeconomically secure. You can’t run a political party under these conditions, or a social movement, and we shouldn’t have to. Advocate for your values, do the work, build the coalition through persuasion, accept that people will always disagree with you and that this is a healthy condition, and stop pretending that you are the subaltern when you’re really a whole industry of A students who went to elite colleges and have never known what it’s like to not be listened to and taken seriously.

To put it simply, grow up. And stop trying to destroy people. Like you yourselves keep saying, canceling doesn’t reliably work, so why bother? Judging by the utter lack of meaningful change since last summer, neither have the protests or riots. That’s not a nice thing to say, but it’s reality, and if you are sincere about helping those you claim to speak for, your first duty is to efficacy. So maybe time to try something else.

freddiedeboer.substack.com

The timing of historical events can give us context as to what the distant powers in the nation’s capital are thinking. Despite it being discussed for around a year or so, arguably the grandest statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee has been torn down in Richmond, Virginia. This coming right after the sloppy retreat from Kabul and Biden’s soon-to-be historic speech about “Nation-Building” seems to almost be like a message that the fronts have shifted and now all the Soft Power muskets will be redirected inwards.

We cannot forget that the flawed concept of Nation-Building did not just come from out of nowhere. Directly after WWII, from an American perspective, the remaking of German and Japanese culture went flawlessly. Japan despite its completely different history and long periods of isolation has become vastly more Western in cultural, economic and strategic ways, than any of the Visegrad nations. These islands that attacked America for dominance of the Pacific have voluntarily and gleefully chosen never-ending vassalhood as their path with almost zero resistance. The same thing could be said of Germany (initially West Germany), their first, second and especially third Reichs were in direct contrast to the Anglo-American values that are at the core of politics in today’s Berlin. Later on South Korea proved to be yet another nation building success.

Image: Japanese people protesting their nation having some level of military strength and autonomy. Cold War era Nation-Building seems to have worked.

This Marshall Plan, or Early Cold War era, proved to certain people in fancy suits that Nation-Building was a viable plan. It seemed to be a proven fact that a militarily occupied foreign land could be restructured into a mini America. And, it also seemed that this was in line with the subconscious will of the locals as the German and Japanese (temporarily barring East Germany) enemies quite readily jumped on the Democracy and Capitalism bandwagon. This is one of many reasons that all Liberals are sure that deep down, being freed from propaganda, their enemies would become Liberal too.

But then came the Russians. After losing the Cold War, Russia should have followed suit with Japan and Germany but it hasn’t. Even during the humiliating Yeltsin period, the Russians wanted to be a Democratic teammate with America rather than the waterboy for them. But then again the smaller Russian Federation of today was never occupied militarily. Perhaps that is why Soft Power Nation-Building in Russia failed. But it is no excuse for Iraq and Afghanistan, which despite billions in investment (aka bribes) and untold human and material efforts, remain un-Americanized.

Joe Biden is even more of a human suit placeholder than his former boss Obama, but “his” message “rejecting nation-building… but not our right to use force anywhere” as the Washington Post put it, sent a big signal from the elite that finally after decades this strategy has become considered non-viable. It would seem that at long last some have woken up to the fact that Germany and Japan were an exception and not the rule.

But beyond this, the core idea of this beaming beacon from the elite is that Soft Power aggression will continue, if not be ramped up to new levels to compensate. Biden said…

“And let me be clear: We will continue to support the Afghan people through diplomacy, international influence, and humanitarian aid. We’ll continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability. We’ll continue to speak out for basic rights of the Afghan people, especially women and girls, as we speak out for women and girls all around the globe. And I’ve been clear that human rights will be the center of our foreign policy.

But the way to do that is not through endless military deployments, but through diplomacy, economic tools, and rallying the rest of the world for support.“

Just like in the early Cold War where it seemed that Nation-Building “just worked”, now it probably seems equally obvious, that Soft Power tactics yield vastly more bang for the buck. The greatest thorn in the side of the Kremlin is the Ukrainian situation which cost a handful of billions to execute. The Maidan Revolution was cheap and effective unlike Afghanistan and the erosion of Russian culture via Hollywood/Social Media works out to be (from Washington’s stand point) even cheaper. This is just one example, but it is a key one. We cannot forget that a certain type of Western elite adores depopulation and mass migration to force a “melting pot” lifestyle onto its allies. This is also highly effective without the need of the military and trillions of dollars to directly break any potential enemy including “allies”.

Image: The era of respecting a defeated enemy for greater harmony is over.

And this is where we get back to the downing of Robert E. Lee’s massive monument. This sends a very strong message that the race-baiting hysteria that happened during Trump is only just beginning. Washington has just freed up a lot of resources to focus more sharply on “diplomatic” efforts to get everyone in line. We are probably in for more witch-hunts for racists and the continued attacks on everything that used to be considered American, from the Founding Fathers to the Bill of Rights. If Afghanistan is some sort of “beginning of the end” for the Global Hegemon then that means that there will surely be problems in the continental 48 and anyone rising up to challenge them will have to be dealt with.

The post-Trump quiet on the homefront is likely to be over, as it now may be time for a crumbling global empire to focus on Nation-Building at home where it is most viable, and for some, most desired.

Here’s a tale of two cops and two murders, Derek Chauvin and George Floyd, and John Doe* and Ashli Babbitt. Two cops, two unarmed citizens killed. One you care about, one you don’t. Even murder is politicized these days.

It is hard to imagine anyone needs much of a recap on Chauvin-Floyd. George Floyd, a black man, tried to pass off a counterfeit $20 bill while messed up on drugs. Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and other cops responded, and in the process of restraining Floyd, killed him. Everyone has seen the video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, and as if it was a civic duty, judged for themselves whether it was appropriate, necessary, and the cause of Floyd’s death.

A jury judged those things, too, and the result was a 22.5 year sentence for Chauvin (in handing down the sentence the judge said it was justified in part because Chauvin “committed his crime in the presence of children,” who of course had gathered to help jeer at the cops.) The woman who shot the snuff video won a Pulitzer prize.

Floyd’s death set off an angry summer of violence under the rubric Black Lives Matter, as progressives shut down opposing voices and several downtowns to insist Chauvin’s actions were part of something called systemic racism reaching back as far as 1619 in unbroken lineage. Celebrities, politicians, and academics jostled each other for camera time to demand the police be defunded. You might have seen something about all this on the teevee?

There’s video of Ashli Babbitt being killed by law enforcement but it has been played by the MSM maybe 1/10,000 as often as the Floyd murder porn. Babbitt, wearing a Trump flag like a cape, was one of the rioters who smashing the glass on the door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby of the Capitol. A plain clothes Capitol Police officer without warning fired a shot and Babbitt fell into the crowd and died. It was the only shot fired in the riot. A SWAT team just behind Babbitt saw the situation differently and never fired on her or those with her.

Like Floyd, Babbitt was unarmed. Like Floyd resisting, Babbitt was committing a crime when she was killed by a cop. Unlike Floyd, there is no question of whether she was resisting arrest because the cop never got that far. He just shot her.

In Floyd’s case, we know everything about Derek Chauvin, and saw him convicted in open court. Not so with Babbitt’s killer. Almost all police departments nationwide are required to release an officer’s name after a fatal shooting. Not the U.S. Capitol Police, which answers only to Congress. Even as Congress demands nationwide police reforms (ironically, the new, lower standards of proof proposed by H.R.1280 — George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 — would condemn the Capitol cop) they have steadfastly refused to release the name of Babbitt’s killer. In February, the Capitol Police stated they would “share additional information once an investigation is complete.” Investigators closed the case in April, cleared the unnamed officer of wrongdoing in Babbitt’s death without addressing the fact that the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, and left it at that. Stuff happens, ya know?

No trial, no public accounting, not even a name for the Babbitt family to use in filing a wrongful death suit. Because Congress exempts the Capitol Police from Freedom of Information Act requests, the family is forced to sue “for documents that identify the officer who shot Babbitt… as well as notes and summaries of what the officer said regarding the shooting and the reasons he discharged his weapon.”

They’d like more information on Babbitt’s death than the “investigation” provided. The Department of Justice simply wrote there was “insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.” DOJ did not hide its legal fudge, which had its investigators look narrowly on a Constitutional question, not the homicide.

Without shame DOJ said it focused on 18 U.S.C. § 242, a federal criminal civil rights statute. This requires prosecutors prove the officer acted willfully to deprive Babbitt of a right protected by the Constitution, here the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable seizure.  Prosecutors would have to prove not only that the officer used force that was constitutionally unreasonable, but that the officer did so “willfully” to deprive Babbitt of her 4A rights. That meant evidence an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment cannot establish the high level of intent required. In lay terms, that’s called a set-up enroute to a cover-up.

Contrast that with the Chauvin prosecution, where prosecutors charged manslaughter, second-degree murder, and third-degree murder in the one death of George Floyd, leaving the civil rights question which saved the Capitol cop as a separate matter. That allowed prosecutors to instruct the jury (there of course was no jury in Babbitt’s case) to decide on emotion, saying “Use your common sense. Believe your eyes. What you saw, you saw.” Imagine a jury in Babbitt’s case, exposed to a looping video of her killing, acting on the same instructions. But that never happened.

No one had much to say during the Babbitt investigation. In Floyd’s case, Joe Biden said he was praying the jury would reach the “right verdict,” calling the evidence “overwhelming in my view.” Maxine Waters demanded protesters become “more confrontational” if Chauvin was acquitted. That was so blatantly inflammatory it was almost grounds for a mistrial.

The president cheers on one prosecution, remaining silent while another murder is made to go away. Cities erect monuments to George Floyd while the NYT runs gossipy articles on Babbitt’s marriage problems. Asking for justice in Floyd’s case is a duty, even if it means burning down stores. Those who want the same justice for Babbitt are mocked as QAnon cultists. Did she not also bleed?

Oh, there’s more. Floyd was only on drugs passing fake money because of racism whereas Babbitt was a seditionist, a vandal, who asked for it as certain as if she wore a mini skirt down a dark alley to taunt her rapist. Floyd’s death created a movement for change. Candidate Trump’s embrace of Ashli Babbitt as a martyr anointed “January 6 a heroic uprising” for white supremacists seeking to overthrow democracy. Absolutely no one would write of Floyd, as one MSM outlet did of Babbitt, “her death, while tragic, occurred for a very good reason. The Air Force veteran, who had been fully converted into the most dangerous and fantastical pro-Trump conspiracy theories, had joined the aggressive vanguard of the January 6 insurrection.” Bitch deserved it. The article went on to compare Babbitt’s martyrdom to “Horst Wessel, a German storm trooper killed by communists in 1930, who inspired the eponymous Nazi anthem.

Others claim Trump is liable for the death, that the answer to Who Killed Ashli Babbitt? is Trump. WaPo wrote “The death of Ashli Babbitt offers the purest distillation of Donald Trump’s view of justice,” which apparently means to them Trump supported George Floyd’s killing while mourning Babbitt’s. Daily Beast frets “If the base believes they are being prosecuted and even ‘assassinated’ [like Babbitt] they will justify anything to reject Democratic rule and future elections that deprive them of power.” Sears and Kmart apologized and pulled from sale T-shirts reading “Ashli Babbitt American Patriot” after an outcry on social media. Headlines read “Marjorie Taylor Greene provokes outrage by comparing Ashli Babbitt’s death to George Floyd’s” because Babbitt was OK-shot “while actively participating in a violent riot” and Floyd was murdered by racists.

It is difficult in the face of so much hypocrisy to find the air to comment on the state of our country. Some murders are more equal than others. Dead bodies only matter when they can be used for your sides’ political purposes. How many white conservative deaths does it take to equal one black death? Why are some cops murderers and others protected with anonymity and a free-pass investigation?

The absolute craven transparency of the progressive argument is what gives me hope. Hope that at some point enough Americans will set aside their blind Trump rage, look past the 24/7 propaganda directed at them, and come to realize even murder now only matters for the clicks it generates. Our media is happy to justify Babbitt’s death, seeing it almost in biblical terms for supporting Trump. Floyd, always just a victim of an unjust society.

Ashli Babbitt was put down for our political sins, and her killer escaped justice with the government’s help. Now ain’t that the Democratic vision of America?

*

*The Capitol Police and the Congress which controls them refuse to name the officer who shot Ashli Babbitt to death on January 6. RealClearInvestigations, however, has identified the shooter as Lieutenant Michael Byrd, a black man. Since then, CNN and others have “voluntarily” removed Byrd’s name from hearing transcripts, and his social media has been scrubbed.

wemeantwell.com

Last weekend in Chicago, there were 54 shootings, five of them fatal. This was one of the fatal shootings. Warning: it’s graphic:

Chicago shooting of Gyovanny Arzuaga and Yasmin Perez on June 19 as they drove with their flag, 1 killed, 1 critically wounded in Humboldt Park pic.twitter.com/p9YcaZJmWU

— Shavo (@d_shavo) June 20, 2021

Look at these two dirtbags, just standing there filming it:

Last week, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who is black, declared that racism is a “public health emergency” in her city, and diverted $10 million in federal Covid funds to fight racism.

This is what happens when you elect Woke Democrats to run your city. By the way, Chicago’s DA Kim Foxx was backed by leftist billionaire George Soros, who has been pouring his money into electing progressive DAs in big cities. San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin is a Soros acolyte, as is Baltimore DA Marilyn Mosby. All those cities are overrun by crime. Reader Jonah R., who lives in suburban Maryland, left this comment:

On Thursday four young black men drove to a public elementary school in the mostly white, affluent DC neighborhood of Cleveland Park, where they fired more than 40 shots at the school in front of nearly 150 witnesses, hitting two construction workers who were renovating the building and fortunately not hitting any children only because they were in nearby trailer classrooms because of the renovation. The police chased them and caught them when they crashed their car. So far there appears to be no explanation for it other than four black dudes wanted to go randomly shoot up a white school. Let me know if this makes the national news where you live. I’m sure it won’t. But this is what happens when criminals feel emboldened by anti-policing rhetoric.

In Baltimore, where the DA has implemented a policy of not prosecuting misdemeanors and low-level crimes, criminals are starting to enjoy a free-for-all environment. The tourist/bar/restaurant neighborhood of Fells Point has seen multiple shootings in the past couple weeks, with one triple shooting occurring just 25 feet from a group of police officers. Some local businesses are refusing to pay their taxes and are putting the money in escrow instead. The neighborhood, already a place for a fun night out at the bars, has been looking like Mardi Gras in recent weeks, but without the cops enforcing laws like they do in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. There’s footage of drunks jumping on police cars while the cops just watch. About a week ago, someone went into Fells Point late at night and just randomly shot a bunch of cars. Some restaurants whose owners had been desperate to reopen are closing at 9 p.m. so their employees can get home safely. Some businesses are hiring private security. Police are not enforcing open container laws, parking and traffic regulations, or laws against people openly selling drugs and liquor on the streets. Only in the past few days have the cops come in, but in pointlessly massive numbers, and they’ve closed streets and manned checkpoints, going to the opposite extreme, as if to spite the neighborhood peons who complained.

I haven’t checked the news from Minneapolis lately. Is the community of activist hobos that formed around the site of George Floyd’s death still illegally “occupying” the site and inviting anarchy? There were three fatal shootings there in their “autonomous zone” in 2020 and one fatal shooting so far this year.

How about a year of activists trying to burn down federal buildings in Portland? Plus, staffing of the Portland police is at its lowest in decades, and there’s been a huge surge of brazen gang violence. According to the AP, Portland disbanded its special unit dedicated to curbing gun violence because activists believed it disproportionately harmed black people.

This is what happens when the “defund the police” chant–which is, yes, a fringe activist fantasy – becomes policy because people are too afraid to stand up to aggressive activists. I live in a safe multicultural suburb, so I’m fine, but my friends and relatives in cities like DC, Baltimore, and New York are freaking out. You can’t for a minute pretend that the rhetoric of the past year didn’t play a role in this surge of violence in our cities.

theamericanconservative.com

Black men are systemically shot and killed in New York City and no one seems to care because the triggers aren’t pulled by cops. If you say discussing this is a distraction from racism, you do it from atop a lot of graves. And how can anyone say that doesn’t matter?

Begin by asking how many are dying in New York, who is dying, who is doing the killing, where is it taking place, and why. The context is New York City saw its bloodiest week in late April with 46 separate shooting incidents, a 300 percent surge from the same week in 2020. These shootings were part of a 205 percent overall increase in shootings in NYC in 2020, the bloodiest toll since 1996. The body count continued to rise in early May.

Who is dying? Some 65 percent of homicide victims are black, though they make up less than quarter of the city’s population. In the unsuccessful homicides, e.g. “shootings,” blacks are over 70 percent of the victims. The dead include more and more young people. In the first half of 2020, 53 persons under 18-years-old were shot versus 37 during the same period a year earlier. Additionally, there have been 215 shooting victims ages 18-24 during the same period versus 125 in 2019. This is because it is gang-related activity that is driving the shootings in the city. Over 90 percent of black homicide victims were killed by other blacks, not by white supremacists or cops.

In 2020 290 black people were murdered and over 1000 were shot, almost all by other blacks. By comparison, only five of the 20 years of the Afghan war killed more Americans in a year. In further comparison, in 2020 the New York City police killed five blacks. You have to wonder which pile of bodies is really the distraction and which is really the more serious problem. This is what a systemic problem actually looks like.

A disproportionate number of the killings and shootings take place inside the vast public housing world of New York City, the 2,602 buildings controlled by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) There are 334 developments which fill an area three times the size of Central Park. Because there are so many people living “off-lease,” no one knows the actual NYCHA population, but it is believed to be over 600,000. If NYCHA were its own city, it would have about the same population as Boston. While much of the public housing is in “bad” parts of town, not all of it is. The housing was built largely on NYC-owned and available land and was championed by wealthy liberals in the 1950s and 60s. Some of NYCHA’s worst residences sit across the street from million dollar condos on the Upper East Side.

New York in general, and NYCHA in the specific, is simultaneously one of the most diverse places in America and the most segregated. About 27 percent of the city’s households in poverty are white, but less then five percent of NYCHA households are white. In contrast, blacks account for about a fourth of the city’s households in poverty but occupy 45 percent of NYCHA units. But even that does not tell the real tale. NYCHA is segregated building-by-building. Rutland Towers in East Flatbush is 94.9 percent black. Though Asians make up less then five percent of the overall NYCHA population, the La Guardia Addition at Two Bridges is 70 percent Asian.

NYCHA is also a very dangerous world. The NYPD counted 59 homicides in NYCHA properties in 2020, up 41 percent in 2019. The murder rate is far worse in the projects than elsewhere. As of late 2020, the projects had seen 15.5 homicides per 100,000 people, compared to only four per 100,000 elsewhere in the city. Police counted 257 shooting incidents in NYCHA projects in 2020, a 92 percent increase over 2019. Some 67 shootings were reported per 100,000 NYCHA residents, compared to 12 per 100,000 in the rest of the city.

The vast majority of these shootings are gang related, the gangs involved in some of the worst locations are mostly black, and the beef is over control of turf to sell drugs inside the city’s vast gulag archipelago of public housing. The mayor’s office both acknowledges and sidesteps this uncomfortable truth by blaming the shootings on “interpersonal beefs.” Worried about the Thin Blue Line, when cops won’t testify against other cops? Try finding a witness inside the projects for a black-on-black gang killing.

It wasn’t always this way. The last time NYC saw a decrease in crime was in 1993 after black Mayor David Dinkins implemented a “quality of life” initiative. This set the stage for what came to be known as “broken windows” policing. It posits minor infractions such as graffiti, panhandling, and public urination create disorder which, when left unchecked, gives the impression crime is tolerated. Aggressively punishing minor crimes creates a perceived intolerance of crime, thereby lowering serious crime.

The numbers support this. New York City experienced a steep decline in homicides from 1990 to 1999. Homicides peaked in 1991 with a mean of 22 homicides per 100,000 people, and fell to a low of slightly more than four per 100,000 in 1998.

Everything changed with the 2014 election of current Mayor Bill De Blasio, who did away with broken window policing, and specifically outlawed the liberal use of stop and search tactics by the police. In the wake of BLM, New York also stopped locking people up for many crimes where they had previously been held for bail, and cut back on undercover and special police units.

Following these changes, complaints about discriminatory policing went down. But violent crime went up. Persons released under bail reform went on to commit 299 additional major crimes last year.

Since lived experience is so important today, before De Blasio changed policing policy, I could walk my dog through a nearby NYCHA complex. No one was gracious, but I was left alone. Today if I go to the same place a young black man will soon pop out to ask “You buying?” and when I say no he’ll growl “Get the f*ck outta here” in reply.

These NYCHA islands, once thought to be the solution, are now incubators of the problem. We can argue over why they exist, but only in the face of how absolutely nothing that has been tried over decades has made a significant change. The deaths of young black people persist. It has proved near impossible to provide incentives that out do what the gangs offer, including quick money, access to drugs, a sense of belonging, a lifestyle promoted by hip hop music, and protection from other gangs. That’s needed today more than ever as the police withdraw (this year the NYPD saw an 75 percent increase in departures and retirements, the loss of over 5,300 cops.)

We have been squawking about longer term solutions for decades, with NYC providing one of the most comprehensive menus of such ideas in the nation — near free housing, education, internships, public medical care, benefits to mothers and children, before and after school programs, pre-K, school breakfasts and lunches, college scholarships, help centers, free or reduced cost public transportation, renaming, canceled statues, and on and on. There is little of the lives of the people affected in New York that has not been touched in an effort to fix something.

The standard progressive response to white people talking about black-on-black killings is that it is a distraction from the real issues, a trick of misdirection, a way to minimize the real problem of police killings. That ignores the harsh light; the score in NYC is 290 dead in black-on-black homicide to five killed by the cops. You bandage all wounds, but start with the one most life-threatening.

Another argument is blacks already talk plenty among themselves about intra-racial violence and that’s enough. But it’s our city, too. We all live here, and sorry to break the narrative, but many of us care for others beyond ourselves. We can also talk about more than one thing at a time, especially if the media, politicians, and black “leaders” will give us the room to do so and stop trying to shut down the dialogue to keep the wound open.

Whites talking about black violence isn’t a palliative for other violence but an acknowledgement complex problems exist which cannot be solved by ignoring some things, and dismissing others with argument-ending pronouncements of racism and systemic bias, now reduced even further to code words like “1619.” The job is pretty easy when you blame everything on one thing, racism, as if it was really that simple.

Yet while we wait for all this to be sorted out, the young black men of NYCHA seem to face our choice between aggressive (“discriminatory”) policing which lands many them raw in jail even as it saves lives, or lite policing which allows young blacks to kill other young blacks as they wish. It’s almost as if their lives don’t matter when the politics of race are in play.

wemeantwell.com

There was a time in American history when the media seemed a lot more subtle in its filtering of ideas. Certainly the blunt advertising of the 1950’s is primitive by today’s standards of subtle product placement and “native” advertising that surround our subconscious on all fronts. But the news media has gone in the opposite direction, becoming so bluntly biased that it is like watching those Disney/Warner Bros. animated propaganda reels from the 1940’s. Today’s “case in point” is CNN’s in-your-face interpretation of the conviction of the police officer that snuffed out the life of George Floyd while he was already handcuffed.

We should not forget that no matter what sort of person Floyd was he could only be rightfully executed after being convicted by an impartial jury during a fair trial with legal representation. The American system was designed specifically not to allow “Judge Dredd” style police work. So Floyd “the man” is not relevant to this discussion, but what is, is CNN’s exploitation of his corpse. The first two sentences of their article are as follows…

“The conviction of Derek Chauvin showed George Floyd’s life really did matter to a justice system on trial.

Now, millions of Americans wait to see whether a moment of rare hope will spur political leaders to deliver similar justice by reforming policing and eradicating systemic racism.”

Firstly, although perhaps taking into account the value of life would be a benefit to court hearings, this verdict only proves that there was enough evidence to convict the police officer in question of murdering a helpless suspect in custody. It proves that he is “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”. The author of this piece either purposely or by instinct has framed the idea of this trial for the reader so that the results are a reflection of the emotions of the state towards the death of Floyd and not a reflection of evidence and

due process. This interpretation makes it look like court decisions come as a gesture of grace from the Emperor rather than the result of pieces of proof convincing a jury one way or another.

The second bit about having “a rare moment of hope” for “eradicating systemic racism” is just as manipulative. It is true that for some mysterious reason political change always requires a catalyst. Politicians simply cannot put up a new street light on a dangerous intersection until someone gets splattered by an SUV. So perhaps the convection could be a catalyst, but it is a weak one. If the court system is capable of imprisoning police who grossly violate their code of conduct then that sort of proves that the system would seem to be working. Furthermore, the fiery Black Lives Matter protests are a much more volatile and effective as a catalyst than punishing someone that most of the country has already forgotten about. Moments of hope are indeed rare but usually follow a major political victory or a supreme court decision, not so much throwing one bad cop (of the many out there) in jail.

But the real icing on the absurdity cake is the idea, hinted at by CNN, is that now thanks to passing some new beefy legislation, that few have fully read, filled with minor nuances and tweaks by people who have mostly never worked in law enforcement, can and and somehow shall end “systemic racism”.

In a country that guarantees equality for all under the law in its Constitution as well as provided all sorts of benefits to minorities, diversity quotas, scholarships for the under-represented and the like, it seems that if there is systemic racism at the core of today’s American government, then it is doing a garbage job of realizing Hitler’s vision for the Aryan future, especially those two electoral victories under Obama’s belt.
Again, according to CNN the amazing Democrat solution of the day that needs to be trumpeted looks something like this.

“The method for making the most fundamental set of changes to policing in a generation, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, is already sitting in the Senate. Democrats say it would end racial and religious profiling, ban chokeholds on suspects, eliminate no-knock warrants on drugs cases, make it easier to prosecute offending police officers and would overhaul police training to build trust with the communities in which officers serve. Yet its path is challenging given the opposition of many Republicans to the concept of Washington establishing federal standards for police.”

This again goes back to the classic logic followed by far too many people the world over, that if you “ban X via law, then X will go away forever”. For the average global peasantry this makes sense, most of us are afraid of the police and will do what the lords in fancy suits tell us to do. So if we order Joe Average that X, Y and Z are now illegal statistically he is likely to just accept it and not engage in those acts even if he thinks the ban is wrong. The problem is that it certainly doesn’t make X, Y and Z go away forerver as some people simply do not care about risks and others may be motivated to engage in them anyways or they are part of human nature which cannot be banned. No matter how many times we make murder illegal it still seems to happen, but there are certainly ways to reduce its number of occurances per year. Things like “racial profiling” fall into this category of things that are frowned upon but will never be eradicated by legislation.

Trying to ban racial profiling essentially means that via bureaucracy we want to punish people for an unfair decision making process that they make in their subconscious minds. Very few policemen are going to go out thinking consciously “I’m going to be racist today” but they certainly work and make many decisions based on their instincts which have a whole array of built up biases, some of which are fair and reasonable, some of which are not.

You cannot ban a form of “intuition” that does not suit your bizarre My Little Pony political worldview. This bureaucratic step means that logically any subject, arrested by an officer of a different race could argue that due to a procedural error of racial profiling they should be let off the hook. People get off the hook based on technicalities all the time, which is again an inherent part of the American system. If the police screw up – you go free, even if you are probably guilty. Now every action of the police that gently scrapes racial lines could become a “technicality”.

Although it may be a matter of personal intuition, this crackdown on profiling seems like an extension of the “Defund the Police” logic. However this is more of a “Scare the Police into Inaction” technique, which makes for an effective strategy but a bad bumper sticker.

Now, of this proposed legislation, the concrete tactical aspects of it do seem like a positive step. A choke-hold is a concrete hand-to-hand combat tactic, no-knock warrants are also a tactic, these can in theory be “banned”, but bans only work if the police are being constantly videotaped and those recording have the ability to use the video as evidence. We could certainly go down a “Whataboutism” rabbit hole asking why the police now cannot choke someone, yet they have been starting to use all sorts of APC like vehicles and brutal crowd control methods in recent years that seem obviously heavy-handed, but we can leave that discussion for another day.

The key issue is that if bureaucracy could solve the animosity between the Police and Black America then these issues would have been over by the end of the 60’s. The fundamental problems are of an economic and ideological nature. Biden and friends can throw as much long-winded legislation at the wall as they want, but they can’t and haven’t made it stick. No amount of CNN spin can cause this horrible approach to government to become effective. If this is the culmination of the massive protests after the death of George Floyd then they were completely in vain. Washington has put another cheap patch on the leaking dam.