RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/548740-what-the-statistics-show-about-police-shootings-and-public-safety

Whatever the verdict in the trial of former Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd, that case — and the tragedy of another death, this time of 20-year-old Daunte Wright during a traffic stop in nearby Brooklyn Center, Minn. — should not be used to advance the narrative of systemic police racism and brutality nationwide. No one has done more to save and protect Black lives — indeed, all lives — than the men and women in police uniforms.  

Among the victims in today’s social and racial upheaval are the overwhelming majority of innocent, hardworking people living in minority communities who are being victimized by nationwide spikes in violent crime. Their communities already are beset by a lack of job opportunities and quality education — neither of which is their fault, nor the fault of the police — yet now they are beset by increased crime as well. Police have become victims, too, as they are expected to do the impossible while being attacked from all sides and portrayed as excessively violent or trigger-happy. 

Any discussion of policing and crime, including police interactions with minorities, is complicated and often turned into an emotional debate by an array of factors, including the sources and causes of crime itself. 

But let’s consider some statistics on police actions.

In New York City in 2018, 36,000 NYPD officers answered more than 6.1 million calls. In all of those calls, a total of 35 police shooting incidents were reported — despite one common refrain that the city’s police are trigger-happy. Of those 35 incidents, six involved police suicides or attempted suicides and four involved animals. So we are talking about barely .01 percent of shooting incidents, or 99.9 percent of police calls in which no shots were fired by the police.  

Not exactly a shooting gallery.

“It would be wrong, in my opinion, to suggest the United States is ready to explode. But the pendulum has been pulled far back by “woke” elitists. From their ivory-towered college classrooms, their sound-proofed newsrooms, their glitzed-up Hollywood studios, and the inner sanctums of their corporate offices, they seem unaware of what constitutes the typical American, what they think and how they feel. They are ignorant of the consequences of what they have wrought. Accusations of systemic racism and the teaching of Critical Race Theory foment divisiveness, and divisiveness leads to hate and hate leads to violence.”

The arc of a pendulum carries its bob in an equal and opposite direction from which it starts. Metaphorically, it describes our country, as politics is subject to the same laws of physics.

In 1937, Albert Einstein, then living in Princeton, New Jersey but thinking of the Europe he had left four years earlier, issued a warning: “Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perennially rejuvenated illusions.” Even without those extremes, political power in the U.S. has vacillated between Democrats and Republicans. In the seventy-six years since the end of World War II, Democrats have held the White House thirty-six years and the Republicans forty. Thus, political extremism has been contained, not by politicians but by the wisdom of voters. Even today, a balance exists. While the Presidency is held by Democrats, conservatives dominate the Supreme Court. And the Congress is divided, with the Senate split 50-50, and the House with Democrats up by 218-212, with five seats vacant. We are a divided nation, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as minority voices are heard and unafraid to speak out, and as long as extremism remains confined.

In February 1788, Thomas Jefferson looked hopefully at the incoming Presidency of George Washington, the only individual to win election (and re-election) without being a member of a political party. He wrote William Stephens Smith, a Federalist Representative from New York: “We are now vibrating between too much and too little government, and the pendulum will rest, finally, in the middle.” That turned out not to be true in the post-Washington years, and it is not true today. In the nation’s most extreme backlash, a Civil War broke out in 1861. A hundred years later, from the mid-1960s to the early-1970s, Civil Rights and the Vietnam War caused a backlash of protests that turned bloody.

Today, we are in the midst of another such turmoil. The difference, in my opinion, is that this time the causes are politically manufactured. There is no question that inequalities exist. They always have and always will. We are not equal in athleticism, intelligence, looks, aspirations or diligence. But today’s “victims” have little in common with those held in bondage a hundred and sixty years ago, with women who were denied the vote a hundred years ago, with blacks who had to comply with the lie of “separate but equal” public schools of sixty years ago, or with gays who were shunned two decades ago. We have come a long way, which is reason to celebrate, but we also acknowledge that all democracies are works in progress. Differences should be aired, respectfully and with tolerance for those whose opinions differ.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/19/white-terror-is-as-american-as-the-stars-and-stripes-how-the-left-is-answering-ibram-kendis-call-for-racial-strife/

Although its participants may not know it, our ruling class is speaking in Ibram X. Kendi’s tongue, and realizing his ‘antiracist’ vision.

Ibram Xolani Kendi, born Ibram Henry Rogers to a black liberation theology-adhering tax accountant father and health-care business analyst mother, is the Prophet of Wokedom to whom the likes of Twitter’s Jack Dorsey pays $10 million to prove his virtue.

Kendi is a bestselling author across several categories, with an ever-growing list of scholarly credentials and awards. He is ubiquitous in corporate media, on college campuses, and at elite conclaves. Perhaps most significant of all, Kendi’s ideas are permeating the commanding heights of society, trickling into every aspect of American life, and therefore turning him into a transcendent figure.

Kendi’s Ideas Serve Today’s Ruling Class

On the first day of the Biden-Harris presidency, the administration issued an executive order claiming America suffers from systemic racism, manifested in “[e]ntrenched disparities in our laws and public policies, and in our public and private institutions,” and charged the whole of the federal government with “affirmatively advancing equity” (emphasis mine).

Numerous other government and private institutions are following suit. Oakland is testing a program to provide 600 black, indigenous, or otherwise non-white families—and only these families—$500 per month for 18 months. A Boston medical center is implementing a pilot program to offer “preferential care based on race” and “race-explicit interventions.”

Critical race theory, ethnic studies, and a panoply of related teachings such as the 1619 Project version of American history pervade U.S. schools, while their supporters wage a war on merit for diversity and against any teacher who would dare dissent.

More than 100 executives leading major businesses recently came together to discuss ways they could swing their weight to challenge voting legislation, including Georgia’s, that they dishonestly portrayed as discriminatory. It’s just one data point in the continuing trend of corporate America’s race left that accelerated during the post-George Floyd tumult of 2020.

Increasingly the rationale for all leftist policies is “antiracism,” the movement Kendi leads. One example is casting the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic.” Although its participants may not know it, our ruling class is speaking in Kendian tongue, and aiming to realize his “antiracist” vision.

If America is fated to succumb to Kendiization—a term coined by a colleague that aptly captures our national moment—and live in a world of “antiracism,” it behooves us to examine the views of the man behind it.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2021/04/18/as-maxine-waters-calls-for-riots-in-the-streets-minnesota-national-guardsmen-shot-at-n2588123

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), a sitting member of Congress, took to the streets in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, where she called on riots to continue. She did so in the dead of the night, knowingly breaking curfew and encouraging others to do the same. As Hannah Nightingale with the Post Millennial reported, sure enough, something came of that. A news release from the Minnesota National Guard alerted that the Minnesota National Guardsmen security team were fired upon at about 4:19am, local time. Fortunately, the injuries two guardsmen sustained were minor. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/18/the-joe-biden-who-never-was/

These are the most radical first three months of a presidency since 1933, the most divisive—and certainly the most dangerous. And its catalyst is the myth of ol’ Joe from Scranton who has unleashed furies and hatreds never quite seen in modern American history.

“Woke” Joe Biden

At an age when most long ago embraced a consistent political belief, late septuagenarian Joe Biden suddenly reinvented himself as our first woke president. That is ironic in so many ways because Joe’s past is a wasteland of racialist condescension and prejudicial gaffes. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, he positioned himself as the workingman’s Democrat from Delaware (or, as Biden once beamed, “We [Delawareans] were on the South’s side in the Civil War.”). In truth, he exuded chauvinism well beyond that of his constituents. 

Biden’s concocted working-man schtick meant praising former segregationists of the Senate like Robert Byrd and James O. Eastland. He would talk tough about inner-city predators, even as he pontificated about his support for tough drug sentencing. Kamala Harris, without any political traction other than her race and gender, once predicated her unimpressive and early aborted presidential campaign on the single strategy of knocking Joe out of the primaries for his purported innate racism that hurt victims of color, such as herself, the deprived child of two Ph.Ds. 

Add up what Joe has said about race and it is hard to find any major political figure of either party who has been so overtly race-obsessed. His corny Corn Pop fables positioned Joe as the white working-class everyman. Indeed, he took on supposed gang bangers from the ghetto, standing them down, no less, with his own custom-cut chain. 

On the paternalistic flip side, Joe kindly allowed young African-Americans at poolside the chance to stroke their heroic lifeguard’s shimmering golden leg hairs, or so he tells us. 

As vice president, Biden condescendingly warned an audience of successful black professionals that a rather meek Mitt Romney had the superhuman ability to “put y’all back in chains.” 

Indeed, he warned them in a fake black patois, reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s grating “I don’t feel no ways tired.” In Bidenland, donut shops are full of Indians and the sum total of Barack Obama is the fact he was supposedly “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” 

We assume then that Joe was suggesting that Shirley Chisholm and Jesse Jackson could barely speak, were unkempt, and perhaps ugly in comparison to Barack Obama. The latter, other than his diction, fastidiousness, and appearance, apparently to Joe had not much to offer the country. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17296/police-related-deaths

These four cases taken together, demonstrate the considerable disparity among cases involving police related deaths. Each case presents different facts, different legal considerations, different moral conclusions, and different lessons to be learned. Let us consider them each separately, as they deserve.

Even if [Derek] Chauvin initially had the right to place his knee on Floyd’s neck or shoulder, there was no reason to do so after Floyd had been handcuffed and subdued.

[Officer Kim] Potter should not have been charged and should be acquitted if brought to trial. The decision to charge her was based not on the rule of law but on the demands of the crowds.

[I]t is unclear whether Officer [Eric] Stillman knew Toledo was no longer armed when Stillman pulled the trigger less than a second after Toledo threw his gun behind the fence, out of the view of the officer.

The refusal by radical anti-police bigots to acknowledge the dangers faced by decent, honest, non-racist police officers — which the vast, vast majority are — endangers us all.

Justice is a double-edged virtue. We need justice for the victims of police misconduct, and we need justice for those falsely or excessively charged with police misconduct.

[Congresswoman] Maxine Waters is seeking justice for neither. She is demanding vengeance without justice, without due process and without morality.

The police must be held accountable for deliberately employing excessive, especially deadly, force against minority and other individuals. But they, too, must be accorded the presumption of innocence and the due process of law. (The city manager of Brooklyn Center, Minn. was apparently fired simply for saying that Kim Potter would be accorded due process!) The rule of law must govern every case, without the heavy thumb of the angry crowd on the scales of justice.

The world is focused on three police-related deaths: the killing of George Floyd by former Officer Derek Chauvin; the shooting of Daunte Wright by former Officer Kim Potter; and the shooting of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old in Chicago, by Officer Eric Stillman. There is a fourth death that has not received comparable attention: Police Officer Darian Jarrott was murdered in cold blood by a career criminal, Omar Felix Cueva, whose car the officer stopped and politely asked for identification.