Politico: They’re worried about what it means for them: for their arms deals, for their trade deals, for international funding and alliances that they depend on.
…Then there are the more parochial concerns: that Trump’s rise will encourage and empower their own nationalists.
…The Israelis are walking their own weird tightrope: Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been perennially at odds with the Obama administration, but with the prime minister condemning the Muslim ban proposal and ducking a meeting on what was supposed to be a Trump tour of the Holy Land in December — all while his U.S. ambassador and confidant, Ron Dermer, consulted with the candidate’s son-in-law, who was writing Trump’s speech to AIPAC last month.
…Certainly, there’s some schadenfreude at play, too, particularly in Germany. After years of being lectured about democracy by Americans, they’re taking in over a million refugees while Trump’s talking about a ban on Muslim immigration. That say that gives them the moral high ground, and a sense of the erosion of America’s soft power in Europe.
But all over the world, leaders are trying to decipher how serious Trump is about what he’s saying. Some are convinced he’ll back away from the policies he’s espoused on the campaign trail, while others worry that he’ll have to stick to at least some of it — and for them, any percentage would be a problem. In Germany, for example, gauging Trump’s commitment to his promises is the extent to which they’ve brought him up with their American counterparts.
Posted inDonald Trump|Comments Off on Politico: Trump terrifies world leaders
Sometimes I wish that I could hang out with the cool kids, the cool crowd, the winners. Sometimes I wish that I had a great six-figure job.
My friend with a great job and spouse and kids says: “The problem with great jobs is that there’s an institution-wide ethos of fakeness. But I guess that’s maybe an okay thing. Nobody gets to “be themselves,” and that’s for the good of all.”
A goy blogs: As identity goes, there is some question whether there’s a distinction between “national” and “racial” and/or “tribal,” but all tend to agree that the tell-tale signs of a healthy and thriving society–on any scale, really–is significant cultural production. I have noted in the past that all of the large-looming cultural products I can think of (Japanese Tea Ceremony, Beijing Opera, Classical music, church liturgies, novel-reading, etc.) tend to have their inception in relatively homogeneous societies. Thus when we think of the origin of rap music, we are right to think of a particular set of streets or blocks in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and when we think of blue-grass, Appalachia comes to mind, and when we think of rodeo, we think of the American South, etc. Interestingly–and by contrast–large cosmopolitan places, home to culturally heterogeneous populations, don’t tend to produce much distinct culture. They’re good at curating already-existing culture, as in the case of NYC’s Metropolitan Museum, and so on. But what culture is spontaneously arising from New York City that might represent “New York Culture?”
I don’t think it’s happening. There is no synthesis–so even if there are writers of various tribal affiliations, they’re all writing and painting and dancing in step with their already-established cultural identities. They aren’t forging new ones. So how are new cultural forms created, who generates them, when do they happen, when don’t they?
My hunch is that one needs to have a near-total disregard for what “outsiders” think about whatever project one is working on. This is why, for instance, contemporary “Christian music” usually rubs me the wrong way: it feels too commercial, too radio-ready, too aware of its relation to non-Christian pop music. It needs to get weirder and more isolated, much weirder, and much more alone. It needs to get so alone that it is no longer aware or concerned with what others are listening to as music. It needs to be able to take is own foundations and instincts and cultural cornerstones for granted–as true–or else the muse won’t help. It needs separation, retreat, withdrawal, secession.
There remains the question of whether I’m wrong about the “need” for culture. Maybe New York City is fine–some people would say it is. They love it just the way it is, with all its various ethnic food places not synergizing in any way, but only protecting cultures established in far-away homelands long ago.
But I am out of touch with my ancient homeland, and although I like Chinese and Thai and Mexican food, none of those are distinctly mine–nor is MacDonald’s. We know what Cajun food is, and where it comes from, and of its history. But what is my food tradition? How was it formed?–is it not formed yet?–how could I participate in forming it? Who belongs to my tribe?
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Getting That Great Job
* “Mari Matsuda, the first female of Asian descent to become tenured law professor in the US. It is she who has called for hate speech laws to only apply to speech against “historically marginalized populations.”
I find Asians complaining about racism, discrimination, oppression, etc to be extremely offensive. It is an act of overt hostility to founding stock Americans.
Nobody forced them to come to this country. For the most part, they’ve been treated extremely well. Calling themselves “historically marginalized” is a form of aggression and stealing. Matsuda should feel free to return to her ancestral homeland.
Btw, one of the reasons Roosevelt ordered some “Japanese-Americans” interned during WW2 was because not a small number of them were collaborating with Japan, doing things such as reporting which ships left west coast ports and when. We knew this because we had broken the MAGIC codes. Yes I’m sure numerous among them were loyal and innocent, however the usual nonsense that the internments were due to “hysteria” is nonsense. Also, it wasn’t all “Japanese-Americans”, it was only those living in certain designated zones, mostly around major ports.
* Norm Mineta was the Secretary of Transportation after 9/11. On September 21, 2001, Mineta sent a letter to all U.S. airlines forbidding them from practicing racial profiling; or subjecting Middle Eastern or Muslim passengers to a heightened degree of pre-flight scrutiny. He stated that it was illegal for the airlines to discriminate against passengers based on their race, color, national or ethnic origin or religion. Subsequently, administrative enforcement actions were brought against three different airlines based on alleged contraventions of these rules, resulting in multimillion-dollar settlements. He showed his intention “absolutely not” to implement racial screenings in reply to the question from Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes right after 9-11. He later recalled his decision “was the right thing (and) constitutional”, based on his own experience as one of Japanese-Americans, those who had “lost the most basic human rights” by being discriminated against and interned during the Pacific War. [Wikipedia]
So the next time your grandma gets selected for “random screening”, you can thank FDR for locking up little Norm.
I’m surprised that Wikipedia still refers to the war as the Pacific War. The correct terminology would be the War for the Re-Unification of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Posted inAsians, Censorship|Comments Off on Asians, Free Speech & Common Sense
* The unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish history. But the subject has been addressed less often by mainstream historians than by anti-Semites or apologists. In this book Jerry Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, separates myth from reality to explain why the Jewish experience with capitalism has been so important and complex–and so ambivalent.
Drawing on economic, social, political, and intellectual history from medieval Europe through contemporary America and Israel, Capitalism and the Jews examines the ways in which thinking about capitalism and thinking about the Jews have gone hand in hand in European thought, and why anticapitalism and anti-Semitism have frequently been linked. The book explains why Jews have tended to be disproportionately successful in capitalist societies, but also why Jews have numbered among the fiercest anticapitalists and Communists. The book shows how the ancient idea that money was unproductive led from the stigmatization of usury and the Jews to the stigmatization of finance and, ultimately, in Marxism, the stigmatization of capitalism itself. Finally, the book traces how the traditional status of the Jews as a diasporic merchant minority both encouraged their economic success and made them particularly vulnerable to the ethnic nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Providing a fresh look at an important but frequently misunderstood subject, Capitalism and the Jews will interest anyone who wants to understand the Jewish role in the development of capitalism, the role of capitalism in the modern fate of the Jews, or the ways in which the story of capitalism and the Jews has affected the history of Europe and beyond, from the medieval period to our own.
* From Publishers Weekly: In four fascinating essays, Muller (The Mind and the Market) sensitively examines how centuries of nomadism and diaspora have shaped Jewish financial life. Particularly intriguing is his essay The Long Shadow of Usury, which traces the roots of Jewish financial life to the time when Christians were banned from lending at interest, but Jews, following the law in Deuteronomy, were allowed to charge interest to gentiles (but not each other). Farmers and laborers could not understand the value—economic or social—of gathering and analyzing information, and Jewish usurers were cast as suspicious and parasitic figures. Muller explores why Jewish populations have been both disproportionately successful in capitalist societies and the system’s loudest critics. Of paramount interest is his portrait of a people driven by exile and oppression to emphasize strong social networks, self-sufficiency, and higher education. Muller backs up his bold assertion—that capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world—with elegance and care.
* With columnists for major newspapers denouncing banks as “blood-sucking,” the financial industry as “parasitic,” and one big bank as a “vampire squid” – well, what exquisite timing for the release of the book Capitalism and the Jews.
Mr. Muller’s work is, on the whole, a model of clear thinking and useful information about how accurately to understand the long and complicated relationship between Jews, capitalism, and anti-Semitism. It’s a valuable read for anyone who wants to understand why all the talk about the difference between the “Wall Street” economy and the “Main Street” economy isn’t necessarily as benign as it might seem.
The book by Mr. Muller, a professor of history at Catholic University, consists of a short introduction and four chapters. It’s the first chapter, “The Long Shadow of Usury,” that’s the most enlightening.
“Usury was an important concept with a long shadow. It was significant because the condemnation of lending money at interest was based on the presumptive illegitimacy of all economic gain not derived from physical labor. That way of conceiving of economic activity led to a failure to recognize the role of knowledge and the evaluation of risk in economic life,” he writes. “So closely was the reviled practice of usury identified with the Jews that St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the leader of the Cistercian Order, in the middle of the twelfth century referred to the taking of usury as ‘Jewing'” says Mr. Muller, noting that the interest rates charged by Jews, “in keeping with the scarcity of capital in the medieval economy and the high risks incurred by Jewish moneylenders, whose loans were often canceled under public pressure, and whose assets were frequently confiscated,” ranged from 33% to 60% a year.
It was Karl Marx, who was converted to Lutheranism as a child by his parents, who managed to combine the old blood libel against the Jews with an attack on capitalism. “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” Mr. Muller quotes Marx as saying in Capital. Mr. Muller goes on, “When Lenin later referred to the necessity of eliminating capitalists because they were ‘bloodsuckers,’ he was merely heightening Marx’s own metaphor.”
It is a short leap from this to the work of the Nazi economic theorist Gottfried Feder, who, Mr. Muller writes, “distinguished between Aryan and Jewish forms of capitalism, the former industrial and creative, the latter financial and parasitic.”
In subsequent chapters, Mr. Muller describes Jewish contributions to capitalism and speculates about some of the reasons for Jewish prominence and success. Americans may know that Jews founded Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, but Mr. Muller reports that Jews helped to establish Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank in Germany, as well as Credit Mobilier in France. Some of this is because of values contained in the religion of Judaism itself. “Unlike Christianity, Judaism considered poverty anything but ennobling,” Mr. Muller writes.
Mr. Muller rejects the claim made by Milton Friedman in 1972 that “for at least the past century the Jews have been consistently opposed to capitalism and have done much on an ideological level to undermine it.” Mr. Muller calls that “at best a half-truth.” In fact, he writes, “many of the foremost theorists of capitalist activity have been Jews,” or of Jewish origin, pointing to Milton Friedman himself, Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Ludwig Von Mises, Irving Kristol, and Margaret Thatcher’s advisers including Keith Joseph, Leon Brittan, and Nigel Lawson.
The author does not flinch, though, from describing Jewish involvement in Bolshevism.
Mr. Muller gets out onto the thinnest ice when he blames Jewish involvement in revolutionary activity and communism for inflaming European anti-Semitism. Sometimes, he frames this claim cautiously: “To be sure, in much of eastern Europe anti-Semitism long antedated the Bolshevik Revolution, and would have been a substantial factor in interwar politics even without the prominence of Jews in the Communist movement.”
Other times he is more assertive: “In Germany, where political anti-Semitism had been on the Wane before 1914, the role of the Jews in the postwar revolutions was the key element in the revival of anti-Semitism on the right.”
That the Jews were being denounced as greedy capitalists at just the same time as they were being denounced as dangerous Communists suggests to me that the denunciations were, at bottom, more about hating Jews than about hating either capitalists or communists.
For most of this book, though, Mr. Muller is a sensible guide to the way that views of capitalism and views of the Jews do have a way of overlapping and influencing each other. As he puts it, “An affirmative approach toward capitalism often went together with a measure of sympathy toward the Jews, while antipathy to commerce and antipathy to the Jews typically went hand in hand.” Mr. Muller mostly leaves it to readers to think about how these precedents apply to the debates of the present day, but there is plenty to think about.
* Professor Jerry Muller makes a compelling case in showing that the attitude of Jews towards capitalism was overshadowed by the contemptuous view that Christianity held about trade and commerce for a long time (pp. 33; 158). Until the 19th century C.E., anti-Semitism was predominantly religious in nature, grounded in the sympathy that the Christian churches had for peasants and artisans, the sources of “sweat” labor (pp. 18; 28; 54; 70; 116).
At the same time, these churches failed to understand the economic value of gathering and analyzing information (pp. 19; 116; 205-206). Christianity officially regarded trade and money lending as “unproductive,” “parasitic,” and “usurious” best left to those outside the community of the faithful, i.e., the Jews (pp. 8; 15; 23-25; 27; 37-38; 43; 116-117).
The “cultural capital” of Jews positioned them well to play a disproportional role in (early) modern capitalism for the following reasons (pp. 4; 9; 209; 213):
1. Judaism was more favorably disposed toward commerce than Christianity which was inclined to glorify poverty (pp. 5; 77; 81-85; 110-115).
2. Jewish culture prized “religious intellectualism” which was easily transferred from religious to secular learning (pp. 70; 87-89).
3. Judaism favored a lifestyle based on discipline, the conscious planning of action, and the avoidance of intoxication (p. 88).
4. Jewish success in the market was based upon longer time horizons. Success for those Jews starting at the low end of commercial life required a willingness to work long and hard and to save in order to accumulate capital (pp. 58-59; 61; 88-89).
5. The propensity to develop social networks was due, in part, to the exclusion of Jews from the larger, gentile society, which provided both a form of collective self-policing and a proto-social security system (pp. 7; 53; 91-92).
6. Jewish culture put much emphasis on high familial investment in children (pp. 92-93).
With the industrial revolution firing on all cylinders, anti-Semitism shifted its emphasis by attacking the Jews as capitalists bent on destroying and despoiling the traditional society (pp. 41; 44; 56-57; 158). The social and economic stratification in which Jews were placed made many of them economically successful, which created resentment among social losers in a given capitalist society (pp. 65-66; 129; 189; 204-205; 213-214). To reduce the resentment created by their success, Jews supported 1) tzedakah (= philanthropy) whose beneficiaries also included non-Jews and 2) income redistribution through governmental income transfers (pp. 126; 130-131).
After WWI, anti-Semites came to the outlandish realization that Jewish capitalists would participate in their own destruction by cooperating with their communist counterparts to topple Christian civilization (p. 161)!
To his credit, Professor Muller brilliantly shows why Milton Friedman’s argument, that Jews played a prominent role in disparaging capitalism while profiting from it enormously, clearly lacks nuance (pp. 73; 124). To come to this conclusion, Professor Muller looks at the range of Jewish political responses to capitalism that he labels integrationist, isolationist, socialist, and nationalist, respectively (pp. 10-12; 104; 190).
1. The majority of Jews in Europe and North America opted for integrating themselves into the broader capitalist economy without repudiating their distinct Jewish identity (pp. 39; 104; 109; 115; 215).
2. The isolationist (or Orthodox) Jews found niches in the capitalist economy that would reduce, to the strict minimum, their social interactions with gentiles and less orthodox Jews (p. 105).
3. The socialist Jews believed in the substitution of the untried communism to the failing capitalist system for the same reasons that non-Jews espoused this ideology (pp. 35; 80; 105-107). Furthermore, these Jews naively hoped that abolishing capitalism would take care of anti-Semitism which was often linked to anti-capitalism (pp. 42; 133). The disastrous role that some Central and Eastern European Jews played in different communist revolutions in the wake of both WWI and WWII, reinforced the prevalent anti-Semitism that did not need additional oil to burn brightly in the hearts of anti-Semites (pp. 124; 140-141; 151; 158; 165-170; 174; 183; 188). The identification of Jews with communism was based upon a distortion similar to the exaggeration of the reality that Jews were more successful capitalists (pp. 135; 147; 152-153; 163; 175-177). Most Jews did not embrace communism because of its atheism and its economic policy (pp. 140; 174). Most communists were not Jews (p. 160). To their credit, these socialist Jews, however, debunked the stereotype of the Jews as “greedy” and “materialistic” (pp. 126; 137).
4. The nationalist (or Zionist) Jews emphasized first and foremost the need for a homeland over which Jews would exercise sovereign power without coming to an agreement on the prevailing economic system (p. 106). Zionism was a reaction to the rise of ethnic nationalism that had a basis in the politics of capitalist economic transformation of others (pp. 190-191; 194-199; 202; 208-210). These nationalist Jews faced two unique and formidable obstacles compared to most other ethnic groups: 1. Re-(acquire) a territorial base on which to form a nation-state and 2. Transform themselves from an economically and socially specialized stratum into a combination of “peoplehood” and “statehood” needed to re-(acquire) sovereignty over a distinct territory (pp. 215-218). Professor Muller observes on this subject that the Israeli economy transitioned much faster from its agrarian, socialist beginnings to its present-day highly commercial nature than older Western capitalist economies did (pp. 122-123). The recently published book “Start-Up Nation” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer is illuminating on this subject.
Professor Muller acknowledges that the high representation of Jews in intellectual professions makes them stand out as standard bearers of almost any political ideology (p. 125). The concept of “tikkun olam” (= repairing the world) in Judaism is not alien to this development.
In summary, Professor Muller realizes a tour de force in remaining as objective as possible in his examination of the multidimensional relationship that Jews have had with capitalism.
* Professional historian Jerry Z. Muller’s new book on Capitalism and the Jews is a collection of four essays covering four various topics concerning capitalism and Jewish and European history. The first essay covers medieval European history into modern European history. Ever since the Middle Ages in Western Europe, Jews were associated with the handling of money. It was more than just money lending, however, Jews were lenders of money with interest: a practice that was seen as sinful and “blood-sucking”.
Usury was considered a base practice for several reasons. For one, writers from classical antiquity saw no justification for deriving money from money; “Money does not beget money,” the old proverb went. The most influential of these classical writers was Aristotle, whose works were disseminated to the Christian West in the High Middle Ages, and whose philosophy worked its way into the thought of Catholic theologians. Interpreting the passage on interest from Deuteronomy (Deut. 23: “You may lend with interest to foreigners, but to your brother you may not lend with interest”) liberally such that “brother” meant all people, usury became sinful in Catholic lands in the 12th century. Indeed, the Second Lateran Council expressly forbade the practice in 1139, and Dante’s Inferno would place usurers along with murderers and blasphemers in the seventh ring of hell.
Yet from about 1050 to 1300 “new agricultural surpluses in Europe made greater commerce and urbanization possible, and that made the economic function of lending money more important”. As the Italian wit Benvenudi de Rambaldis da Imola put it, “those who engage in usury go to hell; those who fail to engage in usury fall into poverty”. The church solved this dilemma in the early 12th century by allowing Jews to practice the sinful activity, since, they reasoned, Jews were not subject to canon law and were condemned to hell anyway because of their repudiation of Jesus Christ. Medieval Kings saw benefits to this rule, since they were able to exact heavy taxes from Jewish usurers (essentially) in exchange for their existence. Thus the rigid connection of Jews with usury began.
Loaning money at interest was indeed a most ignoble profession. Yet in most cases many Jews had no suitable alternative. In the words of Rabbi Eliezer ben Nathan of Mainz (died c. 1170), the Jews had to loan money at interest because they “own[ed] no fields or vineyards whereby they could live, [therefore] lending money to non-Jews [was] necessary and therefore permitted” (quoted in Anti-Semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present). Jews in Western Christendom thus served as a “metaphor-turned-flesh” for money lending, usury, and proto-capitalism. Muller writes, the image of usury “was closely connected to that of the Jew, who was regarded as avaricious, and as an outsider and wanderer, able to engage in so reviled an activity as money lending because he was beyond the community of shared faith”.
The second essay focuses on Milton Friedman’s lecture “Capitalism and the Jews” and challenges Friedman’s main presumptions and conclusions. In this lecture (Muller tells us) Friedman said that Jews have historically benefited from capitalism, yet they (modern and contemporary Jews) have tended to oppose capitalism. Muller responds by showing that although many prominent communist/socialist leaders were Jewish (e.g. Trotsky, Luxemburg, Kamenev, Zinoviev), it is simply a false oversimplification to say that most Jews have opposed capitalism.
The third essay titled “Radical Anti-Capitalism” examines Jews that indeed have opposed capitalism. In the same vein as Friedman’s observation, popular imagination saw European Jewry as supporters of communist and socialist parties in post-WWI Europe. This had some truth, but, Muller shows, it was not as if most or even a large plurality of European Jews supported communist revolution. Rather, many communist parties had Jewish members in prominent roles. Moreover, the promise of anti-nationalism and equality led many young Jews to join communist parties; this caused fascists, conservatives, and other right-wingers to conclude through a jaundiced eye that “Judeo-Bolshevism” was a real spectre that was infiltrating their respective societies. One cannot help but think of the most menacing case of anti-Jewish sentiment: the Nazis.
After WWII the trend seemed to continue as many Jews held high positions in post-WWII Eastern Europe under the shadow of the Soviet Union. This was because many Jews saw the soviets as liberators in Poland and elsewhere, and wanted to help the battle against nationalism–a nationalism(s) that had often relegated Jews as second-class citizens, or denied Jews citizenship entirely. Interestingly, Muller suggests that this (Jews joining the communist cause after WWII) was nourished because Stalin and the Kremlin feared the possible spread of Titoism and felt that communist Jews were unlikely to go the way of the nationalist-communism of Tito after what the Jews experienced in WWII. Muller writes, “communists of Jewish origin seemed the least likely to form an alliance with the local populace against the hegemony of the Soviets.”
Yet Jewish communists were later to be persecuted and purged in Eastern European communist politics. The “Doctors’ Plot” was one prominent example of the embodiment of anti-Jewish sentiment in post-WWII politics, as were purgings of Jews from the governments of Czechoslovakia and Poland and elsewhere.
The final essay in this volume summarizes Ernest Gellner’s thesis on nationalism and applies it to Jewish nationalism: nationalism developed when agrarian society transformed into industrial society because the state/government needed to teach potential industrial workers how to read and communicate in a standard national language. Some communities were of course outside of the newfound nationhood-ness (for example Greeks, overseas Chinese and Indians, Armenians, Parsees, and Jews). These stateless nations could assimilate or create their own nations, which is what Jews did in time.
Muller’s short volume on capitalism and the Jews was a pleasure to read, and contained many insightful observations. I found the first and third essays to be very valuable, and the truly interested reader will find the entire volume valuable as well. Muller necessarily paints with a broad brush, but the end product is neither blurred nor affronting. I highly recommend this book to readers of both Jewish and European history.
Steve Sailer writes: My policy is: I don’t endorse political candidates. If I were to try to set up a 501 c 3 educational charity, the nice people at the SPLC have made clear to me in the past that they would call the IRS’s attention to the slightest slip up on my part. Endorsing candidates is one of the things that technically you can’t do, although it appears to be violated constantly by charities (but seldom ones that are targeted for destruction by the massively rich SPLC).
Anyway, why would you need me to endorse candidates? You are all grown ups and can make up your own minds. My jobs is to tell you things that are true, interesting, new, and funny (in roughly that order of priority). There’s no shortage of pundits telling you whom to vote for, but there is a shortage of pundits delivering on T, I, N, and F.
* From a few comments dropped here and there, I think Steve is concerned that Trump is really not up to the job, not willing to do the homework and get up to speed. That the level of policy detail we hear in Trump’s speeches–meager at best–is about as far as he intends to delve into things.
At the same time, many of Trump’s positions are closer to those of Steve than are those of any other candidate.
I have the same sense of foreboding about Trump.
* Officially, Steve hasn’t endorsed any candidate. In one sense, that can be taken to mean that he can’t really bring himself to support Trump. It’s commendable and to his credit, that he isn’t disrespecting those who do support Trump’s candidacy, many of whom would tend to support some things that he has supported over the years (concept for citizenism, etc).
But unlike Jared Taylor, who has indeed made a calculated risk by publicly supporting Trump and thus playing into the hands of SJWs a la ‘Aha! So only the rayyycists support Trump.’, I would have to pose this question to those HBDers and supporters of various concepts written about here from time to time (such as citizenism etc):
If a candidate can only give you uh, about 10% of what you seek thru the political process, as opposed to nothing, isn’t that 10% far better than receiving nothing at all? Because IF you have to wait for the perfect candidate to show up before you can support them, well, just like Godot or the absentee landlord of old, you’re gonna be a’waitin’ for a mighty long time.
Unlike Trump, Cruz has made a nasty habit of pretending to be something that he is not; namely, a populist, man of the people, etc. Trump, to his credit, hasn’t been blatantly inconsistent nor has he been running as something of which he isn’t. Perfect? Of course not. But people tend to forgive the sinner when he makes a mistake, so to speak, before they forgive the hypocrite who continues to lie, obfuscate etc along the way without ever attempting to change.
At your larger point, what tends to be confusing here, is that many of Steve’s working associates in the Alt.-Right have decided for the most part to support Trump. VDARE which has praised Senator Jeff Sessions for many years for his heroic stands on the immigration issue has been backing Trump for nearly two months now. What we tend to forget is that some may not want to get dragged into the fray until they feel they have to. I can respect Steve’s decision not to publicly support a candidate. I would just hope that if Trump should win the nomination that he can support his candidacy come November.
Again, there’s no such thing as the perfect candidate and getting 10% of what the Alt. Right seeks on issues such as immigration, is better than nothing. Trump and Trump alone brought the issue of immigration into the forefront. No other candidate can make that claim. For that, its understandable why some leading figures in the Alt. Conservative sphere have decided to publicly support him.
* The Jewish hostility to Trump — not just Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias on the left but also Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz, among many others, on the right — is fascinating, because in many ways Trump is a virtual Jew. If you knew nothing about Trump but you heard that a pushy, loudmouthed New York real estate developer with great marketing and publicity skills was running for office, wouldn’t you assume he was Jewish? If you made a list of the top 10 NYC landlords, it would probably be nine Jews and Trump. Trump’s sin, I guess, is having the same nationalistic fervor for the USA that neocons have for Israel.
The article is poorly written but I guess they are really upset. Being non-Jewish, I’m frankly more upset for Tzipi since in my experience women get extremely embarrassed when you indicate that they are giving off a bad odor. That’s not nice.
Anyway, the students took this as blatantly anti-semitic (probably) and linked it to the Nazis, etc. Well, I don’t think that’s quite accurate. Although I like their writing very much, both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche made wisecracks about this supposed special Jewish scent. Schopenhauer used the traditional slur “foetor Judaicus” while Nietzsche, in Anti-Christ, remarked that the early Church fathers were like Eastern Jews(something like “beide ihnen pachnet nicht gut” or something, it’s been 30 years.)
Not sure how metaphysical this “foetor Judaicus” thing is, and not actually asking for extensive exegesis, but you really have to observe that, when a student from a campus organization at America’s top law school affiliated with our nation’s top university is able to ask such a personally (possibly, group directed) offensive question it really is time to re-affirm that American universities became the best in the world after Hitler.
BTW, I haven’t heard of any sanctions against this unnamed student leader, either.
* That’s really very sad and another indication that we are well on the way to idiocracy or worse. Supposedly (and I can, unfortunately, entirely believe it) the questioner (who I’m guessing is some minority type person) claimed that ze did not know of the historical association between Jews and smell (nor probably of anything at all that happened before last week) and was just trying to be impertinent and disrespectful on behalf of oppressed peoples and said “you smell” the way a 1st grader might. Even if this was true, if a white person addressed say Valerie Jarrett in this way, they would not have been afforded anonymity and indeed their ass would be ejected from HLS so fast that it would make their head spin.
Posted inDonald Trump|Comments Off on Why The Jewish Hostility To Donald Trump?
* These primaries with real live voters appear to be a Trump strength.
* Sanders’ chance of winning the Democratic nomination–with this loss– is now zero (barring a Clinton indictment or early death from a coughing fit).
Kasich got 1-in-3 votes of New York Republicans which is surprising since Kasich has facial ticks, pulls his mouth and has other characteristics associated with the use of neuroleptic drugs or possible brain injury or lesion.
Before voting for Kasich I’d like to see a hard copy of a SPECT scan complete with a white matter study and an expert evaluation of his general synoptic functioning and central nervous system cerebral fluid assay.
* Donald Trump is killing it with New Yorkers who pronounce coffee as cawfee, but too bad they are a minority of New York City’s population today. There are way too many 3rd world immigrants and transplant gentrifying hipsters from other parts of the country in that city who do not remotely have a New York accent.
When Fox News went to interview Donald Trump supporters at a diner in Staten Island, they all have very heavy New York accents.
* Orthodox Jews are much more narrowly focused on Israel, and all Trump’s shenanigans are bound to annoy religious people.
* Trump victory speech.
He’s a winner, look at him. He’s 69 years old; impresses like he’s a strong 49. This is a great man. Look closely, men like this don’t come along very often.
* Cruz only won in certain Hasidic Jewish neighborhoods in Central Brooklyn where votes are often determined by powerful Rabbis. It is clear that the Orthodox understand the Cruz is the most pro-Israel candidate. Kasich wins in the richest neighborhoods in Manhattan. Pretty clear the Log Cabin Republicans are behind Kasich with his wins in the West Village, Chelsea and Hells Kitchen. Otherwise, Trump wins among blue collar Whites. Trump won Chinatown…
Still, to put it all in perspective, the Republican vote in NYC is paltry and, not to put a damper on things, but the Republican slate collectively lost to Bernie in NYC.
* The Left Wing media is painting Hildabeast as the color blind there is only one race the Human race candidate and Donald Trump as the race card hustler who traffics in racial identity politics.
* There seems to be some kind of network order at Fox that all on-air women dress like Las Vegas cocktail waitresses. Year-round, warm and cold seasons, they all wear mini-dresses and stiletto heels, and they are strategically seated so their legs are on camera.
It’s F-ing brilliant!
It took me awhile to realize most of them aren’t bimbos. They’re just dressed like they are.
Again, it’s F-ing brilliant television designed to boost ratings with horny men on the right like me. I enjoy it even more because it’s so obvious — and shamelessly designed with me in mind.
* I saw a Somali/Ethiopian/Eritrean looking man today on the streets with a Black Lives Matter t-shirt. He was with a woman who was wearing a burka. It was hard to tell if she is his mother, sister, female cousin, girlfriend, or wife because it was impossible to see what she looks like with her being entirely covered up.
Apparently women’s rights don’t matter to him as much as Black rights do. Race always trumps gender with Blacks.
* I also noted the many long legged blondes behind Trump. There are worse things in life, no? They were either Trump daughter- in-laws or his actual daughter. The creepy consigliere was likely Carl Paladino, a Buffalo Republican power broker. New York Republicans are often slim pickings.
Trump’s new advisor is Paul Manafort who is Connecticut Italian not Buffalo Italian. Manafort means “strong hand” in Italian, which admittedly, is pretty cool.
* Donald and his boys get the girls. That’s why there tend to be “long-haired beauties in the background.” They’re members of his family and his friends’ families. They’d be standing by you if you were lucky enough to get what you wanted. Be honest.
As for the “creepy consigliere,” have you seen some of the chiefs of staff our presidents have hired? Powerful people hire mean gatekeepers. They need them.
Hey, I realize what a cliche it looks like too, but I think we’ve been so castrated in this country that we can’t even recognize what masculine success looks like anymore.
* I doubt it’ll be a contested convention at this point. Trump is easily going to sweep the rest of the Northeast and California.
Cruz is only popular in uber-white states that have a lot of religious fanatics, and his home state of Texas.
Cruz’s problem is that the evangelical brand in politics is completely discredited after the epic failures of Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush. Educated suburban Republicans probably aren’t going to vote for Trump, but they aren’t going to go for Cruz either. They’ll vote for Kasich, letting Trump slide to a bunch of winner-take-all victories.
* Kasich had a lot of PR help from FoxNews that has went out of it’s way to give the guy lots of positive air time. They can make a turd look like a Rolex watch.
Trump has had no real positive PR from the get go. The entire establishment went nuts on him for not following the agenda. He’s been called everything from a racist to Hitler and Stalin(but never Mao) and relentlessly attacked by the GOP and even the Pope.
In terms of Kasich’s appeal, it seems to be to the protected or country club class of Republicans, socially and economically isolated from the ravages of immigration and globalization, they are baffled and terrified of Trump’s appeal to people they detest. After all everything is going great for them so what’s the problem?
* Those that sow the wind, will reap the whirlwind.
The Democrats cannot count on the identity politics monopoly forever, they aren’t facing the usual GOPe this time. Trump is perfectly placed to play divide and conquer with the “coalition of the ascendent “.
Trump single handedly weakened Hillary’s best selling point, Bill. Without Trump, Bernie would not have lasted this long.
I think he will hit hard on her Wall Street ties, to maximize the blue collar vote. To a lesser degree, he will get better margins with Jews, Asians and blacks. I further expect black turnout to drop if Hillary doesn’t name Cory Booker as her running mate. The far-left also doesn’t like Booker, and I don’t see Hillary naming Julian/Joaquin Castro. Texas will not be in play. I expect either Booker or Sen. Tim Kaine of VA. Kaine is fluent in Spanish. A really desperate move would be Sen. Donnelly of IN, who used to be a Blue Dog.
NY is not winnable in the general, unless Hillary is indicted.
If not for his errors in the 2004 debates, Bush might have won CT and NJ narrowly. He was polling around 55%, which is about the most that anyone can get in our current system.
The real deal is that PA will be seriously contested, something that the Democrats have not had to do in the past two elections. That’s tens of millions of dollars that can’t be spent in Virginia and Ohio.
Illinois is reachable, depending on both sides VP picks.
If the Berniebros are disenchanted, Oregon is also within reach as it was in ’00 and ’04.
* The sad thing is the MSM never shows what white masculine male success looks like. If they show a masculine male, it’s always some idiot black rapper with his ‘hos, a thuggish black athlete and once in a while some namby-pamby asexual Silicon Valley billionaire with a beard.
I think it all changed when Hollywood killed off the white action adventure hero in the 90′s and replaced them with odd ball roided out minorities like Wesley Snipes,Vin Diesel or Dwayne Johnson and a raft of females ass kickers.
The fact that 007 is played by a blond Englishman is just amazing, though I suspect he’ll be the last white, straight male in that role.
* All Trump needs is a mediagenic Muslim terrorist attack anywhere in the Western world, in the month before the election. It’s a lot easier to create a false flag Muslim terrorist attack than to prevent a genuine one. Or… a NAM riot.
He may not need either of these things, but they will certainly help.
* Trump was never going to win NY but neither will any other Republican. NY is like CA lost to the GOP forever.
The GOP has to decide what they want more, power or more immigrants to satisfy the demands of businesses that want cheap labor. It can’t have both.
* I am constantly amused by those Cruz supporters out there who like to tout his brilliant legal mind as one of his assets. This alleged brilliance of his has never appeared in reality. Every argument I’ve ever heard him make has been illogical and preposterous, including this one. Consider:
Ted Cruz asserts that with Trump as the Republican nominee, we lose the general election, even with Cruz at the VP slot. And yet Cruz would also like to make us believe that he would win the general election against Hillary, despite the fact that Trump has far and away more voters and more momentum than he has. So this amounts to saying that Cruz is so popular that he can win the general election (despite not being able to win his own party’s primary), and that Trump is so unpopular that he would poison the Cruz campaign in a combined ticket (despite the fact that Trump has abundantly more voters and delegates than Cruz does).
This is ridiculous. Either Cruz is incredibly stupid, or he thinks we all are. It’s probably some combination of the two. People who go through life convinced of their own brilliance, who have never had to work in the real world (like Ted Cruz), develop these sorts of supercharged, solipsistic egos whereby they become convinced that they can bowl everyone over by the sheer force of their intellect, and they no longer need to pay attention to factual accuracy or logic.
This is what gives Ted Cruz his creepy, psychopathic personality. That is why none of his colleagues or coworkers can stand him. This is why he carries on with his hopeless campaign despite the fact that he has no path to victory. And this is why it is absolutely unacceptable to vote for Ted Cruz under any circumstances. He is not the lesser of two evils. He IS the two evils. He combines the elites’ fecklessness and globalism with Hillary’s blind personal ambition.
And in light of all this, I would not say that Cruz’s Evangelical Protestantism and his “true Constitutional conservatism” are all an act. Rather, Cruz epitomizes precisely what these two cultural currents are really all about. Evangelical Protestantism is phony Christianity for stupid, self-righteous Pharisees, and “Constitutional conservatism” is snake oil for well-connected lawyers and bankers, i.e. crony capitalism. Cruz is guilty on both counts.
Donald Trump is the only man who stands for normal Americans. He is the only man who takes reality into consideration when crafting his policies. He is, in other words, the only real politician in the race and the only one who fits the true definition of conservatism, viz accepting and affirming the perennial facts of existence. May God bless and preserve Donald Trump, and guide him to victory in 2016. Amen.
* As for Bernie, Ron Unz’ darling, he may win a majority of delegates but still lose narrowly due to Hillary’s super-delegates, that is, if Hillary does not suffer a fatal or serious seizure before November , which is likely. She looks like a goner, trust me on this. Just look at her eyes and expression. When older people are about to die, they give a certain vibe and she’s giving all the signs.
* The Hillary supporters I’ve talked to like the fact that she’s been around the levers of power for awhile as First Lady, then a senator, and then as Secretary of State. She also seems reasonably bright, more detail-oriented than Sanders or Trump.
Hillary seems like the perfect establishment candidate–if you like the ruling class consensus policies we’ve been pursuing for the last couple decades, here’s a reasonably experienced and competent representative of the ruling class, ready to continue those policies.
Foreign policy missteps that get Americans killed and destabilize countries are entirely acceptable within that framework–it’s just part of the game, gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette, etc. Powerful people evading the rules in ways that would get less-important people jail time is similarly fine–all that fits in the ruling class consensus. Cozy relationships with big banks and the financial industry, again, totally in keeping with how the ruling class likes things.
I think the support for Sanders and Trump (and to a lesser extent for Cruz–he’d be the wild-eyed radical candidate in an ordinary election year) comes overwhelmingly from people who don’t like how the ruling class consensus is working out. That probably also drives Sanders’ and (even more) Trump’s vagueness on policy details–it’s easy to get agreement that we’ve been making a mess of things, but hard to get all the unhappy-with-the-ruling-class types to agree on many policies.
* I am in the UK but sat in a rail replacement bus with my girlfriend we both had a laugh at the dweeb in the couple behind us. He was desperately trying to gain favour with the woman by repeatedly stating that he supported Hillary because it’d be great to have a woman in charge. Her replies were along the lines of don’t be ridiculous and were absolutely flooded with disdain.
I say they were a couple but I doubt they were romantically linked. He clearly wanted to but was a tragic specimen of a 40 year old man. My girlfriend who is apolitical found his voice repulsive.
Another Hillary supporter, a friend, says the same thing, but then he also claimed to me that an action cannot be the right thing to do if it benefits you, even if it benefits everyone as well. He was brought up by overbearing Christian/feminist parents! Yes, that is a thing somehow. He had to play with girls’ toys when younger and eats his feelings to a terrible extent.
Finally, I am related to a semi Hillary supporter. She supports her because she projects her own aggrandised self image onto Hillary. That is pretty much how she makes all judgements about people though. It isn’t the most healthy thing lol but she is a wonderful person when you get past the solipsistic narcissism.
And that is that. 2 x awful repressed beta fools because she is a women and 1 x narcissistic woman because she is a woman.
So it is all primarily because she is female and that is undergirded by the fact that she is the conventional frontrunner. Sheep for the very most superficial form of identity politics! Goodbye Western civilization. Hillary will not be the cause but she is a blatant and somewhat harmful symptom.
* As a Gen-X guy, I realize this election is our last chance to even potentially save the America of my youth. Already the majority of school kids is non-white. There are more people eating taxes than paying taxes and our debt and unfunded liabilities are absurdly beyond any ability to pay them. As a native Detroiter, I have lived what the rest of you are going to see. Living in South Florida now, I’m again ahead of the curve and experiencing what the rest of you will experience in a few years to come.
And so we have Donald J Trump, a cartoonish character in a rational world, as our only hope. Every other candidate represents more immigration, more government crony giveaways in trade deals, more exporting of American industry, and more bigger government. They quibble merely about how fast they will sell out what remains of America’s founding stock. And Mr. Trump, the cartoon character, cannot stop himself from saying things that, in our imaginary rational world, would get him laughed off the podium. But this Trump is the *only* candidate presenting any policy positions that would reverse our steady 50+ year accelerating collapse. Only Trump might shut down the immigration invasion. Only Trump might reverse our suicidal trade policies. So my last hope for America, my only hope, is a guy whose demeanor I find buffoonish (his business success notwithstanding). If the Repugnant-Cons manage to keep Trump off the ballot, I’ll either shred my ballot like I did four years ago or vote for any third party candidate who manages to get on Florida ballots. Voting for freaky scary dishonest religious fanatic and Canadian anchor baby Rafael Eduardo Cruz is a non-starter just as voting for the old Socialist or the old criminal crony.
And every time I think about the America I inherited, I loathe more and more my grandparents (especially) and my parents who set the disaster in motion in the 1960′s.
* Cruz is a very smart man, but it would be foolish to vote for him. Sometimes life is complicated like that. It’s like the hottest girl in school being a bitch or like delicious food being bad for you. Try to fit two contradictory emotions in your head at the same time. It’s not that complicated and it can sometimes be useful.
Trump is less intelligent than Cruz, and has a smaller store of knowledge, but his policies would be much better for America, and indeed the world. There could be lots of reasons for this. Cruz has to serve his donors while Trump self-finances and has a talent for getting free media. There are special kinds of foolishness that only smart people fall for. It could be something else.
How do I know that Cruz is smart? It’s his tone of voice, his general demeanor. That stuff is unfakeable. A smart person can play dumb, but a dumb one can’t play smart. Cruz is a classic smart nerd.
* “How do I know that Cruz is smart?”
How else did Cruz get this far? Good looks? Winning personality?
* The seizure in public is not an impossibility. When I see her viperish glare whenever Bernie timidly reproaches her, I realize that she’s never had anyone oppose her on anything for the last 20 years. Her psyche is totally unprepared for the barrage of abuse that Trump will lay on her during the general. He will dress her down like an unsatisfactory employee, and I think that it’s better than even odds that her brain will start stutter-stepping and she will vapor-lock on stage.
Alternatively, if she reaches her limit during a debate, she might start throwing things at The Don, the way she used to chuck lamps at BJ Bill. I don’t know whether the seizure or the temper tantrum would have more amusement value.
* I don’t think Reagan was much of a policy geek either. If you have the right instincts, you can tell right away whether a proposal is some sort of veiled socialism or not and cut right thru the BS. Democrats love programs with 1,000s of pages of laws and regulations and Hillary will bore you to tears with her mastery of all the little twists and turns. But the thing as a whole will amount to a steaming pile of statist crap.
United Health, one of the biggest health insurers, announced today that they are getting killed on Obamacare and are pulling out of the market in most states. Young suckers (oops make that people) were supposed to buy coverage to balance out all the older sicker people who signed up with pre-existing conditions, but it didn’t happen. Statistically, most people in their 20s and 30s without pre-existing conditions are healthy as horses and have little need of expensive health care plans – some kind of catastrophic coverage to deal with black swan events is all they really need. They will pay into Obamacare far more than they can expect to take out (which was the plan all along). Allowing people with pre-existing conditions to sign up is like allowing people to place their bets on the roulette wheel after it has come to rest. Every one of them is a guaranteed winner at the ins. co’s expense.
* I hope that when Trump gets in, the SPLC and ADL can get audited for four years straight. For best results, appoint David Duke as a consultant to the audits.
Steve Sailer writes: The city of San Francisco has become a notoriously unaffordable place to live. Two-bedroom apartments in San Francisco currently average $4,126 per month, up from $1,840 in 2009. To buy a three-bedroom home would run you $1,612,500.
With San Francisco being one of the epicenters of the environmental movement of the past half century, local homeowners are adept at using progressive verbiage for justifying keeping San Francisco in stasis. As a conservative, I rather admire the cleverness with which liberals have contrived to keep San Francisco physically looking much like it did in the past.
The situation has gotten so bad for young renters that San Francisco now even numbers among its myriad activist groups a pro-capitalist one—the Bay Area Renters Federation, or BARF—that proposes that developers be allowed to develop.
This is part of an increasing national push to allow more construction in already dense big cities. That’s probably a good idea, but it’s worth explaining in honest language what’s actually going on in San Francisco.
Heather Mac Donald writes: Will the anti-cop Left please figure out what it wants? For more than a decade, activists have demanded the end of proactive policing, claiming that it was racist. Pedestrian stops—otherwise known as stop, question, and frisk—were attacked as a bigoted oppression of minority communities. In March 2015, for example, the ACLU of Illinois accused the Chicago Police Department of “targeting” minorities because stops are “disproportionately concentrated in the black community.”
Equally vilified was Broken Windows policing, which responds to low-level offenses such as graffiti, disorderly conduct, and turnstile jumping. Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King launched a petition after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, demanding that Attorney General Eric Holder “meet with local black and brown youth across the country who are dealing with ‘Zero Tolerance’ and ‘Broken Windows’ policing.”
Well, the police got the message. In response to the incessant accusations of racism and the heightened hostility in the streets that has followed the Michael Brown shooting, officers have pulled back from making investigatory stops and enforcing low-level offenses in many urban areas. As a result, violent crime in cities with large black populations has shot up—homicides in the largest 50 cities rose nearly 17 percent in 2015. And the Left is once again denouncing the police—this time for not doing enough policing. King now accuses police in Chicago of not “doing their job,” as a result of which “people are dying.” Stops in Chicago are down nearly 90 percent this year through the end of March, compared with the same period in 2015; shootings were up 78 percent and homicides up 62 percent through April 10. Over 100 people were shot in the first ten days of 2016. King scoffs at the suggestion that a new 70-question street-stop form imposed on the CPD by the ACLU is partly responsible for the drop-off in engagement. If American police “refuse to do their jobs [i.e., make stops] when more paperwork is required,” he retorts, “it’s symptomatic of an entirely broken system in need of an overhaul.” This is the same King who as recently as October fumed that “nothing happening in this country appears to be slowing [the police] down.”
Let’s examine the dilemma imposed on cops by activists like King. On March 25, two groups of youths were fighting on a street corner on Chicago’s West Side. If Chicago officers had dispersed them and questioned anyone who seemed to be harboring a gun, a Black Lives Matter sympathizer would have seen only racial harassment. The ACLU would have logged any documented stops into its stop database in preparation for its next racial profiling lawsuit; the Justice Department, which is now investigating the Chicago Police Department for racism, would have also tallied the stops as evidence of bias. But the police did not move in on March 25, and one of the teens started shooting at his rivals. The gunslinger hit 13-year-old Zarriel Trotter, an innocent bystander; the bullet entered Trotter’s back near his spine and punctured his intestines. As of early April, the police were still searching for the shooter. “It gets scarier out here every day,” a classmate of Zarriel’s told the Chicago Tribune. “Young people in Chicago can’t go outside without knowing whether they will be the next person fired at.”
The Shaun King who petitioned Eric Holder to end Broken Windows policing might argue that officers should overlook such outbreaks of disorder in minority neighborhoods, but many of their law-abiding residents desperately want the cops to intervene. Last summer, I attended a police-community meeting in the 41st Precinct of the South Bronx; residents complained to their precinct commander about large groups of youths hanging out on corners, a plea made time and again in similar police-community meetings. “There’s too much fighting,” one woman said. “There was more than 100 kids the other day; they beat on a girl about 14 years old.” Another man asked: “Why are they hanging out in crowds on the corners? No one does anything about it. Can’t you arrest them for loitering?” A middle-aged man wondered: “Do truant officers exist anymore?” If cops ignore such heartfelt requests for public order because the activists tell them that it would be oppressive to respond, they will betray the very people who need them the most.
In April, another outbreak of street disorder in Coney Island, Brooklyn, resulted in the death of a 17-year-old girl. Ta’Jae Warner had tried to protect her brother from a group of girls gathered outside her apartment building who were threatening to kill him; one of the girls knocked Warner unconscious. Warner died four days later after being taken off life support. “We are killing each other, this is not normal,” a community activist said at the scene of the assault, later posting on Facebook: “A 17-year-old girl was attacked by people who looked just like her. Black Lives Matter.” If parents and other authority figures are unable to control such violence, it will fall to the police to do so.
King and other activists might answer that the cops should just concentrate on making an arrest after a shooting has already occured. That reactive style of policing dominated law enforcement until the early 1990s, when the New York Police Department embraced data-driven, proactive policing. The NYPD’s revolutionary new philosophy held that the police could prevent felony crime by reducing low-level lawlessness and intervening in suspicious conduct; that philosophy spread nationwide and ushered in a record-breaking 20-year national crime drop, now at risk in urban areas.
Moreover, making post hoc arrests for shootings and homicides has gotten even harder in the wake of the incessant Black Lives Matter refrain that the cops are racist killers. Thanks to the no-snitching ethic, lack of witness and victim cooperation was already the biggest impediment to solving violent crime in the inner city; that uncooperativeness has worsened over the last year and a half. In November, Chicago gang members lured a nine-year-old boy into an alley and murdered him in retaliation against his gangbanger father. The father refused to help with the investigation. Black Lives Matter ideology has also chilled informal interactions that could lead to an arrest. “I feel like I can’t talk to anybody because someone might accuse me of violating their civil rights,” a South Side patrol officer told the Chicago Tribune in February.
Chicago had a harbinger of its current depolicing situation in 2012. Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy had disbanded a city-wide, anti-gang task force that advocates had criticized for allegedly making too many stops in minority neighborhoods. Homicides soared, ultimately reaching 500 that year. South Side residents begged for the reconstitution of the task force and the resumption of stops. “We have had enough,” the grandmother of a murder victim told the Telegraph, afraid to give her name for fear of retribution. “The older folks are terrified. We need the police to crack down on them. Responsibly yes, but forcefully.” A local city councilman, Willie Cochran, said that his constituents “wanted a more aggressive force engaging these terrorists on the streets.” His community was “ready to stand by the police” in the face of complaints about “racial profiling,” Cochran added. McCarthy reconstituted the unit in 2013 and the shooting epidemic cooled. (This connection between depolicing and crime has been repeatedly confirmed empirically, most recently in a study of Justice Department police consent decrees.)
The activists’ standard charge against cops in the post-Ferguson era is that they are peevishly refusing to do their jobs in childish protest against mere “public scrutiny.” This anodyne formulation whitewashes what has been going on in the streets as a result of the sometimes-violent agitation against them. Cops are routinely cursed and screamed at; sometimes bottles and rocks are thrown. “In my 19 years in law enforcement, I haven’t seen this kind of hatred toward the police,” a Chicago cop who works on the South Side tells me. “People want to fight you. ‘Fuck the police. We don’t have to listen,’ they say.” Resistance to arrest is up, cops across the country report, and officers are getting injured. Officers worry about becoming the latest racist cop-of-the-week on CNN if their use of force against a resisting suspect, however justified, goes viral.
That officers would reduce their engagement under such a tsunami of hatred is both understandable and inevitable. Policing is political. If the press, the political elites, and media-amplified advocates are relentlessly sending the message that proactive policing is bigoted, the cops will eventually do less of it. This is not unprofessional conduct; it is how policing legitimacy is calibrated. The only puzzle is why the activists are so surprised and angered that officers are backing off; such a retreat is precisely what they have been demanding.
The crime situation in Chicago is unlikely to turn around any time soon. The departments’ stop activity is now being monitored by the same Illinois ACLU that in March deemed the department’s stop rates discriminatory because they did not match Chicago’s population ratios. Blacks were 72 percent of all stop subjects in a four-month period in 2014, according to the ACLU, though blacks constitute only 32 percent of the city’s population. Last week, a Police Accountability Task Force appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel used the same population benchmark to declare that the department has no “regard for the sanctity” of black lives: blacks made up 74 percent of all police shooting victims, lethal and non-lethal, between 2008 and 2015, according to the Task Force; whites made up 8 percent of police shooting victims, though they, too, comprise roughly a third of Chicago’s population.
This flawed methodology for benchmarking police actions—comparing them to population ratios—ignores the incidence of crime. Between 1991 and 2011 (the latest years for which such data are publicly available) blacks made up between 82 percent and 70 percent of all murder offenders. Whites made up between 3.5 percent and 5 percent of all murder offenders. Shooting and robbery disparities are likely greater. Drive-by shootings are simply not happening in white neighborhoods. If police want to save lives (and they do), they are going to be more heavily deployed in minority areas.
Posted inBlacks, Crime, Police|Comments Off on Heather Mac Donald: Violent crime has shot up due to the nonstop war on cops waged by Shaun King, Black Lives Matter, and the ACLU
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
