CBS Chicago has reported that as of late Sunday evening of this Labor Day weekend, 39 have been shot and 5 killed in Chicago. And Monday is still before us. That the Ideologues at B.L.M. chose to denigrate if not defund the police is understandable given their stated goal of destroying America. That simpletons at CNN and the N.Y. Times chose to support them is unconscionable. Anyone with a vestigial knowledge of Human Nature has to know that loosening the grip of those socially sanctioned mechanisms designed to curtail Man’s baser instincts is by definition bound to lead to an increase in criminal activity if not a descent into chaos. Those on the “compassionate” Left apparently lack that knowledge. Indeed the sage Canadian John Ralston Saul maintains the concept of Human Evil has been grossly exaggerated by Capitalists simply looking to ensure a manageable work force. And so in article after article and broadcast after broadcast those given to Saul’s pathologically naive vision of the species insist on referring to the “predominantly peaceful” demonstrations presently underway throughout America, crassly ignoring, as fanatics always do, the inarguable facts of the real world.
At the recently completed R.N.C., Trump launched into a tirade against the policies of N.Y. city’s Democratic mayor and the state’s Democratic governor, blaming them for the sharp rise in violence in the Big Apple. Of course the Left responded with a vengeance. An article in the Times of Aug. 28 is not atypical, its author, Alan Feuer, implying, as is customary, that Trump is a pathological liar by entitling the piece “Here are the Facts.”
Pat Lynch, head of the city’s largest police union, has reported that over 1000 have been shot and 300 killed in N.Y. C. already this year, increases of 87% and 35% respectively, according to Feuer. But in his attempt to disparage Trump’s outrage, the latter insists the causes of this spike to be “complex.” On the one hand, he says, the state’s new bail laws make it far easier for accused offenders to be released before their trial date while concern with the corona virus has led to hundreds of violent convicts being set free prematurely. But these policies, no less than disdain for the apparent systemic racism of New York’s cops, are in fact mandated by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and hardly discredit Trump’s charge. Feuer argues that crime rates are actually down in his state if one includes, for example, the fact that grand larceny has decreased by 20%. It is an absurd red herring. Who among those venom spewing mobs marauding America’s streets is either interested in or capable of grand larceny?
But what is truly disingenuous about Feuer’s article is its citation of statistics pertaining to all of 2020, as if the world had not radically changed after George Floyd’s death on May 25, as if the movement in June to defund the police had not seriously exacerbated the problem. If shootings in N.Y.C. were up 87% from Jan. to Aug., what might that number become if one were to include only June, July and August, those months plagued by the idiotic Democratic insistence that the cops are not really necessary?
Saturday afternoon in Pittsburgh a mob of “protesters” patrolled the city’s downtown core chanting “Fuck the police” and “Fuck the White people.” Approaching a restaurant patio filled with diners, a young Black woman wearing a tee shirt that said “Nazi lives don’t matter” emerged from the crowd and proceeded to terrorize a group of elderly White folks, grabbing the beer of an older lady and quaffing it to the derisive cheers of the crowd.
Oprah would no doubt be appalled by the mob’s behavior but she in fact encouraged it by suggesting all White people not fully conscious of their lives of “privilege” are implicitly racist.
What is truly frightening is that the Left has so poisoned discourse on such issues that any criticism of this kind of uncivilized behavior is immediately, smugly dismissed as Hate speech, unless of course it is offered by a person of Color, in which case he/she will be denounced as an Uncle Tom.
On the other hand, there is cause for hope in the fact that a significant number of former “progressives” have chosen to walk away from the Left as a result of what they have come to see as its moral/intellectual bankruptcy. They shall be the subject of my next blog.