My blog of the 20th cited a few recent examples of Leftist double-speak and outright hypocrisy. One can of course also find examples of such on the Right, but they tend to come from the outer fringes and are perversions of the Rational Humanism defended both here and by the mainstream “conservatives” to whom I have repeatedly referred. Problem is, moral/intellectual decadence pervades the mainstream Left. Would not MSNBC and the Democratic Party itself qualify as representatives of that perspective?
On June 22, Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC suggested the “defund the police” movement was in no way intended to debilitate America’s police forces but rather to have taxpayers’ dollars spent in such a way as to insure both police safety as well as that of the jurisdictions they patrol. Given that crime rates have soared in various Democratically controlled cities around the States, many of which have cut funding to the police, Ruhle would seem to be attempting to obfuscate the fact that the Left had ever endorsed such an idiotic idea. A guest on her show, Miami Police Chief Art Acevedo pointed out the irony of the fact that the “defund” movement had had its most dire effects in poorer neighborhoods, those often populated by the very folks B.L.M. was apparently trying to defend. In the first 6 months of 2021, for example, 81% of the 317 murdered in Chicago were Black people. Was Ruhle being disingenuous in suggesting the Left was in no way responsible for such numbers or was she in fact correct in asserting the “defund” initiative was never really the anti-police lunacy “conservatives” had declared it to be. What are the facts?
In the N.Y. Times, hardly a peripheral appendage of the radical Left, Miriame Kaba wrote last June, just weeks after George Floyd’s death: “Yes, we literally mean abolish the police.” When N.Y.C. cut its police budget by approximately 1 billion dollars, A.O.C. made her intentions very clear, saying: “Defunding police means defunding police. It does not mean budget tricks or funny math.”
Stephanie Ruhle’s editorial, it would seem, had less to do with the Truth than with a crass attempt to exonerate the Left of an initiative that the vast majority of those living in America’s poorer neighborhoods apparently find absurd.
This past Tuesday, June 22, Republican senators used the filibuster to deter the progress of the so-called For the People election “reform” act. Just as the Democrats have talked of re-configuring the Supreme Court because they do not have a majority there, so also they have vilified the Republican use of the filibuster as, what else, “racist,” in an attempt to have it abolished as a political option. Clearly unfamiliar with the concept of irony, however, they used the filibuster 314 times throughout Trump’s years in office, this significantly more than had been used against all previous presidents combined! It certainly doesn’t seem to be an exaggeration to suggest the informing, fascistic double standard of Biden and company to be: We’re right and they’re wrong, so to hell with the checks and balances of a functioning Democracy!