Below is an updated version of my column in The Hill newspaper on how the discussion of reforms following the killing of George Floyd has been increasingly overtaken by the most radical elements in politics and commentary. The atmosphere is strikingly similar for those familiar with history and specifically the course of the French Revolution. That image of reformists becoming reactionaries was particularly evident in New York Mayor Bill de Blasio being booed by a crowd calling for his resignation and the same response to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey when he refused to commit to defunding and dismantling the police department. In Washington, Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered the square near the White House to be named “Black Lives Matter” Square with giant letters painted on the street. BLM however denounced it as a meaningless stunt and activists added ‘Defund the Police.” Bowser refused to answer multiple questions on whether she would remove the added words. To do so is to risk a scene like the ones in Minneapolis and New York.
As writers, editors, and politicians yield to extreme measures, they might want to consider the fate of those who sought to ride the radical wave of the French Revolution.
Here is the column:
Jean-Paul Marat, one of the key leaders of the French Revolution, once mocked the notion that liberty could be established by his fellow revolutionaries since “apart from a few tragic scenes, the revolution has been nothing but a web of farcical scenes.”
Welcome to the French Revolution 2.0.
The tragic killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis resulted in an important focus on race relations and justice in this country. However, it is being lost to an emerging radicalism that challenges people to prove their faith by endorsing farce. Across the country, political leaders and commentators seem to outdoing each other in calling for a new order by attacking core institutions and values. There is much to be done after the tragic death of George Floyd, but there is a growing radical element fighting to out shout each other as leaders of a careening movement. Politicians are joining calls to “defund the police” and writers are calling for private censorship. Moderate voices seem to be fading with escalating demands that leaders demonstrate a truth faith by denouncing the values that define them.
Many are proving their faith by endorsing farce. Take those calls to “defund the police.” Once the mantra of only the most extreme elements in society, it has been picked up by elected leaders. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) has said that defunding all police should not “be brushed aside.” Brian Fallon, former public affairs director at the Justice Department and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign press secretary, has declared support for the movement.
Said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who represents part of Minneapolis: “The Minneapolis Police Department has proven themselves beyond reform. It’s time to disband them and reimagine public safety in Minneapolis. Thank you to @MplsWard3 for your leadership on this!”
Other politicians have joined pledges to go after police budgets or entire departments, even as their officers continue to maintain order and stop looting. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti declared that, despite the huge cost of the riots, he will refuse to expand the police budget. Instead, he said his administration has identified $250 million in cuts and pledged to give as much as $150 million from the police budget to the “black community … as well as communities of color, and women and people who have been left behind.”
In Minneapolis, city council member Jeremiah Ellison assured the public that “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. And when we’re done, we’re not simply gonna glue it back together.” Others, including Council President Lisa Bender, agreed. During the protests and rioting there, Ellison publicly proclaimed support for antifa, a violent and vehemently anti-free speech movement. In 2018, his father, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, supported the antifa movement as deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, tweeting that it would “strike fear in the heart of @realDonaldTrump.”
Politicians seem eager not to be left in the center of a movement shifting rapidly left. Democratic socialist and New York state senator Julia Salazar expressed her delight: “To see legislators who aren’t even necessarily on the left supporting [defunding or decreasing the police budget] … feels a little bit surreal.”
That surreal feeling is likely even more pronounced among looting victims whose stores are left unprotected while politicians and experts excuse such crimes entirely. Socialist Seattle council member Tammy Morales dismissed concerns about looting, insisting that “what I don’t want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told looting doesn’t solve anything.” New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones said that “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence” while, on CNN, Clifford Stott, a professor of social psychology at Keele University in England, said “looting is expression.”
Northwestern University journalism professor Steven Thrasher declared: “The destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response … Property destruction for social change is as American as the Boston Tea Party.” Of course, the patriots in Boston did not keep the tea and the looters seen running out of Target stores with flat-screen TVs do not seem like they are searching for a harbor for disposal.
As politicians rallied around defunding police or defending looting, the media had its own storming of the Bastille this week. Some journalists at the New York Times denounced the newspaper for publishing an opinion column by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on the use of troops to quell riots. Despite the outcry and calls for editors to resign, Times editorial page editor James Bennet and publisher A.G. Sulzberger gave full-throated defenses to using the opinion section to hear all sides of such national controversies.
That was a highpoint in journalistic ethics. It did not last. Hours later, Times editors confessed they had sinned in allowing a ranking U.S. senator to express a conservative viewpoint on the newspaper’s pages; they promised an investigation and a reduction in the number of opinions. The only thing we were spared was the appearance of Bennet and Sulzberger being rolled down the street in a French trumbrel for public judgment in Place de la Concorde.
Ultimately, the public self-flagellation of Bennet did not save him. As demanded by various writers, he resigned.
Even art and creative work apparently must be censored or erased in this new orthodoxy. In Dallas, the well-known statue of a Texas Ranger has been removed because an article in D Magazine referred to racist history connected to the rangers. USA Today reported on the possibility that TV cop shows, from “Dragnet” to “NYPD Blue” to “Law & Order,” must be taken off the air now, so as not to glorify police work.
History suggests, however, that such demonstrations may not be enough. As proven by the French Revolution, today’s revolutionaries are tomorrow’s reactionaries — or victims. Pierre Robespierre led that revolution’s “Reign of Terror” until he was guillotined as one of its last victims, and Dr. Marat’s “farcical scenes” ended with his own stabbing in a bathtub in retaliation for some of his own blood-soaked excesses. It is a cycle repeated in revolutions throughout history: When the music stops, fewer and fewer chairs can be found by those who readily embraced extreme measures.
That is why many of our leaders should consider the words of the French revolutionary Abbe Sieyes. Sieyes was a Catholic clergyman and the author of French Revolution’s manifesto of “What Is The Third Estate?” Yet, when asked what he had done during the French Revolution, he simply responded “I survived.”
Earlier This Year, Turley Promoted Sanders
Now Turley Sees How Bernie Bros Think
All throughout January and February, Turley kept telling us how the Democrats were rigging their nomination process against poor Bernie Sanders. Sanders, Turley told us, represented an important coalition of young, idealists who ‘needed to be heard’.
Turley didnt honestly care about Sanders or the Bernie Bros. Turley only wanted to split the Democrats so Trump could waltz to reelection. Foisting Sanders on the Democrats was a key component of Trump’s reelection strategy. But Black Democrats in particular rejected Sanders out of hand.
So now, in late spring, Bernie Bros are more active than ever amid civil unrest. And ‘yes’, they are scary radicals! The Bernie Bros have Maoist tendencies and they will subject us to a Cultural Revolution if we let them. The problem is that Donald Trump represents the ‘other’ extreme; far-right nationalists personified by small town militia types.
When crazy extremists like Trump make it to the White House, insanity becomes normalized. In this environment far-left Maoists look no less nutty than rank & file Trumpers. This is where we’re at right now and it’s the worst of scenarios.
As Trump’s prospects for reelection grow dimmer, he will no doubt act crazier than ever. Consequently the far-left will match Trump’s craziness. Which really goes to show that Republicans should have let Trump be impeached. Historians will view Trump’s impeachment as a lost opportunity Republicans mindlessly squandered.
The affluent young have been brought up in a make-believe world of naive idealism. Kids growing up in poverty and crime-infested neighborhoods are closer to the mindset of Alexander Hamilton. They know that humans occupy a broad moral spectrum — from rank depravity to typical self-interested amiability, to virtuous sacrifice for the wellbeing of others.
Unfortunately, Democrats have veered off in the direction of naive idealism.
My worries surround the poor job the left-leaning media are doing at informing — theirs is rather a mission of incitement.
The average young protester bathed in such propaganda knows all about the most blatant failings of the police nationwide, and can name half a dozen killings. But few would be able to converse about the steps dozens of cities have already taken to improve policing, whether tightening up hiring standards, improvements in training, community-based policing, hot-spot policing, and Civilian Review Boards (independent channels of accountability). This lack of awareness I lay directly at the feet of the left-leaning media…what claim do they have to informing the public?
Some of the police reforms underway are working better than others — this is to be expected. Implicit bias training has not produced good results, perhaps because it teaches that only whites have instinctual biases to be tamed, when in reality, all humans involved in conflicts need good impulse control. Better grounded in science are the findings of infant psychologists, who find a “self-similarity preference” exists in all infants, as well as innate awareness of racial self-similarity and difference that underlies it. The champions of intrinsic bias training didn’t get the memo.
I personally think the strident left would shrink from the hardened militancy and personal risk needed to attempt a revolution. Their main danger is to pollute the marketplace of ideas with pointy fingers of accusation, while distracting themselves and others from study of good policing — from the spread of successful reforms.
Yes, almost all the reforms that are bearing fruit are postracial in their conception and implementation. We need to hound journalists about their responsibility to play a more constructive role, and to seek out the reform experiments that are working….and to commit to paying attention to successful policing. We need to gently remind journalists that to turn away from the good is….fill in the blank.
This is a repeat of the Maoist Cultural Revolution. All sorts of videos online of people being forced to kneel and apologize for their white privilege, standing in line to wash and/or kiss the feet of BLM leaders, etc. Leftist academia has been working to achieve these results for decades. And urban areas instituting rank voting in their local elections have pushed them over the top.
Gonna be an interesting few years ahead of us.
Right up to the Pluto return in the U.S. natal chart which becomes exact in spring of 2022.
According to astrologers we will either re-affirm our founding principles or let them go forever and move on.
The French people And their Revolution:. Many folks call French citizensfrogs. They eat frogs. In WW II many french, and many in government participated with the German invaders and the Holocaust. Their role gets ignored by media today. When they ran Lousiana they had sex with alligators.
I was with you until you mentioned sex with alligators. Apparently you haven’t been around alligators. Never put any part you want to keep near an alligator.
One very clever thing the French did was run their vehicles on wood when gasoline was scarce. I will let you figure out how. It can be done.
I ate at a Cajun restaurant. Frogs taste good as did all the rest their food.
“Insurrection grows by what all other things die of.” — Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution – A History, 1844.
We would do well to remember how (and when) The French Revolution ended; quickly, with that “Whiff of grapeshot,” fired from the cannons of the young, previously obscure French General, Napoleon Bonaparte, in front of the Église Saint-Roch, in Paris, 1795.
“… the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and become a thing that was !”
Shooter– Good quote from a great historian. Dickens is said to have claimed he read Carlyle’s history 300 times. Schama’s more recent history” Citizens” is also very good.
Having failures at dispersing mobs in the past Carlyle says this time the cannons were in the hands of someone who knew how to handle them, Napoleon. The mob lost.
It’s often a difficult read, stylistically, compared to modern English, but I have read it five times, each with more understanding and appreciation for Carlyle’s insights.
So many wonderful quotes: “One goes to sleep rich and wakes up penniless, one might as well be in Turkey.” Jacques Necker to Louis XVI, 1789.
Shooter– It is a difficult read. I am on my fourth turn and each time I learn more and enjoy it more. Schama’s account is great, and it is straight history; Carlye is poetry and he carries one into events as only poetry can. And I agree, it is full of wondeful quotes, truly a pleasure to read over and again like listening to a favorite symphony, and it cannot be rushed if it is to be savored. Thank you for bringing it up.
I just remembered the powerful scene Carlyle painted of the gorgeous royal carriage bobbing like a cork in a sea of excited and dangerous humanity as it carried the King and Queen from Versailles to Paris. They never saw Versailles again. What a wonderful, moving, outrageous and sad history it is.
His is the only account I read that said the skin of some of the victims of the guillotine was tanned and worn, men making better leather for having thicker skin.
Have you also read Gibbons? That is another extraordinary experience.
Sadly, I have not read Gibbons at length, only excerpts now and again. On my list. (It’s a long list.) Thanks.
Napoleon also believed that putting the mob down swiftly and firmly saved lives. He had years before watched the wavering defense at the Tuilleries that ended with the murder of the Swiss Guards and thought then it could have gone differently if the king and guards had been more decisive. He was usually right about such matters.
Our FBI and now our Democrat politicians kneel to the mob.
Soon nothing can be done without approval from the Council of the Wokerati.
What now (15 November 2020) one wonders? Even a blind man can see we are on the edge of a precipice …
We need to be honest and name those who have aided and abetted these radicals – the Democrats and the DNC. Formerly mainstream Democrats were quiet as they let themselves be run over by radicals. Democrats, bowed before radicals and supported extremists and extreme issues. Democrats lied about members of the Trump Administration – Sessions, Flynn, Kavanaugh, C Page, the list is endless. Democrats watched meekly as their radical compadres tried to take down anyone who disagreed. Democrats sat silent while lies were told repeatedly, more so over the last 3 years, but consistently over the last 2 decades. The Democrats – yes all of them – have prostrated in front of radicals who hated them as much as they hated conservatives. The Democrats and the DNC have no morals or ethics. Power and hatred are their calling card. The are complicit in it all and responsible for it all.
That is rich. The President retweeted this comment: the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat. He has spent his entire Administration sowing hate and division. He’s very clear that he wants to suppress the vote because if too many people vote the Republicans will lose. The attack on peaceful protesters with gas, flush bangs and a military Tactics is a symptom of his view of the AMERICAN People.
Gee, and I thought Justice Holmes died in 1935, your honor.
People confuse a disparity, which is a difference, with racism, which would be a cause.
Anytime there is a racial disparity, it is touted as institutional racism. But that would require the systematic, deliberate bias against blacks. Jim Crow and South African Apartheid would be examples.
Blacks fare worse than other demographic groups in education, so it’s called racist. Actually, a nuclear family, strong emphasis on education in the home, and help with homework would have addressed that. While I have many complaints about the sad stated of the public education system, school administrators and teachers are not all racist, deliberately keeping black students down.
There is already a system in place to deal with police misconduct. All 4 officers involved in George Floyd’s death have been charged.
But that’s not enough for the mob. They scream that all cops are racist, and to defund them. That is not in support of black lives; that’s in support of criminals.
Outright homicide under color of law will be prosecuted. But cops are getting afraid to do their jobs. They are put into positions where they are expected to get physical, and even fight with criminals at times. Yet, the armchair quarterbacks will parse their every movement on video from the safety of their homes. Going to work every day, they now have to worry about going to prison. It’s not worth it.
The sheer gratuitousness of this is what amazes. The utter perversity. I have occasion to see what street-level Democrats are saying among themselves right now. They have no value as civic actors.
Of course Democrats oppose Trump etc. And of course they are as penetrated by radicals and opportunists as they have been fore decades.
Instead ask why the Republican party leadership at the local level, in the absence of national leadership, has utterly failed to embrace to embrace Trump and Trump voters.
They had 3 years and plenty of money to build a real infrastructure and failed. That was their last chance. They blew it. They were foot draggers and lazies and country club types. Trump was too boorish for them. They had no idea what was waiting, because they had refused to read the signs for decades. In short, the people got a leader, but his own party screwed him out of foot dragging and laziness.
It is all headed towards a one party state now.
“Infrastructure”?
“Leader”?
What’s wrong with this guy?
The money for infrastructure went to sheer graft and upscale tax breaks. The corruption of the Trump administration and it’s local underlings jumping out of the trojan horse behind will be studied for its sheer crime scene in a portapotty foulness for generations.
No significant new money was appropriated for “infrastructure”, even though Trump ran on that promise. Democrats signaled – and continue to signal – their willingness to vote for it, and Trump has done nothing about it – with them or with his GOP allies in Congress.
I would like to congratulate our leftists colleagues in their latest attempt to create heaven on earth. Many have tried to create such a utopia in the past but I am certain this time their efforts will be met with success. I only ask that every leftist who supports the BLM agenda and advocates dismantling the police be forced to live under the same conditions they insist for others.
What could possibly go wrong?
antonio
As someone who lives in deep Blue California can attest, the Democrat Party has moved away from law and order, and preferentially supports people who break the law, and/or do not pay taxes, over those who obey the law and/or do pay taxes. Endorsing Illegal immigration. Sanctuary Cities. Emptying jails over and over again, even before Covid-19. Increasing the threshold for felony theft to $950, so that shoplifters can steal with impunity. Calling looters and rioters agents of change. Defund the police. Calling the lawful conviction of African Americans who commit crimes a racist mass incarceration.
On top of that, nothing is ever your fault, as long as you belong in that protected category. It’s the white cis-gendered man’s fault. If this was the French Revolution, as in Professor Turley’s article, then the white cis-gendered, Christian male would be the landed gentry headed to the guillotine.
The issue requires being able to hold a couple separate but equal truths at the same time, something this blog has sincere problems doing. Yes, emotionalism takes over any political movement. Happened with Bernie. Happened with the tea party. Happened with Trump…
And emotionalism will slide from an evolutionary pattern to a revolutionary one. Painful as it is to consider Trumpism a revolution ( it really wasn’t. It culminated in a technical victory in a low turnout election that is soon to be reversed).
But there is now revolutionary fervor in the air around the issue of police brutality and throwing the baby out with the bath water is creeping in. Does that mean there shouldn’t be fundamental change in policing in America? Absolutely not. We’re seeing the logical culmination of the crackdown behind 9/11 and sentiment like the Patriot Act. Most truly experienced law enforcement inside the government saw the danger then of lowering the bar both in terms of policing and gathering of intelligence was not just in the tendency for excess — it lowered the quality of restraint and the intelligence gathered as well. Waterboarding didn’t get better intell…it got coerced intell. Taking restraints off the police didn’t get a better behaved citizenry, it got way too many thug cops. Not that thug cops were a new entity, they’ve been with us forever.
But skilled and effective law enforcement is no joke. And willingly turning backs to the funding of the police writ large isn’t the way to get there. Systematic reform is a necessity. Starting right now.
Hellvis– “But skilled and effective law enforcement is no joke. And willingly turning backs to the funding of the police writ large isn’t the way to get there”
Interesting conclusion to your liberal screed. Translate: still a liberal but got scared when the anarchists you cheered got too close to home.
Dude, I grew up during forced bussing in the ’70’s in Denver with a Dad who worked intelligence. One of my best friends just retired from career State Dept. postings around eastern Europe and Africa. Practicality is my one and only fliter.
Another one of my best friends growing up is on the show Grey’s
Anatomy, so there’s that also. Lol.
Any rate, your attempt to translate my thoughts into ‘liberal screed’ is a dumb as it is simple. GFY.
“Waterboarding didn’t get better intell…it got coerced intel.”
That sounds like typically progressive confusion. Was the ‘coerced’ intel wrong? Even if equally right sooner is usually better than later. Can’t tell if you are for or against it.
Only a liberal believes his credibility is increased by having a best friend act on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’. Why was that supposed to increase your intellectual weight?
” I’m not a doctor but I play one on television and that makes one of my best friends smart.” Good grief.
Irony alert: mentioned my friend acting as a joke. Comedy being rooted in incongruency and all. My apologizes, I’ll slow down and diagram the joke next time, chin.
As far as waterboarding, it’s lack of effectiveness is well regarded as being true these days. Look it up. Read interviews of those who actually did it. Even just spare a second of thought to the practicality of getting information solicited through torture…, people will say anything during it to make it stop. Even if it were true intell to begin with, by the time the torture stops it’s not current anymore. Here’s a hint: time to take your tongue out of Dick Cheney’s b hole, he doesn’t even like the fact you’re willing to go there.
waterboarding has nothing to do with this. i always opposed the method we used to call “chinese water torture” and of course they will say anything to get it to stop. it is against the geneva convention. it is unwise. worst of all, it weakens the taboos against torturing prisoners and can lead to them torturing american POWs too. i always opposed it and it has nothing to do with this
nor even does the flawed if not homicidial police methods applied to george floyd by chauvin and his errant partners. nothing in that tragedy justifies one single rock thrown, building torched, or cop shot in reply
and plenty of cops been shot the past week. anarchy unleashed. dont apologize for it
Intelligence, practicality and the State Department in one breath. Interesting.
Yeah. I’m good like that.
What can you do in one breath, mistress?
“I grew up during forced bussing in the ’70’s in Denver with a Dad who worked intelligence. One of my best friends just retired from career State Dept.”
You are a clone and a clown announcing his lineage and close proximity to the civil rights movement. Guess who.
Allan– I was waiting for him to say many of his best friends are black.
…And some of the people that ran into the Hellvis style mob are ‘black and blue’.
Good one!
Thanks Young. This one was easy.
+1 Hellvis.
I seriously doubt radicals will prevail except in a few localized communities.. Bernie lost by a wide margin, proving that at lest the Democrats are a centrist party, eve if the GOP no longer is.
Book, if you are a typical Democrat, the Democrats are not centrist.
Yeah Young, Book and I both fit into the pragmatic wing of the dems I suspect. Hard to recognize during what’s happened beneath the red hats and all I know. Time to waterproof those hats — not sure they’ll weather that well when all y’all have to climb back under the rocks next jaunuary.
DK about you Hellvis, but my primary candidate has won every Democratic race since ’92, so I think I can claim to fairly represent the party mainstream. Each of those candidates won the popular vote in the general except Kerry, so center of the electorate as well. I pride myself on being pragmatic, also a centrist position.
Pocahontas split the vote, but why expect a dem to know what their own party does.
It’s Mad Max Thunderdome & Max (Mel Gibson) tries to negotiate with Aunt Entity (Tina Turner). Laws were broken & penalties must be paid. Justice is a roll of the dice.
J H Kunstler put it beautifully today:
———-
Requiem For George Floyd
The occasion of the state funeral for the late George Floyd — rivaling the solemn progress of Abraham Lincoln’s casket across this land at lilac time so long ago — may be a good time for Americans to take stock of what condition our condition is in. Going on a fortnight of protests, riots, and looting, what exactly does black America seek in its cry for an end to systemic racism? Forgive me for saying the petition is vague. I’ll have to tread into realms of discourse that are taboo these days, so gird your loins if you care to follow.
Is there a campaign of police genocide against black people? The facts and numbers say emphatically no. (They’re discussed in detail in many articles by Heather MacDonald at City Journal.) Is it true that “black people aren’t heard?” If you follow The New York Times, America’s “newspaper of record,” that’s all you will hear. Has justice been denied in the killing of Mr. Floyd? Four cops have been swiftly arraigned on grave charges. Are black people denied the privilege of governing their own affairs? Many cities are run by black mayors, police chiefs, and district attorneys where, year by year, social dysfunction has only gotten worse.
Is a substantial portion of the black population not thriving in comparison to whites and other racial or ethic groups? Apparently so. The only truly systemic dynamic in their plight is the campaign by government, ongoing for more than fifty years, to uplift them with social programs, cash assistance, and affirmative action, plus monuments, prizes, and holidays, and very vocal public encouragement from “allies” in media, entertainment and sports. All this “help” only seems to make the problems worse.
It’s beyond obvious after a half a century and trillions of dollars spent that well-intentioned government support destroyed black family formation. Seventy-five percent of black children are raised these days in households without fathers because cash assistance is forbidden where there is “a man in the house.” Everybody knows the problem is generational and severe. Paying unmarried women (often just girls) to have babies can easily be seen as leading to many social disadvantages. Who is militating to change that — say, to allow cash assistance to married couples? Nobody, most particularly black America. Why? Because it’s an established racket, a hustle, a pattern of living, complete with customs and rituals, such as giving over young black men to prison as an initiation to manhood. Why are they sent to prison? Because they commit crimes.
The bamboozlement over this was especially vivid last week in the contrast between the sanctimony of the daytime protest marches and the nighttime looting, vandalism, and arson, of which there are hundreds of videos on the web, showing young black Americans acting like savages. The police all over America didn’t dare try to stop it lest they produce a new martyr to aggravate the insurrection. No plea arose from leaders in black communities across the land to stop the disgraceful behavior. It was not even recognized as disgraceful, rather regarded as a necessary ceremony for purging the bad feelings over George Floyd’s gruesome death at the knee of George Floyd.
Why not try succeeding at school rather than prison? School has different requirements. I will venture an idea which is not just taboo, but taboo to an extreme: many black children cannot succeed in school because they do not speak English correctly at home and the schools have, as a definite policy, done nothing to correct that because it would be labeled as “racist.” If your language dispenses with grammatical form — such as the difference between the expression of past, present, and future — you’re liable to suffer cognitive disadvantages which results in doing poorly at school. You may even be incapable of showing up on time for anything.
The number one job in elementary school should be teaching children first to speak English, because without it, they’ll struggle to learn anything else. But we’re not interested. It might hurt someone’s feelings to learn that their speech is deficient. It might anger a parent to hear that. So, we choose to let the children fail. It’s a choice we make by consensus. Here’s some news for you: multiculturalism is itself a form of racism that ghettoizes language. Do you want that to continue? Are you really interested in change? Change that. Start there.
This points to a deeper and more fundamental question: Does black America really want to fully participate in our national life, or do they want to remain an oppositional faction within it, dependent, resentful, and violent? The George Floyd fiasco has distracted the country from the most severe economic crisis of the century, so far. Do you understand how much thought and effort it will take to reorganize America’s economic life? We are not going back to the way things were before the year 2020. A lot of familiar arrangements will not continue. Comforts and conveniences are phasing out. We don’t have time for histrionics. Can we please just respectfully bury this troubled man and get on with the tasks at hand?
——-
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
The campaign to aid blacks in universities has taken a turn that even the Babylon Bee can’t keep ahead of: at UCLA and the University of Washington the demand is for a separate and easier grading system for blacks.
Separate But Not Equal is the latest Progressive idea.
It’s almost as if Progressives believe black people aren’t very smart on average.
Oddly, this could be an improvement. For years academia has been lowering stsndards to preserve diversity and the external appearance of equality. With a system of Black Grades and Everyone Else Grades they can at least restore standards to Everyone Else.
If they could get away with it [and maybe they do in some schools] they could skip classes and just give black students a folder of Black Grades and a football and send him to the practice field or to the protest against something or other.
To your point about language, it would be interesting to hear from teachers whose students speak perfectly fluent English at school, and a second language perfectly fluently at home – and often act as interpreters for family and friends who speak English only rarely.
You have explained the problem exactly, but no one will listen to it.
I don’t know if it’s all that radical to call for Bill De Blasio’s resignation.
At least some 500 police across the country have been killed or injured. Does that make sense?
The similarites, thus far, to the French Revolution are disturbing. The madness of the ‘intellectuals’ and the ‘elites’ has begun to infect people who should know better. The French Revolution began at the upper reachers of French society and ran down to torrents of blood in the gutters. Bastille Day should be a day of national mourning in France. We don’t want our own.
The consistent ingredient of history is the ability to refer to it selectively. Revolution is change made abruptly that is long overdue. The US Revolution included much racism, bigotry, ideological mumbo jumbo and stands today for arguments going in all directions. The founding fathers took away from Great Britain the ownership of slaves and protected that ownership. The Civil War was a sort of revolution for evil. It is still going on. The second amendment is a perfect example of perverse reference and interpretation. There is not one word that refers to the individual’s right to arm itself and take the place of the ‘well regulated militias’ intended. Yet it is perversely referenced. The French Revolution included mob manipulation, ideological trysting, and tens of thousands of executions of innocents. The pendulum had swung so far to the oppressive right that Newton’s third law was the result. Americans are no better. Study the past. Be truthful. The scum of the earth are to be found in every country at any time. Refer to America’s pathetic and hypocritical attempt to respond to hundreds of years of slavery. The responses are still being tossed around. Witness the racist bigoted economically driven leadership. Listen to the disgrace of our President and ask yourself if royalty is not poking its perverse head up out of where the sun don’t shine.
Issac: “Revolution is change made abruptly that is long overdue. The US Revolution included much racism, bigotry, ideological…”
You packed a lot of b.s. in your statement and it is not worth my time to contest it. However, in simple fact the French Revolution took place over years rather than abruptly. Read about it.
The French Revolution, took years, but was abrupt when measured against almost all social evolution. The seeds of both the American Revolution and the French Revolution were sown over many years throughout the ‘Age of Enlightenment’. The American and French Revolutions were abrupt moments of change. The concepts of both revolution have been in the minds of men who make it to an age to have experienced life and have the time to think. Read your Pre-Socratic fragments.
Okay, if you think so. But you’re wrong. Forget Socrates. He didn’t actually say much about the French Revolution. Try reading about the French Revolution itself. Pick up Carlyle’s history or Schama’s.
what Plato observed about democracy, is that it ends in chaos and tyranny. something like that. which was the story of the French revolution thousands of years later. i am not sure if Isaac got the memo or not. see, “the Republic.”
Isaac has a few nuggets of insight in his verbal dungheap
The analogy to the French revolution is simple. The rising rich men of the cities, the bourgeoisie, wanted to take down the Church and King, so they could let their power run more freely.
They instigated chaos in the Capitol, by riling up the lumpenproletariat, and sicking them on the forces of order.
The chaos opened their door for their other patsies to take control, and the class-murder of aristocrats began.
The beneficiaries were not the sans-culottes, the real winners were the merchants.
This is Marxists style analysis, and in America, a country which was born out of a similar budding-capitalist revolt against feudalism, the reality is obscured.
Right now, i can see it with tools of Marxism I learned at university. I hated it but now i see the value.
I can also see how today’s top billionaires who control finance capital, mass media, social media, and other institutions, want to stifle a middle class revolt lead by Trump, and they have again weaponized the lumpenproletariat to seed disorder and intimidate the legacy population into submission. They are also advocates of globalism.
I have to go back to Lenin’s insightful essay “Imperialism as a late stage of capitalism” to explain this to people, but my Republican and conservative friends don’t like me invoking Marxist thinking because they have been conditioned against it by their incompetent right wing intellectual leadership.
See i am a Trump voter, and I reject the slouching towards capitalism’s last stage of global imperialism ie just now what is called GLOBALISM
the irony is the CCP are communists but they are Chinese nationalist communists, and they want to use globalism to destroy America, their rival, in favor of a new globalist order in which THEY are the plurality and the enforcer. This is their cunning vision, this is why they have made friends with American billionaires, who would sell out any nation, and have no loyalty to anything or anyone besides themselves
people misunderstand that communism was “against” capitalism. it always has seen capitalism as a necessary precursor to their final victory.
the American revolution and French revolution were applauded to remove feudalism. the American civil war, to erase chattel slavery. The 20th century wars and revolutions, the retrenchments called the New Economic plan, and whatever the CCP calls its state-capitalism now, all considered necessary phases in history, including all this today. Very cunning stuff!
Much of the impetus for the Revolution came from aristocats, even royalty, who were intoxicated with the Progressive ideas of Rosseau. The king’s cousin, Orleans, later Egalite, was all for the new ideas and even voted for the king’s execution. Later he said probably that was a mistake but that revelation seems to have come to him just before his own neck was clamped in the guillotine.
lol … “Mistakes were made.”
Or Marquis De Sade who was a nut and a sexual libertine
Enlightenment ideas were their excuse
their organization was in the lodges
abbe barruel explained it. look him up. oh wait here ya go
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_Illustrating_the_History_of_Jacobinism
the key faction to understand for our purposes now, is not the defunct illuminati, nor the tepid lodges, it is the billionaires, who have inherited the mantle of “progress”
they are the hand behind all this chaos and the agenda is not “social justice” it is in fact quite simply and purely globalism, that is to say, free trade, unrestricted immigration which they call “the free movement of labor,” and human rights ideology which weakens what remains of the Westphalian order.
they have only cared about America as a carrier of their ideology to weaken the nations and leave them ripe for the pickings. this was the plan in 1913 and it is a century later. but if America is no longer under their control, they will punish it, teach it a lesson, and then it will come back submissive and chastened to do what it is told.
Kurtz– De Sade was actually pretty sharp and wrote well. These days he would be a guest and friend of the Clintons.
“I can also see how today’s top billionaires who control finance capital, mass media, social media, and other institutions, want to stifle a middle class revolt lead by Trump, and they have again weaponized the lumpenproletariat to seed disorder and intimidate the legacy population into submission. They are also advocates of globalism.”
Except Trumpism is not based in a middle class revolt. Much like with the French Revolution, the Trump voter thinks they’re driving a revolution but are actually being worked over by a carnival barker out front, the billionaire class working their dirty goat impulses behind…, i.e, massive tax cuts for the top, complete deregulation drive at literally any opportunity, etc. while letting you guys identify as ‘deplorables’ or whatever. That particular tag, along with the red hats, just identifies you as gullible but in the midst of an emotional swing in what you think is your direction. In the end, Trump will just declare bankruptcy on you like he always does. Already has.
the deregulation has been petty.
the tax cut was not aimed at the top, it was aimed at the upper middle class.
the concentration of wealth is under-rated, even by the Democrat rah rahs who complain about it., it is actually far more profound deep and vast.
the billionaire cast can play endless games with taxes and pay whatever they feel like paying.
it’s petty administrative managers of society who think they are more important than they really are who benefited from the tax cut.
the industrial heartland did have an economic interest in backing trump, i don’t need to debate that, you are not the sort who cares anyways, but yes it has and could more benefit from fair trade over free trade, rerouting of supply chains back to America instead of endless offshoring to PRC
you mention sovereign default by US. always a good question to ask about that considering the math. who knows if ever or when. i thought that it might and Trump was the guy to get it done.
but now i can see there is no need since we have NIRP coming. the racket can just continue for another decade at least. they can monetize the debt forever. Just as Japan has done.
Now as to who is gullible. Perhaps it is you who are gullible if you think anyone besides that list of top billionaires above Trump is really in charge. not rioters protesters nor even politicians.,
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/george-soros
and 100 or maybe 1000 or so other bastids like him
they could really care whether or not cops answer 911 calls in Minneapolis anymore. that is insignificant to them one way or another. the main thing is that the middle class is scared into submission by these riots. that is the agenda.
As someone who trades grains for a living these days i can totally see how Trump’s fair trade has benefitted farmers in the midwest…
Bahahahahahahahahaha!!!
they’ve suffered but they got paid for their losses and then some. so no worries. most farm operations are corporate for a long time now, not really family farms, that was on its way out long ago. if you are a grain trader then you know that too
And you have me all lmao over the idea that Trump is in charge.
yes evidently he is not. why that pleases you is your own personal reckoning of your interests. time will tell if you have reckoned correctly. evidently you find your interests lie with shaming white people and rioters intimidating the general population. you must be very well off!
the concentration of wealth is under-rated, even by the Democrat rah rahs who complain about it., it is actually far more profound deep and vast.
The sketchy advocacy groups who traffic in this data put the share of assets held by the wealthiest 1% at between 30% and 40%. It’s been thus for a generation. There isn’t much of a secular trend. It’s gone down and it’s gone up over three generations.
What you’re neglecting is that for the vast majority, their asset is their human capital. This has always been so.
i could care less about sketchy advocacy groups and whatever product they are selling. if i was quoting them i would have given attribution. i am not.
i understand how investment banking works and I understand how guys like jeff bezos command their owned media assets. or how soros seeds outfits like BLM with his billions
if you were smart you would see it too. you are smart, but you are also old, even older than me, and curmudeonly, and don’t want to admit that the billionaires are as powerful as I am suggesting they are. the managerial caste is a bunch of sheep, and their relative “command” over their 401ks and inflated home values is of little political significance.
if they have “human capital” to offer they have rented it out too cheaply, and they have no plan to revise their strategies. that managerial caste are the worst bunch of weak-kneed wussies ever.
use your math and compare how fast they Federal Reserve has conjured up the last 11 trillion, who it has benefitted, and what if anything those people are doing to help restore order or protect American sovereignty. they are doing nothing, in fact, they appear to support the chaos. i hear roger goodell aping the party line now, here is a well heeled manager who provides the circus for the deplorables, and today he’s telling them to shape up.
goodell is a centi-millionaire, who only is worth about 150 million, and gets paid like 45 million for his day job. which is to keep the NFL racket moving on behalf of the billonaire ownership, but not get in the way of their more important schemes, like this BLM stuff. in fact if he is ordered to parrot the party line, he will do so, and he has. just as he sent charlie daniels packing.
these are above the 1%; it was not the 1%, but, yes, it is indeed the 1/10 of top 1% who are absolutely worthy of every bad name we could imagine for them.
white people in general, should not be angry so much at the baggy pants looter, but the Roger Goodells of America.
I have to go back to Lenin’s insightful essay “Imperialism as a late stage of capitalism” to explain this to people,
It’s not an insightful essay. Thomas Sowell has debunked it for general audiences. For people familiar with historical statistics on economic activity and the actual granular history of the acquisition of overseas dependencies, it’s a nonsense thesis.
ah Thomas Sowell. I must have missed that one. but yes the essay was prophetic genius
I read this essay 30 years ago and it stuck with me. i am apparently not the only person who finds that it helps explain recent developments. I just picked this guy out of a hat, havent’ read anything besides the abstract, but it seems like maybe he’s one of the people who find it still has as much currency as ever, if not more
http://vuir.vu.edu.au/37770/1/KING%2C%20Samuel%20-%20thesis_nosignature.pdf
i am going to start a list of “perhaps Ok billionaires.” Elon Musk, Peter Thiel.
Any others?
The rest are all deemed anti-American subversives until proven otherwise.
At the top of the list, certainly, Geoge Soros. But he is just one. Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, capos at Google and Apple, definite enemies of the American people.
Here’s an essay Absurd can make better sense of than I can. but im not the guy who needs to think about how monopolistic control of silicon valley and its ties to the Chinese state-capitalist rivals are a political alliance that is acting to take Trump down, fully resolvable inside the theoretical framework of late stage imperialist rivalry and concerted action to destroy westphalian sovereignty as a relic of the past which impedes the schemes of transnational capitalist ventures
https://monthlyreview.org/2019/07/01/late-imperialism/
seems pretty obvious to me but Im simple minded i guess
and I lack friends in the old Republican ranks that would have sniffled at such things. hell, i just lack friends in general.
I guess the fact that i am now a nobody and a londer, explains why i can keep my eyes open and see things that have evaded Republican groupthink with its roots in the Ronnie Reagan era. i don’t have a bunch of country club stuffed shirts holding me back from calling a spade a spade.
see the problem with most Republican stuffed shirts is that they see their piddly little retirement funds and think a few million bucks of net worth means they are good, like modern day version of Puritans who think they are elect. Well, that’s really American, but it’s really silly too. If you are under 100 million in assets don’t quit your day job guys. because you aint that different than thems below you.
it’s hard to understand the scope of control that someone like Buffet or Bezos or Dorsey or Bill Gates or Bloomberg or Soros has, but yes, they are yuuuuuuuge
Trump was an upstart compared to them, they were miffed that he barely made the cut with his inflated real estate values, that’s why they ordered their flunkies in the papers to make the point that he really wasnt a billlionaire anyways. probably is even less so now.
the key thing is the span and depth of control that the richest have. you have to define richest and if you do it properly then, yes, so much comes clear that was formerly obscure.
Speaking of dung, yours is somewhat deeper the overview than mine. The problem with Marx and those guys is that they were trying to simplify an overwhelmingly complex situation. The ‘order’ that was had been in the throws of being replaced for ‘not very long’. The order of things and the desire to change it had been with human kind since before the Greeks. Sparta and the other city states, Carthage and almost every other ‘nation’ had devised constitutions that were designed to over ride the ‘order’ of the day. For thousands of years ‘orders’ have been at odds with constitutions. Today is no different except that constitutions have replaced religious doctrines and are, in like fashion, selectively interpreted by the ‘orders du jour’. Thus the tripartite check and balance of most nations’ governments. Three has always been a successful number, well before 1776. As for Trump; he is his own worst enemy as his actions conflict with his statements which are blithering idiocy most of the time. Trump is and has always been someone privileged by birth to move on throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. He inherited expertise, connections, and wealth in the field of real estate, but not much else. He is and will always be, sizzle without the steak.
‘See i am a Trump voter, and I reject the slouching towards capitalism’s last stage of global imperialism ie just now what is called GLOBALISM’
Here you reveal your gullibility when it comes to Trump’s song and dance. Obama put together an economic bloc involving the Pacific Rim nation, intentionally excluding China; in order to offset rising Chinese economic threats. This bloc would have assisted the nations surrounding China to resist much of which they are no longer able to resist after Trump screwed it up. The same with the Iran nuclear deal. Iran sent 97% of its fuel out of the country in order to get sanctions lifted. Now Iran is rebuilding its stockpiles. Trump is a simpleton. He gives the dupes that follow his dog and pony show an enemy. Age old and so many times the cause of misery, Trump is a poltroon and hopefully will go soon. Take a seat and listen to the blithering idiot sometime. Don’t shoot up any Lysol.
“statements which are blithering idiocy most of the time.”
Yes, yours are.
there are and have been some among the powerful who want to slow or limit the accretion of power to the CCP and some of them are in the defense establishment. Obama had a good anti-CCP strategy in the “pivot to asia” as i have said here about ten times when you were not listening
the trade deal however was arguably something to contain Chinese power as you suggest; OR, perhaps, only to secure some things against them, fully inside the context of exactly what i was talking about, late stage imperialistic control over third world labor and emerging markets. You obviously didn’t “get it.”
I have always thought that the Clinton faction was deep in bed with the CCP going back to Bill’s presidency, and Obama was something of a rival to her. The fact that there are subfactions in play in the Democrat party does not in the slightest bit invalidate my thesis, not any more than would factions inside the Republican party.
my thesis is that billionaires in charge of transnational ventures are competing, and they will come together or rival each other in concert with certain venues or issues as they see fit, but the entire picture can be understood from the context of Lenin’s essay
isaac, from your comments, you are in the vein of the usual liberal thinking about constitutions as wonderful laudable whatever, and you suffer from a Democrat version of tunnel vision and shortsightedness that is even more pathetic than what the old fuddy duddies of the Republican establishment who hate trump have going against them.
you can call me names like “gullible” if it makes you feel good, but I have introduced you to your homework. maybe it’s over your head, isaac. but if not you can use the internet to learn what that essay by lenin was about; how it has been interpreted over many decades; and how the current neoliberal thinking is fully resolvable inside of its framework
this essay by lenin along with the works of political theory which i have recommended by carl schmitt, are the valuable suggestions i bring to this audience. you can take it or leave it as you like.
The French Revolution. It seems more like Germany in the 1930’s.
I guess there is nothing radical about murder by police…,just same old same old! God you have really gone full right wing on this.
JT:
“Abbe Sieyes. Sieyes was a Catholic clergyman and the author of French Revolution’s manifesto of “What Is The Third Estate?” Yet, when asked what he had done during the French Revolution, he simply responded “I survived.”
*********************
Of course, you’re right and is precisely what some us here were noting months ago when the Left went crazy. And much to the consternation of our resident Marxist troll(s)- with all the sock puppets who knows. The new madness about defunding the cops, is the latest move that will blow up in their faces as people won’t go without protection and you can bet right-wing militia groups will fill in the void. Untrained militia won’t have the same nuance about civil rights so natural justice will prevail to the applause of the employed, landed citizenry. It’s Dodge City without the cowboy hats and maybe that’s just what we need. Citizens understand that being a spectator to your own guillotining isn’t particularly good TV. Sure nice being on the side with all the guns and ammo and the shooting sense.
The French Revolution set aside a weak king and replaced him a strong emperor. Sooner or later people get tired of anarchy and killing each other and yearn for someone to take control. Unfortunately that someone is too often a Lenin or Mao or Hitler.
I have been saying for a while that it will take Right Wing Death Squads to fix the country, but I am moving up my timetable from 75 years out to about 50 years out. We will get our Hitler or Pinochet whichever, to straighten things out and take out the garbage. Or, an asteroid strike, fatal pandemic or prolonged financial depression. It will take something big to force Americans to face Reality.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
I agree if reality is an actual consequence rather than only a ‘B’ in Gender Studies.
It is fun to see the reactions of cheerleading leftists when the revolution pitches a brick through their windows: “Way to go guys! CRASH! Wait! I’m on your side! CRASH! Hey! I said I’m on your side!! CRASH! *** You motherf**kers!!!” RED PILL I have laughed through a few videos like that. Nothing says “Reality!!” like a couple bricks and a Moltov Cocktail through the window.
LOL! That great philosopher, Mary Shelley, wrote about peoples’ creations coming back to haunt them.
I hope they get justice, and I hope they get it good and hard!
If I was the Minneapolis cops, I think I would announce that they are going to voluntarily “defund” themselves for the next three days, and just go home. Bingewatch “The Purge” series.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
That is a great idea. Maybe they could send the peaceful protesters to the city council homes to liberate them from white privilege and their big flat screens while the cops drink beer in an easy chair and watch the liberation on tv.
Bastille Day is coming… july 14… get over the charge for the change of the future. If this bothers you. Russia awaits you. Putin will welcome you and teach you how to undo the constitution you abhor.
We still are protected by the constitution. Russia, dismantled to do away with free elections, establishing the position of Tzar ..m
The French revolution. To me it feels like Germany in the early 30’s.