We’ve Seen this Movie Before

By now it should be clear to all sentient beings that protests over the killing of George Floyd have been hijacked by left wing radicals. Moreover, they (the radicals) mean to transform America by any means necessary, including the use of violence. The response from the political establishment that runs American cities set ablaze has been stone cold silence. It is then followed by a predictable cave-in to mob violence. What explains this?

It helps to look at history.

In the 1960s, the forerunner to today’s violence, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown proclaimed that “Violence is as American as cherry pie”. He urged his followers to use violence to resist the American government which he characterized as the “Fourth Reich” and urged his followers on with such comments as “If America don’t come around, we’re gonna burn it down.” That wasn’t an isolated remark. 

Elected the 5th Chairman of the ironically named Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he also served as Minister of Justice for the Black Panther Party. While Chairman of SNCC he urged followers at a Washington D.C. rally to “carry on guerrilla warfare in all the cities…and make the Viet Cong look like Sunday school teachers.” 

A little earlier Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which later became the Weather Underground, made an appearance. For the Weathermen, violence was necessary to create change. Brian Flanagan, a founding member, said “When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some pretty horrible things.” 

And so the Weathermen set off a wave of violent protests and bombings across America. In 1970 Bernadine Dohrn announced a “declaration of War”. A few days later a bomb manufactured in a Greenwich Village townhouse, intended for an Army base, exploded killing three Weathermen. The explosion set off an FBI manhunt and the Weathermen went underground, hence the change of name to “Weather Underground”. 

Other leaders of the movement included the infamous Chicago 7, the group put on trial for fomenting the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention, helped along by the behavior of the Chicago police. This group included Tom Hayden, a graduate of the University of Michigan. He authored the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the Weathermen. Later in life he married Jane Fonda and won seats in both the California Assembly and Senate. 

Renne Davis, who graduated from Oberlin College, was an early activist in the SDS. He was an organizer of MOBE, The National Mobilization Committee to end the War in Vietnam. His father had served as chief of staff of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Harry S Truman. Later in life Renee Davis became a business consultant advising Fortune 500 companies on business strategy.

Jerry Rubin, along with Abbie Hoffman, founded the Yippie Party. Rubin studied at Oberlin College before graduating from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in history. He attended the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, but quickly dropped out to pursue social activism. That included a trip to Havana to learn about the Cuban revolution. 

Meanwhile his fellow founder of the Yippies, Abbie Hoffman, studied at Brandies University where he became a student of Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse. 

The influence of Herbert Marcuse, father of the New Left, can not be over emphasized. Marcuse worked as a professor at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis Universities. It was at Brandies that he wrote his most influential work “One Dimensional Man”. Marcuse believed that “all questions of material existence have been solved, moral commands and prohibitions are no longer relevant”. The realization of man’s erotic nature was what was needed to truly liberate humanity. 

Liberating humanity, according to Marcuse, would require intolerance for heretical beliefs. Below I quote from Marcuse’s A Repressive Tolerance,1965.  

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.”

Sound familiar? It ought to because it is the animating idea behind today’s cancel culture. 

Which brings us to Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the real agenda the organization is pushing, which has precious little to do with civil rights. Because they have no use for civil rights for anybody. They are self described Marxists; individual rights are not part of their vocabulary.  Anyone who doubts this has only to view this 2 minute clip (below) in which Co-Founder Patrisse Cullors declares “We actually do have an ideological frame…we are trained Marxists.” 

Patrisse Cullo — Co-Founder of BLM

And if that is not good enough, go visit the BLM Website where they proclaim their goal to transform Western society into a socialist Utopia through revolution. Here is specifically what they say:

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).”

So let us not be naive about this.  BLM is just one of many radical left wing Marxist groups who attack traditional Western institutions in an attempt to undermine the freedoms of a liberal society we take for granted. They, along with their brothers in arms, intend to stamp out those institutions that stand in their way; institutions like the traditional nuclear family, private property, the rule of law and the sovereignty of the individual.  

Like the Weather Underground before them, they are at war with human nature and Western society. There should be no doubt about this. All you have to do is listen to them. It is the same old story; we have been here before, it is merely a reboot of 1968. 

So why have progressives remained quiet in the face of this onslaught? After all, it is the progressive establishment that runs the major cities in America—the ones that have been torched. It is oh-so-progressive Seattle that stands by watching helplessly as a section of town is taken over by radicals in an armed insurrection.  It is progressive Minneapolis that has a police department so lawless that the city council decided to defund it and turn it over to someone else. It is progressive New York mayor Bill de Blasio who announced that he was going to reduce the NYC police budget by $1 Billion—presumably to improve the quality of policing. The list goes on. 

Why is it that in city after city minority citizens distrust police departments that report to progressive politicians? How is it that those same progressive politicians are silent when violent Marxist radicals hijack citizen demonstrations when those citizens peacefully and correctly demand that their rights be respected? 

The best word for it is cowardice. 

It was Aristotle who said the most important virtue is courage—because without courage the other virtues fade away. And so it is today. Progressives refuse to stand up for what they claim to believe about the rule of law, citizens’ rights and the liberal institutions that have protected what used to be known as the American way of life. 

It is progressives that have been responsible for the management and oversight of city police departments and school systems for the last 50 years or so. And they have failed miserably. Rather than admit error and implement the reforms so desperately needed, they choose instead to appease the mob. They do this because they are captured by special interest groups (like public sector unions) and are more interested in virtue-signaling than doing the hard work of governing responsibly. 

And so what we are left with is an incoherent political philosophy (progressivism) that lies at the root of the problem; a political class that would rather deal in sanctimony than govern, and affluent citizens who increasingly wall themselves off from the consequences of their votes. 

In the meantime poor and minority citizens are distrustful of police, a sure sign of a governance failure—at the very least. Meanwhile poor and minority citizens do not have access to quality schools that would enable them to better their lives and compete on a level playing field. That opportunity is denied by progressives who refuse to allow school competition either through vouchers or charter schools. 

So by all means, Progressives should keep on playing #Resistance. Virtue signaling is so fun and easy when somebody else pays the price. 

JFB

Defunding the Police

People misunderstand what “activists” mean by “defund the police”. It doesn’t mean the abolition of policing. It does mean moving the jurisdiction of policing to another larger political entity—for instance moving the jurisdiction (and management responsibility) from the city to the county. It also means that the taxing locus will be the county. But the city will not reduce its spending by the amount its police budget has been reduced. It will use that money for more “social services” which is to say income transfers and vote buying. 

So the Minneapolis city council, which for eons has been one of the most liberal cities in the country, has now voted to disband its police department by a veto-proof majority. 

They have, in effect, conceded that they are incapable of managing their own police department. The same is largely true of its public school system; they just haven’t gotten around to admitting it yet. 

This raises several rather obvious questions that Progressive cheerleaders in the press have thus far been reluctant to ask. 

  1. Is Minneapolis somehow significantly different from other big U.S. cities, and if so, how?
  2. Does the Minneapolis experience represent a failure of governance and government? If not, why not?
  3. How can it be that in Minneapolis (and everywhere else) the same one-party political machines that have consistently produced the same failures in policing and schools have been continuously re-elected for 50 years or so?
  4. How can it be that Progressives, who claim to represent the interests of minorities and the poor, and who have presided over this disaster, have any credibility left at all? 

JFB

Wealth, Poverty and Politics: A Discussion with Dr. Thomas Sowell

One of the problems we face in the public square is that “argument” consists largely of assertions without regard to facts, evidence, or logic. It is commonly assumed, for instance, that differences in outcomes result from unequal treatment, and that were it not for unequal treatment differentiation in outcomes would be essentially non-existent. Things like taste, interest, ability, discipline, industriousness and even biology are mere social constructs that reflect the preferences of an oppressive class hierarchy. 

There is a further underlying assumption that were it not for this oppressive class system, otherwise known as capitalism, poverty could be eliminated and the wants and needs of people could be fulfilled. (Note: material poverty has been largely eliminated in the West by…capitalism).  

The common thread in all this is the assumption that wealth and income derive from external resources rather than from the development of human capital; that wealth should be distributed rather than created and earned. Most importantly, it assumes that wealth is the default position of mankind.

It isn’t. The default position of mankind is existence under conditions of poverty and scarcity. The reason why the West lives in abundance is because over the centuries it has created institutions that protect property rights, individual agency and the rule of law, all of which are necessary preconditions for liberal market capitalism. 

Dr. Thomas Sowell, a pre-eminent economist with the Hoover Institution, discusses wealth, poverty and politics in a wide ranging interview with Peter Robinson in the video below. 

JFB

Dr. Thomas Sowell

Don’t Know Much about History…

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Jean-Jacque Rousseau

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Edmund Burke. 

There is a great philosophical divide between classical liberalism and utopian socialism. It is this divide that drives modern politics and has done so since the time of the French and American Revolutions. The intellectual poison served up by Rousseau, eagerly consumed by the ignorati, has wrought tremendous cultural damage. The damage is evident in the smoking ruins on literal display in America’s cities and figuratively in its cultural institutions. 

For some historical perspective on todays politics and culture, it is well worth watching the discussion  below with the David Starkey (no relation to Ringo), a Cambridge educated and very controversial British constitutional historian.

JFB

Dr. David Starkey

The Week Trump Lost the Election

When the history books of the 2020 election are written they will most likely say that this was the week that Donald J Trump lost his bid for re-election. Not because of the economy; not because of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police; not because of mass protests and later rioting. 

Donald Trump lost because his deceitful and cowardly nature was laid bare for all to see including those who would prefer not to see. It was laid bare when he was whisked to a bunker in the White House when the crowds outside got unruly. It was there and then that his phony macho rhetoric crashed into the reality of his cowardice. 

Had he been a real leader he would have gone outside to address the crowd, while showing some humility and decency.  But that is not part of his make-up. Instead he ran and hid in his bunker displaying his true nature—that of a coward and a weakling. 

The American people can tolerate a lot in a President. Over the years there have been plenty of opportunities to forgive and forget. But the American public has little tolerance for an amoral sniveling coward in the White House; a narcissist whose primary concern is his own well being rather than that of the nation. Which is why even Mr. Trump’s backers are starting to waiver. Come November, the American public will likely show Mr. Trump the door. 

JFB