The Other McCain

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

Hunter Biden’s Beijing Honey Trap

Posted on | May 9, 2021 | Comments Off on Hunter Biden’s Beijing Honey Trap

Remember when the media spent three years chasing the “Russian collusion” narrative and then Democrats impeached President Trump because of what he said in a phone call with the president of Ukraine? If they were really serious about foreign interference in American politics, the media would be leading every broadcast with this story:

Hunter Biden’s emails reveal his close relationship with the Chinese-American secretary who worked for him when he went into business with the man he called the ‘spy chief of China.’
The mysterious young assistant wrote the president’s son flirty messages, sent him opposition research for Joe’s White House run and encouraged him to draw funds from the company’s accounts when the joint venture collapsed and even ended up with Hunter’s military dog tags.
In 2017 Hunter went into business with Patrick Ho, secretary general of Chinese oil giant CEFC.
Hunter described Ho in a call recording on his abandoned laptop as the ‘spy chief of China’, and the Chinese businessman was later surveilled by US law enforcement as a foreign intelligence threat before he was convicted of bribery in 2018.
After launching his multi-million-dollar joint venture with CEFC, Hunter was assigned a 29-year-old Chinese-American assistant, JiaQi Bao, who quickly struck up a close and intriguing relationship with her Biden boss.
At first, emails show the New York-based Bao diligently scheduled flights, hotels and even doctor’s appointments for the president’s son.
But mysteriously, the young assistant also sent him opposition research to help Joe Biden’s 2020 election bid, urged him to take cash from the joint venture’s accounts as the business collapsed and wrote flirty and personal messages and even ended up with Hunter’s military dog tags in her New York apartment — the same tags he can be seen wearing in home-made porn videos he recorded on his laptop.

Read the whole thing, and remember that the contents of Hunter’s laptop were first made public by Rudy Giuliani who — coincidentally, I’m sure — was recently the target of an FBI raid.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, who quips: “Beijing evidently has a whole gang of Fang Fangs to bang Democratic yanks.”)




 

Category: China, Joe Biden, Scandal

Biden’s ‘Diversity’ Administration

Posted on | May 9, 2021 | Comments Off on Biden’s ‘Diversity’ Administration

We all know what “diversity” means, even if we’re not allowed to say it plainly. “Diversity” in hiring or college admissions would not be controversial if it were, as proponents claim, merely about finding qualified women and POC (“people of color”) for prestige positions. Instead, what “diversity” actually means in practice is a secretive system of quotas where women and POC are hired (or admitted to elite schools) without regard to their relative qualifications. “Diversity” means a lowering of standard in the name of “equality,” and anyone who objects is smeared as a racist, sexist, homophobe. Occasionally, however, the problems with the “diversity” regime become so apparent that even well-mannered people can’t help but complain:

President Joe Biden has now taken the push for “diversity” in STEM to a new level. His candidate to head the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the U.S., is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced. She has no background in physics, the science of energy, or the energy sector. She has never held a position as a scientific administrator. The typical head of DOE’s Office of Science in the past has had managerial authority in the nation’s major physics labs and has been a physicist himself, Science reports. The new nominee’s only managerial experience consists of serving since 2020 as an interim associate dean of UC Merced’s graduate division.
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is, however, a black female who has won “accolades for her work to promote diversity in science,” as Science puts it. Berhe would be the first black woman to head the $7 billion office, and that is reason enough, according to the diversity mantra, why she should oversee X-ray synchrotrons, the development of nuclear weapons, and ongoing research on nuclear fusion.

(Hat-tip: Vox Day.) Of course, being a black female is not her only qualification for this job. “The main goal of her research is to understand the effect of changing environmental conditions on vital soil processes.” So she’s a member of the “climate” cult, and therefore is perfect for accomplishing Biden’s goal of destroying the U.S. energy industry.




 

Category: Joe Biden

David French Gets Paid to Hate You

Posted on | May 8, 2021 | Comments Off on David French Gets Paid to Hate You

Ace of Spades points out that The Dispatch, “[f]ounded by conservative thought leaders Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French,” has been avidly defending Facebook’s ban of President Trump, without disclosing that The Dispatch “has a financial relationship” with Facebook.

In case you’ve forgotten, The Dispatch was launched in late 2019 and, by early 2020, had acquired something north of $6 million in investment capital from . . . Well, who, exactly? Good luck on finding news reports with that information, but suffice it to say that it came from rich people who hate Trump voters, and according to Ace, this includes Facebook.

What this means is that Facebook and other rich liberals are paying David French to smear you (and the other 70+ million Americans who voted for Donald Trump) as an extremely dangerous “white supremacist” who should be prohibited from using the Internet at all.

These “conservative thought leaders” — the ones who believe that every decent person with “principles” will always vote for Democrats — have not abandoned their lucrative grift now that its original purpose (i.e., electing Joe Biden and a Democratic congressional majority) has been accomplished. Instead, David French and his friends are engaged in a scorched-earth vengeance campaign to destroy the lives of everyone who voted for Trump, because that’s what they’re getting paid to do.

Let us stipulate, arguendo, that David French may be acting in good conscience. That is to say, perhaps French — who is, after all, an alumnus of Harvard Law School — actually does believe you are a dangerously ignorant, hate-filled crypto-Nazi who deserves to be arrested by federal authorities and locked up in Leavenworth. This is what every Harvard alumnus thinks, that the 70+ million Americans who voted for Trump are an existential threat more dangerous than al-Qaeda or ISIS.

The point, however, is that the people who run Facebook think you’re dangerous, and they’re paying David French‘s bills, so when he goes on CNN to join Brian Stelter in warning the CNN audience about how dangerous Trump voters are, it’s because that’s how French earns his pay.




 

Category: Media Bias

Truth or Satire? It’s Getting Harder to Tell

Posted on | May 8, 2021 | Comments Off on Truth or Satire? It’s Getting Harder to Tell

January headline from The Babylon Bee:

CNN Unveils New Format
Where Hosts Just Watch Fox News
And Yell At It

This is awfully close to describing what’s happened to CNN in recent months. Once Biden was inaugurated, the network lost its raison d’être of producing anti-Trump propaganda. Ratings for CNN have evaporated since January and, unable to excite their audience with live performances of journalistic fellatio on Biden (metaphorically speaking), they devote hours every day to critiquing whatever is on Fox News.

 

So the other night, Tucker Carlson raised questions about whether the number of deaths from COVID-19 vaccine are being underreported. He didn’t advance any “conspiracy theory” during that segment, or make claims that could justify Sanjay Gupta’s unhinged reaction:

“What he’s done is he’s basically looked at these open-system adverse reporting systems and said ‘hey look, this suggests that 30 people a day are dying of the vaccine.’ Absolutely not true,” Gupta said on CNN’s New Day.
“The problem is that it continues to stir up this vaccine hesitance or outright vaccine reluctance . . .

Hey, Dr. Gupta: Maybe “vaccine hesitance” doesn’t really matter, but do you really care about Fox News viewers? No, I’m pretty sure you would be very happy if they all died tomorrow. So please spare us your concern-trolling. My thought all along has been that the draconian lockdown regimes and mandatory mask-wearing orders, at best, didn’t do much to stop the pandemic and quite possibly made it worse. Anyone can examine the state-by-state per-capita death rates and see that there is no clear correlation between the severity of the lockdown regimes and the relative safety of populations. Florida is doing just fine, despite all the hate directed at Gov. DeSantis by CNN and other liberal media outlets that prophesied a catastrophe in the Sunshine State.

Nor do I think that Biden’s manic insistence that everybody must get vaccinated before life can return to normal is justified. Those who are most at risk from the virus — the elderly and those with health issues that might make them vulnerable — need to get vaccinated, but healthy young people have a near-zero risk of death from COVID-19 and it’s senseless to require them to get the vaccine. So whatever Tucker Carlson says about vaccine-related deaths probably won’t make much difference one way or another in the overall fight against the pandemic. What it may do (and this is what the Democrats who run CNN are really concerned about) is give some Republican lawmakers encouragement to resist efforts by the Biden administration to make vaccination mandatory.

They’re telegraphing their punches, so to speak. Everybody with two eyes and a brain can see where they’re going with this. At some point — maybe in a few weeks, maybe this fall — the Biden administration will claim that too many people are refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and measures will be introduced to punish the unvaccinated. At that point, questions about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine will be very relevant to arguments by opponents of these punitive measures.

I’m not an “anti-vaxxer,” but I do know people who’ve had adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine — not fatal, but not pleasant. Lots of people say that second Moderna shot is a doozy. Personally, I’ve never gotten the flu vaccine, because I have confidence in my immune system. About once a year, I get the common cold or the flu — it’s hard to tell the difference, and I don’t really care which it is — and I go through a few days of coughing and wheezing before I get better. No big deal. Except for that one time in 2011 when I came down with a serious case of bronchitis that scared me pretty bad, I just refuse to worry about stuff like that. Worrying causes stress, and stress is bad for your immune system.

Speaking of worrying, maybe the folks at CNN should worry less about what Tucker Carlson says and worry more about why their network sucks. “Fake news” is the Enemy of the People, you know.




 

Category: CNN

In The Mailbox: 05.07.21

Posted on | May 7, 2021 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 05.07.21

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Pretty sure the last point is the one that triggers the “greens”.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Another George Soros-Funded Prosecutor
EBL: SCTV – I Was A Teenage Communist
Twitchy: “You Didn’t LISTEN To Us!”
Louder With Crowder: Jobs Report – joe Biden Thinks Paying People To Not Work Isn’t Why They’re Not Working
Vox Popoli: Bill Gates Didn’t Kill Himself, also, The Essence Of SJW
According To Hoyt: Stop Singing Fados, also, Hard Or Soft?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Agony Of Pizza
American Conservative: Shed No Tears For Liz Cheney
American Greatness: Disabled Farmer Sues Biden Over Race-Based Financial Relief
American Power: Niall Ferguson, Doom [not the videogame]
American Thinker: What’s Behind Vaccine Hysteria?
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Paper Tiger Friday
Babalu Blog: Critically Ill Girl Slows Down Construction Of Havana Luxury Apartheid Hotel
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For May 7
Behind The Black: Today’s Blacklisted American, also, Ingenuity’s Fifth Flight Today
Cafe Hayek: Perpetual Motion Machines Are Impossible, Even In Public Finance
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: A Telling Chart, also, Yup, This Is How Far California Has Fallen
Don Surber: We Should Be In The Golden Age Of Journalism
First Street Journal: Governor Wolf To Lift All COVID Restrictions – Except The One That Bugs People Most
The Geller Report: Biden Admin Considering $1 BILLION In “Humanitarian” Aid To Iran, also, April Job Growth Tanks, Unemployment Rises To 6.1% As Democrats Destroy The Economy
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Some Basic Christian Doctrine
Hollywood In Toto: Tina Fey Does Complete 180 On Woke Comedy
The Lid: Biden’s Amtrak Tale – Lying, Or Dementia?
Legal Insurrection: NY Supreme Court Judge Overturns Syracuse U Fraternity Suspension, also, Oklahoma Governor Stitt Signs Law Banning Critical Race Theory From Public Schools
Nebraska Energy Observer: The Friday Report
Outkick: Albert Pujols Deserves Much, Much Better, also, Bobby Valentine Is Running For Mayor In Connecticut
Power Line: Another Sensible Decision From Ron DeSantis, also, A Redundant Prosecution
Shark Tank: Florida Enviro Groups Begin Attacking Gov. DeSantis
Shot In The Dark: To Journalism, And Beyond! also, Duty
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – Resolved, The Environmentalists Are Going Too Far Too Fast
This Ain’t Hell: Reporter Claims Her Job Requires A Bulletproof Vest, also, Army Authorizes Ponytails
Transterrestrial Musings: Starship History, also, A New Commune In Colorado
Victory Girls: Biden’s Call for National Prayer Day Omits God
Volokh Conspiracy: Baltimore Prosecutor Asks FCC To Investigate TV Station For Criticizing Her
Weasel Zippers: Biden – Jobs Report Is Great, Country Is Great, No Questions! also, Jobs Numbers So Disappointing CNBC Can’t Believe Them
The Federalist: Jenner’s Candidacy Reveals The Truly Tolerant Political Party Isn’t The Democrats, also, April Jobs Numbers Are So Bad CNBC Thought It Was A Typo
Mark Steyn: Tal Bachman – We Have Met The Enemy, Part II, also, Hearing The Music

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Category: Linkagery

Crazy People Are Dangerous: Florida Man Steals Two Cop Cars — ‘Illuminati, Help!’

Posted on | May 7, 2021 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous: Florida Man Steals Two Cop Cars — ‘Illuminati, Help!’

Xavier Cummings was high on meth and ranting about the CIA when Volusia County sheriff’s deputies finally put the cuffs on him:

The man accused of stealing two police cruisers and leading law enforcement on a high-speed pursuit in two counties had a bizarre outburst in court on Friday.
Xavier Cummings is being held in the Volusia County Jail on two counts of grand theft of a motor vehicle, two counts of grand theft of a firearm, escape as well as other charges.
When a judge denied Cummings bond on Friday, he had an outburst that caused him to be removed from the courtroom.
“Illuminati, help!” Cummings shouted.

(Spoiler: The Illuminati did not help.)

Deputies said Cummings told them following his arrest that he was given permission to take the Cocoa patrol car through mental telepathy.
The report indicates Cummings showed signs of experiencing mental-health issues, stated he used crystal meth earlier in the day, and had not slept in approximately 24 hours. . . .

(Earlier this week, I drank too much coffee, didn’t get enough sleep and made three typos. I didn’t steal a police car, though.)

The chase caught on a Volusia County sheriff’s helicopter video began when Cocoa police responded to a report of a disturbance near a Cocoa motel on Thursday afternoon.
Investigators said when officers confronted Cummings, he jumped into an unattended patrol car and drove away.

(Is Xavier Cummings a criminal genius, or what?)

Several Cocoa police officers then pursued Cummings on Interstate 95 into Volusia County before forcing the stolen cruiser off the road and into the woods between Edgewater and New Smyrna Beach.
When officers moved in to arrest Cummings, he emerged from the woods and jumped into another Cocoa Police Department vehicle and continued fleeing northbound on I-95, police said.

(Oh, he’s definitely a criminal genius.)

Police and deputies used stop sticks to disable the second police cruiser. At which point, Cummings was taken into custody without further incident.
No officers or deputies were injured.
Cummings is being held in the Volusia County Jail without bond.

This criminal genius will surely find a way to escape, with or without the assistance of the Illuminati. Meanwhile, watch the video:

 

Yeah, that crystal meth is a heckuva drug. Think I’ll stick with coffee, even if I did make three typos this week. “Illuminati, help!”




 

Category: Crime, Florida

In The Mailbox: 05.06.21

Posted on | May 7, 2021 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 05.06.21

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

The bright promise of atomic power

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: F*c*book/Instagram Bans Signal For Telling The Truth
EBL: How Is This Justifiable?
Twitchy: Atlanta Mayor Defends Firing Of Cop Who Shot Rayshard Brooks
Louder With Crowder: Ron DeSantis Signs Election Reform Bill Live On Fox News, Tells Other Media They Can’t Attend
Vox Popoli: Devoured By The Borg, also, In Case You Weren’t Sure He’s Fake

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Dear Western Women – You Are Traitorous Dimwits Who Must Be Spanked
American Conservative: The Conservative Case For Teen Pregnancy
American Greatness: Are Americans Becoming Sovietized? also, Asking The Wrong Question About Liz Cheney
American Thinker: The Incredible Vanishing Flu, also, Needed – A National Election Fraud Database
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Tradesman News
Babalu Blog: Castro Dictatorship Desperate To Quash Crusade For Freedom In Cuba
BattleSwarm: Texas House Passes “Urban Camping” Ban
Behind The Black: Today’s Blacklisted American, also, No Plans To Shoot Down Long March 5B Booster
Cafe Hayek: Quotation of The Day
CDR Salamander: Diversity Thursday, also, How Will Your Division Replace Its Equipment?
Da Tech Guy: The Blue Man’s Burden, also, CDC Now Stands For Corrupt Democrat Cesspool
Don Surber: Movement To Abolish The FBI Begins, also, “Dick Cheney…Take Your Daughter Hunting”
First Street Journal: A (Probably) Meaningless Victory For Property Rights
The Geller Report: Michigan Voting Machines Had Unauthorized Implant To Circumvent Security, also, Maricopa County Can’t Get Passwords To Voting Machines For Election Audit – Only Dominion Has Them
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Sixty Years Ago Yesterday
Hollywood In Toto: PTC Offers Tips For Parents Fearing Streaming Platforms Gone Wild, also, Wrath Of Man Delivers Action & Frustration
The Lid: Biden & Harris Giving Bizarre Mixed Messages On Masks & Vaccinations
Legal Insurrection: Student Sues Virginia Tech Alleging She Was Forced Off Soccer Team After Refusing To Kneel, also, Michigan State Student Government Calls On Collège To Hire Employee Dedicated To Illegal Immigrant Students
Michelle Malkin: Biden’s Ruinous Refugee Dump
Nebraska Energy Observer: 4th Turning
Outkick: Jimbo Fisher Confident An Ass Beating Is Coming For Nick Saban, also, The Athletic Fails To Get NYT To Buy After Axios Merger Falls Flat
Power Line: Atlanta Officer Who Killed Rayshard Brooks Reinstated, also, A Moment In The Life
Shark Tank: Fried – DeSantis Now Using Fox As “State-Run Media”
Shot In The Dark: Revised, also, I’m Not The Only One
The Political Hat: The Normalization Of Killing Patients – New Zealand, Portugal, & New Mexico
This Ain’t Hell: Regarding Returning Vets, also, National Air & Space Museum Goes To A Galaxy Far, Far, Away
Transterrestrial Musings: The Cruel Ritual Of Diversity Training
Victory Girls: Asians Fill Proud Boys’ Coffers After Attacks, also, Biden’s Restaurant Relief Fund – White People Need Not Apply
Volokh Conspiracy: NY Court Pressuring Mom To Remove Rock With Small Confederate Flag
Weasel Zippers: Last Week Biden Told An Amtrak Story. None Of It Was True. also, White House Defends Facebook Censorship – “More Needs To Be Done”
The Federalist: Critical Race Theory Illuminates Democrat Master Plan To End Honest Elections In America, also, Joe BIden Dodged Half A Million In Taxes, Wants You To Pay Your Fair Share
Mark Steyn: Not Tonight, Josephine, also, Going Fourth…But Not Multiplying

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Category: Linkagery

Is Black-on-Black Crime a ‘Myth’?

Posted on | May 6, 2021 | Comments Off on Is Black-on-Black Crime a ‘Myth’?

Eugene Volokh seemed to be puzzled by another law professor’s claim:

An article by a criminal law professor [April 22] in the Columbus Dispatch included this assertion:

“The reality is that Black-on-Black crime is a myth, and that Black and white people routinely commit crimes at similar rates, but Black people are overwhelmingly targeted for arrest.”

Yet I think this is not the reality, at least as to violent crimes of the sort that are usually labeled “black-on-black” when committed by black criminals against black victims.

That Volokh post was linked April 24 by Instapundit, who linked it again on Monday, suggesting how important this question is. But of course, it’s not actually a question at all — we know for a fact that black-on-black crime is real, not a “myth,” and that however “similar” the crime rates may be across racial lines, violent crime is a much more serious problem in the black community than anywhere else in America. These are facts which anyone can ascertain easily by reference to data published annually by the federal Department of Justice, so the real question is, why would anyone make the false assertion that black-on-black crime is a “myth”?

The simple answer: Southern Poverty Law Center.

You see, the university professor whose column caught Volokh’s attention linked to a 2017 SPLC “HateWatch” item by Dave Neiwert who, in turn, linked to a Department of Justice report, the contents of which he badly misrepresented. But before I get into that, some relevant history . . .

As I’ve sometimes mentioned, I was born and raised a “yellow dog” Democrat and never in my life voted Republican until 1994. Both political events and personal experience influenced my repudiation of my native partisan allegiance to the Democrats. If you lived through the 1990s, you can probably remember the series of events — the 1991 Gulf War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Rodney King incident, the L.A. Riots, the election of Bill Clinton, the Waco disaster, the Yugoslavia civil war, etc. — which did much to make me begin thinking seriously about politics and policy. These were years when I did a lot of heavy reading of history and philosophy, seeking to remediate a deficit from my collegiate years, which were spent in the party-hearty haze of a rock-and-roll lifestyle.

In 1992, I was still a Democratic Party loyalist, and proudly plastered a Clinton-Gore bumper stick on my old Chevy Impala. But I’d abandoned my youthful hedonism by then and had become a more-or-less respectable petit bourgeois — married to a fine Christian woman, working a suit-and-tie job as a small-town newspaper writer, with three young children and a mortgage on nice little home. My bourgeois way of life gave me a vested interest on one side of what Pat Buchanan, in his speech to the 1992 GOP convention, had called the Culture War. That is to say, as a married Christian parent, the issue of “family values” now concerned me more directly than they had during my youth as a rock-and-roll party animal, and there was also the matter of economics. I was beginning to read the Austrian economists (Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek) and their heirs (particularly Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams), from whom I discovered that my vaguely Keynesian views on economics were a pathetic error. Anyway . . .

Having briefly recounted some of the influences that led me to abandon my Democratic Party birthright and embrace conservatism, I have to explain that my venture into conservative thought was like an explorer venturing into an uncharted continent. This was terra incognito to me, and I had little appreciation of the various camps and factions within the Right. However, many of those who sought to mentor me on this journey were decidedly in the paleoconservative camp, so that by 1996 I was regularly reading Chronicles (where Sam Francis was a monthly columnist), and was therefore quite sympathetic to the critique of the Republican Establishment as a bunch of phony sellouts. Also, I was well aware that neoconservatives were accused of trying to monopolize influence over the GOP, and to steer policy in a direction symbolized by the failures of George H.W. Bush’s “New World Order.”

It was during this period, circa 1996, that I encountered a remarkable book, Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America, first published in 1992 by Jared Taylor. If there is any one person in America most hated by the SPLC, it’s Jared Taylor, who became publisher of the American Renaissance and who has probably done more than anyone else to call attention to facts about race relations in America that liberals don’t want anyone to know about. Long before sites like Breitbart and Daily Caller were chronicling some of the kind of stories about race (“hate crime” hoaxes, for example) that conservatives now take for granted as part of their regular journalistic diet, Taylor was finding such news items and compiling them in his monthly American Renaissance newsletter.

What made Paved With Good Intentions such a remarkable book was that Taylor used the Lexis/Nexis database to compile a vast amount of news items from regular sources (New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, etc.) so that the endnotes contain hundred upon hundreds of undeniably factual citations. You may disagree with the opinions Taylor expresses, or the arguments he makes, but when it comes to compiling facts relevant to America’s racial problems, he is simply without equal. Taylor’s excellence in this regard was demonstrated in a monthly feature of his American Renaissance, “O, Tempora! O, Mores!” This was a digest column of news items and, in the era before the Internet made possible other means of publicizing stories that the national media would like to ignore, the “O, Tempora! O, Mores!” column was an amazing source of information that contradicted the liberal narrative.

All of this I relate by way of explaining, in part, how I came to be smeared as a “white supremacist” by the SPLC, who did not fail to notice my byline on a 1999 story at The Washington Times about Taylor’s study, “The Color of Crime: Race, Crime, and Justice in America.” That study has been revised and updated several times since and, because they can’t dispute the facts Taylor references in this study, instead the SPLC has spent years huffing about his “racist” interpretation.

Let me say something very clearly: It doesn’t matter.

Whether or not Jared Taylor is a racist, or whether his interpretation of crime data is tendentious, are trivial matters when viewed in comparison to the actual facts about race and crime in America. And the main point of his “Color of Crime” study was that so-called “hate crimes” are a tiny drop in the vast bucket of violent crime in this country. The habit of liberals, certainly as much now as in 1999, is to scream constantly about “racism,” an allegedly pervasive problem for which “hate crimes” are cited as proof, while ignoring the amount of violence perpetrated by black criminals, most of which is inflicted on black victims. In contrast to Jared Taylor’s opinions about race, the facts actually do matter.

If you believe the SPLC, the main problem with Taylor’s analysis is that he ignores the role of poverty as a cause of crime in the black community. But anyone familiar with basic methods of sociology immediately understands that you cannot look at the correlation between three variables — crime, poverty, and race — and leap to a conclusion about cause and effect. If Taylor asserted that racial differences are the cause of variations in crime rates, I must have missed that part, but I think one may be agnostic on this matter of causes and still find oneself astonished by the absolute size of differences between groups in terms, for example, homicide rates. Anyone who thinks black-on-black crime is a “myth” must ignore incontrovertible evidence in homicide statistics.

In 2019, according to the FBI, there were 13,927 murders in America. In 7,484 cases — 53.7% — the victim was black. According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. population is 13.4% black, so that black murder victims are about four times the share of the total population. Furthermore, of the 11,493 murder cases in 2019 where the race of the offender was known, 6,425 — 55.9% — of the perpetrators were black. How is black-on-black crime a “myth,” if black people are more than half of the murder victims and perpetrators in a country that’s less than 15% black?

No honest person can look at these facts and deny that violent crime in the United States disproportionately involves the black community. If it’s “racist” to say so, then facts are now racism.

Well, if the facts about race and crime are so obvious, how was it that Ohio State University law professor Sean Hill could believe “that Black-on-Black crime is a myth” and that violent crime rates are “similar” for whites? Because his source for that claim was Dave Neiwert’s SPLC article, and Neiwert seems to be unable to understand the data presented in that 2017 Department of Justice study. Neiwert’s headline — “White supremacists’ favorite myths about black crime rates take another hit from BJS study” — makes sense only if you failed to carefully read the statistics in Rachel Morgan’s DOJ report, “Race and Hispanic Origin of Victims and Offenders, 2012-15.”

The first thing to notice is that Morgan’s study only looked at “nonfatal violent victimizations,” i.e., not including murder. Morgan lumped together into a single category four separate types of crime: rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault, but excludes homicide. Why does this distinction matter? Because homicide is a crime where you get numbers that can’t be fudged easily. I mean, sure, some victims’ bodies might get dumped in a swamp full of alligators or otherwise concealed, and sometimes a murder can be made to look like an accident, but such cases are rare enough that they don’t affect the bottom-line figure — i.e., nearly 54% of murder victims being black. On the other hand, many sexual assaults are never reported to police, and a lot of simple assault cases might not make into the official tally for one reason or another, so that the numbers for “nonfatal violent victimizations” probably aren’t as reliable as the homicide body-count.

With that in mind, the “good news” in Morgan’s study is that black people were only 14.5% of victims of “nonfatal violent victimizations,” are roughly the same as their percentage of the U.S. population, even though they’re vastly overrepresented among murder victims. The problem with this, beyond what I’ve noted about the probability that these numbers for “nonfatal” crimes are less reliable than homicide statistics, is that (a) the categories of crimes Morgan has lumped together are so vastly different, and (b) she doesn’t disaggregate these crimes in reporting the race of victims and offenders.

All these caveats aside, however, Morgan’s study still doesn’t constitute evidence that higher black-on-black crime rates are a “myth.” If you’ll look at Table 3 in her study, Morgan provides rates (“per 1,000 persons age 12 and older”) for “Total violent crime” (excluding homicide) and for “Serious violent crime” (i.e., excluding simple assault). Narrowed down that way, excluding homicide and simple assault, the rates of victimization for “serious violent crime” (rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault) are:

White-on-white ……….. 3.7
Black-on-black ……….. 6.7
White-on-black ……….. 0.8
Black-on-white ……….. 1.2

“Holy statistics, Batman! That’s amazing!”

The per-capita rate for black-on-black “nonfatal serious violent crime” is 81% higher than the white-on-white rate. (Basic arithmetic: Subtract 3.7 from 6.7, and divide the difference by 3.7.) Furthermore, the per-capita rate of black-on-white “nonfatal serious violent crime” is 50% higher than the white-on-black rate. If you were trying to debunk “white supremacist myths,” these are not the statistics you’re looking for.

I guess maybe Dave Neiwert didn’t pay attention in math class, or maybe he was so desperate for evidence to disprove a “myth” that he overlooked the actual numbers that even Jared Taylor would consider proof of his own theories about race and crime. And, as I say, it doesn’t matter what theory Taylor might derive from his analysis; what really matters are the underlying facts. We can argue about what the numbers mean — and, indeed, I have directly told Taylor where I disagree with his opinions — but differences of opinions don’t change the reality, namely that black-on-black crime is a serious social problem, accounting for more than half of U.S. homicides and, in terms of other “nonfatal serious violent crime” accounting for an 81% higher rate of victimization among black people.

In fairness to Dave Neiwert (who at times has done some very good reporting about actual “hate crimes”), the way Morgan expressed her data in that 2017 DOJ study made it difficult to locate the relevant comparison of crime rates. And I suspect that Professor Hill at OSU didn’t dig down far enough into the numbers in the DOJ study to realize that Neiwert had misinterpreted it. This explains why Professor Volokh was so puzzled. In order to find the truth, you had to (a) get past Professor Hill’s claim based on (b) Neiwert’s faulty analysis of (c) Morgan’s DOJ study, which didn’t express the relevant data points in a very accessible way.

However, the entirety of this 2,100-word exploration, including the digression to recount my personal connection to this story, is merely a preamble to a related discussion about the media and “myths”:

A basic tactic of political propaganda is to brand your opponents as dishonest or stupid. No one trusts a known liar, and no one wants to be associated with beliefs they consider stupid. Unfortunately, propaganda is generally a tool of liars, and many people are too stupid to recognize the difference between propaganda and news.
Skepticism toward the news media has increased in recent years because intelligent Americans recognize how much of what is reported as “news” is actually political propaganda. But not enough people have devoted the time necessary to understand the vast arsenal of deceptive tactics employed by the media liars who claim to be practitioners of journalism. Consider, for example, how the media use the word “myth.”
Since November, CNN and other liberal media outlets have devoted endless hours to assuring their audience that election fraud is a “myth.” No one has ever won an election by cheating, CNN viewers are encouraged to believe, and these viewers are incited to reject as a dangerous fringe “conspiracy theory” any suggestion that Joe Biden’s election was tainted by voter fraud. . . .

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

And please, hit the freaking tip jar. It’s been a long week already.




 

Category: Crime, Media Bias, Racism
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