RUTHFULLY YOURS

Imran Awan, the former Democrat IT staffer who was arrested last month at Dulles International Airport as he tried to flee the country amid an FBI and Capitol Police investigation, still has an active, secret email account on the House computer system, The Daily Caller reported Tuesday.

Awan and several members of his family — including his wife Hina Alvi — are being investigated by the FBI and Capitol Police for conspiracy, bank fraud, and cybersecurity violations. The clan was reportedly barred from using the computer networks at the House of Representatives back in February.

According to the Caller, Awan’s email address is still active “and linked to the name of a House staffer who specializes in intelligence and homeland security matters for Indiana Democratic Rep. André Carson.”

Court documents and emails obtained by TheDCNF show Awan used the address 123@mail.house.gov in addition to his standard imran.awan@mail.house.gov account.

He and two of his Pakistani-born brothers, as well as his wife, are at the center of an FBI investigation over their IT work with dozens of Democratic congressional offices. Authorities shut down Awan’s standard email account Feb. 2, and he was arrested by the FBI at Dulles International Airport trying to board a flight to his native Pakistan on July 25.

Authorities apparently did not realize Awan has a second account that is not linked to his identity. While his main email address began rejecting mail after it was shut down, the 123 address was still accepting mail Tuesday.

The Daily Caller’s intrepid reporter Luke Rosiak discovered that the account belongs to Nathan Bennett, a Carson aide whose work in Congress includes “national security and foreign affairs” and work on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The member Bennett works for, Carson, is a member of both the House Intelligence and House Homeland Security Committees, and previously employed Awan. CONTINUE AT SITE

The history of academic criminology is one of grand pronouncements that don’t often prove out in the real world. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, criminologists demanded that public policy attack the “root causes” of crime, such as poverty and racism. Without solving these problems, they argued, we could not expect to fight crime effectively. On this thinking, billions of taxpayer dollars poured into ambitious social programs—yet crime went up, not down. In the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, as crime rates continued to spike, criminologists proceeded to tell us that the police could do little to cut crime, and that locking up the felons, drug dealers, and gang leaders who committed much of the nation’s criminal violence wouldn’t work, either.

These views were shown to be false, too, but they were held so pervasively across the profession that, when political scientist James Q. Wilson called for selective incapacitation of violent repeat offenders, he found himself ostracized by his peers, who resorted to ad hominem attacks on his character and motivations. Wilson’s work was ignored by awards committees, and criminological reviews of his books, especially Thinking About Crime and Crime and Human Nature, were almost universally negative. In the real-world policy arena, however, Wilson attained significant influence: the Broken Windows theory of policing and public order, which Wilson developed with criminologist George Kelling, became a key part of the proactive policing strategies that would be largely responsible for the great crime decline starting in the mid-1990s.

In short, while academic criminology has had much to say about crime, most of it has been wrong. How can an academic discipline be so wrongheaded? And should we listen to criminologists today when, say, they call for prisons to be emptied, cops to act as glorified playground attendants, and criminal sentences to be dramatically reduced, if not eliminated? Answers to the first question are readily available—and suggest the answer to the second.

Academic criminologists are mainly sociologists, trained in statistics and armed with theories. Though most don’t study crime or violence directly, they have produced useful studies about offenders and the criminal-justice system. Through their work, we know, for example, that criminal behavior is strongly intergenerational, that relatively few people account for the majority of all crimes, and that some offenders desist from crime over time but many others simply change the types of crimes they commit. We also have learned that most offenders are generalists—that is, they commit a diverse assortment of crimes—and that steps can be taken to reduce criminal events by making them more difficult to carry out. Most criminals, it turns out, are lazy.

In other ways, though, criminologists’ lack of direct contact with subjects, situations, and neighborhoods—their propensity to abstraction—invites misunderstandings about the reality of crime. Most academics have never met with women who have been raped or children who have been molested, or seen the carnage wrought by a bullet that passed through a human skull, or spent a lot of time with police on the street. The gulf between numbers on a spreadsheet and the harsh realities of the world sometimes fosters a romanticized view of criminals as victims, making it easier for criminologists to overlook the damage that lawbreakers cause—and to advocate for more lenient policies and treatment.

Evidence of the liberal tilt in criminology is widespread. Surveys show a 30:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives within the field, a spread comparable with that in other social sciences. The largest group of criminologists self-identify as radical or “critical.” These designations include many leftist intellectual orientations, from radical feminism to Marxism to postmodernism. Themes of injustice, oppression, disparity, marginalization, economic and social justice, racial discrimination, and state-sanctioned violence dominate criminological teaching and scholarship, as represented in books with titles like Search and Destroy: African American Males in the Criminal Justice System, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.

A quick perusal of Presidential Awards for Distinguished Contributions to Justice, bestowed by the American Society of Criminology (ASC), shows that the winners were primarily rewarded for their left-wing advocacy. They included a judge in Massachusetts who advocated abolishing the state’s death penalty, an FBI agent who successfully sued the organization for ethnic discrimination, and a former director of juvenile corrections in Massachusetts who closed the state’s juvenile reformatories and wrote a book alleging that the system hunted down black men for sport. The society also honored Zaki Baruti, a radical black activist in St. Louis known for his hatred of police and support for leftist causes.

Recently, the ASC’s policy committee sent a mass e-mail to members, asking for help in countering a Wall Street Journal editorial written by Heather Mac Donald, a longtime City Journal contributing editor and a writer known for eviscerating liberal claims about the police and the justice system. Mac Donald argued that because of increased scrutiny and charges of racism, police had rolled back their efforts to deter crime, at least in minority communities, resulting in rising violence in many cities across the country. She called this the “Ferguson Effect,” after the town in Missouri where the (justified) police shooting of Michael Brown, a young black man, in 2014 ignited riots and gave rise to a new anti-law-enforcement push from advocates, the press, and Democratic politicians. The existence and extent of the Ferguson Effect is an empirical question that can be debated. But it is telling that the ASC had never shown any interest in rebutting the hundreds of editorials that repeated factually baseless claims about police shootings or the racism supposedly embedded in the criminal-justice system. Only Mac Donald’s work was singled out—as was Wilson’s, years earlier.

At one of the big summer events that enthrall those who dwell inside the D.C. bubble, interns from Conservatism, Inc. square off against interns from Libertarian, Inc. at a debate hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute. The annual event, which occurred earlier this month, once again exposed a problem that has hounded conservatives for quite some time: they’ve forgotten how to persuade. They speak in clichés. And even the youngsters sound like old fogeys. https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/30/black-hole-modern-conservative-rhetoric/

“From what I observed,” writes Maria Beiry, an editorial assistant for the American Conservative who reported on the event, “millennials at this debate—many of whom will go on to be leaders in Washington—were not taking to conservatism.”

Why not? While the libertarians “favored data” and used it “to not only drive home their points but also to call into question the conservative argument,” conservatives spurned those arguments and “favored philosophy.”

“At the mention of philosophers such as Aristotle,” Beiry reports, “audible ‘what’s’ and ‘heh’s’ could be heard among the students.”

Jargon and Checklists
These difficulties flow from a central problem: conservatives seem to go out of their way not to be understood. More and more, there appears to be nothing of substance behind the jargon they employ.

Just as “Christianese”—used increasingly in Evangelical Christian circles—has had a tendency to crowd out biblical orthodoxy, “conservatese” has similarly tended to push aside anything of intellectual substance in political conservatism. Words and phrases that have been carefully crafted in the conservative echo chamber sound a false note when they’re used in front of audiences who aren’t predisposed to nod their heads in agreement.

And over time, such language has had a wearing and wearying effect on those who use it, dulling their minds in the process. Conservative rhetoric has become full of slogans and shortcuts for arguments—mere boxes on a checklist—rather than invitations to dialogue and debate.

As Paul Gottfried points out, vague sentiments such as “the permanent things” and words like “values” appropriated and defined in the popular imagination by Progressives have come to define conservative rhetoric. It’s become a bit of a joke that’s apparently over the heads of those who regularly speak in such dreary ways.

Modern conservative rhetoric also has a penchant for the non-political, attempting to drain political life of its vitality and seeking to replace it with the contemplative life simply.

For instance, the notion that “beauty will save the world” heard on many a serious liberal arts campus offers no real guidance for politics and can be harmful for the young, especially because they are so likely to misunderstand it. Children, after all, are typically moved by their untutored passions rather than by reason and often mistake ugliness or fads for beauty. On an intellectual level, this kind of rhetoric is imprecise, sloppy, and undermines the philosophical foundations upon which the conservative project is built. Cut it out, already.

Conservative Rhetoric on Race
Not all conservative rhetoric, however, is quite so self-defeating.

The argument from some conservatives that the “Democrats are the real racists” should not be so easily dismissed. It is an understandable attempt to turn the tables on their foes, pointing out that Republicans have a much better track record on civil rights and simultaneously laying bare the Democrats’ grim legacy on race.

Gerard Alexander, for example, has demolished the narrative that the Republicans’ rise in the South in the latter half of the 20th century was due to racism. In a deep dive into the research, he shows

the GOP finally became the region’s dominant party in the least racist phase of the South’s entire history, and it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region’s growing and confident communities—not its declining and fearful ones.

The GOP, of course, was founded on anti-slavery principles. The Republican Party platform of 1856 opposed both slavery and, interestingly, polygamy, calling them the “twin relics of barbarism.”

Democrats, in contrast, historically have been more opposed to the principle of natural human equality than not. From Alexander Stephens, who as the vice president of the Confederacy argued that the principle of equality was an “error,” to Barbara Norton, a Louisiana state representative who said that the founders were “teaching . . . a lie” when they wrote “all men are created equal,” Democrats have habitually been on the wrong side of human equality.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left outfit that labels mainstream conservative organizations “hate groups” and whose “hate map” inspired a terrorist attack in 2012, has released a map of every Confederate monument in America. But the map does not just include statues: it also lists towns, cities, counties, and even middle schools that bear the names of Confederate generals.

“More than 1,500 Confederate monuments stand in communities like Charlottesville with the potential to unleash more turmoil and bloodshed,” the SPLC posted with the map (emphasis added). “It’s time to take them down” (emphasis original).

The post urges visitors to send a letter to the editor of their local newspaper. “White supremacists incited deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week in defense of a Confederate monument. We must show the country that [your city’s or county’s name] gives no safe harbor to such hatred. We must remove the monument at [location],” the sample letter read.

“If our government continues to pay homage to the Confederacy, people of color can never be sure they will be treated fairly,” the letter continued. “And we will never solve our community’s problems if an entire group of citizens is alienated or feels targeted for discrimination.”

As is often the case when the SPLC takes up a cause, this issue is far from clear cut. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that 62 percent of Americans supported leaving “statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy” standing. At the same time, 86 percent of those in the poll said they disagreed with white supremacy and 73 percent said they disagreed with white nationalists.

Even African Americans favored keeping the statues (44 percent to 40 percent). Indeed, a group in Dallas organized to protect Confederate statues — and the members are mostly African-American.

“I’m not intimidated by Robert E. Lee’s statue. I’m not intimidated by it. It doesn’t scare me,” former city council member Sandra Crenshaw, a black woman, told CBS Dallas-Fort Worth. “We don’t want America to think that all African Americans are supportive of” removing the statues. She denounced as “misguided” the idea that “by taking a statue down, that’s going to erase racism.”

But the SPLC not only encourages this “misguided” idea, it warns of “more turmoil and bloodshed” unless the statues are removed.

The group does not only list statues, either. Its Confederate map includes counties named after Confederate generals like Lee County, Fla., in the Fort Myers area. It also includes parks like Confederate Park in Demopolis, Ala. It lists cities like the city of Fort Bragg in California. CONTINUE AT SITE