Category: Social Factors

As the Police Are Scorned and “Progressive” Prosecutors Settle In, Murder Explodes Across America

by · Jul 6, 2020 12:36 pm

The New York Times today makes some efforts to explain away the story, but for the most part tells it straight up:  Murder is surging in cities across the country:

Overall crime is down 5.3 percent in 25 large American cities relative to the same period in 2019, with violent crime down 2 percent.

But murder in these 25 cities is up 16.1 percent in relation to last year. It’s not just a handful of cities driving this change, either. Property crime is down in 18 of the 25 sampled cities, and violent crime is down in 11 of them, but murder is up in 20 of the cities.

Continue reading . . .

Abolish the Police? “That Would Be Suicide.”

by · Jul 3, 2020 9:02 pm

The types  —  mostly white  — who went to Columbia and NYU Law and take the limo out to their weekend place in the Hamptons are none too pleased with the NYPD.  Their man, Mayor Bill de Blasio, just cut the police budget by a billion dollars, in a time of dramatically rising violent crime.

But New Yorkers who lead ordinary lives have a different view.  Asked about the prospect of abolishing the police, the response made up in common sense what it lacked academic refinement:  “That would be suicide.”

The commentary in the Western Journal lays it on the line.

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Because Black Lives Matter, Save Them Instead of Sacrificing Them to Blind Ideology

by · Jun 28, 2020 2:31 pm

As I noted in an earlier post, no normal person disagrees with the proposition that black lives matter.  So the obvious question is:  What can we do to preserve and enhance them?

This is not a hard question, because we’ve been preserving and enhancing black lives for an entire generation.  We didn’t do it by tearing down statues, defacing monuments, chucking bricks through store windows or setting up lawless “autonomous zones.”  Liberals know perfectly well how we did it, but don’t want to admit it because that would confound The Received Woke Wisdom.  Jason Riley of the WSJ spills the beans, however.

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The Black Lives Matter Agenda, in Its Own Words

by · Jun 26, 2020 7:15 am

Since no normal person thinks that black lives do not  matter, I thought it would be worthwhile trying to see what else is in the Black Lives Matter program.  Fortunately, this got looked into by Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine.  Here are some of the goodies:

The retroactive decriminalization, immediate release and record expungement of all drug related offenses and prostitution, and reparations for the devastating impact of the “war on drugs” and criminalization of prostitution, including a reinvestment of the resulting savings and revenue into restorative services….

Reparations for the wealth extracted from our communities through environmental racism, slavery, food apartheid….

A divestment from industrial multinational use of fossil fuels and investment in community- based sustainable energy solutions….

In other words, BLM has ambitions well beyond, and having nothing to do with, police behavior.  It has a comprehensive, far Left agenda taking root in a vision of America as a centuries-long racist cesspool.

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The Supposed Distinction Between Peaceful Protesters and Bomb Throwers

by · Jun 16, 2020 11:37 am

We have been repeatedly admonished to distinguish between peaceful protesters, on the one hand, and rioters and arsonists, on the other.  For many of those in the Defund movement, my guess is that that’s a fair and needed distinction.  But many isn’t everyone.  As we now hear from a leading voice on the Left, Nation magazine, violence and looting are not the mere occasional incident, or a few hotheads or opportunists taking advantage.  Violence is integral to achieving their aims.

The beans get spilled here:  In Defense of Destroying Property

 

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The World’s Most Intelligent Virus

by · Jun 15, 2020 3:03 pm

It’s not exactly news at this point that we are beset with a deadly (at least to older people) virus that spreads easily in crowds.  It’s for this reason that we now have enforced social distancing and are strongly encouraged to use face masks in public.

What wasn’t known until recently is that, remarkably, the virus can tell (1) if you want to visit grandma in the hospital or attend your kid’s high school graduation, in which case it will spread like crazy and you must keep your distance (or, frequently, stay home altogether); or (2) if you want to attend an anti-police rally or trash the local monument, in which case it will show Solidarity with the Cause and not spread one little bit!

National Review has the story Continue reading . . .

Tom Cotton’s Op-Ed and the Ensuing Gnashing of Teeth

by · Jun 13, 2020 1:12 pm

Sen. Tom Cotton, a combat veteran and a leader for sober, law-oriented criminal justice, wrote an op-ed for the NYT arguing that, if civilian police were unable or unwilling to restore order to cities ravaged by riots, arson and looting, the military should be called in.  Immediately there ensued an uproar inside the Times, which then apologized for running the piece.  The Times said the op-ed did not, on reflection, meet its “standards,” never explaining, however, what those standards consist of.  It has since become obvious that they consist, not of honest debate  —  which used to be the standard for the discussion of public issues among opinion leaders  —  but of abject obedience to the new, “woke” party line of the extreme Left.

We are left to wonder whether the Times’ apology is the beginning of the end of journalism as we have known it and, even more ominously, of classical liberalism itself, now to be replaced by an updated version of the Cultural Revolution and enforced conformity of thought.  Ross Douthat, a committed NeverTrumper, explains why he’s worried. 

News or Parody?

by · Jun 10, 2020 7:54 pm

It’s getting harder and harder to tell whether you’re reading the New York Times or the Onion.  I’m going to quote the opening paragraphs from an article about how the anti-police movement is reacting to TV cartoons about police dogs (not a typo) and ask readers to guess the source. Continue reading . . .

Jason Riley Spills the Beans on Race, Policing, and the Media’s Pervasive Deceit

by · Jun 10, 2020 12:20 am

Jason Riley of the WSJ is one of the brightest and most honest observers of the real story with crime, race and policing.  His column today about Chicago’s murder crisis is short but devastating.  I repeat excerpts after the break, but the entire column is worth the read.  Here’s a sample:

The political left, with a great deal of assistance from the mainstream media, has convinced many Americans that George Floyd’s death in police custody is an everyday occurrence for black people in this country, and that racism permeates law enforcement. The reality is that the carnage we witness in Chicago is what’s typical, law enforcement has next to nothing to do with black homicides, and the number of interactions between police and low-income blacks is driven by crime rates, not bias. According to the Sun-Times, there were 492 homicides in Chicago last year, and only three of them involved police.

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