Police Chief Carmen Best, by resigning this past week, just did Seattle two huge favors.

Having the city’s first Black police chief get driven out, supposedly in the name of furthering Black equality, was an embarrassment for our city. But that’s what city leaders needed at this moment — they needed to get embarrassed, to be chastened or humbled a bit by their own slipshod performances. Thanks to Best, it appears that at least some of them were.

The other favor Best did us is that her departure spotlighted the real ideological split at City Hall on this issue, which is: Are we trying to fix the police, or tear them down?

Americans are being misled by the "anti-racism" ideology, which is less about helping black people and more about advancing Marxist goals. //

Racial justice groups are being flooded with money.

Big companies made multimillion-dollar donations.

“Bad idea,” says black radio host Larry Elder in my new video.

“It is condescending… and not helpful. I urge white people to chill. Stop helping us, because you’re making things worse!”

Making things worse, he says, because it supports the activists’ claim that “blacks are victims of racism. (But) if racism were in America’s DNA, Obama never could have got elected. Racism has never been more insignificant a factor in one’s success than right now.”

I push back. “It must be a huge problem or there wouldn’t be all this protest!”

“Well, they’re being lied to,” Elder responds. Teachers, black activists, and the media give “young people the impression that racism remains this huge problem in America when it is not.”

It’s not, he says, because today any person who does three things can succeed: “Finish high school, don’t have a kid until you get married, get a job. Do those things, you will not be poor.”

The biggest problem facing the black community today, says Elder, is the absence of fathers. In the 1960s, most black children were raised in two-parent households. That changed when our government’s war on poverty began.

The handouts sent the message that it’s the government’s job, not your responsibility, to take care of you and your kids. “A mother with two children makes more money than she would make on minimum wage because of all the goodies she gets through the welfare state!”

Now, he says, Black Lives Matter actually encourages the breakup of families. Their website does say, “disrupt the Western-prescribed, nuclear family.” //

Recently, Washington’s Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the taxpayer-funded Smithsonian Institute, posted that “white culture” means things like “nuclear family,” “self-reliance,” “rigid time schedule,” and “delayed gratification.” //

I wanted to ask the “anti-racists” if they notice that they and white supremacists now support similar segregationist policies, like blacks- (or whites-) only spaces. Foster points out that both white supremacists and anti-racists believe “race is an immutable attribute of who we are.”

He prefers Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision: a nation where “people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

“Black Lives Matter leaders don’t really want the vision of MLK,” says Elder. “They want a color-coordinated society—as long as they’re the ones who do the coordinating.”

Every dime from these corporations is a lie.

The Times’ supposition that America was racist at its core follows radical abolitionists rather than thinkers like Frederick Douglass who claimed the Constitution is an anti-slavery document. //

Since The New York Times published The 1619 Project a year ago, an army of scholars, historians, economists, and concerned citizens have criticized its bad history, bad journalism, and bad-faith effort to re-found the country on its original sin of slavery instead of its virtues. Unable to respond with intellectual honesty, the creators of the project have avoided discussion. //

The project’s flagship essay, written by project architect Nikole Hannah-Jones, argues that America’s true founding should be 1619, the year slaves were first brought to Virginia, instead of 1776, the year the 13 colonies declared independence from Great Britain. The reason 1776 is no longer worthy of being our founding date, Hannah-Jones says, is that the writer of the words “all men are created equal” did not mean them for black men and women. She thus claims the words were a lie until black Americans made them true. //

The below responses are strong rebuttals to all of these contentions.

Disgusting.

"Donald Trump is absolutely right." //

“Joe Biden is unfit to be president, and Joe Biden is a racist. Joe Biden has the mindset of a plantation owner. He thinks he knows how every black person thinks, how we walk, what we should eat.

Joe Biden doesn’t understand that black people are individuals. Condoleezza Rice and Al Sharpton are different individuals. We have a different mindset.

No one black person speaks for black America. //

“He [Biden] has been lying about his civil rights record for decades. He lied and said the NAACP endorsed him for every one of his campaigns. Actually, the NAACP has endorsed him for zero of his campaigns.

He lied and said he was arrested trying to visit [late South African president] Nelson Mandela.

And for decades he said that ‘I have participated in desegregating restaurants and movie theaters in Wilmington, Delaware. Zero evidence!

The New York Times looked at it and said, years ago, that his adviser gently reminded Joe to stop saying it because it wasn’t true, and he kept saying it anyway. //

TheLeoTerrell
@TheLeoTerrell
Replying to @JoeBiden
Too late . Your comments are racist.
9:39 PM · Aug 6, 2020 //

“Joe Biden gave us the crime bill in 1994. President Trump gave us the first step. The bottom line is this: I don’t need the Democrats to insult me or try to placate me with African garb, Nancy Pelosi.

Obama's claim that the filibuster is racist is an alarming harbinger for how Democrats will attack and reject limits on power.

Everything is racist, and I mean everything. //

The fact that Europeans depicted Jesus in European form is more easily explained by the reality that such is all the knew. There was no internet to go see what people from Judea looked like hundreds to thousands of years ago. This is why you often see Africans depict Jesus as not only black, but with very darkly toned skin as well. If you go to China, you will find Jesus depicted as Chinese in underground churches.

That is not “supremacy” on the part of anyone. Rather, it’s a result of cultural knowledge and a realization of the scripture that tells us we are all made in his image. Yes, Jesus was almost certainly an olive-skinned man with dark hair being a Jew from the region he was from. But that doesn’t make it wrong for cultures and Christians all over the world to see themselves in their Savior. //

To give an example of how much of a non-issue this is, I’ll note that Evangelicals were the main thrust behind the support of The Passion of the Christ. Where was the outcry that Jesus wasn’t depicted as a European if it’s so important to their dogma? The answer is there was no outcry because the assertion that Evangelicals care about Jesus being seen as European is simply a lie.

George Floyd's death was the best day Black Lives Matter ever had. //

Floyd’s death served a singular purpose that I think is important, and that’s the conversations around police tactics and methods. That’s a conversation that is definitely needed because perfecting policing is always a good thing and knowing what not to do in certain situations will prevent a lot of grief, fired officers, and news cycles in the future.

But if we’re being realistic, Floyd’s death didn’t highlight a major problem that many think it did.

According to the Washington Post “Fatal Force” database, 2019 saw police shoot and kill 999 people. Out of that number, 55 suspects shot and killed by police that were unarmed, 14 of which were black. Keep in mind that “unarmed” doesn’t necessarily mean “innocent.” Some of these police shootings were still considered justified due to the suspect’s actions such as the physical assault of an officer or attempts at seizing an officer’s weapons.

But let’s say all of the unarmed killings were justified. In a country of about 40 million black people, 14 of them dying by the hands of officers while unarmed is hardly an epidemic. I’m not excusing unjustified shootings by police officers at all, but let’s not pretend that we have a major problem of innocent black people being gunned down by officers in the streets like Black Lives Matter is suggesting. It’s just not happening. //

The point of George Floyd wasn’t to raise awareness, it was to start a war, and it succeeded.

Black Lives Matter is not a movement that focuses on the equality and protection of black lives, and this isn’t me speculating or accusing. These are the words of many of its cheerleaders and administrators. //

CNN host Don Lemon told Terry Crews exactly what BLM was about. //

Don Lemon says black lives don’t matter unless they’re being taken by cops and that you should start your own movement if you want to make black-on-black violence an issue.

The Gospel of Grace sufficiently covers it all, but the media feels differently

It is important, therefore, that we work together in combating organized crime in all its forms. We must use our courts and our law enforcement agencies, and the moral forces of our people, to put down organized crime wherever it appears.

At the same time, we must aid and encourage gentler forces to do their work of prevention and cure. These forces include education, religion, and home training, family and child guidance, and wholesome recreation.

The most important business in this Nation--or any other nation, for that matter-is raising and training children. If those children have the proper environment at home, and educationally, very, very few of them ever turn out wrong. I don't think we put enough stress on the necessity of implanting in the child's mind the moral code under which we live.

The fundamental basis of this Nation's law was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings which we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don't think we emphasize that enough these days.

If we don't have the proper fundamental moral background, we will finally wind up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the state.

Above all, we must recognize that human misery breeds most of our crime. We must wipe out our slums, improve the health of our citizens, and eliminate the inequalities of opportunity which embitter men and women and turn them toward lawlessness. In the long run, these programs represent the greatest of all anticrime measures.

And I want to emphasize, particularly, equality of opportunity. I think every child in the Nation, regardless of his race, creed, or color, should have the right to a proper education. And when he has finished that education, he ought to have the right in industry to fair treatment in employment. If he is able and willing to do the job, he ought to be given a chance to do that job, no matter what his religious connections are, or what his color is.

I am particularly anxious that we should do everything within our power to protect the minds and hearts of our children from the moral corruption that accompanies organized crime. Our children are our greatest resource, and our greatest asset--the hope of our future, and the future of the world. We must not permit the existence of conditions which cause our children to believe that crime is inevitable and normal. We must teach idealism--honor, ethics, decency, the moral law. We must teach that we should do right because it is right, and not in the hope of any material reward. That is what our moral code is based on: do to the other fellow as you would have him do to you. If we would continue that all through our lives, we wouldn't have organized crime--if everybody would do that.

Our local, State, and Federal law enforcement agencies have a major role to play in this whole task of crime suppression.

As law enforcement officers you have great powers. At the same time you must never forget that hand in hand with those powers go great responsibilities. You must make certain that these powers are not used for personal gain, or from any personal motive. Too often organized crime is made possible by corruption of law enforcement officials.

But, far more than that, we must always remember that you are officers of the law in a great democratic nation which owes its birth to the indignation of its citizens against the encroachment of police and governmental powers against their individual freedoms.

Now there isn't any difference, so far as I can see, in the manner in which totalitarian states treat individuals than there is in the racketeers' handling of these lawless rackets with which we are sometimes faced. And the reason that our Government is strong, and the greatest democracy in the world, is because we have a Bill of Rights.

Attempts to smear the college are not just dishonest but betray a misunderstanding of why critical race theory has no place in the classical liberal arts. //

By the inflexible logic of critical race theory, Hillsdale’s abolitionist past does not matter, its efforts to improve private and public schools do not matter, its financial aid to underprivileged students does not matter. All that matters is that the school does not go out of its way to categorize students by race, does not practice affirmative action, does not accept the terms of debate about race set forth by the progressive left, and refuses to repent of all these sins. //

Indeed, the only remotely substantive criticism of Hillsdale Whyte levels is that it refuses to categorize students by race or practice race-based affirmative action in admissions. What Whyte may not realize—or simply refuses to acknowledge—is that Hillsdale eschews racial categorization on purpose as a matter of principle.

Hillsdale’s refusal to comply with federal affirmative action requirements resulted in a series of court cases in the late 1970s and early ‘80s that ended with the college withdrawing from all federal financial assistance programs. Today it is one of the few colleges in America that accepts no federal funds—and no federal mandates.

Indeed, Hillsdale has always considered such mandates tantamount to racial discrimination. In contrast to the race-obsessed thinking of the Black Lives Matter movement, Hillsdale has always hewn to the thinking of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., who understood that race was not the most important thing about a person, and that the promises of the American Founding transcend race and national origin.

If the college’s leaders have “pooh-pooed diversity,” as Whyte says, it is because the diversity she has in mind is utterly hollow. Unlike progressives, classical liberals believe race itself is an incidental feature of the human condition, neither essential nor determinative, and in many ways merely a construct. At a college especially, the only kind of diversity that should matter is intellectual diversity, which is sorely missing from most colleges and universities today but alive and well at Hillsdale.

"We have to stop making excuses." //

The program, which the Caller wrote required “producing and maintaining assessments of fair housing practices,” essentially “saddled HUD’s payroll with an estimated 64 additional employees, whose salaries cost American taxpayers up to $15 million a year.”

Sec. Carson told the publication, in part:

“In nearly every case, it is a fact that local governments are more adequately equipped to deal with their community’s unique needs than any unelected bureaucrat in Washington. //

The Daily Caller added that Sec. Carson hasn’t been shy about bulldozing his way through the mounds of unresolved Fair Housing cases left by the previous administration:

Carson has also cleared a significant backlog of Fair Housing complaints rolled over from the previous administration. Data provided to Daily Caller indicate that under Carson’s leadership, HUD has investigated and resolved 22,933 Fair Housing cases since January 2017. //

I certainly don’t have a problem with us helping people who are poor, people who find themselves in difficult circumstances. I don’t know if it needs to be based on race.

It needs to be based on circumstances.”

Racists and social justice warriors are pretty much twins. //

Both racists and the social justice obsessed want segregated spaces, have a love of racial identitarianism, defining all things through the lens of racial experience, and believe discriminatory practices should not only be legal, but also encouraged.

As politicians are working to find solutions to police violence, having a comprehensive understanding of the statistics is essential. //

If Democrats truly want to solve police brutality they should do a little research.

The current media trend indicates that blacks are targeted by the police; however, new research reports just the opposite. A study released in late 2019 found “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities” across police shootings. //

The findings continue, citing that “white officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.”

Rather, police are far more likely to kill whites during a confrontation. For example, in 2017 457 white Americans were shot to death by the police in comparison to 223 black Americans.

This trend continues into 2020 where statistics show that police more commonly kill whites during confrontations. The ratio of police violence by race has not changed much over the past five years. //

When taking population differences into account, the argument against systemic racism holds up as well. Despite representing 13% of the population, the FBI reported that in 2017 black Americans committed 53% of homicides and 54% of robberies. Further, when looking into violence committed against police, black American men represent 33% of cop killers despite being only 6.6% of the population.

As the crowds need to be proactive against racism  — and more importantly, to be noticed for doing so — the accusations of racism are stretching thin.

Your tax dollars at work //

If a conversation about race can only start when I acknowledge a) that I am racist because of my race and b) use some profoundly stupid definitions, then I no longer see the purpose in talking, and I no longer see the purpose in caring to talk. Demanding that I engage in some sort of racial equivalent of a Maoist struggle session as the price for you thinking I’m not racist simply makes me want to tell you to f*** right off. It is not going to happen. The downstream effects are going to be something the clowns producing this propaganda will not like. //

So much of this is utterly ridiculous. Scientific method=whiteness? Wife is homemaker and subordinate to the husband is Whiteness? Planning for the future is Whiteness? Bland food is Whiteness?

This is not a list of cultural norms; it is a list of counterfactual nonsense and racial stereotypes that aren’t really racial at all. Most of them are the marks of most cultures across geography and time. Some, like conceptions of time, are products of the industrial age and arise wherever there are trains or factories. //

Rod Dreher at American Conservative observes:

What kind of neighborhood would you expect to have if most of the people in it devalued hard work, rejected the idea that they needed to be on time, refused to defer gratification, did not respect authority, sought out conflict, laughed at politeness, rejected the traditional family model, and so forth? You’d have communities that were beset by crime and generational poverty, without the cultural tools to overcome the chaos. //

Skeptical Techie
3 hours ago
Racist drivel no matter how you look at it.

A) Many of the points are long-gone aspects of American culture and most subcultures.

B) Many points are, due to (A) or for other reasons, simply racist, sexist or culturist tropes in and of themselves.

C) One of the easiest ways to highlight a racist position or statement, is to simply flip whom is being described OR the trait being described.

In this case, another method to unmask racism, sexism or culturism is to flip both those described AND to flip the trait(s) described.

Thus, if one is to have the chutzpah to take the chart and flip
from white to whatever and ascribe to them the opposite of the traits described
they would be painting a picture that nobody would wish to attribute to their
culture, race, whatever. //

Lee Norris
4 hours ago
There isn't another culture on the planet that spends so much time trashing the very principles that gave birth to it.
It's a form of insanity.

How do we remove what we can't locate? //

“You hear this phrase — systemic racism, systemic oppression — you hear it from our college campuses, you hear it from very wealthy and fabulously famous sports stars, you hear it from media types. First of all, what does that mean, and whatever it means, is it true?”

Here’s Mr. Sowell:

“It really has no meaning that can be specified and tested in the way that one tests hypotheses.”

“It does remind me of the propaganda tactics of Joseph Goebbels in the age of the Nazis, in which he was supposed to have said that people will believe any lie if it’s repeated long enough and loud enough. And that’s what we’re getting.”

Trust me, this is not how you build trust and cohesion //

The message that this kind of training clearly sends to non-BIPOC (to use the noxious abbreviation) Army personnel, military and civilian, is that you are a white supremacist. Period. Full stop. That message is not going to be well received. What it will cause, just as surely as the race relations classes I witnessed in Germany, is division and distrust.

“Who even is this guy?” one Wisconsin protester asked, staring down at the toppled statue of Hans Christian Heg, an abolitionist leader who fought and died for the Union in the Civil War.

It’s a baffling but instructive image. Why would antiracism protesters target Abraham Lincoln, let alone daring 19th-century abolitionists? In being toppled by supposedly antiracist protesters, Heg is accompanied at least by John Greenleaf Whittier and Matthias Baldwin, among the other memorials to worthy causes swept up in this fervor.

The reason is that our iconoclasts of 2020 do not care. This is about leveling each and every institution and rebuilding America from scratch, not making repairs. That’s why the counterproductive destruction of abolitionist monuments is actually useful to observers—it reflects the broader incoherence of the ideology driving this potent wave of iconoclasm.

Critics of academia have for years carefully dismantled the faulty logic underpinning abstract poststructuralist Ivory Tower doctrines like intersectionality and critical race theory. Plainly, they do not make sense, and regularly dissolve when applied to reality. But because they insist on a progressive-or-bigot binary, slowly these ideas intimidated and persuaded people of good faith into submission.

How, for instance, does intersectionality explain video The Federalist captured last week of a white woman in luxury athleisure harassing a working-class black female cop for being a racist? It does not. This is an ideology that classifies all dissent as bigotry and violence, whether the dissenter is black or female or working class.