Category: American Spectator

Biden and the ‘White Supremacy’ Smear

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There is exactly zero evidence that Kyle Rittenhouse is a “white supremacist,” but the absence of evidence did not prevent the Joe Biden campaign from smearing the teenager who defended himself against an Antifa mob during the Kenosha riots.

Kyle Rittenhouse’s lawyer Lin Wood is not happy about this:

After last night’s debate, the Biden camp put together a video that they then tweeted out indicating President Trump and Kyle Rittenhouse are white nationalists. This is not true and now a defamation claim is being prepared against Joe Biden.
In last night’s debate the moderator and Joe Biden’s tag team member, Chris Wallace, pressed President Trump to condemn violence in American cities by white nationalists. The two cities where Wallace said white nationalists were active were Kenosha and Portland. President Trump responded by saying all the destruction over the past few months comes from the radical left. . . .
After the debate, candidate Biden used this exchange in an advertisement, wrongly accusing the President of being a white nationalist and indicating Kyle Rittenhouse was as well . . .
Now it looks like Biden has a lawsuit coming based on his defamation of the young 17 year old in Kenosha who was involved in the death of two men from the Antifa/BLM riots while acting in self defense.

You know who else got smeared last night? The Proud Boys:

The crucial moment in Tuesday night’s debate was near the end when Joe Biden invited President Trump to throw the Proud Boys under the bus, and the president refused to do it. The president was asked by moderator Chris Wallace “to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland.” Trump replied, “Sure, I’m willing to do that,” but then added that “almost everything I see” in terms of violence “is from the left-wing, not from the right-wing. I’m willing to do anything.… I want to see peace.”
After further back-and-forth, Trump said, “Give me a name,” and Biden said, “Proud Boys.” To this, Trump replied: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, but I’ll tell you what, somebody’s gotta do something about Antifa and the Left, because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left-wing problem.”
Because I personally know both Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and the group’s current chairman Enrique Tarrio, I was pleased by that response. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Why White Lives Don’t Matter

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No, I’m not talking about this — not yet, maybe later today — but rather about an interesting fact you probably haven’t noticed: Nobody cares how many white suspects get shot by cops. And I mean absolutely nobody cares. Certainly no black person has ever bothered to investigate how often the police shoot white suspects, but white people don’t care, either. Like, if I got pulled over by cops tomorrow and became belligerent when they tried to arrest me, nobody would care if this resulted in me being shot to death. My own family wouldn’t really care. My friends would be like, “He probably had it coming. He was always an idiot.”

There would be no protest marches. Benjamin Crump wouldn’t be all over CNN complaining about the “excessive force” if I got shot by cops. And this is not just true for me, but of any other white person.

Why is this? It’s because the Left has convinced a sizable percentage of Americans — especially the kind of fools who vote for Democrats — that the law is fundamentally unjust. To the Left, law is always an expression of political power and, because “people of color” are alleged to be oppressed, therefore the law is an expression of injustice. So when the cop attempts to enforce the law, according to this leftist worldview, the correct thing to do is to resist this oppressive power.

You were driving 20 miles over the speed limit with an expired tag and no insurance? You’re a victim of injustice! That cop is an oppressor! 

This idea that police, merely by enforcement of well-known laws, are acting as agents of “systemic racism,” explains why there must be riots every time a black person gets shot by cops, whereas CNN can’t even be bothered to notice when the cops kill white people:

Freddrick Hadden was shot to death by a sheriff’s deputy in Burke County, Georgia. A habitual felon who had only recently been released from prison, Hadden had kidnapped his ex-wife at gunpoint. When Deputy Eric Madison pursued Hadden to a home near Hephzibah, the woman escaped Hadden’s vehicle. She was shot twice by Hadden before Deputy Madison returned fire, killing the kidnapper and saving the woman’s life.
That incident in August 2019 attracted no national media interest. CNN didn’t cover it, there were no protests, and Joe Biden has never mentioned it. Perhaps that’s because Freddrick Hadden was white and Deputy Madison is black.
For months, Biden and his media allies have abetted #BlackLivesMatter activists in inciting racial fear and hatred, claiming that “systemic racism” by police accounts for the deaths of black suspects at the hands of police. Even though research clearly disproves such claims, the facts haven’t stopped Democrats from trying to exploit this slanderous narrative in their effort to defeat President Trump. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

‘I Also Hope to Keep a Steady High’

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Worrying about politics is a waste of time, and nobody who knew me when I was in college could ever have imagined that I would grow up to become a political journalist, wasting my time this way.

My perspective on the political scene is idiosyncratic, simply because most people in this racket have been political junkies all their lives. They came to Washington right out of college, and wish nothing more than to be taken seriously as pundits, capable of prognosticating future outcomes. In contrast, I left college with the career goal of becoming a rock star, jammed in bands for a while, then stumbled into a newspaper career three years later, worked for years as a sports editor, and didn’t make it to D.C. until I was 38 years old, married with three kids.

It happened the other day (thank you, YouTube algorithm) that I started watching old videos of the jazz-rock band Chicago. Did you know that Chicago’s guitarist Terry Kath was Jimi Hendrix’s favorite guitarist? To listen to Kath play on “25 or 6 to 4” is to be amazed, and it’s a pity that Kath (who died tragically in 1978) is so seldom mentioned among the rock-and-roll greats. Kath could also sing like Ray Charles, a distinctive bluesy baritone, and as I watched videos of Chicago in early concerts, I remembered one of my old favorites of theirs, “Dialogue (Part I & II)” in which Kath trades lyrical lines with Peter Cetera:

Are you optimistic
About the way things are going?

No, I never ever think of it at all.

Don’t you ever worry
When you see what’s going down?

Well, I try to mind my business,
That is, no business at all.

When it’s time to function
As a feeling human being,
Will your Bachelor of Arts help you get by?

I hope to study further,
A few more years or so.
I also hope to keep a steady high

Such was my youthful attitude: “Don’t bum me out, man.”

You can perhaps see why I’ve always been mystified by these ultra-serious young “activist” types, crusading against social injustice all over the Internet when they’re not busy rioting in the streets. Far be it from me, a responsible father and grandfather, to encourage young people to pursue psychedelic hedonism as a way of life, but in some ways that would be preferable to becoming a “social justice warrior.”

These cynical ruminations were inspired not just by old Chicago songs, but also by the realization that the past three months of riots started because George Floyd overdosed on fentanyl.

 

Has any attempt to “keep a steady high” ever backfired so disastrously? Documents made public last week show the medical examiner found Floyd had “a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances,” and bodycam videos show Floyd complaining “I can’t breathe” before the officers put him on the ground. In fact, the reason Floyd was on the ground was because he refused to let officers put him in the back of the police car, struggling and complaining of COVID and claustrophobia. Police, recognizing his “excited delirium” as evidence of a drug overdose, called an ambulance, then held him on the ground while they waited for the ambulance to arrive. There was no “systemic racism” involved, nor can the charges of murder against the officers be justified.

Well, I try to mind my business,
That is, no business at all.

Do you see the relevance here? The 1970s were a decade when there was a lot to be depressed or angry about, if you cared to pay attention to what was happening in the world. So not caring — complete cynicism — became a very widespread attitude. Just mind your own business and, like the song said, “try to keep a steady high.” Also, if you’re going to freak out on drugs, try not to do it on a city sidewalk after you’ve just been caught attempting to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.

Am I “optimistic about the way things are going”? Well, it is a hazard of my profession that I can’t simply ignore how things are going, and I hesitate to offer predictions, however . . .

How bad do things look for Joe Biden’s campaign right now? Consider this: Democrats are worried about Minnesota, a state no Republican presidential candidate has carried since Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide. Yet polls show President Trump gaining ground in Minnesota, and Democrats are worried because they haven’t seen any appearances by Biden or his running mate Kamala Harris. “Why aren’t they here?” one Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party official told Minnesota Public Radio last week. “We need to hear from them. We need to see their presence on the ground.”
Biden’s peril in Minnesota is in many ways emblematic of everything that’s gone wrong for Democrats in this campaign. While the Real Clear Politics average of Minnesota polls still shows Biden leading Trump by more than five points, a poll by Emerson College earlier this month had Trump within three points, and a poll by the GOP-affiliated Trafalgar Group two weeks ago showed a tie in Minnesota. How could a state that twice gave majorities to Barack Obama, a state that not even Ronald Reagan could win in his 1984 landslide, be in play for Trump this year? Well, in a word, riots. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Did I mention that Adam Schiff is blaming Russia for the riots?




 

Targeted for Destruction

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When I was a road warrior on the campaign trail years ago, I got into the habit of using the blog as a sort of notebook — three or four posts a day, with photos, quotes, etc. — which I would then cannibalize in the evening for my American Spectator column. Sometimes I still utilize that modus operandi, as for example in my COVID-19 coverage, where I would often do a midday rant inspired by Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings (dear God how I despised those), and compose some statistical comparisons that were then fed into my regular columns on the pandemic.

All of that is preamble to explaining that yesterday’s blog rant (“Democrats vs. Suburbia: Biden Will Make ‘Magic Dirt Theory’ Federal Policy”) was really a warm-up for a 1,900-word opus that begins thus:

One of the basic tasks of the political Left, not only in contemporary America but on a worldwide basis ever since the French Revolution, is to identify those social institutions that are healthy and functional, then ruin them completely, and call this result “reform.” Sometimes millions of people die as a result of the Left’s appetite for “reform” (e.g., collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union), but always innocent people are made to suffer on behalf of the allegedly idealistic motives of the self-anointed progressive “reformers.” . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.

By the way, our commenter “JeffS” deserves a hat-tip for calling my attention to the anti-zoning measure enacted last year in Oregon, thus informing two paragraphs toward the end of my column.




 

The Usual Suspects

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There is no problem in the world that cannot be blamed on racism, and therefore we know how to solve all the world’s problems:

  1. Tear down statues of Christopher Columbus;
  2. Loot the local Walgreen’s during a “mostly peaceful” protest;
  3. Hold a CNN Town Hall with Greta Thunberg;
    and
  4. Vote Democrat.

Perhaps you might criticize this solution as illogical, but that’s because you’re a racist and logic is a tool of white supremacy.

Anyone expecting facts and logic from the #BlackLivesMatter movement is doomed to be disappointed. What the movement is about — other than making the organizers rich from corporate contributions — is promoting a political narrative to help elect Democrats by appealing to raw emotion. On the one hand, affluent bien-pensant white women are able to assauge their sense of personal guilt by masochistic rituals of self-denunciation. On the other hand, black people are encouraged to vent their frustration, resentment and rage through “mostly peaceful” protests and (of course) voting for Democrats. As I’ve said before, these “protests” are actually Joe Biden campaign rallies, because outside the context of election-year politics, we wouldn’t be having all these suburban punk anarchists running wild in Portland and Seattle (which are, by the way, two of the whitest major cities in the United States). Because the media are so dedicated to the partisan project of preventing President Trump’s re-election, the public is being bombarded with atrocity propaganda, intended to “energize” Democrat voters by portraying black people as victims of “systemic racism.” If we do not push back against this propaganda, our silence implies that we agree with the Democratic Party’s message: White people are evil. Police are racist murderers.

And thus there is a need to talk about overlooked facts:

Racism did not kill Breonna Taylor. She did not die from prejudice or discrimination. Her death was not caused by Confederate monuments or statues of Christopher Columbus, nor could her death have been prevented by social-media hashtags. If you don’t know who Breonna Taylor was, the short version of the story is that the 26-year-old was shot to death March 13 by police in Louisville, Kentucky, during a drug raid. The long version of the story is rather more complicated, but Taylor’s death has been reduced to a slogan (“Justice for Breonna”) by the #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) protest movement.
Like so many other police shootings seized upon by this movement, BLM activists are interested in promoting a political narrative that ignores specific details of Taylor’s death. Most of the movement’s supporters have probably never looked past the slogan-sized condensed version of the story — an unarmed black woman killed in her own home by white cops — to ask whether racism had anything to do with her death. Certainly the national media have not sought to determine whether the facts of this cause célèbre support the BLM movement’s mythology of “systemic racism” as the one-size-fits-all explanation for police shootings. Fear of being targeted by “cancel culture” plays a role in silencing all criticism of the movement, and therefore no one (no, not even Tucker Carlson) has questioned the BLM narrative of Breonna Taylor’s death. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Death of a White Man

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Probably no one will mourn the passing of Sean Ruis, who flipped out last week in a Michigan convenience store when the clerk refused him service because he wasn’t wearing a mask. Ruis reacted by stabbing a 77-year-old man, and was subsequently gunned down by a sheriff’s deputy:

For her part, Gov. Whitmer said she was “incredibly sad” about the incident. “I cannot ever pretend that I understand someone who would become murderous over wearing a piece of cloth on your face,” Whitmer told reporters Wednesday. “But what I can say is that violence is never the solution.”
Because the knife-wielding dead man was white, nobody rioted after he was shot to death. No statues were toppled, no stores were looted, no sports teams were renamed. White people getting shot by cops doesn’t interest the national media or arouse the outrage of “social justice” activists, so there were no angry protest mobs chanting outside Gov. Whitmer’s office, blaming her for Sean Ruis’s death.
Crime is only of interest to the national media when such stories can be used to advance the political agenda of the Democratic Party. . . .

You can read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Democrats Celebrate Their Heritage

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And by “their heritage,” of course, I mean, slavery:

Tuesday at USA Today there was a fascinating “fact check” article covering that idiotic spectacle put on by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and several other congressional Democrats last week in which they donned African kente cloth scarves and knelt on the floor of Emancipation Hall for some eight minutes and change in some sort of morbid tribute to George Floyd.
Because kente cloth, by the standard of this stupid moment in American history, is quite reminiscent of, and therefore pays homage to, the African slave trade. And therefore those wearing it also support the African slave trade . . .

Or so we must conclude, judging by contemporary standards. Many years ago, when I was first accused of “white supremacy” — !!! — my reaction was to wonder if words still have any meaning.

Whatever my Thought Crimes might have been, certainly I was not so foolish as to advocate, or even to imagine, resurrecting Jim Crow segregation or some other policy that might truly deserve to be called “white supremacy.” I have never endorsed any such policy, because it would be utter folly to do so. It is absurd to think that any sizeable percentage of Americans in the 21st century would support a return to segregation, or the disenfranchisement of racial minorities. For better or worse, we must live within the circumstances of political reality. Anyone who wants to go off into some kind of neo-Nazi fantasyland (“Wolves of Vinland”) is free to do so, but they are pursuing a delusion.

Because I am not a “white supremacist” in any meaningful sense of that phrase, I can laugh at my SPLC hate-list membership, and no intelligent person nowadays takes the SPLC seriously. They destroyed their own credibility by making such accusations so promiscuously and, while it is sometimes amusing to play this “gotcha” game against liberals, the whole point is to illustrate the absurdity of the game.

Refusing to kowtow to political correctness can get you in trouble, but the alternative — Pelosi and Schumer with their kente-cloth public ritual of self-abasement — requires a surrender of human dignity. I have nothing to say to any white person who imagines that such spectacles are the kind of help black people need, except seek psychiatric treatment.

Crazy people are dangerous, and progressive kooks are leading the Democratic Party down the road to perdition. There is no reason that the rest of us ought to follow them down that road, even if our refusal to join them means that we will be smeared as racists. It wasn’t me who hired Derek Chauvin as a cop. Minneapolis is more than 1,000 miles west of here, and I am not eligible to vote in Minnesota. So if the police hired by the Democrat-controlled government of Minneapolis engage in acts of racist brutality, certainly I cannot be blamed. The responsibility is not mine and, because no one in Minneapolis gives a damn about my opinion, I am not obligated to say anything about their problems. What I have said on the topic has mostly been about calling attention to certain facts that the liberal media don’t want us to notice.

At any rate, if the wearing of kente cloth is a celebration of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, what about old Beatles songs?

Did you know that Paul McCartney once wrote a song celebrating slavery? Well, neither did he. It took about half a century after “Penny Lane” was a hit for the Beatles before historians decided that this street in Liverpool was a legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Sir Paul wrote the song as a nostalgic ode to Penny Lane as the scene of childhood happiness “beneath the blue suburban skies.” The Liverpool-born musician could not have known, while composing the cheerful tune in the mid-1960s, that scholars would one day conclude Penny Lane was probably named in honor of James Penny, a local mariner who made his fortune in the slave trade in the 1700s. Historians have not been able to prove this as a certainty, but the mere possibility was enough to inspire vandals to deface a sign in Liverpool with graffiti: “RACIST Lane.”
History is a horror show for liberals, who only look to the past in search of grievances they can exploit in their remorseless quest for political power. The liberal has a quasi-religious faith in Progress, which means that yesterday — another McCartney song title — was self-evidently worse than today. The past was a bad time, according to liberals, who see nothing there but oppression. Your nostalgia for the pleasant memories of childhood is almost certainly racist, and probably also sexist and homophobic. . . .

You can read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

A Reason to Riot, or a Pretext?

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Heather Mac Donald explains the relevant facts:

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

Are we clear about this? Is it not apparent that, however much we deplore racism or police brutality in general, the specific facts of the George Floyd case are anomalous, and not typical? A statistically rare event has been falsely portrayed as representing a larger truth about “systemic racism,” when in reality the evidence contradicts that representation. People claiming to speak on behalf of “the black community” have been paid to promote this false belief, and the media have irresponsibly helped propagate a dangerous mythology. We have seen this before:

James Scurlock was a criminal. David Dorn was a cop. The two men never met, but the cause of their deaths — Scurlock in Omaha, Nebraska, and Dorn in St. Louis, Missouri — was related. Both were killed this past week as a result of the dangerous storm of violence that most media outlets describe euphemistically as “protests” or “unrest.”
Americans are being told by intellectuals, politicians, and TV pundits that this deadly chaos is about “systemic racism,” to quote Joe Biden, but what we are actually witnessing is the return of a dangerous belief system that Manhattan Institute scholar Fred Siegel called “the riot ideology.” People are being killed, businesses are being looted, and the fundamental basis of a free society is being jeopardized because this irresponsible mentality has been promoted as a solution to racial inequality, when in fact it is a major cause of the problem. The deaths of James Scurlock and David Dorn illustrate the damage done by the riot ideology. . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.