What Do You Say to a Progressive Seattle Politician?

I'm scheduled to have a phone conversation this afternoon with my progressive Seattle Councilman Dan Strauss, who was elected in 2019 over a slightly less progressive Heidi Wills. Heidi showed up at my yoga class, where I used to like to zing the teacher Jim, who would always have the conventional wisdom line from The New York Times or The Atlantic.

What should I say to Dan?

I think that I will ask him about Defund the Police.

First, I will ask him which activist groups are pushing it. Is it just Black Lives Matter, or is it a whole phalanx of activist groups?

Then I will ask him what he thinks is the problem? Police brutality? Gang warfare? Systemic racism?

Then I will tell him about my understanding of the problem, from liberal journalist Jill Leovy, author of the 2015 book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America. I'll tell him that I wrote about the book back in 2015 "The Real Problem 'Ghettoside.'" See this is how Leovy reports it.

1. Blacks in the inner city are mad as hell because murderers never get caught.
2. Blacks in the inner city are mad as hell because the police are always harassing young men on the street.

There is a very good reason why murderers don't get caught. It's because of "snitches get stiches." The gangs intimidate witnesses so they won't testify at trial, although "everybody knows who done it." BUt everyone is still mad that the perps don't get perped.

The police react to this situation in a sensible way. Since they "know who done it," they harass the guys "who done it" for minor street crimes. And everyone is mad about that.

What to do? Well there is something. I read once from a policeman that the dirty little secret of successful policing is informers. If you have informers you can bust up the gangs. And the murdering is all about gangs defending their turf and conducting border warfare. Also, of course, since a lot of economic activity in the inner city operates outside the law, the folks in the inner city can't call on the police for help when illegal activity is involved.

And that includes simple off-the-books employees.

Yeah, that's a problem. The gangs exist because of the marginal economy in the inner city that operates on the edge of legality, because uneducated people and unacculturated people often can't get well-paying jobs above the minimum wage, or union jobs because they don't have the connections.

Gotta be careful not to get too far into the reeds.

But maybe I'll tell him the story of Lady Marjorie's fencing contractor. See, Marjorie had some fencework done and was not happy with the work so she stopped the check she had just written to the contractor. A short while later, a check-cashing facility called! The contractor was getting cash on the check with which to pay his off-the-books Mexican workers. So I wrote about this at American Thinker and pretty soon got an email from an auto mechanic in Florida. He said that it was almost impossible to get and on-the-books job, and that was a problem because he needed a credit record to get a home mortgage, and for that you need an on-the-books job.

Oh well, it's an imperfect world, and it's tough trying to bend the arc of history towards justice.

Then, I think I'll ask him about Allyism, about the three layer social analysis of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

Where does he fit in there? As an Ally? Or as a "white oppressor?" And what about tech billionaires and CEOs? Are they white oppressors or are they allies because they donate to BLM and censor "far right" insurrectionists?

Then, maybe, I should ask him about Defunding the Police now that we know from January 6 that the real problem in  America is "far right" insurrectionists, which are so big a problem that the usual practice of freeing people accused of crimes without bail has been suspended. And we need 30,000 National Guardsmen in Washington DC, while we didn't need them in Seattle and Portland last summer.

Don't you think, I'll ask him, that the post January 6 events are something of a "tell" from the ruling class? Are they not saying that BLM and AntiFa are nothing to worry about, because they are the street thug of the ruling class. whereas Trump insurrectionists are an existential threat that needs immediate action and overwhelming force.

Maybe I'll even have time to offer my reductive Three Peoples theory that experiences America not as a moral drama but as just three kinds of people trying to live their lives: Creative people that want to make a difference; Responsible commoner that want to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law; and Subordinate clients that want their lives protected by political power

I wonder how it will actually go down.

Great Rebellion: Dems Have Actually Reversed Conservative Reforms

I was moving my old blog posts from 2005 - 2008 onto Google over the last few days, and one thing I noticed: since whenever, we conservatives had all kinds of good ideas for reforming the welfare state, from welfare to choice in education to making Social Security into a real savings program. 

Yeah. Good luck with all that. I saw an earnest piece by a young fellow from the Reason Foundation, Satya Marar, advocating for school choice. Yeah. Where has that gone in the last 15 years? Hey, today, union teachers don't think they have to teach -- while partying in the Caribbean -- because COVID.

Which is the point of all government bureaucracies, reducing the workload until all the bureaucrats are doing is having meetings to decide when the next meeting will be.

You would think that black voters in the non-functional inner-cities would be fit to be tied about the lousy schools. You would think. But actually, black voters look at the schools as a jobs program.

Remember how Obama reversed the conservative welfare reform of the Nineties? Thanks, Barack.

You would think that black voters would be fit to be tied about how welfare has devastated their communities over the last 50 years. You would think. But with the end of marriage, what's a single mom gonna do?

And now the Soros prosecutors and Defund the Police movements are reversing the "broken windows" policing that pulled New York City murders down from about 2,000 a year to 600 a year.

You would think that black voters in the inner cities would be fit to be tied about lawlessness and murders, since they are predominantly black-on-black. You would think. But they don't dare, because "snitches get stitches."

Actually, I classify liberal programs into three categories:

Left's Crimes. I'd say race politics is the top of the list. Defund the Police.

Left's Errors. I'd say Social Security. Imagine if ordinary Americans saved their own money for retirement.

Left's Conceits. That's recycling, electric cars, bike paths, organic food. 

So here's the Biden plan. We are going to keep all the entitlement programs, which can't be afforded. And then we are going to pile extra spending on climate change, including no doubt mandatory electric cars and sky-high fuel prices.

Oh, and after 50 years of quotas, Affirmative Action, and "diversity" now we are going to indict the entire white working class as "white oppressors" and go full steam ahead on "systemic racism."

You would think that our liberal friends, with their passion for equality -- and "equality hurts no-one" according to a yard-sign at the top of liberal Phinney Ridge here in Seattle -- would hate and despise all gubmint programs that treat people unequally, especially since race is a social construction.

What with the Democrats winning the two Georgia Senate seats in the runoff, I think it is fair to say that whatever we racists-sexists-homophobes have been doing over the last 50 years, it hasn't been working.

Well, whatever the road back to equality and respect -- because if there is one thing that is absolutely clear, it is that Democrats don't think they need to respect Republicans and white working-class whites -- it has to start with the average deplorable refusing to cower before the race card.

I don't know how to do that, but I am sure that there are thousands of political geniuses that do.

And it all has to start with the idea that, to coin a phrase, we are mad as hell and we are not going to take it any more.

In other words, a Great Rebellion.

You Noticed: Our Rulers are Going Stark Staring Mad

You might ask: why don't the wokerati just leave us alone? Why do they have to be in our faces about our racism-sexism-homophobia? Why get in the faces of the police? Why allow the homeless to trash the place? Why release violent suspects onto the street? Victor Davis Hanson goes on and on about the ridiculous behavior of our ruling class.

Is there really a legal system any more, at least as we once knew it, in our major cities—New York, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles? Violent crime has soared. Murders are up 30-50 percent in many of those places... 

In 2020, whether an arsonist, looter, or rioter was arrested, indicted, and jailed depended on the ideology of the perpetrator and the political context of the crime. Old ideas like “broken windows” preventative enforcement went down the memory hole. Did Rudolph Giuliani’s crime-reduction miracle in New York City ever really exist? Is it legal for a district attorney simply to announce that he will no longer enforce the legal code?

A clue comes from Curtis Yarvin's latest, "Socialism and capitalism are both fake."

We can say: “socialism,” in the 20th century, is an aristocratic movement which intends to promote the interests of the working class.

Of course, the followers of the movement, people motivated by fashion -- I suppose the folks with their virtue-signaling yard-signs -- don't really count. It's the real aristocrats that count.

Yet for those betters, the true aristocrats, the motivation of the ideology is at least as much ambition as empathy.  

Socialism has never really been a working-class movement to help the workers. It was always been an aristocratic movement, an intellectual cult and, as very often happens, a clerical nobility.

But things aren't really going too well for the clerical nobility. There is still sin in the world: blacks are still doing badly in school, and still the leaders in violent crime. And the white working class are now the leaders in dying of despair.

How could this happen, with all the good sort of people trying to make things better. Strictly speaking, we could all agree, if things are going wrong then dollars to donuts, it is probably the fault of the ruling class, the clerical nobility.

But, of course, nobles never blame themselves when things go wrong. It is always the "other." That's the beauty of the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative. We allies are putting the pedal to the metal to help the oppressed peoples. If something is going wrong, it must be the fault of the white oppressors. QED.

It could not be, could not be, that the programs and policies -- even the very idea that government can make a society better -- are wrong, and instead of making things better are making things worse.

As I have written many times, from When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al, a religious group does not just give up when its prophecy fails, when the promised socialist heaven on Earth does not appear. It redoubles its efforts, for a while.

Now I say that the whole idea of a just society is a pipe-dream. The best we can hope for is a society where injustice is kept down to a dull roar. I say that the whole idea of the top-down administrative state is a conceit of the ruling class, and bound to increase injustice. I say that the whole idea of government education is a disaster, because it ends up being an indoctrination in ruling-class ideology, whereas I think education should be a "diverse" environment where parents can try out their kooky ideas on their children -- which, I suspect, would turn out to be a lot less kooky that the ideas of the ruling class. I say that the whole edifice of entitlements is a disaster because it sequesters the savings of the people as handouts that can never be reduced.

And I say that the Age of Politics is over. We've got to find new ways to indulge in our masculine lust for loot and plunder, and our feminine lust for virtue-signaling. These lusts are All Too Human, and will not go away. The question is how to divert them into social beneficial channels, like converting warriors into sports heroes. Yes. How do we convert virtue signaling into socially beneficial channels?

Meanwhile we are condemned to live in a world where our ruling class is going stark staring mad.

Still, they haven't started a world war recently.

Policing -- Contents

The Reality of Policing

1. Dangerous Crime Family Uncovered in Britain
   
   
2. Brits Look Through "Broken Windows"
   
   
3. Feeding the Underclass in Britain
   
   
4. "Broken Windows" Eat My Dust
   
   
5. Decline of Violence and Guns
   
   
6. Liberals! Don't Push Yourselves Off the Cliff!
   
   
7. A Proper Government Cannot Allow "No Go" Areas
   
   
8. The Real Problem "Ghettoside"
   
   
9. Obama: Not Cloward-Piven but Jerry Lundegaard
   
   
10. Dolezal's Resignation: A Window into the SJW Mind
    
    
11. #BlackLivesMatter Means More Race Politics
    
    
12. Brussels: Look on the Bright Side
    
    
13. African Americans and the Ferguson Effect
    
    
14. Dear African Americans: Politics is Not the Answer to Your Problems
    
    
15. Muslim Problem Solved. Except...
    
    
16. African Americans: Please Don't Go into the Wilderness
    
    
17. Peace Be to the Deplorables
    
    
18. Bloomberg's Gaffes Tell Us the Truth about Politics
    
    
19. You Noticed: Our Rulers are Going Stark Staring Mad
    
    
20. Great Rebellion: Dems Have Actually Reversed Conservative Reforms
    
    
21. What Do You Say to a Progressive Seattle Politician?
    

Bloomberg's Gaffes Tell Us the Truth about Politics

Rule One of politics is that you should never tell the truth. The reason is simple: the whole point of politics is to band together to get something that you couldn't get by ordinary free exchange of labor and/or money.

And obviously, you are going to have to lie to get that something that you shouldn't want.

So, we have the Dem's great billionaire hope, Michael Bloomberg getting blasted for saying, a few years ago, things that you are not allowed to say any more.

A gaffe in politics is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

Do our liberal friends ever worry about things like that? That things you were allowed to say five years ago are now utterly beyond the pale?

Anyway, Pat Buchanan lists Bloomberg's No-nos for us. The first No-no is the "broken windows" policing concept, that you police the areas where the crime is.

"One of the unintended consequences is people say, 'Oh, my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.' Yes, that's true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. ... Why do we do it? Because that is where all the crime is. ... And the way you get the guns out of the kids' hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them."

In the book Ghettoside Jill Leovy explains why this is a problem. I wote about this five(!) years ago at American Thinker. It's because in the black community people complain about crime this way. They complain that the courts won't convict the real criminals. Good point: but there is a reason for this. The gang-bangers intimidate potential witnesses, and so they don't testify, and the gang-bangers don't get convicted. But the black community also complains about police harassing folks on the streets. Well, the reason they do that is to nail the known gang-bangers for small infractions on which the arresting officer can testify and ordinary intimidatable eye-witnesses aren't needed.

Do you see the internal contradiction here? If so, go to the head of the class. You are a person that understands why politics never works.

Then there was the gaffe about the Great Recession, about the policy of ending "red-lining" or denying mortgages to poor, usually black, areas. Oh, Mikey, how could you?

"It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone. ... Redlining ...was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, 'People in these neighborhoods are poor, they're not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don't go into those areas.'"

Now, the red-lining started in the New Deal area, after the federal government started its secondary market in mortgages to "help" end the Great Depression. You can see why they might do it. Now that the mortgage market had been taken over by govenment with its Federal Nation Mortgage Association the banks might not care too much about the creditworthiness of the borrowers since they would merely originate the mortage, get all the commissions, and then sell the mortgage to Uncle Sam's Fannie Mae.

Do you see the progression? First we have a Great Depression, the consequence of the Federal Reserve System absolutely cocking-up its response to the credit crisis consequent upon the stock market crash of 1929. Then we have the Federal National Mortgage Association, an attempt to revive the mortgage-lending industry after the wipe-out of the Great Depression. Then we have the need for government regulations to regulate the regulated. Then we have an additional unanticipated consequence, discovered in the civil-rights era, that the victims of the regulation were poor inner-city blacks, therefore racial discrimination. So we decide to take off the regulations that were put in there to stop corrupt activity. And then we have another financial crash that fortunately was a mere echo of the 1929 crash. Although in 2008 as in 1929 the Fed was stumble-bumbling around like a Skid Row drunk. Again.

[What I mean by that is that little Ben Bernacke, Fed Chairman, was saying, in the fall of 2008, that he didn't have the legal authority to bail out Lehman Brothers, and so, instead of nipping the crash in the bud, it went on for another five or six months. Ben, oh Ben! What do you think is the meaning of the phrase that the central bank is the "lender of last resort?"]

See, to me, all this shows that utter flatulence of modern government. What's the point of having police if they don't beat up the latest gang-bangers? That's what police are for: keeping the lower-classes of the time down to a dull roar. And what's the point of government programs and regulation if they tie themselves in knots of utter pointlessness?

My line is that the dirty little secret of modern times is that, really, we need very little government. Because the vast majority of people are good little boys and girls that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the laws, unlike almost any era in history.

Back in the day we needed brave defenders to keep the Vikings or the Mongols from conquering and killing us, raping and enslaving our women, and stealing all our grain.

But in the last 200 years we have entered a new era, where it does not pay to conquer, loot and pillage. Just leave people alone to produce and exchange, and make sure that you are the ruling class that gets its percentage off the top.

Because even with two world wars and endless destruction, the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has added up to an increase in personal income of 30 times. And we are now, according to experts, down to a global poverty rate of 10 percent that is utterly unprecedented in world history. And all through the development and intensification of people producing, inventing and exchanging, "ships setting sail again, all over the world."

However, now as ever, there is no greater crime in politics than telling the truth. Because we, the voters, insist that our leaders lie to us.

And Michael Bloomberg will have to pay the price for his truth-telling.

Peace Be to the Deplorables

Item Two of my Perfect Plan is that the People of the Creative Self should be compassionate and understanding of the People of the Responsible Self, in the same way that the People of the Creative Self demand that the People of the Responsible Self be compassionate and understanding of the People of the Subordinate Self.

Put into everyday language, we demand that the educated elite stop beating on the Deplorables as racist sexist homophobes, just as they demand that "the rich" stop exploiting and oppressing the traditionally marginalized. Sauce for goose is sauce for the gander.

You see, I think that the biggest problem in the world right now is the conceit and the sense of entitlement in the educated elite. On the one hand the educated elite is afflicted with the conceit that they are the lions, the movement, the chosen (as in Skip Marley's "Lions") to lead and lift the marginalized out their eternal slavery. And that is to be done by political power, the kindly attentions of the chosen to provide benefits and entitlements to said oppressed and marginalized.

I would say that the record of the last 150 years is that the more that the educated elite succeeds in getting political power to lead and lift the marginalized the worse it is for the marginalized. Oh yeah, it was great to help the working class and give them free education, and union rights, and government pensions. For a while. But now look at the white working class: abandoned by their patrons in the educated elite as Deplorables, and desperately short of the middle-class skills and culture that you need to wive and thrive in the modern economy.

Or women. What has the sexual revolution and women's liberation and careers for women really done for women? The divorce revolution has allowed men to cast aside their wives; the sexual revolution plus abortion on demand has forced women to surrender their young bodies to men, and allow men to love without commitment. Oh and it has pitched many a woman into a life of regret about the babies she "got rid of." What is the point of careers for women? Don't people understand that "career" is a cunning plan to get men to compete for the spoils of corporate office rather than the spoils of war? It is crazy to teach young women that "careers" are the highest and best thing in life. One day, women will discover that the whole women's liberation movement is a crock. And they they will be angry. Oh wait, they already are.

Or blacks. What has the civil rights revolution done for blacks lately? And what did the First Black President do for blacks? No doubt the police have it in for blacks. But maybe that makes sense, given that black men murder at a rate about eight times greater than white men. I dare say that your average policeman is well aware of that. But to act on it is called "profiling" by the educated elite. No doubt that many murders go unpunished in inner cities. But that is because witnesses are intimidated from testifying in court, per Jill Leovy's Ghettoside. And no doubt the police harass the local gangbangers: that's because the gangbangers can only be prosecuted for "breaking windows" when witnessed by a police officer. Meanwhile Latinos seems to be taking over the homebuilding industry. And the educated elite seems much more interested in the plight of the "gender-nonconforming" than the continued marginalization of blacks. One day, blacks will discover that the race politics of the Democrats is a crock. And then they will be angry. Oh wait, they already are.

No, the educated elite should not be leading the marginalized into an orgy of marginalization and a Skip Marley fantasy about being the chosen, the movement to lead the marginalized to glorious vengeance. Sorry chum, the dreadful oppressive capitalist class has just spent 200 years flooding the world with cheap products for the masses. The capitalist Deplorables are in the business of inventing new products and spreading them around for all to enjoy, and they are very good at it. How bad could it be?

Then there is the other war of the educated elite upon the Deplorables, the culture war that declares the cultural norms of the bourgeoisie to be suffocating and patriarchal for the glorious educated elite and their creative spawn. I've been reading Peter Gay's Why the Romantics Matter in the past few days and it reminds me that the war on the responsible middle class has been going on for 200 years, with the various Romantic movements defining themselves by their difference from the awful, dull, patriarchal, rule-obsessed, kitschy, tasteless middle class.

The point of difference between all the Romantics -- and that is why I call them People of the Creative Self -- is the difference between ordinary middle-class individualism and what Charles Taylor calls the "expressive" individualism of the educated creative elite. Call it the difference between responsible individualism and creative, "expressive" individualism. All your artists and writers think that the ordinary middle class stinks, because of what My Fair Lady's Alfred P. Doolittle calls "middle-class morality."

No doubt, from the lordly height of a Lord Byron or various other scions of wealthy families that could afford to become artists and writers, the middle class is rather mean and pathetic. But I think that attitude fails to put itself in the place of the Other. And understanding the Other is the beginning of wisdom, according to Schopenhauer.

The center of gravity of the middle class is the merchant class, people who live their lives trading goods and services, and this way of life goes back to the founding of cities, 3,000 years ago. The whole point of a merchant is to be trustworthy and responsible, so that people will trade with him. It obviously is a Big Thing, because the religions of responsibility -- Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity -- started their emergence about 3,000 years ago. The idea was and is that humans are responsible individuals, responsible in particular to God, who will judge them at the end of days. In my view Christianity is most particularly the religion of people just entering the middle class from rural idiocy and the rough comfort of the village and the blood kindred. I have a quote that I like to use to illustrate this, the words of a preacher in the Great Awakening of the mid 18th century.

When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.

This is exactly the point of the People of the Responsible Self, to experience yourself as a responsible being for whom the abdication of responsibility is a damning sin.

Now, the People of the Creative Self are always tempted to regard this experience of people just learning how to make it in the city as rather small beer, a thing for little people, Deplorables really, that lack the courage and the fortitude to step out into the uncharted waters of a creative life.

OK, then why is the same not applicable to the People of the Subordinate Self that want to live by handouts from their political patrons? Get a life, kid! Stop gang-banging and get a job!

I have been dipping into Jungian psychology recently, and touched Jung's idea of "individuation," which means the difficult process of getting to understand yourself, in a gradual process, as an individual person with your own particular character and history. What Jung is not saying is that creativity is the only thing, and that a refusal to use the means appointed to be creative is a damning sin of the patriarchy.

It's a sad thing, to me, that everyone seems to be attacking the middle class. It is a difficult row for the middle class to hoe, because, as I insist, the defining thing about the middle class is that it is not that interested in power, and yet, beset by the educated elite on one hand and the underclass catspaws of the educated elite on the other, it looks like the middle class is going to have to take up the weapons of power in order to defend itself and its responsible culture.

I would tell our liberal friends in the educated elite that they really don't want to get the middle-class Deplorables angry. That's because the culture of responsibility and trust has the potential to be more powerful than anything the creatives or the victims are capable of doing.

I say, Peace be unto the Deplorables, if you know what is good for you.

African Americans: Please Don't Go into the Wilderness

The whole cunning plan of leftism, since its invention in the 1840s, is to hive off groups of people in nation states into a different loyalty.

The idea is to persuade those newly-arrived in the city that they don't belong with the city folk and shouldn't try. They should instead establish a separate identity, under the kindly leadership of the local lefty rich kids.

This is a very bad idea, and has brought death to something like 100 million humans and misery to countless more.

The best thing for the country folk newly arrived in the city is to learn city ways and the city culture of responsible individualism. But the leaders of the city poor have preferred to appeal to their country tribalism, and teach them to believe that the resident city folk have it in for them, and that the prosperity of the city folk is based on exploiting the poor suffering worker. But not to worry, the rich-kid leaders will make the bloody bourgeoisie pay up. (Bourgeoisie is French for city folk).

After the left had had their evil way with the working class they went on to segregate women and minorities away from the city folk; women from marriage and children, and non-whites from whites.

The left has been particularly successful in segregating blacks from the common herd. Something like 90 percent of blacks vote for Democrats, the party of rich kids and the marginalized. But the next favorite minority group, Hispanics, only voted 66 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

It is not the purpose of this article to inquire why this might be so.

I don't know whose idea it was, but in the last two years of the Obama administration someone decided to angry up blacks after a stupid black thug in Ferguson, Missouri, got himself shot by a policeman after he robbed a convenience store. The consequence is that, in cities where Black Lives Matter activism is strongest, murder is up big time and 20 percent in the US overall in the last two years. The reason is simple. In cities where Black Lives Matter activism is influential the police have stopped using the broken windows/data-driven/CompStats policing strategy that aggressively targets gang-associated thugs. So black thugs kill other black thugs, and liberals know that the reason is racism.

But people are idiots, and so if you are a Democrat you believe that Black Lives Matter and that police are targeting and harassing young blacks. Now black NFL players have got into the action. Of course they have; they are just following the Zeitgeist like 97.2 percent of the rest of us do.

But I plead with our African American friends not to follow this folly and wander out into the political wilderness. Don't let the politicians and the activists run your life. They don't care about you; they only care about your vote.

And I think that in the near future we will see a sea change in the nation's politics. I expect that Hispanics and Asians will move into the Republican Party as they become solid middle class and think of themselves as "whites." The thing about Hispanics and Asians is that they don't have "white guilt." Hispanics, according to opinion polls, think that blacks are lazy. I suspect there will come a time where Hispanics and Asians will unconsciously want to differentiate themselves from the struggling lower orders, as those newly arrived in the middle class tend to do. And struggling lower orders for them will be blacks.

I also expect that the next generation of Democratic politicians will be unattractive to the broad middle class. When the Nancy Pelosis and Chuck Schumers finally retire, white pajama boys like Jon Ossoff and hard-left minority politicians like Tom Perez just aren't going to appeal to the broad middle of America.

The bottom line is that if you want to wive and thrive in the modern world you need to learn the cultural code of responsible individualism, the creed of the middle class. Otherwise you will just be the shock troops in some politician's political army, and when you are no longer useful the politicians will leave you by the roadside to wither away and die.

And the only way for African Americans to finally get their full and deserved membership in the great American nation is to stop the left-wing protest rubbish and just get with the program, the program of the middle class and its culture of responsible individualism.

There is no other way.

Of Course Trump is "Divisive"

All the liberal media is united: President Trump's tweets criticizing the NFL players "taking a knee" during the national anthem are "divisive."

Well, of course it is! Politics is about winning elections, and that means dividing the electorate. You can do it with a scalpel, or do it with an ax.

That's why I have my catch-phrase: Politics is Division. Actually I think a more accurate catch-phrase would be: Politics is the Art of Division.

The question is whether President Trump is a skilled divider or a clumsy one. That is all.

Democrats perhaps are inclined to believe that Trump is an evil divider. Maybe they are right. But maybe they really have no clue how evil and divisive their politics of race and sex is.

For instance, I assume that the NFL players are taking a knee because Black Lives Matter, and young black men are getting killed all over, especially by white cops.

Only, as Jill Leovy wrote in Ghettoside, things are a bit more complicated than that. The basic problem is that when a gangbanger kills someone in the 'hood, the prosecutors can't get witnesses to testify because the gangs intimidate them. So the black residents are angry that the guilty go free. The cops compensate by arresting young hoodlums for minor offenses, for which the cops can testify. But the black residents are mad about that too, because they don't like the police harassing them in their daily lives.

What's a mother to do? Well, when I was a juror in a case where a young black guy had been brought up on some minor offense with cops the only witnesses, the solution was simple. We looked to the one black woman on the jury to find out which way she was going to vote. Guilty, she said. So we honkies agreed with her. Go along to get along, as the saying goes.

The problem is that liberals are idiots. Here's an example. The Guardian is all wigged out that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election because too many women voted with their husbands than for the "First Woman President." And that is what academic "surveys show."

The key distinction, according to [Oregon State University Assistant Professor] Kretschmer’s research, is that single women tend to cast votes with the fate of all women in mind, while women married to men vote on behalf of their husbands and families …

 No kidding, Sherlock! And it really is monstrous that married women should be looking at the larger picture, that what matters is that their husband has a good job which helps support them and their children to raise the odds that the kids will get out of the nest and go on to wive and thrive in their turn.

The intriguing thing about the left's folly is that they don't seem to realize that their unmarried, unchild-centered world where "women cast votes with the fate of all women in mind" is going to go straight down the toilet, because the bottom line for human society is not to bend the arc of history towards justice but, as Black Swan guy Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, to bend the arc of history towards Survival.

Because if women don't have babies and raise them to maturity there won't be a tomorrow.

Because only if you and yours survive unto the next generation, only then you can start to worry about justice.

Except that, as I say, there is no such thing as justice. Only injustice.

Meanwhile the results are in on President Trump's political division operation on the NFL. By 64-25 percent, the American people think that "NFL players should stand and be respectful during the national anthem."

The thing about Donald Trump is that he is doing things that nobody on the right dared to do. Nobody dared to take on the liberal cultural hegemony and tell that dominatory hierarchy to put it where the sun don't shine. And that's because up till yesterday, politicians on the right knew that they simply could not win in such a fight. Because as the old saying had it, you don't pick a fight with a guy that buys ink by the barrel.

The thing about sayings is that they are true until they are no longer true. I suppose the old saying has now been replaced with a new one, that you don't pick a fight with a guy that buys his bytes by the billion.

Maybe that's why liberals have been amping up their hate machine these last years and calling everyone "haters." They don't like losing their cultural hegemony, and so they are trying to shut everyone up with naming and shaming while they still can.

Anyway, as I wrote a year ago about the time of the Republican National Convention: "All I Know is that Gentlemanly Conservatism is Dead."

Was I right, or was I right?

Muslim Problem Solved. Except...

My grandfather, who ran a small export business in Japan until WWII intervened, used to declare that "it's all over bar shouting."

So I am here to announce that the Muslim problem has been solved: it's all over, bar shouting.

It's all in a piece by David P. Goldman.

The Muslim problem is quite simple. Ordinary Muslims in the West are more afraid of the terrorists than they are of the police.

Right now, according to Goldman, the intelligence services attempt to penetrate the Muslim terror gangs by seeding them with Muslim criminals that get out of jail free by agreeing to inform on their terror pals. But the terrorists are on to the bureaucrats' game and so make the informers prove their loyalty to the Muslim cause by performing terror acts.

That is why almost all the terror attacks are committed by "known wolves."

No kidding. This makes a whole lot of stuff make sense.

The problem is not that different from the black gang problem, as told by Jill Leovy in Ghettoside. Everyone knows who done it, after some drive-by killing, but nobody will inform against a gangbanger, because they are afraid. On the other hand, black inner-city residents rail against the police that arrest gangbangers for minor offenses.

It was Civil War generals Sherman and Sheridan that taught us how to deal with terrorists and their sympathizers. Writes Goldman:

We don't have to be particularly smart; we merely have to do some disgusting things. Sherman and Sheridan suppressed sniping at Union soldiers by Confederate civilians by burning the towns (just the towns, not the townsfolk) that sheltered them. In other words, they forced collective responsibility upon a hostile population, a doctrine that in peacetime is entirely repugnant, but that in wartime becomes unavoidable.

By the way, did you know that Gen. Sheridan was an adviser to the Prussians in 1870 and taught them how to deal with French snipers and hostile populations?

We probably don't have to do anything that disgusting. The lesson comes from the solution to the "anarchist" problem in the US before and after World War I. I wrote about it here (H/T Steve Sailer).

The solution was to deport the anarchists, who were usually European immigrants, like Sacco and Vanzetti and the sainted Emma Goldman. After about 556 anarchists were deported the whole thing died down.

Except of course that our lefty friends have canonized the martyrs to the faith, as well they might.

Now, I must say that I am very encouraged by all this, because I see the solution to the Muslim problem also solving the world's lefty problem. Yay!

See, the only reason we have not gone Full Sherman is because of lefties, because they have selected Muslims as the next group "outside the system" for whom they are going to advocate for their "rights." I have written about this here and here. This advocacy for people outside the system made a lot of sense in 1850 when the workers were outside the system, and again, sorta, when women got the vote, and again when the Civil Rights Acts ended the Jim Crow era in the US South.

By the way, the KKK was the South's way to go Full Sherman and terrorize the people in the South so that they would fear the KKK more than the federal Reconstruction troops and officials.

My biggest fear right now is the escalating Partisan Stress Index of Peter Turchin and his Ages of Discord. Left and right in America are raising the stakes on each other, to levels last reached in the 1850s. Eventually it could lead to civil war again.

I don't know about you, but I really do not want civil war in the good old USA.

But not if the Big Problem is Muslim terrorism. That's because the only real job that justifies the obscene cost of government is to Keep Us Safe.

Sooner or later the people will demand that the government Keeps Us Safe from Muslim terror. They will blow right by the left's vile lies about "hate" and "xenophobia" and "Islamophobia." They will ask the President "Is it Safe," and the President will respond by applying Shermanesque tactics to frighten the moderate Muslims into abandoning the extremists in their midst.

Obviously, we are not at the point where the President sends troops into Muslim neighborhoods to burn all their houses down. But I reckon that the first politician that figures out how to square the circle, by deporting Muslims back to their hellholes if they have information about terrorists in their midst and did not report it, is going to have a very big career.

And the point about President Trump is that he is starting to set out markers on the Muslim question, such as with his Muslim Ban from selected terror-supporting countries. Lefties are setting out markers about "hate" and "Islamophobia." Eventually, the American people will have to choose.

Dear African Americans: Politics is Not the Answer to Your Problems

You can talk all you like about the failings of Donald Trump, but the riots in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, subsequent to the killing of a black suspect by a black police officer seem to speak more clearly about the state of America today.

Years ago, I read a guy that said simply that politics and laws can do something about egregious injustice and discrimination. But politics should get its nose out of moderate and light injustice and discrimination.

In other words, politics is a very blunt instrument and can't do much more than keep the peace, and then not even that all the time.

So people that put their faith in politics keep getting disappointed.

Thus, in the 1960s the race riots in major American cities began after the passage of the landmark civil rights laws.

Thus, in the 2010s the race riots in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Milwaukee began after the election of America's First Black President.

Why? Because politics and civil rights laws cannot make African Americans whole. It can make slavery and Jim Crow illegal but it cannot vault African Americans into the middle class.

You get into the middle class by changing your culture from the subordinate, resentful culture of the worker or the peasant to the responsible culture of the middle class. Not by Affirmative Action and diversity programs.

By the way, the chap killed by a cop in Milwaukee, 23-year-old Sylville Smith beat a shooting rap.

He beat a shooting rap at a jury trial in 2015 when a witness recanted, allegedly after Smith intimidated him. 

This is what Jill Leovy recounts in Ghettoside. Cops can't get a conviction on murders, because of witness intimidation. So they arrest the bad guys, that everybody knows who done it, for minor violations where they can be convicted on the testimony of a police officer.

I was on a jury years ago where a black suspect was tried for some minor offence purely on the testimony of two police officers. During jury deliberations the five white jurors were all quiet until the sole black woman on the 6-person jury announced for conviction. Then we followed her lead and voted for conviction.

If you want to step out into the modern world of global exchange and of trusting anyone who demonstrates trustworthiness then you must step out of your tribal enclave. You cannot sit there ready to strike out at the tribe over the hill or in the next urban gang territory. You have to declare for peace and base your public life on the principle of serving others before you serve yourself. And the first thing you do is stop listening to the politicians and activists that tell you that the answer to your problems is force: against the police, against the bosses, against the 1%.

Maybe, after the disappointment of the civil rights revolution, and after the disappointment of the First Black President, and after inner-city African Americans have burned down their cities again, our African American friends will give up on the false promise of politics and just pitch in and become Americans who happen to be black.

But that is the way of humans, and of the United States. We only do the right thing after trying all the alternatives.

African Americans and the Ferguson Effect

There's a lot of hand-wringing going on right now about whether the "Ferguson Effect" is real or Memorex. There has been a significant uptick in the murder rate in major American cities since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by a policeman in August 2014. Is this uptick real, a consequence of police failing to police gangbanger thugs in inner cities, or is it move along, nothing to see here?

Here is stalwart Michael Barone making the central point:

Black Americans were the primary victims of the huge crime increase starting in the late 1960s, and they will be the primary victims again if the Ferguson effect continues to result in more homicides. Can’t we prevent this awful history from repeating itself?

To which I say: who is this "we," Kemosabe? It is "they," the African American voters of the Fergusons and the Baltimores and the Chicagos, who must decide what to do.

Do they want to replace all the white cops with blacks? I say go for it. Do they want to reduce incarceration of young black offenders? No problem.

But maybe some African Americans in these cities will decide to vote for an equivalent of Rudy Giuliani, the man that ran for mayor of New York City and hired a police chief that brought "homicides in New York [down] from 2,445 in 1990 to 328 in 2014." Why not, if that is what they vote for?

Let's compare African Americans with another "little darling" of the liberals, the white working class. Back in the 1930s FDR and the New Deal absolutely loooved the white working class. So the workers got Social Security and union bargaining rights, which was cool for a couple of decades after World War II when you could walk out of high school into lifetime union "good jobs at good wages." But the music stopped in the Sixties as the lumbering unionized industries started to face foreign competition and the payroll taxes on labor started to get serious, and the Dems decided they didn't love the white working class so much as they loooved African Americans and women. So the white working class was left out to dry, and has wandered in the political wilderness ever since.

Today the white working class is all excited about Donald Trump and his slogan to Make American Great Again. Hey, maybe he will, maybe he won't. But the white working class is excited about him and that's democracy.

Same thing with African Americans. For fifty years liberals have loooved them as their little darlings, served them up their First Black President, and what good has it done them? I don't know, but if if blacks want to vote for an empty suit like Barack Obama and white radicals like Bill DeBlasio and various black corruptocrats that is democracy.

Generally what happens in politics is that Stein's Law operates and if something can't go on forever, it will stop. So the people wake up to reality and vote to change things. But they usually wake up too late. That's because most people are tribal and vote with their tribe, which doesn't work in the global society and economy. If you ask me, that is the situation with the white working class. And really, they still haven't got the message. Whacking China and walling off Mexico isn't going to bring the white working class back to life. Getting up every morning and doing what it takes with what you've got is what it takes.

The problem with America is the idea that a wise elite can fix things behind the scenes, using its expert knowledge, while distracting the voters with free stuff like health care and paid parental leave. There are two problems with that. First of all, the elite ain't that wise, and secondly, eventually you run out of other peoples' money to distract the voters. And then you are Venezuela.

Right now, African Americans are torn two ways, if Ghettoside by Jill Leovy has it right. On the one hand they are pissed off that the police fail to catch and put away murderers. On the other hand they get pissed off when the police harass young black homeboys on the street, charging them with petty crimes.

You tell me what to do.

Brussels: Look on the Bright Side

When the liberals at Vox respond to the Brussels "attentat" by writing that stopping immigration won't solve anything (H/T Steve Sailer), we should applaud.

Because it means that our liberal friends are forgetting nothing and learning nothing.

And the only way we get to solve the Islamist problem is when the liberals get discredited enough to be pushed off the stage.

The basic thing we need to do about Islamist terror is better policing. Call it "broken windows" policing that worked so well to civilize New York City and other US crime meccas. The point is that the police use data-driven methodologies like CompStat and police where the crime is. No more no-go areas surrendered to local militias. This should be easy to do, were it not for liberals that oppose it on the grounds of Islamophobia. So it cannot be implemented until liberals are marginalized and pushed off the political stage.

The next thing we need to do is to militarily defeat militarized Islam. According to German military theory there are three levels of military action: tactical, operational, and strategic. Obviously the US and its allies have the power and the means and the technique to defeat radical Islam at all these levels. It could be messy, but it is doable, were it not for liberals that oppose it on the grounds of colonialism. So it cannot be implemented until liberals are marginalized and pushed off the stage.

Which brings us to the real problem, the political and cultural problem. We are not going to deal properly with the Islamic problem until the west (or perhaps the Rest of the World) gets out of its present funk and faces Islam confidently and openly as capitalist, free, and not afraid to say so. This is a challenge, because the West is stuck in an internal culture war between a not very effective conservative movement that is not very good at standing for freedom and justice and the rule of law and a post-Marxist rump that is determined to ram every foolish idea of the last 200 years down our throats.

But this is why the Islamic crisis is such a good thing. Without it, our lefty ruling class and its poisonous race, gender, and gay/trans politics would be sailing ahead, dividing us by race, sex, religion, whatever, without a cloud in the sky. Instead the Islamic moment has revealed that the liberal emperor has no clothes.

The cultural Marxist movement was bad enough when it was just keeping blacks in a racial ghetto, separated from the rest of America by liberal race politics. It was bad enough when it taught women to hate marriage and children and desire to be eternal victims of the patriarchy. It was bad enough when it taught young Americans that the best thing in the world was to create a thing called gay marriage. But when Muslim extremists are represented as yet another marginalized and oppressed group and Americans warned against Islamophobia, then the liberal ruling class really has advanced a bridge too far. Not only that, but ordinary people in Europe and America can see it and that is why they are abandoning establishment politics and moving towards candidates and parties that insist that the government not just occupy territory, tax the inhabitants thereof and reward its supporters, but actually defend the inhabitants from harm.

Yes, I know. The humanity! The idea that governments should go beyond their petty power games of subduing the population and rewarding their supporters and actually do what they advertise and protect the people they oppress with their guns and their regime thugs!

What we need is a Great Awakening that creates a spiritual rebirth in the West. That is hard, and it can't be called to order.

The other great need is to shame the ruling class out of its poisonous secular religions and divisive politics that has done so much harm to poor and unskilled people in the West over the past 50 years, and demoralized the rest of us. This is what conservatism was called to do and has failed to do, as witness the Year of Trump.

My point is that we should not be horrified and disheartened by the rising Islamic terror. It will force us in the West to confront ourselves and clean the Augean stables. If we are up to the challenge we will create a new birth of freedom and prosperity. If not, well, if not, what's the point?

#BlackLivesMatter Means More Race Politics

If you are sick to death of Donald Trump I have a proposition for you. Let's talk about Black Lives Matter instead. Did you know that Black Lives Matter is George Soros funded?

I get the problem. Blacks are disproportionately arrested by police. If you are black or liberal or both you figure this disproportion is a manifestation of institutional racism, and you want it to end. You demand that it end.

And now we read about a detention center in deep blue Chicago that visits horrible indignities on the 82% of its inmates that are black. How's that Blue Model working out for ya?

The problem is best illustrated by my American Thinker piece "Why Don't Liberals Care about Black-on-Black Killing" on Jill Leovy's book Ghettoside about murder in the black LA ghetto. Even as a card-carrying liberal, Leovy tells how hard it is to get witnesses to testify against gang members when they shoot and murder. The police are really frustrated that the folks in the ghetto won't testify against the gang members. So the police compensate by arresting young blacks for "broken windows" offences. The black community gets really frustrated by that.

But liberals like New York mayor Bill de Blasio really hate "broken windows" policing. They think it is racist. Only trouble is that "broken windows" policing lowered the crime rate in big cities wherever it was tried, big time. Murder in New York City peaked at 2,605 in 1990 and was then brought down to 648 in 2013 by police chiefs like Bill Bratton and mayors like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg.

Now, under liberal Bill de Blasio, crime is up. Why? Because liberals are harassing the police for harassing the hoodlums, and so the police aren't keeping the hoodlums off the street.

But yesterday, on the anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown, police in Ferguson, Missouri shot a black man they say was shooting at them.

So, if Black Lives Matter, what do we do? Do we clamp down on the police and tell them to stop harassing young black men for street misdemeanors? Or do we double down on "broken windows" policing?

The truth is that, ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution, there has been a vicious circle about the oppression of the lower class in the city. On the one hand, the new immigrants to the city tend to be unskilled and more violent than seasoned city dwellers. So they are low paid and discriminated against by employers. On the other hand, the violent young men provoke demands for a police crackdown on hoodlums, and the crackdown is used by radical activists to mobilize the lower class for marching and protesting.

My solution is to help the lower class socialize to the ways of the city and the market economy. Then they will all become boring middle-class jobholders and householders. But there are always radical organizers that believe the problem is injustice. And there are always marginal young men drawn to the excitement of the dawn raid.

Last weekend we saw the disruption of a Bernie Sanders rally by Black Lives Matter protesters. Does that mean that the Democratic Party will be pushed left by a new outbreak of radicalism?

But the last time we had a lot of black protest was back in 1967-68, and we know how that turned out for the Democrats.

One fine day America's blacks will all be boringly bourgeois and working and married-with-children, and we will be worrying about something else.

But that time is not yet.

Dolezal's Resignation: A Window into the SJW Mind

We conservatives don't often get to read the internal communications of the social justice warriors, the jargon, the corporate bubblespeak, that they emit when talking to each other. But Rachel Dolezal's resignation letter, penned by the fake black head of the Spokane NAACP to her fellow SJWs, gives us a window in the the lefty soul.

Dolezal starts with delicious bureaucratic gobbledegook.

Many issues face us now that drive at the theme of urgency. Police brutality, biased curriculum in schools, economic disenfranchisement, health inequities, and a lack of pro-justice political representation are among the concerns at the forefront of the current administration of the Spokane NAACP.

Notice what is missing: Jobs, jobs, jobs.  Because our liberal friends these days, and presumably their social justice clients, aren't really that interested in jobs. (I'm assuming that "economic disenfranchisement" is really about access to some sort of government privilege rather than ordinary access to the job market.)

Then Dolezal segues into delicious corporate PowerPoint-ese.

While challenging the construct of race is at the core of evolving human consciousness, we can NOT afford to lose sight of the five Game Changers (Criminal Justice & Public Safety, Health & Healthcare, Education, Economic Sustainability, and Voting Rights & Political Representation) that affect millions, often with a life or death outcome. 

Yay! Gotta love those "Game Changers." It's really delicious to see these anti-capitalist SJWs using the very language that sales managers use to motivate their sales crews out there in corporate-land.

And of course we are all interested in the Game Changers, even the lowest of the low: the racists, sexists, and homophobes that so pollute our world. Let's take those bullet points and restore some sanity:

• Criminal Justice & Public Safety. Because of gangs in the inner city it is very difficult to get residents to testify against gang thugs. So we must restore the "broken windows" policing policy that the Ferguson Effect has stopped. Why is "borken windows" so important? It gets around the fear of "snitching" by using the testimony of police officers when arresting and trying gang members. So it puts them away for minor infractions, when people are too afraid to testify against them for their drive-by shootings.
• Health & Healthcare. Let's repeal Obamacare and convert Medicaid into a cash subsidy with which low-income African Americans can buy real health care, instead of the second-rate care they get with Medicaid.
• Education. Let's implement school choice nationwide and give black mamas the chance to get their kids out of violent inner-city schools that basically act as jobs programs rather than tickets out of the ghetto.
• Economic Sustainability. Goodness knows what the twisted liberal meaning of that is. I suspect it may be that people with jobs can never be fired. But the truth about the economy in the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that there is no "safe space" where today's workers can hide from the gusty winds of economic growth. People need to get a decent education and they need to surrender to the market. Any policy that "saves jobs" is a policy that is taking money away from Hillary Clinton's "everyday Americans" and giving it to people with powerful friends.
• Voting Rights & Political Representation. I suppose this is all about the Democrats' efforts to gin up the black vote by insisting that Voter ID and limited early voting is about bringing back Jim Crow. But if I were an African American I'd be thinking about illegal immigrants voting and taking jobs away from people like me.

Dolezal finishes with the usual call to action that every motivational speaker uses at the end of a speech.

It's about moving the cause of human rights and the Black Liberation Movement along the continuum from Resistance to Chattel Slavery to Abolition to Defiance of Jim Crow to the building of Black Wall Street to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement to the ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ movement and into a future of self-determination and empowerment.

I like that "future of self-determination and empowerment." It reads a lot like my own notion of "responsible individualism." And indeed I have faith that most white Americans that haven't given in to the temptation of putting on a fright wig to access the benefits of politicking-while-black would like nothing better than for African Americans to come out of their self-imposed racial ghetto and join the rest of responsible individual Americans trying to make a decent life with work and marriage and children in the greatest country in the world. 

Obama: Not Cloward-Piven but Jerry Lundegaard

Some people think that the Obamis are executing on a brilliant Cloward-Piven strategy to make the country ungovernable. That's why the president and his minions are "angrying up" African Americans against white cops killing young blacks.

All part of the plan, according to John Nolte.

Keep ‘em down. Keep ‘em angry. Pretend you are their savior not their oppressor, and keep ‘em voting for the very thing destroying them: big government and the Democrats who control it.

This sinister plot is no secret. It’s openly called the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

But I think that the Cloward-Piven Strategy, named after two lefty professors predicting revolution, is not a strategy. It is a tactic. Sure, it can angry up the proles so that radical leaders can enlist them into a political street army. Then the police hold back from vigorous policing and the violence gets worse. But then what?

I suspect the same goes for Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. It's all about mobilizing the urban working or underclass against The Man, making him follow his rules. But like Gandhi's non-violence, it only works against a "Man" that operates according to bourgeois law and a "Man" that has compassion for the struggling masses.

But the question is, with Cloward-Piven and Alinsky, what next? When you've got your urban army set up and organized, what do you do with it? Can you look around a corner and see where your lefty activism is going to take you?

There, in my opinion, is where things start to go wrong.

It's like the set-up in the movie Fargo. Car dealer Jerry Lundegaard sets up a cunning plan to have a couple of low-lifes kidnap his wife so his rich father-in-law can pay the ransom and Jerry can get his hands on his father-in-law's money. What could go wrong? As Instapundit Glenn Reynolds would say.

Everything, that's what.

Think of the Obama presidency. After the biggest financial crash since 1929, the Obamis say Hey, let's nationalize the health care system, let's drench the energy sector in stupid green subsidies and drive coal plants out of business. Oh and let's make sure we get out of the slump with a quick $1 trillion stimulus to keep state and local government employees on the job. What could go wrong?

Everything, that's what, from a failed Obamacare built on lies and a fracking revolution that makes nonsense out of green energy. And an excruciatingly slow recovery because of all the new costs that the Obamis have thrown over the economy.

Now the Obamis think it's a brilliant idea to end the "broken windows" and "stop and frisk" policing of the last 20 years. Because Black Lives Matter. Because liberals hate the unjust "stop and frisk" policing policy that unjustly targets young men of color. What could go wrong?

Everything, that's what, from murder to mayhem. Here's Leah Barkoukis in "Families of Shooting Victims to de Blasio: 'We Need Stop-and-Frisk'." You mean that urban residents actually want unjust and racist "stop and frisk?" Golly. Who could have seen that coming? In Baltimore:

Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend.

And now in Baltimore "the people who not too long ago decried the presence of police in their communities are now are wishing they’d come back."

There are two narratives about urban policing. There is the Robert Peel narrative, that in the modern big city policemen are needed to control young lower-class single men. Robert Peel was the guy that created the Metropolitan Police in Britain in 1829. Then there is the progressive narrative that the "gentle giants" are victims of the system. Because racism, or inequality.

The "broken windows/stop and frisk" policy belongs in the Peel tradition and was developed in response to the urban riots of the 1960s and the explosion in crime thereafter. The combination of riots and crime created the "law-and-order" politics that elected Richard Nixon to the presidency.

The idea of "stop and frisk" is that you go after minor street crimes on the theory that the guys creating street disturbances are the same as the guys doing the murders.  Says Wiki:

The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Since then it has been subject to great debate both within the social sciences and the public sphere. The theory has been used as a motivation for several reforms in criminal policy, including the controversial mass use of "stop, question, and frisk" by the New York City Police Department.

When Wiki writes "great debate" and "controversial" they mean that liberals hate it.

But there is a bigger issue that "stop and frisk" solves. The problem is that people in the inner city won't testify about gang murders; they are too afraid. Of course the inner-city folks blame the po-lice for their failure to arrest and convict the killers. But "everybody knows" who done the killings, including the police. So the police get their own back by arresting the known thugs for minor crimes whenever they catch them. The young thugs and their liberal activist mentors hate this.

And so when Bill de Blasio became Mayor of New York City he pushed back on "stop and frisk".  Of course he did; he's a progressive and progressives hate "stop and frisk." And in the wake of Trayvon Martin and Ferguson and Staten Island and Baltimore police all over the nation have eased back on "stop and frisk." Hey, why risk your freedom and your family and your career because you didn't dot the 'i's and cross the 't's in your last arrest? But coincident with the backoff in "stop and frisk" has been a startling rise in urban killing. Who could have see this coming? As always Heather Mac Donald is the go-to person on this in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

What we are getting is almost a scientifically controlled experiment to measure the effectiveness of "stop and frisk." We all know, because we all understand scientific method, that "correlation is not causation." That goes back to Hume. In the last 20 years the crime rate has come down dramatically. And also police forces across the nation have been implementing "stop and frisk." But hey, that's just correlation.

But now, courtesy of Barack Obama and Bill de Blasio and the lefty rioters in Ferguson and Baltimore, we have a suspension of "stop and frisk." And low and behold, urban killings are up sharply.

I'd say that this is just about as close as we get in this world to "causation."

What is the explanation for the dumb-as-posts policies of our liberal friends, who just cannot seem to learn? Why in the world have liberals insisted that "stop and frisk" was mere racism and oppression, and are now seeing their opposition to effective policing blow up in their faces?

Here is my evaluation, gleaned from a commenter at National Review. The answer to the question is that liberalism is not a governing philosophy. It is a secular religion. "The Z Man" is commenting on the inability of the progressive ruling class to curb the Clintons:

The central issue is that Progressives lack the ability to police their ranks, other than the hunting of heretics. They are good at chasing off a guy like Juan Williams for apostacy, but they can't figure out how to police common criminals like the Clintons.

See what he is saying? He is saying that the only thing the Progressives know how to do is to police orthodoxy, and hunt the heretics. But that is a tactic of a church or a religion. It does not try to look around the corner and think about what the hunting of heretics might do in the larger world. It does not think about a code of honor for the governing class, either from a moral or a strategic perspective.

And here is The Z Man's big point. "A political class with a moral grounding would have cut off [the Clintons] long before they made it to national politics." But in 1992 the Dems were desperate.

But now we have the "Fargo Presidency." Hey, let's angry up the African Americans and drive them to the polls in 2016. What could go wrong?

Well, everything, that's what. Let's just start with the vital Republican "war on women." If everything is quiet at home and abroad then it's a fine idea to terrify women into believing that evil white Republican men want to take their contraception away from them. But suppose the news is full of urban rioting and the sudden rise in crime?

Then America's biddable women, that once were soccer moms and then security moms and then hands-off-my-uterus moms, would now become law-and-order moms. It's visceral. A woman cannot begin to function as the bringer of life until she is safe. As Jack London opines in The Sea Wolf, when the ship starts sinking the women start shrieking. They expect the men to make them safe. Of course Jack London was a jerk and an alcoholic and a drug addict. But he did believe in socialism.

The number one question women have is "Mr. President, Is it Safe?" And it looks like "safe spaces" will be front and center in 2016.

Thanks to the Fargo Presidency.

The Real Problem "Ghettoside"

We've all gotten used to the liberal "police brutality" meme, where police target minorities for abuse. That's when the police are not ignoring murders and concentrating on arresting minorities for minor infractions.

Now comes Jill Leovy with Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (H/T Steve Sailer) and she's getting a soft-focus interview on NPR's Fresh Air in "'Ghettoside' Explores Why Murders Are Invisible In Los Angeles:" as in

Our guest today, journalist Jill Leovy, argues that black communities suffer deeply from too little law enforcement, or at least law enforcement of a certain kind.  

You see, murders in the black ghetto get very little coverage in the media, and so Jill Leovy decided to sit down and document every murder in Los Angeles in a blog, The Homicide Report, and now she's written a book about it. Murder in the black ghetto may be routine, but it shatters the lives of families on the receiving end. And to compound the agony, very few murders of young black men are "solved."

Well, looking at numbers from LAPD from about '88 through the early 2000s, around 40 percent, if the victims are black men.

And injury shootings have an even lower "solved" rate, at 25 percent. What is going on here? Here is what is going on:

[Leovy:] I spoke to a mother, once, in South Bureau - black woman - her son had just been murdered. I think this was maybe a couple of days after the murder. I had gone to her door. And it was one of these cases where the police just had no witnesses. The case wasn't going anywhere. The mother told me that since the murder, the killers, who she knew, who were, I think, the gang members who lived on her street, had been knocking on her door and taunting her and laughing at her - her grief.  

Here's the black grievance: on the one hand, police are too heavy handed. On the other, they don't bother to solve the big stuff, the murders.

[Leovy:] [A] a standard black grievance against police that you hear in South LA, that has to do with the generally understood problem - too much consent searches, we say, in LA, too much stop-and-frisk, too heavy of law enforcement, too much presumption of guilt when you take stops.

What I hear, when I'm in these neighborhoods, is a combination. It's a two-pronged grievance. There's another half of that. And the other half is, I get stopped too much for nothing, and the police don't go after the real killers. They don't go after the really serious criminals in this neighborhood.

Then there's the intimidation:

[Interviewer:] You know, you write that most of these cases are made not by physical evidence, you know, fibers or that kind of thing, but by witnesses and a phrase that you hear a lot in some of these communities after a homicide is, everybody knows who did it. But it's the reluctance of witnesses to cooperate that is such a huge barrier. You want to just explore that for a moment and talk about what fears witnesses have and why?

LEOVY: Well, witnesses I think justly fear retaliation. There's a lot of kind you might call it soft retaliation - signals, hard stares. I had one witness on a case who a couple days after she - the perpetrators clearly saw her at the scene, woke up in the middle of the night, and they're banging hard on her windows, bunch of guys walking slowly around the house banging, banging on each window for a long time. And they didn't hurt her, but that's terrifying. And it's very clear what that's saying. What that's saying is, think about what we will do to you.

You can see why the police are running around harassing the homeboys. They can't get any witnesses for the murders, but knowing who the culprits are, they can at least get them for the small stuff.

End of facts, beginning of analysis.

Many years ago, I read a policeman that said that the dirty little secret of policing is informers. If you don't have informers you don't know what is going on and you can't prosecute urban crime. And that's what we just read about above. "Everybody knows" who did it, but nobody is willing to testify.

And, of course, these urban killings are, really, combat deaths in the contests for turf, the border wars, between rival urban gangs.

Now my theory of government is that every government is an armed minority occupying some territory and defending it from enemies, foreign and domestic. It supports itself by taxing the inhabitants of that territory. Period.

On this theory, urban criminal gangs are proto-governments that carve out territory within the territory of a larger national government. They defend that territory from other proto-governments and they tax the inhabitants for their "protection," And the larger national government tolerates it.

This has been going on in the United States for at least a century and a half, ever since the Irish came over in their "coffin ships." First it was the Irish gangs, then the Jewish gangs, then the Italian gangs. Now it's the black gangs and the Latino gangs.

But why? I think the main reason is that the immigrants on the lowest rung of the ladder don't have the connections and the credentials or the skills to enter the formal economy (which today taxes labor at up to 25 percent, including payroll taxes, unemployment, workers comp and mandatory benefits). So they have to operate outside the law. So they are vulnerable. They may work "off the books" or they may aim higher at the risky trade in illegal or highly taxed substances. But they have to work outside the law because they don't have the education, or skills, or experience, or connections, or whatever, to be competitive in the formal economy.

Remember the cruelties, Voltaire is supposed to have said. He was talking about the cruelties of the ancien régime. We too have our cruelties, and the poor have their grievances.

And so we can see a two-point program to solve this problem. Point One is to reconquer the urban ghettos and smash the gangs. Point Two is to abolish the cruel "helping" state interventions in the economy that make it impossible for unskilled people to work in the formal economy.

Otherwise, the problem of "Ghettoside" is insoluble. But maybe the ruling class likes it that way.

A Proper Government Cannot Allow "No Go" Areas

One of the little factoids that has popped up to my attention in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings is the existence of the French "Zones urbaines sensibles" -- or "no go" areas, where the police don't go to enforce the law of the land.

Sorry, Charlie, but that won't wash. Let us inquire of the political philosopher, Norman Tebbit, once minister under Margaret Thatcher in Britain. Says he:

A state must have a territory over which it is sovereign, and a people who owe it allegiance.  It must have the capacity (and the will) to defend its territorial boundaries and its people from aggressors. It must provide not only external but internal security, allowing its citizens to go about their lawful business freely, and criminal and civil justice systems as well as a currency and the regulatory and legislative infrastructure needed for agriculture, industry and trade.

That's in the first chapter of my magisterial American Manifesto; it is called "Government and the Technology of Power." Notice the key words: "territory over which it is sovereign." That means no "no-go" zones.  Did you know that in 2006, according to Daniel Pipes, there were 751 "no-go" zones in France?

Of course, one of the points of "The Technology of Power" is that most of what government does these days has nothing to do with these basic jobs. But after a while I talk about proto-states, like the territory controlled by an insurgent group, or the Red Base in southern China occupied in the 1930s by Mao ZeDong and Zhou Enlai. These proto-states operate exactly like a real state. They tax, they spend, they draft soldiers, and defend their territory from other states. Go on, read about it.

There are, of course, no-go zones in the United States. I am thinking about criminal gangs and South Chicago, where businesses pay protection money to the gangs, and the writ of the police is weak.

After the disaster of urban crime in the 1970s, conservatives decided to come up with a solution to urban crime. That's what "broken windows" policing is all about. It is about prosecuting criminal activity even in the most pathetic inner-city ghetto, and its technology, CompStat, is a system to measure how well the cops are doing, individually and collectively in suppressing criminal activity. That, of course, is what President Obama and Attorney General Holder have been attacking in Seattle and other cities across the US. Only it looks like the assassination of two NYPD cops recently might have put their cunning plan on hold.

I've had a bit of an epiphany in the last two weeks that relates to all this. No, not from the cop assassination and the Charlie Hebdo killings. Not at all. I expect that sort of thing, and I expect it to get worse before it gets better.

No, my little epiphany came from reading the early chapters of The Sources of Social Power by sociologist Michael Mann. In writing about the first agricultural societies, Mann talks about "caging." The early irrigating farmers were caged, because they could no longer escape from their governments. They needed government to defend their improvements and the mechanisms of their alluvial irrigation.

If the caging idea is true about the first agriculturalists, then it is doubly, triply true about us, living in the post-industrial west. There is no way we can survive for a day, let alone a season, unless the whole apparatus of modern society keeps running, and running well.

So we expect our governments to do their job, dammit, and do it well. Because if we are caged, then we insist that Muslim immigrants be equally caged and subject to state power.

It is, I suggest, absolutely unacceptable for modern multicultural governments to allow Muslim "no-go" zones in their cities. First of all, governments must insist that everyone, even the little darlings of the ruling class, obey the law. Second, a real government cannot allow the formation of proto-states within its territory, any more than the United States allows Russia the right to operate military bases in the continental United States.

Government is force. Government must be sovereign, force-wise, within its own territory.

Liberals! Don't Push Yourselves Off the Cliff!

Conservatives and Republicans, whatever our faults, can point to two decisive domestic policies of the last 30 years that really made a difference. The first was supply-side economics. The second was "broken-window" policing. The first policy ushered in the Reagan Revolution and ignited a twenty year economic boom from 1980 to 2000. The second made New York City livable and cut the murder rates in the Big Apple by over 50 percent.

But liberals seem to have forgotten the lessons of the past. No doubt that is why Republicans are surging to political power everywhere in America except the two left coasts. Here is a lifeline to my liberal friends before they push themselves off the cliff.

Supply-side economics is why Bill Clinton ran as a "new" Democrat to split the difference between the Sixties Left and the Reagan Right. When he betrayed his promise and raised taxes and pushed HillaryCare he got himself a Republican Congress in the 1994 midterms. In 1996 he passed welfare reform in order to win reelection and prove he'd learned his lesson.

"Broken-window" policing was an idea advanced by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1982. It was implemented in Boston and New York by Bill Bratton, famously while Rudy Guiliani was mayor of New York City in the 1990s. The idea was to pin-point high crime areas and harass young men that committed minor crimes of vandalism, thus sending a message to the street that disorder would not be tolerated. It was a counter-strategy to the "police brutality" politics of the Sixties and 1970s; police had responded by retreating from the streets and career trouble, and letting crime rage unabated.

If liberals were smart and if they truly believed in science they would have read, learned, and inwardly digested the theory and the evidence. But they didn't, and you can see that by reading the Wikipedia links above. They equivocate; they dance and jive. So if you are a genuine NPR/NYT liberal you don't pay no nevermind to the lessons of supply-side economics and broken-window policing.

But there is a penalty for ignoring reality; you get punched upside the head. The Clinton generation of Dem politicians knew that they had to pay their respects to supply-side economics and pretend they supported the cops even if they didn't believe a word of it. They had to pretend because the "stupid" voters believed it. But then a generation of liberals grew up that knew not Reagan. Call it the Vox generation, after young Ezra Klein's website. They went to college and got their economics straight from Keynes and their politics straight from the left, and so they never got taught that Keynes and cop-baiting was poison for Democrats, quite apart from the fact that they were poison for the economy and for society.

So let's rehearse for our lefty friends why they must take their supply-side and broken-windows medicine if they want to resume the aborted drive for a new Democratic majority. Look, I get that leftist politics is all about benefits and justice for the poor. But you don't get to do it unless you have the economy working and the streets safe.

So let's do the elevator story on economics that every liberal should know.

Supply-side economics The basic thing to grasp is that Keynesian economics is like a relief pitcher for government. It's a get-out-of-a-jam dodge. It says, in the middle of a financial crisis: oh gosh, we can't reduce government benefits while people are unemployed; we can't let our favored corporate friends go bankrupt. So we must keep spending and we must print money. Unfortunately that doesn't get the economy back on track. Supply-side economics says: yes, you must bail out the banks to prevent a credit collapse, but then it's back to hard money. Yes, you don't want the unemployed rioting in the streets, but the way to stimulate the economy is by cleaning out crony subsidies and regulations and taxes and lowering the marginal tax rates on work and investing.

Here's the elevator story on broken-windows policing that every liberal should know.

Broken-windows policing The basic problem of every city since the Industrial Revolution is that you get a strategic concentration of young lower-class males with few skills that tend towards the instincts of all young men down the ages: the dawn raid. Starting in the 1830s with the London Metropolitan Police the response of the middle class to the criminal gang activity of young lower-class urban males has been vigorous policing. The job of British "bobbies" and America "cops" has been to get in the faces of the young thugs and say, like Dirty Harry, Go ahead, make my day. When the cops do this the young thugs retreat and the city becomes safe. When they don't, as in New York City in the 1970s, the young thugs rampage around and make life hell for the poor.

Let us turn to Karl Marx and my copy of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He begins:

Hegel says somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

He means, I assume, that if we don't learn our lesson the first time around, we will be forced to learn it the second time, only this time in the corner wearing a dunce cap.

Supply-side economics was a response to the tragedy of economic "stagflation" in the 1970s. The Keynesians said that they had figured out the business cycle and how to avoid economic reverses. The 1970s proved them wrong, and supply-side economics proved that there was another way, and it worked.

Broken-windows policing was a response to the anti-police politics of the Marcuse Left in the 1960s and the crime wave that followed in the 1970s. It said that, whatever the "root cause" of poverty, there is no alternative to aggressive policing right in the faces of the young lower-class thugs. When implemented in Boston, in New York, in Los Angeles, broken-windows policing worked.

So come on liberals. Stop the madness while you still can. Go with the settled science and stop being deniers about supply-side economics and broken-windows policing.