It’s Monday, January 30th, 2023…but before we begin, though one cannot render judgment without all the evidence, after viewing the Tyre Nichols body cam footage…
…we were struck by the fact the uninhibited violence and rage the five Black police officers acted out against Mr. Nichols is simply a symptom of a larger problem. However, Van Jones’ ridiculous claims to the contrary notwithstanding, it has nothing to do with the effects of racism, Black or White, but rather the culture of Black-on-Black violence which characterizes contemporary urban communities.
“No one in our nation should fear interacting with the police officers who serve our diverse communities, large and small. We all want to be safe. Many Black and brown people, however, and many young people in general, are justifiably afraid to interact with law enforcement officials.“
Here’s the juice: Many, many people of every age and every skin color, Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and White, are justifiably afraid to interact with young Black people. And it has nothing to do with racism, rather an honest understanding of an unfortunate reality: The disproportionate source of the majority of violent crime in America, even if those in positions of authority refuse to admit such.
Here’s to justice being served in the death of Tyre Nichols.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, courtesy of NRO, Wilfred Reilly offers Progressives another exposure to the deadly green radiation of facts and figures, as…
“Less than a decade back, Black Lives Matter arrived on the national scene with a two-part message: A near-genocidal campaign is being waged against black Americans, and virtually all contemporary problems in the black community are the fault of white people.
This is no exaggeration. BLM spokesman Cherno Biko appeared on prime-time Fox News to argue that a totally innocent, presumably unarmed black person is “murdered” (his words) roughly once per day. Ben Crump, perhaps the nation’s most prominent attorney, published a best-selling 2019 book actually titled Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People. At one point, as I noted in my own book Taboo, the Black Lives Matter website called for “re-payment to Blacks of all wealth ever extracted from a majority-Black community” by means of “racism, slavery, food apartheid, housing discrimination . . . and capitalism.” And so forth.
Now, the receipts for the effect of this movement are in. And what they show is the remarkably complete failure of a Narrative. As crime-data resources like Disaster Center and the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program make clear, murders in the United States increased from a low of 14,164 in 2014 — the year Black Lives Matter truly kicked off — to at least 22,900 in 2021, just seven years later.
This surge can be directly tied to the BLM-linked “Ferguson Effect” and “Floyd Effect.” In 2021, University of Massachusetts researcher Travis Campbell found that cities that experienced Black Lives Matter protests and riots — and surely often attempted to accommodate the demands of the marchers — did see some decrease in police homicides . . . but also experienced “a huge overall increase in murders.” The resulting murder surge was at least 10 percent overall, “equaling 1,000 to 6,000 additional murders” when expanded to the nationwide level.
Using more prosaic but equally effective methods, Jason Johnson of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund found exactly the same thing: a direct and statistically significant correlation between declines in the kind of proactive policing hated by BLM and surges in homicide. In New York City, arrests of criminal suspects dropped by 38 percent while murders rose by 58 percent — increasing by more than 100. In my hometown of Chicago, arrests declined by 53 percent, while the corresponding surge in homicides was 65 percent. In the metroplex city of my new Kentucky home, Louisville, arrests plunged by 42 percent and stops overall by 35 percent; murders rose by a staggering 87 percent.
Even more remarkable than the existence of what is sometimes just called the “crime wave” was how targeted its effects actually were. While I have seen few mainstream pundits bold enough to discuss specific trends here — perhaps because very heterodox writers like Steve Sailer have — the United States has not in fact seen a rise in total crime since the last decade. Per the report “Criminal Victimization, 2021,” based on the victim-reported Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey (the BJS-NCVS), which is widely considered the gold standard of American crime data, crime overall did not increase significantly that year.
As presented in Table 14 of the authoritative report, 2,734,700 Americans were victims of serious (“index”) violent crimes — as compared with 2,599,620 in the Covid-19 lockdown year of 2020, 3,059,060 in 2019, 3,254,250 in 2018, and 3,106,346 back in 2017. Felony property crime also did not increase across this set of years, and neither did white-on-black or black-on-white crime (with this analysis beginning in 2018). Even black crime overall, heavily concentrated in the South, wasn’t really up: Contra internet memes of the “13/50” variety, identified blacks committed 974,378 — or just about 25 percent — of the 3,995,668 total violent crimes that took place in 2021. All of this data, which is totally noncontroversial, can be read in the report.
What did increase was hyper-violent, specifically black-on-black crime — murders, public shootings — concentrated in large and mostly blue cities that basically gave up on the idea of enforcing the law (“white” cities that did the same, such as Portland, Ore., saw similar results). Between the late 2010s and 2022, black Americans went from being responsible for less than 50 percent of 14,000–17,000 murders annually to being responsible for 60.4 percent of the 22,900 annual murders sourced above. Per easily available FBI data, the black homicide rate increased by roughly 50 percent in just the few years since the death of George Floyd. This is, notably, a purely “culturalist” result that has nothing to do with genetics or racism. It is, also, one of the most significant legacies of BLM.
I present all this statistical wonkery because I am a statistical wonk, but it shines light on a deeper point. Black Lives Matter’s solutions (“pull back the cops in dangerous neighborhoods”) failed in an obviously predictable way that got lots of people hurt and killed because BLM’s core premise is wrong. In 2023, contemporary racism is simply not the main barrier holding back black folks, or any other groups of Americans — whether Chinese, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, Indians, Nigerians, or anything else.
Evidence of this is all around us. We would see it if we stopped slap-fighting our countrymen, who are often wearing the same designer shirts and shades as we are, long enough to look for it. Today, either seven or eight — depending on how you decide to count South Africans — of the ten richest ethnic groups in the U.S. are nonwhite, including some of the populations I just listed. For that matter, East and South Asians — and probably Jewish Americans and West Africans, who are harder to break out of broader racial categories — outperform Anglos on today’s meritocratic SAT, averaging close to 1200 as versus an 1118 for “whites overall.” Over on the physical side of things, high-dollar professional sports are among the most integrated enterprises on the planet, with Major League Baseball and the NFL being diverse in the literal sense and the NBA clocking in at around 72 percent black.
Of course, none of this changes the brutal reality of history. “Systemic minority barriers to college admission,” and the like, obviously don’t exist these days — rather the opposite for that one — and in the United States of 2023, most people can make it. People sail here on bedroom doors to try. But it empirically is harder to achieve financial or social success if you start out poor. And owing to past conflict and race war and oppression, many more black kids, proportionately, are poor than is the case for white kids.
But here’s the thing: That’s also accurate almost verbatim for immigrants from Ukraine or Bosnia, or güero Mexicans, or plain Appalachian folks (trust me!) — and the actual non-secret path to achieving success is identical for all of these countrymen. It’s easy to mock the hokey old Success Sequence that almost every single ’80s or ’70s kid heard from a coach or priest/rabbi or (coughs) their father, but it really is true that you have a 1–2 percent chance of ever ending up poor if you do just four things at the start of life.
Those are: Take any job and work until you get a better one, wait until marriage (or age 25, for the cynics) to have children, avoid getting convicted of a felony, and graduate high school with any marks that make that possible. It’s also literally true that the biggest group-level predictor of success in school — again, contra both racialists and hereditarians, and per the Brookings Institution, of all places — seems to simply be how much kids study for class. Who knew?
Banter aside, the answer is that every sane person knew that. In Reality World, much of what the critical Left insists on calling “whiteness” — like showing up for business meetings on time — is prevalent in Japan and Nigeria, and in every minority-owned business I have ever worked at, and in what could more efficiently be called “civilization.” It would be a mitzvah indeed to start teaching this reality instead of fake oppression narratives, which lead nowhere or to chaos, to all of our kids and fellow citizens. Looking at the results BLM actually produced, let’s start . . . now.“
Tucker’s interview of Michael Shellenberger is on point:
Next, for those still needing proof no amount of money will ever satisfy the insatiable, speaking at the latest meeting of California’s reparations task force…
“California’s reparations task force met again on Friday in San Diego with public comment from speakers who urged bold action and for the state to go forward with payments to African Americans as repayment for slavery. After comments by Dr. Shirley Weber, California Secretary of State, one speaker blasted the suggested amount of $223,000 per resident as insufficient.
Reverend Tony Pierce came to the microphone and slammed the idea of limiting the cash payouts to California residents: “There should be no residency requirements for California! We have to encourage our people to come back to California! What better way to encourage our people to come back to California if we have no requirements?”
“How will reparations be paid?” he added. “Immediately!” After being told that his time is up, Pierce yelled at the audience, “And $200,000 is not enough! $223,000 is not enough!”…”
Actually, enough is enough, “Reverend”. Here’s a second shot of the juice: Reparations could be the most patently pandering, utterly unworkable idea to come down the Progressive pike since LBJ started paying people not to work and have babies out of wedlock. More importantly, it would provide compensation to those who weren’t ever slaves from those who never enslaved.
And in the Pot Calling the Kettle Black segment, Best of the Web records….
It’s amazing how quickly words on the political left can go from trendy to dirty. The signature progressive phrase of 2020 is now so discredited that even Democratic politicians are using the label to smear intraparty rivals. Alice Yin, Gregory Pratt and A.D. Quig report for the Chicago Tribune:
An often-combative Mayor Lori Lightfoot once again took the offensive against her leading challengers, repeatedly interrupting rival candidates and even the moderator during a forum Thursday as she defended her mayoral record.
As it has during much of the mayoral election, crime became a main focus of the discussion as Lightfoot attempted to portray herself as the one person actually addressing the issue while her opponents were coming at the topic from different sides of the political spectrum.
Turning to U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” García, a progressive congressman from the Southwest Side, Lightfoot labeled him as a supporter of the defund the police movement, declaring: “This man is a (police) defunder, pure and simple.Don’t let him fool you.”
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and there’s no one as desperate as a politician faced with the possibility of losing their office and having to get a real job.
Moving on, here’s another septet of special selections certain to pique the curiosity of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). Apparently the jumbotron at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans honored Tyre Nichols prior to an NBA game on Saturday, January 28th.
No word on whether professional basketball will make the effort to remember the thousands of other innocent Blacks killed by other Blacks just in 2022, likely because there aren’t enough total NBA games in a season to keep up with the number of victims. Hells bells, they could barely keep up with Chicago.
(4). If you think The Donald is the only prominent political figure clinging to claims of stolen elections, this account from NRO’s Dan McLaughlin should lead you to think again. As Dan so accurately observes, “None of this stuff bothers Democrats when their own side does it.”
(5). Writing at his Weekend Jolt, Judson Berger declares, when it comes to anything emanating from Joe Biden’s mouth, it’s all malarkey, as the truth is truly not in him.
(6). Since we’re on the subject of this career prevaricator, Biden recently observed some people think he’s “stupid“…immediately after which he called out for “Doug the congressman”, though in fact searching for Rep. Don Beyer.
Joe, people don’t think you’re stupid. Your amazing display of ignorance and narcissism brings to mind this line from William Devane in Payback:
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…
…Major Jon…
…and Speed:
Though unlikely to inflict as much damage as its M-1A counterpart, if nothing else, those 31 Abrams would certainly eat Putin out of house and home!
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with this week’s nominee for the Elizabeth Warren “Song of Lieawatha” Award for actual cultural appropriation, courtesy today of NRO, as Dan McLaughlin notes a…
“The University of Wisconsin-Madison awarded a $5,000, 10-week residency to an art scholar who pretended to be of Native American descent, so the scholar could develop a “toolkit and curriculum around cultural appropriation,” before she resigned. Kay LeClaire, who uses they/them pronouns, labeled themselves as “two spirit,” an indigenous term used to describe those who identify with both masculine and feminine qualities.
LeClaire had, for years, falsely claimed “Métis, Oneida, Ojibwe and Cuban heritage” and had even adopted an Ojibwe name, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. LeClaire also co-owned an Indigenous and queer art and tattoo parlor and occupied a space on the Missing and Murdered indigenous Women Task Force and garnered recognition as a prominent Native American voice before the controversy emerged.
…Aside from being awarded the paid residency, LeClaire got involved in other topics concerning the indigenous community on UW Madison’s campus, including criticizing the university for flying the Ho Chunk flag, which, according to the institution, aimed to “educate the campus about Ho Chunk culture and First Nation’s history.”
LeClaire, pretending to adopt an indigenous lens, criticized the university for flying the tribal flag often displayed during Native American heritage month or on Indigenous People’s Day, alleging the move was performative. LeClaire had also previously criticized a nearby music venue formerly known as Winnebago, slamming the venue’s White owners for allegedly profiting from Native American identities…”
That such complete and utter woke bullsh*t could go unchallenged indicates just how far American academia has fallen.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Ami Horowitz and Dennis Prager highlight how The Left is every bit as crazy and twisted as it sounds and seems.
Tales of The Darkside
With the help of Rebel News, Dave Rubin puts the lies of hypocrisy of Progressives into proper perspective.
On the Lighter Side
Nick forwarded this humorous look at the travails of Southwest Airlines and the perils of its passengers. Herb Kelleher must be rolling over in his grave.
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