The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘The Vision of the Anointed’ Returns

Posted on | November 26, 2020 | 1 Comment

One of the most predictable consequences of a Joe Biden presidency — assuming the Democrats get away with this obvious fraud — will be an astonishing increase in violent crime. Recall that in the five or six months prior to the election, riots occurred across America in support of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, dedicated to what Steve Sailer has called “the new Zeroth Amendment,” i.e., “No Black man must submit to being arrested if He’s really not in the mood to be arrested.”

In the wake of the George Floyd riots, Heather Mac Donald warned of “the Minneapolis Effect,” as shootings skyrocketed in the city as a result of police being restrained from pursuing criminals. Elsewhere, Mac Donald has written that the Biden-Harris platform statement on law enforcement “reads like a Black Lives Matter wish list.” While violent crime in the United States has declined significantly since the early 1990s, the downtrend began reversing after the 2014 Ferguson riots, and crime has especially soared among black residents in a number of major cities including New Orleans, Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit and Chicago.

Speaking of Chicago, it is certain that dozens of black people will be shot there during this four-day holiday weekend:

2019 Thanksgiving weekend: 4 killed, 28 wounded
2018 Thanksgiving weekend: 4 killed, 20 wounded
2017 Thanksgiving weekend: 8 killed, 37 wounded
2016 Thanksgiving weekend: 11 killed, 64 wounded
2015 Thanksgiving weekend: 9 killed, 22 wounded
2014 Thanksgiving weekend: 5 killed, 23 wounded
2013 Thanksgiving weekend: 4 killed, 12 wounded

Just as Thanksgiving murders in Chicago are predictable — the data form a pattern — so also we may predict that the consequences of a Biden presidency will include a massive crime wave in America.

Black Lives Matter is a pro-crime movement. You cannot be anti-cop without being pro-crime, and the Democratic Party has embraced BLM as a symbol of moral authority. The Biden-Harris anti-police agenda is not about facts and logic, but rather expresses sentimental notions of “social justice,” a belief in an imaginary world where all problems affecting black Americans can be explained by white racism. When it comes to crime in the black community, this means that the gangbanger dealing dope and shooting up the neighborhood is not really a criminal, but rather a victim of racist oppression — blame whitey! In this twisted worldview, the black criminal becomes a sort of civil-rights hero in a social-justice drama in which police are the villains. If you think I’m engaged in hyperbole, consider an incident that happened last year in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne, California: An assault and theft occurred at a convenience store on El Segundo Boulevard where William Ewell, 24, was one of three men who “began arguing with the female cashier. … Ewell then walked behind the counter where the cashier was standing and forcibly grabbed store items from the display”:

The female cashier attempted to stop Ewell at which time she was assaulted by the subjects. Employees were able to force them out of the store. While outside, an employee was hit by a trashcan in the face thrown by Ewell.

Police were called. Ewell and another man were arrested.

End of story? No, because when police showed up to arrest Ewell, a woman recorded a cellphone video that “went viral” on social media:

A wailing, disruptive woman placed herself in the line of fire on June 7, when she barged into a scene where police were taking a robbery and assault suspect into custody at gunpoint . . .
The incident occurred at the intersection of Prairie Avenue and El Segundo Boulevard, the woman said in the now-viral cell phone footage.
“They have their guns drawn on this young, black man right here,” she railed, panning over to show a man on his knees facing away from police. “Why are your guns pulled on this young man?”
The suspect, later identified as 24-year-old William Ewell, had been stopped by Hawthorne police after an officer was flagged down by citizens at a gas station at approximately 6:45 a.m., the department said in a press release.
A gas station employee pointed to a male walking across the street, and told the officer he had just assaulted another employee inside the store.
While the officer was gathering information about what had occurred, a witness called 911 to report that a robbery had just taken place at the same location, and that “there were possible weapons involved,” according to the press release.
The officer was able to keep sight of the suspect the witnesses were pointing at, and drove across the intersection to detain him.
He was later identified as Ewell.
Cell phone footage showed Ewell as he hollered over his shoulder at the officers and told them he was unarmed.
“He has no weapons on him!” the woman parroted. “We live right now! We are so live!”
She then interrupted the officers at the scene, and began distracting Ewell by asking him for his name, at which point he began flailing his arms and telling her that people down by the gas station had “attacked” him.
Ewell dropped his hands to speak to the woman, making them no longer visible to the officers who were holding him at gunpoint from behind.
“Get out of my way! Get out of my way!” one of the officers yelled at her, motioning to the side.
Although the officer’s weapon was pointed at Ewell, the woman had positioned herself in front of him, and was directly in the line of fire.
“Are you gonna shoot him?” she asked the officer. “Relax, because they will shoot you — they killed my boyfriend in 2015. Yes, he was killed by the police!”
“You gonna shoot me too, right? For filming, right?” she asked the officers, while still standing in the line of fire. “We live! Look at that big -ss gun she got on this man with no weapon!”
Additional officers rushed to the scene as the officers continued to hold Ewell at gunpoint.
“Is all that really necessary, ma’am?” the woman behind the camera asked. “I’m sorry. I just need to know. Is all the guns drawn on him necessary?”
The woman identified herself as “Sky,” and said that her boyfriend, Leroy Browning, was killed by police in 2015.

The woman’s video went viral and was seen by millions who had no idea that Ewell had just attacked a woman at the convenience store, that witnesses to the crime had pointed out Ewell to the first officer on the scene, and that police responding to the scene had been told by 911 dispatch that “there were possible weapons involved.”

Also, how did this woman’s boyfriend get shot by the cops?

A man shot and killed by a deputy outside a Taco Bell in Palmdale early Sunday [Dec. 20, 2015] has been identified as 30-year-old Leroy Browning, authorities said Monday.
Browning, who is suspected of driving under the influence before crashing into the side of the restaurant, was shot by a deputy after he resisted arrest and allegedly grabbed hold of a gun of another deputy, said Lt. David Coleman of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau.
The incident occurred just before 3 a.m. in the 37900 block of 47th Street East after the Taco Bell had closed but some employees had remained inside. The employees reported that a vehicle had crashed into the business near the drive-thru and the driver appeared to be unconscious, officials said.
A blue-steel pistol and a baggie of marijuana was found in the car during the course of the investigation. It was later determined that Browning was wanted for armed residential robbery and assault with a deadly weapon in which a victim was shot in July, Coleman said. A warrant had been issued for his arrest. . . .
Following field sobriety tests, the suspect became belligerent and charged the deputy who was trying to arrest him and wrapped his arms around him “like he was going to tackle him.” He began “pulling at the deputy’s gun,” other deputies came to his assistance and struggled with the suspect who continued to pull at the gun. At some point, the deputy communicated with others that he had his gun and one of the assisting deputies fired his gun multiple times.

So, he was wanted for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon when he got drunk and crashed into a Taco Bell, then “became belligerent,” resisted arrest, and grabbed a deputy’s gun.

Bang, bang. R.I.P., Leroy Browning.

You see, when you know the whole story, the “systemic racism” narrative doesn’t withstand scrutiny, but we are expected to jump to pre-ordained conclusions about such incidents, to believe that both Leroy Browning and William Ewell were victims of oppression. Facts that don’t fit this “social justice” narrative are made to disappear; for example, in the photo at the top of this post, notice that the officers aiming their weapons at William Ewell are both female and neither one of them is Caucasian. Also, perhaps you didn’t notice that the officer on the right is wielding a non-lethal weapon that fires beanbag projectiles. The cops did not want to shoot Ewell, but because a witness had told 911 that he might be armed, they weren’t taking any chances — routine precautions.

What do laws mean if police are deprived of their ability to enforce laws? What is the point of investigating an assault or a robbery if, when a suspect is identified, police cannot make an arrest? How are they to make an arrest if suspects are encouraged to resist arrest? And that’s exactly what BLM is all about — inciting violent resistance to law enforcement, on the premise that black suspects are victims of racism.

The most rudimentary exercise of logic will suffice to dismantle the arguments embedded in BLM rhetoric, but of course this rhetoric is intended to inflame emotions in such a way as to foster beliefs that are impervious to facts and logic. An appeal to ethnic tribalism, encouraging black people to view white people — all white people, but especially white police officers — as hostile enemies, produces a situation in which anyone within the black community who disputes the social-justice victimhood narrative is viewed as a traitor. Hating cops becomes a requirement of tribal loyalty, in much the same way that hating Jews was required to prove one’s status as a “loyal German” under the Nazi regime.

Who is to blame for this state of affairs? White liberals, that’s who.

We see them on CNN, praising Joe Biden’s “empathy” — he cares, and caring is all that matters in the liberal worldview that Thomas Sowell described as The Vision of the Anointed. So long as someone has the “correct” political beliefs, they are judged by their idealistic goals, rather than the actual results of the policies they advocate.

What matters, to liberals, is being sympathetic toward certain “mascots,” as Sowell calls them. As long as one has the proper sympathies, then everything else becomes irrelevant; you are among the anointed, and anyone who opposes you is among the benighted. One might think that such a nonsensical worldview would be regarded as objects of ridicule, but the fact that most university professors, prestigious journalists and other intellectuals embrace this belief system means that they seldom encounter any articulate criticism from anyone whose opinions make much difference to them. You’re never going to be fired from Harvard, CNN or the New York Times for being wrong about public policy; you can only be fired for not being sufficiently “woke.”

One of the amazing things about liberals is how they are able to persist in their erroneous beliefs — which are often harmful to the very people they claim to want to help — despite overwhelming contradictory evidence. However, if your beliefs are not based on facts and logic, but rather on an emotional commitment to a certain worldview, no amount of rational argument can ever persuade you that you are wrong.

Ed Driscoll linked this morning to a review of The Vision of the Anointed in which the reviewer, Professor Stephen D. Cox, notes Sowell’s observation about liberals “finding substitutes for argument”:

Suppose that you doubt the necessity or usefulness of some great new government program. You may first be presented with a quantity of decontextualized “facts” and abused statistics, all indicating the existence of a “crisis” that only government can resolve. If you are not converted by this show of evidence, an attempt will probably be made to shift the viewpoint: outsiders may doubt that there is a crisis of, say, homelessness, but “spokesmen for the homeless” purportedly have no doubts.
There may also be an attempt simply to declare victory by relabeling current political proposals as inherent rights: it will be announced, in vague yet dogmatic terms, that everyone has a right to decent housing and that government is therefore compelled to provide it. . . .
If even these methods fail to win you over, attention will be redirected from the political issue to your own failure of imagination or morality. It will be insinuated that people like you are simplistic or perversely opposed to change, lacking in compassion and allied with the “forces of greed.” (As Sowell observes, it is always the payers rather than the spenders of taxes who are considered vulnerable to the charge of greed.)
Perhaps the most potent of all the “tactics in lieu of arguments” that Sowell studies is the practice of assessing political programs by their supposed moral intention instead of their visible effect. Thus, a “poverty program” can always be justified by its compassionate motive, even if it turns out to have a disastrous impact on the poor. The opponents of such programs can be blamed for their hard-heartedness.
These are the kinds of argumentative fallacies that occupy a crucial place, as Sowell shows, in the discourse of influential modern-liberals. Reviewing his evidence, one naturally thinks of the old question from Jeremy Bentham’s Book of Fallacies: Is it credible that the “inanity and absurdity” of such arguments “should not be fully manifest to those persons who employ them”? In other words, how can people who argue like this possibly be sincere? Sowell’s answer is precise and compelling: “People are never more sincere than when they assume their own moral superiority” (p. 3).

The assumption of moral superiority is the psychological basis of liberalism. What is remarkable is how securely liberals insulate themselves from the consequences of policies based on arrogant folly. Unless and until criminals start showing up in the vicinity of Martha’s Vineyard, Malibu or other enclaves of the elite, the rest of us will be made to suffer for this folly. Don’t say nobody warned you.




 

Category: Crime, Intellectuals

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One Response to “‘The Vision of the Anointed’ Returns”

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