Two quotes from Black “conservative” Thomas Sowell:
“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians who must be civilized before it is too late.”
“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”
As the title of my aforementioned book “Progressivism: Mindless by Design” clearly implies and as Thomas Sowell would seem to believe, we are presently beleaguered by a Culture which over the last fifty years has increasingly abandoned the prescriptions of Reason for the tyranny of raw emotion. I know Mr. Sowell is not a medical doctor, but from my perspective he has diagnosed perfectly the disease that is destroying Western Civilization.
I have compiled a list of dozens of former “progressives” who, as they got older, came to realize the intellectual vacuity and inherent totalitarianism of the Left and chose to embrace a basically “conservative” perspective. It is no coincidence that Ayanna Pressley, a member of the socialist “squad” presently clamoring for Biden’s attention, is lobbying to have the voting age reduced to 16. Why wouldn’t she? No sane person familiar with the videos posted over the summer highlighting the behavior of the members of Antifa and B.L.M. could have failed to notice the immaturity, the irrationality, the belligerence, indeed the propensity to violence of most of the youthful “protesters.” They are the very barbarians to whom Sowell was referring. Understandably sympathetic to the plight of certain demographics, they would never “think” to consider both that Socialist government solutions to such dilemmas are born of a demonstrably superficial vision of Human Nature, the very vision being propagandized in our Universities, while inevitably entailing the abrogation of the Freedoms upon which America was founded. But that’s fine with Ayanna, apparently eager to put the future of her country in the hands of those not considered mature enough to legally buy liquor.
Derek Chauvin’s trial is underway. The barricade around the court house in Minneapolis is a tacit admission that America has put its future in the hands of barbarians. The facts of George Floyd’s death are complicated. Those who have concluded that he was the innocent victim of a racist cop without familiarizing themselves with the various extenuating circumstances of his death, are simply beyond the reach of reason. I have no intention of going into the details of the drugs found in his body, his criminal history, the irrationality of his behavior or the protocol recommended to Minneapolis cops in dealing with such situations. But what is eminently obvious is that if Chauvin is convicted of the lesser of the charges leveled against him or, god forbid, fully exonerated, there will be riots in the streets of America, riots in fact incited by the narrative that has come to dominate Western Civilization, the ludicrously simplistic narrative that White people are all racists while people of Color, even when high on drugs and chronically criminal, are always their innocent victims.
I am not suggesting Chauvin ought to be exonerated, though I certainly don’t think he should be convicted of willfully murdering Floyd. The death of Breonna Taylor is far more troubling, the testimony of her neighbors being more or less unanimous in refuting the contention of the police that they had announced who they were before battering down her door. When her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, thinking they were under attack by a gang of thugs, opened fire on the intruders, the cops unleashed the hail of bullets that took Breonna’s life. Walker was a legal gun owner and the drug dealer the police were seeking was apparently Breonna’s former boyfriend. Subsequent to her death one of the cops, Brett Hankison, was fired and charged with reckless use of his firearm while Kenneth Walker has just been exonerated of all blame in the incident. Brandon Tatum who is a Black, retired police officer maintains Breonna was heavily involved in the drug dealings of her ex, but even if that is true, it in no way justifies her death.
One of the few positive results of the Summer of Chaos has been widespread recognition of the need to overhaul police protocols in dealing with incidents such as the above. The “no knock search warrant” which led the three Louisville cops to break into Breonna’s apartment without, apparently, identifying themselves, seems like an open invitation to disaster. Had I been Walker, I too might have opened fire!
Brandon Tatum chooses to believe Walker knew very well he was shooting at the police. Of course we shall never know the truth with certainty. But if he sympathizes with cops dealing with potentially violent criminals, it is no doubt a result of his awareness of the incomparable chaos of the sort of life and death confrontations cited above. Yes there are bad cops and racist cops, but for Tatum it is absurd to extrapolate from such confrontations the Systemic Racism of all American Police Forces and indeed of U.S. Society in general.
In the narrative pushed by the Left, it is precisely in moments of extreme stress that the unconscious biases of Whites are likely to manifest themselves. Indeed were one who has never had a racist thought in his life to go out of his way to be unduly generous to a person of Color, his generosity would in fact be interpreted as an admission of guilt. While it is absurd to forge political policy out of such conjectures, it is conjectures rather than facts that seem to motivate the “conscientious” Left. But the “facts” do not validate its moral outrage. Indeed a recent Wall Street Journal article reported that the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the D.O.J. “concluded that there was no statistically significant difference by race between how likely people were to commit violent crimes and how likely they were to be arrested.” If, in other words, 50% of those taken into custody in any given jurisdiction are Black, it is not because of the prejudice of the police but simply because 50% of the crimes were in fact committed by Blacks.
The notion that violence is necessary to the eradication of whatever genuine systemic inequities continue to plague America, is absurd. The changes wrought by the peaceful demonstrations of Martin Luther King are proof. But these are different times and those who pillaged America’s streets last summer are not of the same stuff as the followers of Dr. King. Respect for the Law among the “woke” has all but disappeared. Indeed the Law is now seen to be but a tool of oppression. That it is such in certain foreign tyrannies is of course true. But in the Post Enlightenment West, respect for the Law is deemed essential to a truly civilized society, to the peaceful exchange of ideas amongst people who respect the rights of others. That this rational formula for human progress has now been replaced among vast portions of Western populations by the childish notion that one’s feelings of outrage, of victimization, take precedence over all else, is evident day after day in the news reports of the mainstream media which, ironically, often celebrates this brazenly destructive principle.
On Sat., Mar 6, a cheer leading competition was scheduled for the Kentucky International Convention Center in Louisville. I assume there were some Black girls among the contestants, but as the predominantly White crowd of young females made their way into the Center, they were greeted by members of B.L.M. who, spewing profanities of various sorts, derided them for, what else, their “White privilege.” Megaphone in hand, Carmen M. Jones’ delightful message was basically “Ya, Breonna is dead, but you spoiled little princesses, you have a great day! “
Hatred, envy, self-pity, pettiness, vulgarity, stupidity, ignorance of History and indeed ignorance of the Self, all lavishly self-evident among the “social justice” warriors of the Left, those screaming obscenities at a bunch of innocent young White girls who have absolutely nothing to do with their overwrought sense of victimization. And of course if their antics should incite resentment amongst a significant portion of the White population, then the founders of B.L.M. will have achieved what Patrice Cullors clearly saw as one of their fundamental Neo-Marxist goals, the continued deterioration of the social fabric of America.