CIVIL WAR. THIS TIME WITHOUT BEARDS.

 I’m running out of metaphors to describe 2020. It needs a straightjacket and a horse tranquilizer. How can this not challenge liberals’ faith in the inevitable progress of humanity? To a conservative, civilization is the crust on a volcano. We’re always one calamity away from “Lord of the Flies.” What I see is a whole nation at each other’s throats. WHERE’S YOUR CIVILIZATION NOW, HUH??

 

The rhetoric has become dangerous. Now, recklessness is Trump’s bread and butter, but Nancy Pelosi has called him an “enemy of the state” and Republicans “domestic enemies.” Liberal sociologist Jonathan Haidt, who is dedicated to fostering mutual understanding of the political tribes, admits these times are different, and the only way out of it is “love,” a wholesale cultural commitment to a different ethic. For a hopeful liberal, who likely believes in that progression of history nonsense, it is a stunning and pessimistic concession.

 

Predictions are always wrong, but since opining is a stronger compulsion to Omnipotentblog than even that thing I do with my toenails, I continue. First, the bad news. A Yougov study found 70% of Millennials—“The Gratingest Generation” as George Will calls them—would vote for Socialism given the chance. Only 50% approve of Capitalism. 36% approve of…(sigh) Communism. 22% believe “society would be better if all private property was abolished. (Wait. 14%…huh? Yeah, I know.) 64% of Generation Z has a favorable opinion of Socialism. Both Millennials and Gen Z reported that Communism was presented more favorably in school than previous generations. One recent study found 64% of undergraduate college students believe recent rioting and looting was justified. 52% favor slavery reparations, and 51% said America is “inextricably linked to white supremacy.” 72% of conservative students censor themselves. At the University of Chicago, ranked highest in freedom of speech, one student wrote, “I vote because Corona virus won’t destroy America, but Socialism will.” For her thoughtcrime, she was widely denounced by her peers, threatened with violence, and told she didn’t belong at the university.

 

Columnist Steve Rowland cites Stanford historian Niall Ferguson claiming America’s “doomsday clock” is at “2 minutes to Fort Sumter.” Rowland cited polls showing 1/3 think civil war could break out within the next 5 years and 7 out of 10 believe we are 2/3 of the way to civil war.

 

A Quillette.com study from June set out to explore the left’s desire to deculturate America. The study intentionally probed the outer limits of radical thought. The results were disturbing. 70% of Liberals and 79% of Very Liberals want major changes to the constitution. 44% and 58% want Mt. Rushmore destroyed. Large numbers want racial quotas in museums, history books, street names, and for national parks to revert totally back to nature. 17% of Very Liberals want the official language changed. (If it’s Cockney, I’m in.)

 

In 2017, national security expert, Keith Mines, noted conditions are similar to what he saw in other countries. He felt the U.S. had a 60% chance of civil war over the next 10 years. “It’s just like 1859; everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.” He stated other experts’ predictions ranged from 5% to 95%. The consensus was 35%. And that was five months before Charlottesville. A recent survey showed a 95% and 139%, respectively, increase in gun and ammo sales, shattering previous records. 

 

After the tumult of the 60’s and 70’s, sociologist and historian, Robert Nisbet, offered ten conditions of revolution. An argument could be made that all of them apply to 2020.

·         Recent dramatic changes in the economic or societal order.

·         Breakdown in respect for and by authority.

·         Recent increase in societal wealth. (People getting a taste of what could be.)

·         Recent liberalization, allowing those recently “freed” to sense what is possible to gain.

·         Intense politicization/polarization.

·         Intellectual elites taking advantage of politicization to increase own status.

·         Disconnected or random catalyst that brings social temperatures to a boil. (COVID???)

·         Crusaders coalesce under a clear moral banner to attack societal norms (SYSTEMIC RACISM!!!).

·         Presentation of an idyllic, utopian vision as alternative to the current corruption.

·         An existing guilt amongst members of the ruling class (WHITE PRIVILEGE???).

 

Democrats recently war-gamed scenarios for a contested election. The exercise ended with California, Oregon and Washington seceding and the U.S. military having to step in to remove Trump. Hillary Clinton has suggested Biden should concede the election “under no circumstance.” And Trump has notably refused to commit to a peaceful transition. He frequently predicts massive fraud and chaos due to millions of ballots sent out unsolicited. The Democrats accused Trump of sabotaging the Postal Service to sow election chaos.

 

Afraid yet? Is there any hope at all? Eh, some. The general trend in America is actually away from Socialism. The same Yougov study above found an increase of 47% to 53% of Americans unlikely to vote for Socialism from 2018 to 2019. 56% of Americans define Socialism much more positively than it is, suggesting the good branding of Socialism is really an illusion.  58% view concerns about Communism as just as or more relevant than during the Cold War. There is also a trend away from Marxism amongst the younger generations. 8% fewer Gen Z than Millennials prefer Communism. Their approval of Socialism also decreased by 8% from 2018 to 2019 versus a mere 1% decrease by Millennials.  

 

It should be clear by now that race isn’t the real issue here, but what do polls say about defunding the police? Despite actual decreases in budgets in Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles, most Americans are against it. While one study showed 57% of blacks are in favor of defunding the police, another showed 81% want either the same amount or more police presence in their neighborhoods, including 79% who had recent interaction with police.

 

It is accepted dogma that the nation is hopelessly polarized. But maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. Two organizations presented data suggesting the perception is much worse than the reality. The higher the consumption of news—which is mostly, “Can you believe ____ said ____??”—, the bigger the perception gap.

 

 

 

So what are Omnipotentblog’s odds of civil war? Well, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 70%. Wednesdays and Thursdays, 30%. Other days, I just suck my thumb. I do, however, put odds of post-election civil unrest at precisely 99.64%. Will it be massive? Will fat, middle-aged bloggers and Republican suburbanites be sucked into hastily-formed militias to take on left wing mobs? De Toquesville argued that revolutions are inherently unlikely in democracies; Too many have too much to lose. In “Fractured Republic”, Yuval Levin argued that just as social conservatives overplayed their hand years ago, so too will the left. Since fairness is deeply ingrained in the American character, the exhausted majority will rebel against radicalism. Are we still a reasonable and fair people? Lord, I hope so. My money is on this: Regardless of who wins the election, leftists will press on. Democrat-run cities that defenestrated the police will devolve into the cesspools of crime they were in the 70’s and 80’s. Large numbers of Americans will continue to be indoctrinated through the explicitly Marxist and pseudo-religious tenants of Critical Race Theory. Its adherents will continue to agitate. But because class hatred is not in America’s DNA, and because 180 years after DeToquesville, history continues to prove him a genius for the ages, they will not get what they want: the overthrow of Capitalism. It will leave them embittered by failure, enraged at the lack of progress, and blaming…well, everyone. They will not fall to their knees and repent; Leftists never do. They will simply wonder why their children and the rest of America reject their nonsense. They will be as miserable and lost as ever. Like now.

 

Ah, destiny.

FOR BY RACE ARE YE SAVED

 

Nearly every conservative writer and barking dog on TV has noted the religious flavor of our revolutionary mood. Even liberal commentators have used the term “Original Sin” to describe American slavery. A Puritanical spirit has overtaken the land as the disciples of Wokeness embrace a secular version of Calvinist Total Depravity. Grace, however mysteriously doled out by John Calvin’s Predestinarian God, is limited in Wokeness to the randomness of genes. Melanin is salvation. Traditional Christophobia has always argued against the harshness and judgmentalism of Christianity. “Mean people, those Christians. They hate the gays, you know.” The Christians’ retort is, “But grace! For God so loved the world!” and such. The great irony is that Christianity’s replacement has no grace at all, no expiation of the cardinal, unforgiveable sin of whiteness, only eternal guilt, perpetual subservience, restitution, and reparation. When the total suffering of non-whites across all time and space has been matched by the whites, only then may humanity live in peace and equality.

 

Umm. No thank you.

 

 

Sinners in the hands of an angry mob.

 

Christian sin and racism as defined by Wokeness have much in common. You don’t have to murder to deserve hell “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” As you are born into sin, so you are born (If white, of course. Goes without saying.) into racism, the only sin that matters. The Bible, despite its complexity, is often very black and white: saved and unsaved, heaven and hell, the flesh and the spirit, etc. etc. Yet, one is struck by the binary nature of Wokeness. It is not a component of the whole; It is the whole. Robin DiAngelo, author of the holy scripture “White Fragility,” stated, “Nice, white people who really aren’t doing anything other than being nice people are racist. We are complicit with that system. There is no neutral place.” The good are the sheep and the Anti-racists who shepherd them. The rest are wolves.

 

Not a church service. Definitely not. (Click for video.)

 

 

In, “America,We Had a Good Run,” Omnipotentblog noted how the Western decline of traditional religion is being channeled into all manner of pseudo-religious beliefs like astrology, occultism, UFO’s, and even trolls. David French wrote of his Harvard friend, who loved to mock the fairy tale of Christianity while bragging of her child’s “Indigo Aura.” Some on the right, too, have replaced hymnals and homilies with quasi-religious devotion to outlandish and gnostic conspiracy theories like QAnon.

 

I came across this book at a mental health symposium. Science!

 

In, “No,the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why.” Professor James Lindsay describes a secular philosophy dripping in religious fundamentalism. A framework of assumptions manifesting itself in safe spaces, trigger warnings, and deplatforming, shields believers from heresy and doubt. The rejection of discourse lies in the notion that arguments and facts themselves come from a world completely saturated in white supremacy. In accepting a reasoned debate, one accepts the racist scaffolding that frames it. Therefore, debate is pointless; You would only be accepting rules stacked against you and your truth. Experience is the final arbiter, the final conclusion. And if some melanin-blessed person’s “truth” is that they are not a victim of white racism, that they are free and have agency, well, what more proof do you need he is an Uncle Tom? As one writer put it, the whole thing is a Kafka Trap: The more one objects, the greater the evidence of his guilt. Among other things, a Smithsonian curriculum on race listed “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness” as:

·         Objective, rational thinking.

·         Cause and effect relationships.

·         Quantitative emphasis.

·         Delayed gratification.

·         Hard Work.

·         Politeness.

·         Time.

 

You see, belief is truth, and math is racist. (Don’t tell the Indians and the Arabs.)

 

But why is all this madness happening NOW, for crying out loud? One reason may be that we are finally seeing the ripened fruits of a generation of indoctrination, triggered by the trauma of forced Covid isolation. Another is the personal isolation and ghettoization of information wrought by technology. And some say literally all of this is because of abject hatred for Trump-Hitler. Another explanation is a phenomenon widely described but little understood: the loss of confidence by elites in their own values. In Charles Murray’s excellent book “Coming Apart,” he describes the nature of white poverty. He focused on whites to remove race from the discussion. He showed, convincingly, IMHO, that the roots of poverty exist wholly apart from racism. Elites practice bourgeois values. They get as much education as they can, get married before having children, work hard, and save. Divorce rates are low. This group instinctively travels the road to success and then stunningly turns around to scorn such values as racist and patronizing. The solution to poverty, according to Murray, is simply for the elites to preach what they practice.

 

Shelby Steele, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a black man, explains, “There is a great deal of shame in what America did to black people. Whites acknowledge that…It has compromised their moral authority, weakened their power in American life. There is in the white part of American society…a need to recover moral authority. So often, white institutions will take our problems on, not because they want to fix those problems, but because it restores moral authority and power. I call that white guilt power.”

 

After 9/11, I asked an Orthodox Jewish friend of mine how he explained the intense hatred many Muslims felt for Jews. “It’s a spiritual problem.” And a spiritual problem requires a spiritual solution, he said. The Bible says man is inherently sinful, and the more one knows about people, the more it becomes obvious the human psyche is a machine built for self-justification. Yet, the Bible says that nature itself is a witness to His majesty. Despite vast levels of comfort and abundance in Western society, if St. Augustine is correct, no amount of pleasure and security will fill the God-shaped vacuum in the human heart. Successful or not, faithless or not, we cannot escape the constant murmur of sin in our souls. White guilt may be peculiarly modern. Guilt itself is timeless.

 

I must make another point, which may seem disconnected, but is not. Many commentators have observed that the whole liberal cause is an “unrequited desire for community.” Sociologist Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” documented the dissolution of society’s civic culture and social capital as far back as 1950. The British government recently set aside millions of pounds to study and solve the problem of loneliness. Republican Senator Ben Sasse, wrote an extremely well-received book called “Them: Why We Hate Each Other—And How to Heal.” His conclusion is that the fractiousness and division in our country is because of loneliness. This yearning for community cannot be bifurcated from the deep, existential need for meaning. Volumes of research say the actively religious are happier. The Apostle Paul says to not neglect meeting with one another. We need meaning and community and often we get the one from the other. Going to church? Two birds. One stone.

 

The violent riots near my home elicited deep sadness in me. There is great anger in this country. If the diagnosis is correct, the decline of faith and the rise of loneliness and isolation have caused a conflagration of pain. One great truth of life is that the only things inevitable are death and taxes. But the great truth of human nature is that Man needs Man and Man needs God.

 

Revive us again, oh Lord.

 

KILL ALL THE WHITE STATUES, THEN WE’LL BE FREE.

“I don’t want knowledge. I want certainty.”

                                                David Bowie, Law (Earthlings on Fire)

The tiny car circled the ring several times and stopped. Clowns began to pour out. 9, 10, 11, holy crap, 12! And another and another. The good people of America keep thinking we have reached peak stupid. And then another clown gets out of the car.

 CNN’s Chris Cuomo saves America, one deadlift at a time.

Jonathan Haidt’s copious data shows that the right understands the left much better than the left understands the right. While the right has no shortage of clowns and demagogues, it is leftist ignorance that is the clear and present danger. With a single simplistic idea in his head, the average white statue killer is fueled by ignorance. Yet, this idea has been nurtured and cultivated by academia and other elites with a well-planned and comprehensive agenda. The riots are no accident. And it should be obvious by now they are not about race. These riots are the fruit of a tree planted long ago, and below is the ship of fools responsible.

Counter Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacque Rousseau (1712-1778) was an angry, petty man who wrote brilliantly about the problems of modern society. A believer in the natural goodness of man in his primitive state, he wrote, “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.” The movies “Avatar” and “Dances with Wolves” illustrate the romantic idea of Rousseau’s “Noble Savage”. A return to innocence is impossible, however. Possibly the single most important influence on the modern left, he believed the only solution was a radical, top-to-bottom reorganization of society.

Rousseau

German Idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) believed history is directional and progressive and not cyclical. On a rug in Obama’s oval office was stitched a quote from MLK Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” When you are warned to be on the right side of history, thank Hegel.

Hegel

We can thank German Philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) for identity politics and class warfare. Critical Race Theory and Intersectionalism are Marxist in form and function, using race as a proxy for class. In the utopian Das Kapital, profit and property are theft. History is not made by “great men” but by the Zeitgeist or “spirit of the times.” Equality—an absolute one, devoid of individual reward and consequence—trumps all other social considerations. Force is required to achieve it, of course, as the current stakeholders will not relinquish their power by gentle persuasion. Competition and individualism are “chaos” to the Marxist, anathema to the need for order and control. The individual must disappear into the collective as the only source of meaning and moral transcendence. To a Marxist, the hive-mind of Star Trek’s “The Borg”, is not a horror story, but a fantasy. Read The Borg President, one of my best.

King of all Wankers

When Hillary Clinton referred to herself as an early 20^th century Progressive, she was surely steeped in the philosophies of, among others, 28^th President WoodrowWilson. In their writings are the seeds of the modern Democrat Party. Enormously consequential, Wilson is often considered one of America’s best presidents. He was also very, very racist, and the policies during his administration were overtly fascist. The Progressives’ influence on the modern left is complex and broad. However, one unique gift is their faith in experts and central planning. Responding to the endemic corruption of the Gilded Age, where patronage ruled government appointments, Wilson was a strong believer in Technocracy, an army of unaccountable, lifetime-tenured bureaucrats. Leftists have an unshakeable belief in their own talents, in their abilities to solve any problem. The modern nanny state is Wilsonian Progressivism at its core.

Woodrow Wilson

Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) The Post-Modern Sartre believed reality is a social construct. If you ask a “peaceful” protester whether the situation truly justifies her brick through the Macy’s window, you might hear, “This is my truth.” By substituting “my” for “the”, you have instant justification for anything imaginable. When Don Lemon, a man apparently incapable of embarrassment, savaged Terry Crews for Wrongthink, he was later asked about it. “My role as a ‘journalist’ (quotes added) is to speak from my truth, and from my lens and from where I come from. And I don’t think those things are biases.” Touché, Don.

Smartest man in America.

Against this stand Newton and Plato. Newton’s belief in a God that is fixed and predictable caused him to believe the natural order itself was discoverable, the very concept responsible for science. Plato believed that truth, despite its mystery and elusiveness was like a solid object, standing firm against wish and belief. To reject objective truth is to enable a glib dismissal of crusty dogmas of the past, especially religion, which, you know, is just a bunch of he said/she said. Those familiar refrains, “We need to have a discussion” or a “national conversation” about things? By “discussion”, they really mean “shut up and listen”, of course, but they often don’t know what they want, exactly; They just want something different. Their ideological ethereum is how leftists, without irony, hold the right accountable for the sins of its past while completely ignoring their own. They sometimes, in astounding displays of gaslighting, claim the historical left was really the right, because, you know, left = good and right = bad. It’s a neat trick. The good fruit of post-modernism is the open-minded, tolerant liberal who loves free speech. The bad fruit is the insufferable coffee shop loud-talker who emphatically rejects truth as non-existent while maddeningly claiming to have no ideology at all.

“Umm…isn’t that itself a truth claim?”

“Shut up.”

Jean Paul Sartre

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Gramsci’s contribution was the argument that Marxism cannot focus solely on economic or political issues. Marxism will gain influence when it builds an intellectual and moral culture in the hearts of the people. He argued for building a “Counter Hegemony”, a culture of working class intellectuals whose primary function is to make the masses critical of the status quo. Gramsci would be pleased with the news having devolved into endless salvos of outrage porn, for only the angry cry out for change. More than any other, Gramsci is responsible for the intense indoctrination in the schools.

Antonio Gramsci

Herbert Marcuse—Marcuse, of the influential Frankfurt School, is considered the preeminent theorist of the New Left. His most consequential contribution may be his understanding that the left cannot not prevail in a fair fight. To triumph in the clash of ideas, the left must reject their opponents’ legitimacy and crush them. We can thank Marcuse for Cancel Culture, for the epidemic of doxing and deplatforming. Since Western Society is root and branch oppressive, tolerating it contributes to social oppression. Tolerance is hate. Hate is tolerance.

                                              

Herbert Marcuse

In 1983, Soviet defector, Yuri Bezmenov, gave a talk regarding KGB tactics for subverting Western nations. First, take over the education systems and teach the children to resent their governments, to despise their liberties as tools of inequality and oppression. It would take a generation but when those children came of age, full of resentment and entitlement, they would be ready for the next step, the systematic destruction and reframing of their nation’s history. Topple the statues. Destroy the art and symbols of the nation. Then, create enmity between law enforcement and the citizen, between the employer and the worker. And most importantly, attack religion, that existential pain-killing opiate of the human heart. Pain is necessary. For if the heart has anything which gives it comfort or contentment, it will never yearn for something greater.

The intellectual class, bitter they are not in their rightful place on the throne, has long promoted Communism in America. In 1919, journalist Lincoln Steffens returned from the tremendously bloody Russian revolution and proclaimed, “I have seen the future and it works.” In 1932, Walter Duranty of the New York Times, won a Pulitzer prize for reporting that concealed two million dead from a famine perpetrated by Stalin to break the Ukrainian will. Presumably, both acted in good faith, believing the dream of equality was achievable. Yet, while BLM leaders openly admit they are trained Marxists, the average protester probably just wants a little justice and equality. Who could be against that? Full of sentiment and angst and desire for good things, most of them probably aren’t bad people, just pawns, “useful idiots” as Lenin called them. And idiots they are. Useful? Not to a people desiring to remain free.  

WHICH BLACK LIVES MATTER?

“And I say we should not listen to those who say the voice of the people is the voice of God. For the riotousness of the crowd is always close to madness.”

Alcuin to Charlemagne.

Some years ago, I walked around the ancient city of Ephesus in Turkey. A spectacular site with marble streets and statues, I stood in the great amphitheater and pondered something: In Acts 19, Demetrius, a silversmith who made his living fashioning idols, incited a mob. Angry over the dishonoring of his beloved goddess and the prospect of losing income from fewer tchotchke sales, he led the chant, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” for hours. “Soon the whole city was in an uproar,” v 29. They seized two of Paul’s companions intending to lynch them. The mob dispersed when a speaker noted they were about to be charged with rioting. Allegations of Roman racism would not have prevented their massacre. I thought to myself how odd this ancient scene was. Here in the 21^st century, people seem more reasonable and calm. And then last week, blocks from my home, banks were burned and stores were looted. And, in my opinion, it was all for a lie. 

Most have seen the video of the white knee on the black neck. If you are a decent person, it is painful to watch. The last straw in a seeming parade of incidents, it proved to many that the police and White Amerikka are violently, irredeemably, racist. Activists proclaim black genocide. It simply is not true. Racism, that stubborn vestige of human nature, clings to us like toilet paper from an airport bathroom. Yet, its perceived power is false. Nothing is more taboo in America.

How can so many can be so wrong?

In 1997, CNN and Time conducted a poll that asked white and black teens “Is racism a major problem in America?” Both groups said, "yes." But when black teens were asked about racism in their own lives, 89% percent said racism was a "small problem" or "not a problem at all". Nearly twice as many black teens than whites called "failure to take advantage of available opportunities" a big problem in their lives.

According to a 2014 Census Bureau study, blacks are almost twice as likely to live in poverty as all races combined, 27% vs. 15.5%. What can explain this? Marriage. Conservatives have always argued the preeminence of family and the data proves it. 71% of all black children are raised by single mothers. The poverty rate for black married couples with children is only 10.8% but skyrockets to 46.1% for single mothers. The rate for all races is very similar: 8.2% poverty for married couples and 37% for single mothers with children. The drastic difference in poverty rates is almost wholly explained by family status.

One of the least racist countries on earth according to the Washington Post, less than 5% of respondents in America say they would be bothered if a neighbor of a different race moved next door. Jonah Goldberg writes, “By any measure America has become astoundingly less racist…In 1958, according to the Brookings Institution, 44% of whites said they’d leave if a black family moved in next door. In 1998, only 1% did. In 1990, according to the Pew Research Center, 63% of non-blacks expressed dismay at the prospect of a close relative marrying a black person. By 2016, that number had dropped to 14%. In 1967, only 3% of Americans married outside their race or ethnicity. Today, nearly one-fifth do.” Fakehatecrimes.org has 390 entries. If racism was so ubiquitous, why would anyone fabricate examples? Wouldn’t they be everywhere? Did German Jews paint swastikas on their own shops? No. The Nazis did that for them.

Policy prescriptions behind the  “Defund the Police” movement range from popular reforms to… “Yes, We Mean Literally ‘Abolish the Police’”. In 2014, after the Michael Brown incident, there was a notable uptick of violent crime in many cities. Widely studied, most researchers believe the “Ferguson Effect”, a reduction in community policing and 911 calls due to mistrust, were a direct cause of the increased violence. In Baltimore, where police presence was reduced after the Freddie Gray riots, murders skyrocketed. Residents blamed it directly on the lack of police patrols. Charles Barkley asks a relevant question:

“Who the black people gonna call, Ghostbusters?”

Police shootings of blacks are down 75% since 1971. The Washington Post has kept statistics on fatal police shootings since 2015. Their summary, while noting the vast majority of the dead were armed, focuses heavily on racial disparity. When you dig into the data, however, you find this: Last year, out of 1001 fatalities, only 44 were unarmed. Of those, 10 were black. When you look at each individual case, only a handful were questionable shootings. Six were officers being assaulted. Two were unarmed men who threatened officers or claimed to have guns, and two, despite officers’ claim of seeing weapons which were later found, resulted in police being prosecuted. In a nation of 330 million, 43 million of whom are black, you have only 10 killed by police without a weapon. Only a couple of those, after intense investigations, were found to be inappropriate.

Black Harvard Professor Roland G. Fryer Jr. published a study showing blacks were about 18% more likely to be manhandled by cops but actually less likely to be shot. Given the much higher crime rate of blacks, the study shows blacks may be somewhat treated with deference. “It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Fryer. A recent study out of Washington State University found similar results.

U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow notes:  

·         Black males, 6 percent of the U.S. population, are responsible for 42% of cop killings in the last decade.

·         In 2015, a cop was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was likely to be killed by a cop.

·         Whites commit 59% and blacks commit 37.5% of violent crimes (murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault).

·         Blacks are approximately 6.8 times more likely than whites to be arrested for murder.

Kirsanow quoted Heather Mac Donald, author of “The War on Cops”:

Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5% of all black-white interracial violent victimizations (excluding interracial homicide, which is also disproportionately black-on-white). That works out to 540,360 felonious assaults on whites. Whites committed 14.4% of all interracial violent victimizations, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks.

Race of victim	Total	Race of offender				Sex of offender			Ethnicity of offender
		White	Black or African American	Other1	Unknown	Male	Female	Unknown	Hispanic or Latino	Not Hispanic or Latino	Unknown
White	3,315	2,677	514	61	63	2,914	383	18	803	1,476	1,036
Black or African American	2,925	234	2,600	17	74	2,603	291	31	83	1,878	964
Other race1	220	54	39	122	5	196	22	2	19	132	69
Unknown race	110	46	24	7	33	100	9	1	18	40	52

Blacks are three times more likely to be murdered than whites. Chicago alone had 800 murders in 2016, dropping to 510 in 2019. For every unarmed black person killed by police, there are approximately 300 black murder victims, 89% of whom were murdered by other blacks. Just this weekend in Chicago, 102 people were shot and 14 killed including a 13 and a  three year old boy. Who cares about these black victims? No, really. Who cares about them?

 Dead child Mekhi James, 3. 

Everything is about narrative. Cops are great. Cops are bad. Blacks are innocent victims. Blacks deserve what they get. The George Floyd narrative, like Freddy Gray, Trayvon Martin, Rayshard Brooks, and many others, is not so clean. Floyd had meth and synthetic heroin in his system and tested positive for Covid-19. Officer Chauvin had multiple complaints of excessive force. Stopping this is hard. Politicians have attempted to reform police departments many times. What usually happens? If you want your blood to boil, read this piece about reform attempts destroyed by police union libel, slander, and blackmail. If you want effective reforms both sides can support, don’t defund cops, take on their unions.

With all the outrage over racism, life has been getting better for blacks in nearly all areas, thanks in large part to pre-Covid record low unemployment and poverty for blacks but also due to a decades-long reduction in crime, increasing levels of education and continually improving attitudes about race. Sadly, some of this is starting to reverse. Yet, the outrage does not match reality.

 And what is the wreckage that restless rioters have wrought?  Too early for accurate estimates, the Claims Journal fears insured property damage may reach “catastrophe level.” 750 officers were injured in the first week of June alone. Murders are up 56% in Chicago and 100% in New York City in the last 28 days. As of 6/10/20, at least 12 police officers were shot, two of them murdered, including this guy…

...retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn, shot dead while trying to keep a pawn shop from being looted. Do black lives matter? If so, which ones?