The Detroit Riots of 1967 and its Meaning on the Fiftieth Anniversary

 

Detroit — “Half of the eight mayoral hopefuls on Detroit’s primary ballot next week have been convicted of felony crimes involving drugs, assault or weapons, a Detroit News analysis shows. Three were charged with gun crimes and two for assault with intent to commit murder. Some of the offenses date back decades, the earliest to 1977. The most recent was in 2008.” Detroit News, August, 4, 2017

As the SNL Church Lady would say, “Well, isn’t that special.” Then again for Detroit, where the typical lead story for the local evening news show is a gristly homicide or two du jour, this Detroit News piece is just another “dog bites man” story that should hardly raise a concern. “What,” you say, “the next mayor might be a convicted felon?” Who cares? … is the correct answer. Not much is left in Detroit to steal, and what difference at this point does the mayor, crooked or otherwise, make with the prolonged unfolding of this nightmare of a place that long ago stopped being a city in any normal sense? Besides, you have to “accentuate the positive,” as the old tune goes; to find four political aspirants in Detroit who are not convicted criminals, I suppose, is a victory of sorts. 

It’s not as if a felon in the Detroit mayor’s office isn’t without precedent, quite a recent one, in fact. His Honor, Kwame Malik Kilpatrick, (pictured above) who plundered his home town from 2002 to 2008, resigned as mayor in 2008. This big lovable lunk was convicted on felony counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice. Sentenced to four months in jail after pleading guilty, he was released on probation after serving 99 days. In May 2010, he was sentenced to 18 months to 5 years in state prison for violating his probation and sent back.  

Leave it to a hack political consultant and and NAACP activist, aka race careerist, to attempt to decorate this pig with lipstick. Greg Bowens, a former press secretary to Dennis Archer, an inconsequential Detroit Mayor of yesteryear, “said there are candidates with past hardships in every election cycle. It’s not something unique to Detroit or the political arena in general, he said. ‘Black marks on your record show you have lived a little and have overcome some challenges,’” said Bowens. (my italics)

With “black marks” our consultant may have committed a serious micro-aggression, but for obvious reasons, he gets a pass. But wait a second; are these black marks really supposed to mean that “you have lived a little”? Yes. We are operating in an alternative PC universe, and so we have, it seems, a new, improved definition of “convicted felon.”  “Overcoming some challenges” is a very nice touch as well. It sounds infinitely better than “a long rap sheet.” While you might be tempted to think that by “past hardships” Mr. Bowen should be referring to the harm suffered by the victims of our four candidate-felons, don’t forget, this is Detroit where everyone is celebrated as a victim of some sort.  

Let’s take a look at one of the mayoral aspirants because, well, it’s good to know what counts as “living a little” for an up and coming Detroiter and possible next Mayor. 

Again, from the Detroit News. “First-time contender Donna Marie Pitts, 58, has multiple felony convictions dating back to 1977, according to court records in Wayne and Oakland counties….   In 1977, Pitts was convicted of receiving and concealing a stolen 1977 Oldsmobile. She was sentenced to a year of probation. A decade later, she was charged with two counts of assault with intent to murder and two firearm offenses in connection with two separate shooting incidents on March 24, 1987, Detroit Recorder’s Court records say.” (italics added) The list of the “challenges” Ms. Pitts has somehow managed to “overcome” goes on a bit longer, but I think this is enough for you to get the picture. 

“Intent to murder.” Now this certainly gives generous scope in a unique Detroit sort of way for understanding how far “living at little” can take you, if you are so inclined – trying to make a certain someone you don’t like into a certain non-someone, that is, someone who is “not living, period.” “Murder” is, perhaps, too strong a word. Once again, we are flirting with micro-aggressions. Somewhere around the year 1950, Detroit had a peak population of approximately two million people. It now tops out at around 700,000, its diminution, perhaps, due in part to the flight of a lot of folks hoping to avoid the intentions of the “live a little” sorts like Ms. Pitts in between their bouts of auto theft and armed robbery.

How did we arrive here? How is it that career criminals are allowed to compete for public office and have their predations insanely glossed over by an assigned spokesperson as some sort of a valuable “learning experience?” More importantly, how is it that in the course of about sixty-five or seventy years one of the great American cities is now a  squalid, crumbling shell of its former self, a shrunken slum run by sleazy kleptocrats, sucking its basic resources for survival from the Feds and those Michigan tax payers fortunate enough not to live there? Much of the rest of the state would be happy to deed this mess over to Canada and move it across the river. Without Detroit, Michigan’s crime statistics would resemble those of Sweden, pre-Islamic invasion. But, of course, the Canadians wouldn’t dream of it.

One explanation is the 1967 riots, a defining moment presaging the coming collapse. I observed the lawless chaos first hand in downtown Detroit fifty years ago last month, one of my most indelible early adult memories. On a lovely, sunny July afternoon I was with three college friends in a car in downtown Detroit, Livernois avenue. We were coming back from a baseball game at Tiger Stadium, a doubleheader with the Yankees.

Heading into the downtown, we had no clue about what had been happening there for the last twelve or fourteen hours. We were just passing through. At first, everything seemed normal for downtown in the Motor City. However, strange things then began to happen. For no apparent reason, traffic came to a halt. We were sitting at a light that kept changing from green to red, then back to green. No movement. My friend driving the car was the first to notice, and initial disbelief at what we were seeing gave way to horror; cars on fire; the sidewalks with mobs in motion, not single individuals. A Detroit cop standing in the street helplessly watched scores of people streaming out of shops and stores (they were closed; it was Sunday) with their windows broken out, loaded down with TVs, liquor bottles, clothing and other loot. The looks on the faces of the looters were unforgettable – happy people no longer bound by silly laws; they were “helping themselves” to free stuff, enjoying the Sunday romp. This was a good thing for us, I guess, since they left us alone in the car.

It, of course, turned out to be something other than a romp. That day in Detroit began one of the worse riots in American history. Detroit police and the Michigan State Police were unable to contain the mobs who were looting stores, torching buildings and in some cases sniping at fire fighters. Governor George Romney pleaded with Lyndon Johnson for federal assistance. As we finally drove out of the city after hours of congested traffic, we witnessed on the incoming roads the Michigan National Guard ordered by Governor Romney, bumper-to-bumper in their military transports. Shortly later, the 82^nd and 102st Airborn Divisions arrived, courtesy of LBJ. Five days later the riot officially ended with 43 dead, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed. Only the 1863 New York City draft riots during the American Civil War and the 1992 Los Angles riots were greater.

This was the beginning of the end for Detroit as a great city. A lot of the stores and businesses that were destroyed in the riots belonged to Jews and other non-black ethnic people. They were not rebuilt in Detroit. The owners moved away. In 1974 Coleman Young was elected mayor reigning for the next twenty years, Detroit’s first black mayor. Young didn’t bother to hide his animus toward white people, and most of the city’s remaining whites moved out beyond Eight Mile Road, the boundary that separated an almost completely black and increasingly poor and violent Detroit from the white Detroit suburbs. 

Young functioned for Detroit as a Robert Mugabe prototype, a crypto-communist lusting for racial revenge. Put in charge of a rich and vast social-cultural-political asset that took hundreds of years to create, he managed in just twenty years to turn it into a crime-ridden, third-world hell hole that became a world-wide symbol of political corruption, urban blight and destitution. (See: “Take him to Detroit”) The productive, tax paying, property-maintaining Detroiters left, in moved the drug-dealing gangs who laid waste to the neighborhoods – robbery, assault, arson and murder part of the daily routines. Vast tracts of the city became uninhabitable, and ultimately uninhabited, blocks and blocks of abandoned homes. Young infected the dwindling residents with his poisonous racial resentment rendering them indifferent to his accountability for the rampant waste and corruption that engulfed the city, content to play the role of victim, blaming white, racist America for the city’s poverty and misery.   

Detroit became a massively subsidized, highly dysfunctional urban jungle from which most anyone who could would escape. A collapse of such epic and tragic proportions, of course, requires at least some explanation. The one too hard to resist? White racism. Over the last fifty years this explanation has moved from the status of a hypothesis that could be examined, questioned, tested and modified into a rigid, official orthodoxy that defines what race in America is all about. As with all orthodoxies held in place and enforced by the central organs of power, punishment falls inexorably and severely on the doubters and non-conformists. To raise the slightest doubt that any and every manifestation of racial inequality or differential in status is not the result of racism is itself a racist gesture, and being labeled a “racist” in contemporary America does not help one succeed in those basics like employment, education and social recognition.

With this explanation firmly embraced fifty years ago, prodigious amounts of attention, energy and resources were applied for remediation. Whites needed to step up, attone, and make things right. By reducing racism and providing more opportunity for black Americans, Detroit and other urban centers would become better places. Fifty years later, a fair question would seem to be: How did it all work out?

Prior to the Bolshevik revolution, its architect, Vladimir Lenin, supposedly had said, “the worse the better,” meaning, the more wretched the social conditions, the better the chances for a successful revolution. The identity politics of the cultural Marxist left turned this Leninism on its head; “the better, the worse.” By almost all objective measures, the barriers of racial prejudice and discrimination have significantly fallen over the last decades. Jim Crow and its vestiges of racial segregation are long gone. Fifty years ago the equalizing of black and white America became “mission central” with the legislatures, federal, state and local, creating and the courts enforcing anti-discrimination laws in the areas of housing, employment, government contracting and education. Massive federal aid came to the heavily black-populated cities. Affirmative Action and EEOC, came into being with strict compliance requirements for universities and employers to make room for members of “underrepresented” groups. Schools and universities across the south desegregated in a rapid dismantling of the “separate but equal” legacy of Plessy v Ferguson. Schools and universities across the country focused their pedagogy on the evils of racism, the history of slavery and segregation and the moral imperative of equality. Blacks moved into prominent positions in every region of American culture and life, including the American presidency, Secretary of State and Attorney General. Utterance of the “n-word” for whites became a career-killer.

With all of this in the rear view mirror, Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, like Detroit a half a century earlier, were burned down by their black residents, the rioting blamed on the excesses of white, racist policemen. The goal of ending racism in spite of all of the legal and political forces moving toward it, the cultural support of the media and the entertainment industry, and the educational-academic establishment firmly in place, turned out to be a colossal fool’s errand. Cities across America – St. Louis, Newark, Birmingham, Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore – are now Detroit-like with high levels of criminality, poverty, illiteracy, and corruption. Black rates of incarceration are staggering. Racial tensions and resentment are rising daily.

The orthodoxy, however, remains impregnable. White racism is now, supposedly, even more insidious, pervasive and ineradicable than ever before imagined. “Racism” has become much too generic to be useful in explaining racial disparities, and it must be uncovered and exposed in its innumerable recondite forms such as “systemic racism,” “institutional racism”, “covert racism,” “economic racism,” “environmental racism,” etc. To combat racism in 21^st-century America is like being drawn into a frustrating, never ending game of “whack-a-mole.” Beat down one and a different one pops up elsewhere. In effect, racism is ubiquitous, as President Obama told an interlocutor, it is in our DNA, a long time before it will be “cured.” This, of course, is vintage Obama on race. There is no “cure.” Racism and white responsibility for it are forever in the future – time to stop resisting “white privilege” education and get with the program.

In the 2016 Presidential election, racism was central message of the campaign, specifically Trump’s racism. Perhaps the most memorable moment of the contest was Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” denunciation of Trump supporters as “racists,” people in her words, “irredeemable …. not part of America.” Would any thoughtful person, even the most pessimistic, reflecting on the future of American race relations in late 1967 have imagined that a half a century later, a Presidential candidate of a major party would be routinely characterized by the entire main stream media and the opposition party as another Hitler, a 21^st-century, pogrom-planning fascist, broadly supported by voters (62 million people) motivated entirely by racial prejudice and hatred?

Over the last fifty years “racism” has been transformed into the left’s most potent and versatile political weapon, and in no conceivable way will they ever relinquish it. Why would they? As an instrument of moral blackmail it always works to their advantage. No one can or ever will be able to prove he is not a “racist.” In fact, denial merely reinforces confirmation. Just the threat of the accusation brings surrender. “I am not a racist. How can I show you?” Surrender it has been, and how has it worked for the betterment of black Americans? Look at Detroit and Donna Marie Pitts. There is your answer. 

 

 

Stephen Paul Foster's newly published novel

 

 

 

Against Anti-Racism and the Hemeneutics of Hatred

Fighting racism requires knowing what it is – not an easy task….  [R]acism is a Schimfort: a term with pejorative connotations, whose very use inevitably tends to be more instrumental than descriptive. To call someone a racist, even if the charge is intellectually dishonest, can be a useful tactic, either in successfully paralyzing or in casting enough suspicion as to curtail credibility.  
                                            Alain de Benoist, “What is Racism?”

A proposal: to make the charge of “racism” an automatic libelous offense if made by a private citizen, an impeachable act with the loss of government pension if made by a public official.  Punishment falls on the accuser unless the charge could be substantiated and confirmed by empirically verifiable evidence based on a single, legally promulgated definition of “racism” with clear, operational terms. What about free speech, you counter? Well, what about it?  Free speech has done a disappearing act in Canada where the Canadian Senate recently passed Bill C-16 which puts yet another hate crime on the books, this one making it a hate crime, are you ready? -- to refer to a transgendered person who has become a “he” as a “she” and vice versa. “Transphobia” is born joining its morally defective cousins, homophobia and Islamophobia, phobias that will put the possessor in the cross hairs of the local prosecutor.  Also, free speech in western Europe has given way to government regulated speech where any criticism of a member of a designated protected class is prosecutable, again, as hate speech. Here in the U.S.? Try going to any university and college campus and see how far free speech takes you before some social justice warrior throws a plastic bag of feces at you because you are deemed a “hateful” person, or some self-designated “anti-fascist” starts punching you because disagreeing with him makes you a fascist.

Essentially, the governments in the western world have clearly shifted away from the long-held high priority of liberal, democratic polities for freedom of expression to the suppression of “hatred” selectively and arbitrarily interpreted and enforced by high placed ideologues who get to determine whose hatred gets punished and whose is justified. This turns the business of legislating, of making readily understandable rules that everyone is expected to follow, into a contorted hermeneutics of hatred where the subjectivity of moralizing displaces the objectivity of law and the intended universality of its application. The ideologues who operate the abstruse moral machinery that is designed to suppress hatred have theorized individuals into distinct groups, the oppressed and the oppressors, the later who exploit and, of course, hate the former. The social world the ideologues envision is a deeply morally fractured one populated by helpless, blameless victims who need protection from the malevolent, menacing bigots who fail to recognize the humanity of those they oppress. The moral and legal order of such a world then must be structured to protect the oppressed and punish the oppressors, and so the moral and legal standards and expectations necessarily differ depending on whether you are an oppressor or one of the oppressed.  The mad scramble then commences. You join, if you can, the community of the oppressed, articulate your grievances, agitate for revenge, and demand the assistance and protection of the state.  Failing that, retreat, submit, be quiet and hope the political police will leave you in peace.  Whatever one might wish to call this kind of social-political order, a “democracy” is not what firsts jumps to mind.

But a swift and resolute implementation of the above proposal would have many immediate and enormously salubrious effects. Below are just a few. To begin with, it would liberate public discourse from the fetters imposed by the preening moralists and scolds in so many places who wait to pounce on any and every deviation from the script of political correctness.  Some of the scolds are even highly paid to do so. In the workplace, at cocktail parties, in schools, churches, labor unions, political assemblies, and, even as unimaginable as it might now seem, university classrooms, people could speak their minds, express their concerns without the threatening, censorious race commissars launching protests and coercing apologies, Chinese Cultural Revolution style.  Fewer lobotomized college students would be assaulting campus speakers who might hurt their feelings. No more time wasted on deciphering “racist dog whistles.” No longer would we have to endure the hypocritical, disingenuous calls from the likes of Barack Obama, fresh from consorting with a scurrilous race-hustler like Al Sharpton, for a “national conversation about race” because it would actually be possible to have real one, or rather, many, without a threat to your career, reputation, even your physical safety.

The enacted proposal would reduce the current mass hysteria most recently manifest with the election of Donald Trump, christened during his campaign by Hillary Clinton and the MSM as an “unredeemable” racist along with the sixty-two million people that voted for him. There would be fewer reincarnated Hilters and Mussolinis, Bull Connors and George Wallaces to fear, agonize over and scare small children.  The Ku Klux Klan would be the laughable fringe-guys in pointy hats numbering of a couple of thousand nationwide, not, once again, all the Trump voters from Hillary’s “basket of deplorables.”  It would be less likely that another disillusioned Democrat like James Hodgkinson would take target practice at Republican congressmen.  The Southern Poverty Law Center, unable to smear any conservative individual or organization it took a fancy to, would have to close up shop.

This proposal enacted would also mute the multitudes of charlatans and extortionists who populate the “diversity” industry.  Unable to affix “racist” to every conceivable thought, gesture, word, and institution that strikes their fancy, the vast “victim” community under their care, one which they now relentlessly endeavor to expand, would begin to shrink.  The elaborate taxonomy of racism, now in a growth mode – “overt racism,” “covert racism,” economic “racism,” “systemic racism,” “institutional racism,” “environmental racism,” “legacy racism,” and many more – would be duly recognized as mysterious and incomprehensible mumbo jumbo and thus sink happily into oblivion, a subject matter for anthropologists sometime in the far future to ponder as a practice of post-modern superstition or witchcraft.  With many fewer individuals and institutions certified as “racist,” there would be a substantial decline in micro-aggressions which, like a reduction in crime, would make everyone happy. Especially pleased would be university presidents who could relax a bit and not worry about whether they must grovel and apologize every time they hear of one on campus and whether they will be fired for being too lenient on the micro-aggressors.
 
Many “professors” of English and sundry area studies programs would have to seek actual, useful employment. There would be little demand for professors of Post-Colonial Studies, even less for literature courses that are all about the racism in Shakespeare, Milton and Faulkner and every other dead white male in the literary canon. African American studies programs would wither since they are premised on discovery of “racism” as the core of the American experience.

Calling or labelling a person now a “racist” is an excellent way to do accomplish several things that enhance your self-esteem and elevate your status as a superior person.  Firsts, it shows how deeply you care about the disadvantaged, the magnanimous dimensions of your personality and your sensitivity to the suffering of others. As well it immediately separates you from that “racist” you have identified, who, of course, is your complete opposite. Thus the contrast dramatically demonstrates your vast moral superiority and justifies your self-righteous disdain.  It also bolsters your standing among friends and colleagues as a truth-to-power speaker even if that “racist’ you have called out is an unemployed mechanic from down the street whose house is in foreclosure. Best of all, you don’t have to do anything else to bolster your virtue credentials, like send your child to that rundown inner city school full of, well, you get the picture.  Sometimes it is even fun, especially when that “racist” gets really angry and flustered after you have outed him and you get to relish his discomfort as he stumbles through all of those futile protests to convince you otherwise.
 
However, this proposal if enacted would constitute a bold step toward making people more accountable and responsible for the language they use to assert their superior virtue, and it would impose a cost to what is now, cost-free moral preening.  Taking “racism” out of the compendium of popularly permissible slurs would mean that “racist,” as an accusation with all of its invidious comparisons would have to give way to an honest, “I don’t like you,” which is fine. No one is required to like anyone. But not liking someone only means just that, with no implications for your moral stature, no put-downs that testify to your own goodness. So, if you accuse someone of an offense that relegates them to, as Hillary Clinton so elegantly put it, “a basket of deplorables,” as “irredeemable,” you should be able to prove it and suffer some penalty if you cannot.

Most importantly, this proposal enacted would also greatly advance the possibility of making an honest consideration of what the implications are for the mass migrations from the third world that are currently assaulting the countries of the west.  In much of western Europe, native Europeans who question the inundation of refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Asia are shamed by the politicians, in collusion with the media moguls, as bigots and xenophobes.

Immigration is an enormously complex issue with incalculable cultural, political, economic and security implications. Millions of immigrants, many destitute and low-skilled, carry an enormous financial burden that falls mainly on the middle and working class natives. Many of those entering Europe are unable to speak the language of the host country.  Many come from societies with very different cultures, whose values are in conflict with those of western secular society. Not surprising then is that some of new comers are resentful of their hosts and inimical to their norms.  This means that cultural conflict is inevitable and that the sheer number of new-comers threatens the long-enjoyed stability of the host countries.  All of these concerns are real, pressing and legitimate, but the elites who have opened the gates remain crudely reductivist in their own defense, seemingly blind to the coming catastrophe and resolutely self-righteous in their condemnation of those who question them.  Those native, French, Germans, Swedes and Dutch who doubt the wisdom of the inundation and fear the destruction of their own culture get the reductio ad racista treatment so long successful in beating down legitimate dissent.  First, you de-moralize dissent and make it into bigotry; then you make into criminals those citizens you have turned into bigots, unable now in any way to participate in the decisions that affect their lives and those of their children.  That the likes of Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Stefan Löfven continue to call their soft tyrannies run by unelected bureaucrats who punish their citizens for speaking the truth “democracies” is one more expression of their treachery and dishonesty.
 

If the above proposal were enacted the social and political elites would have to begin to argue their case and relinquish the smear that has served so well for so long.

When Hillary met Donald, or, how HRC got Rope-a-Doped

 You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that....  Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.  Hillary Clinton, New York City, September 9, 2016

For one unfortunate enough having to cull through the last thirty years or so the reams of Hillary Clinton’s tedious, mostly pre-programmed verbiage – the speeches, interviews, press conferences, campaign stumps -- the challenge is to find anything that is not (a) pandering and grievance mongering (b) self-servingly invented or false (c) a projection of her own hostility and paranoia (d) malicious and rancorous slander of her numerous “enemies,” that is, anyone who had the temerity to remind the public of her frequent detours around the truth.  At some point when Hillary Clinton no longer remains a threat to the American people and some hapless biographer must, out of the “sow’s ear” of her long, sordid career attempt to produce a readable “silk purse,” a starting point might likely be the most memorable and enduring of her many slurs, the one above, the “basket of deplorables,” combining all the elements of ‘a’ through ‘d’ above, made during her abysmal 2016 Presidential campaign.

To grasp the true “Hillaryness” of this moment one must not just read the words but watch her actual delivery captured on the You Tube video, where she does a passable impersonation of Joseph Goebbels.  She is speaking in New York City to an LGBT group, people with whom she, perhaps, feels the most at home, real Americans, as she suggests to her enthusiastic followers, not the Untermenschen she is complaining about. When she gets to this point, her demeanor changes. The frantic, screechy voice slows down a bit and lowers. She takes deeper breaths and her gestures are more rhythmic and forceful. This is not the routine, robotic pandering one typically sees with HRC. There is a slight weariness about her, the kind she must frequently experience that comes from having to pretend to tolerate so many stupid people on the campaign trail, like those who can’t quite get the hang of transgendered pronoun assignment.  She is more deliberate and calm, off script, speaking from her heart.

Unfortunately, what comes from the heart of Hillary Clinton, whatever its rare composition might be, unintendedly reveals how politically simple minded, ideologically primitive, and power grasping she is, sort of a severe, undeviating national schoolmarm, singling out and shaming those rowdy, naughty kids so that the nice, well-behaved ones can feel rightly and proudly superior and understand just how well favored and special they will remain by constantly sucking up to the teacher, affirming her wisdom, benevolence and authority. Hillary has never risen above being a cold moralist on the hunter’s prowl, a maniacal, unselfconscious ideologue driven by the need to make those multitudes of nasty, unworthy people out there do what they they are supposed to do, or, to make them face the consequences. What the consequences she had in mind for the designated “unredeemables” can only now be a matter of grim speculation. This malignant moralism tainted as well by avarice, perhaps, helps to explain the single largest flaw of her campaign that likely scuttled her election, one that frustrated even her acolytes, her inability to create a rationale for her presidency beyond the heights of her own ambition.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and even more so, the aftermath of the election has brought us to the nadir of identity politics, American-style, always a churning, roiling miasma of grievances, always the drive to recruit more victims, stoke the raw resentment higher.  A first in American post-election politics for expressing disappointment and frustration over the result was when a disaffected, resentment laden Democrat tried to gun down a bunch of congressmen because they were Republicans. Afterwards, Phil Montag, a Nebraska Democrat Party official, was recorded saying of the wounded  Congressman, Steve Scalise. “I’m glad he got shot.” Scalise must have been one of the irredeemables Hillary had in mind.  Montag was just saying out loud, what many Democrats, I suspect, were thinking.  

Identity politics did work out better eight years ago for Obama, but Obama was young, fresh and black, adept at working the levers of white guilt, whereas Hillary even by then was, well, none of the above, and with the warmth and personality of cobra (ironically and cruelly noted by fellow candidate Obama, “you’re likeable enough Hillary” in her failed 2008 primary campaign).  She was trying to be Obama II in the 2016 Presidential election, but there was only one Obama, and Hillary was carrying a lot of baggage.

There is so much irony to relish in the retrospect of the 2016 campaign: the Clintonistas plus the MSM early in the primaries salivating at the thought, improbable as it was at the time, of a Republican Donald Trump facing Hillary in the general election.  Given HRC’s well known, shall we politely say, “limitations,” who could possible have been a more magnificent target?  Here was the raging bull in America’s china shop of politics, a tailor-made, larger than life caricature of all those horrible things the Democrats had long taught the American voters to believe compose a typical Republican candidate. The only voters both Democrats and establishment Republicans could predict to turn out for this rude, ineloquent braggadocio with the orange comb over would be a couple of unemployed coal miners fresh off their bar stools, the knuckle-dragging bigots from the sticks who cling to their religion and their guns, and the remnants of the Klan. Everyone else was going to be “Ready for Hillary!”  However, they failed to realize, if this declaration were reformulated as a question, “Ready for Hillary?” it would resonate more like a promo in a trailer for a horror movie.

The irony throughout this most bizarre election in American history persisted up to the end.  As the election season moved toward completion, reality for Hillary and most of the Democrats never seemed to dent their fantasy of a landslide and coronation, never intruded enough to make them realize that Hillary, with all her material advantages and full alignment with the organs of mainstream culture, plus Trumps numerous blunders, was just not going to be able to seal the deal. 

Late on last November 8^th reality came crashing down on the aspiring national schoolmarm and the entire establishment. The country, it seems, was not quite ready for Hillary. Given over as she as always been to the delusion of her self-perfection and given, as always, no inclination for self-introspection, her defeat, she bitterly complained, was the fault of Jim Comey, Vald Putin, and too many, “you know, to just be grossly generalistic,” deplorables -- racist, sexist white guys, one and all, who once again took away what was rightfully hers.  Not enough “progressives” out there, too little progress.

Perhaps, but consider another possible explanation, one best illustrated with reference to the outcome of different contest, a sports one, billed as “The Rumble in the Jungle”, a huge upset that shocked the world -- a boxing match staged in Kinhasa, Zaire, October 30, 1974.  The massively hyped matchup featured World Champion, George Forman battling former champ, Muhammed Ali.  Forman, 25 years old, bigger and stronger, at the peak of his career, was heavily favored to defeat Ali, at 32 his dazzling skills fading, a step or so, slower than in his prime, seemingly unprepared to withstand the onslaught of Forman’s herculean power.  Under the blazing African sun that day George Forman, too late, came to understand what “rope-a-dope” meant and to taste defeat bitterly seasoned by overconfidence. Laying on the ropes for the first seven rounds, arms up to protect his head from a knockout blow, Ali let Forman pound away at his mid section draining his energy and exhausting his huge, powerful punching arms.  In the eighth round Ali danced into the center of the ring and knocked out the man everyone expected to win the fight.

In the 2016 election Donald Trump, a novice, underdog political pugilist, did to Hillary Clinton what Ali did to George Forman.  He rope-a-doped her. Massively funded and staffed, arrogant and overconfident, buying the hype from the MSM and the happy-talk from the retinue of sycophants she kept in tow, Hillary apparently came to believe that she was going to be President simply because she thought she should be President. Trump was a loathsome, sexist slob: all she had to do was to keep repeating it.  Throughout the most of general election, like George Forman flailing away at Ali, Hillary was daily pounding Donald Trump. Vague and unclear to the electorate as to why she should be President, other than the fact that she was not Donald Trump, all she needed to do to put him on the mat was to keep throwing the usual Democrat punches: Trump was a racist, sexist, xenophobe, Islamophobe who would wear a pointy hat and white robes in the White House, a Hitler here, a Mussolini there, everywhere a Trump Brown Shirt.  From the vernacular of identity politics she extracted and threw every sock of PC feculence at him imaginable hoping to make him so politically and morally toxic only the troglodytes would want to vote for him.  Trump, however, laid on the ropes and let the insults rain down, treating them as being just that, pure insults, not the substantive, irrevocable moral stains intended by the Democrats to stick to him and destroy his character and sink his election.  Unlike conventional Republicans, Trump seemed unphased, offered no apologies, used the insults to energize his base, and did not walk back his own controversial, sometimes outrageous cuts at Hillary and her crew.  Like the effects of Forman’s shots to Ali’s ribs, Hillary’s “racist” jabs and “sexist’ roundhouses at Trump failed to put him away. Hillary’s strategy of PC name calling found her “preaching to the choir” and the choir in the swing states like Ohio and Michigan couldn’t quite find the right tune.  Late on November 8^th the cable news anchors (CNN, MSNBC, FOX, CBS) in stunned disbelief and unable to disguise their horror, began to grasp that the Orange Man was going to be President. Trump had weathered Hillary’s best shots, come off the ropes and turned her “inevitability” upside down.

“More than anything else, Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” was her defining and damning moment. Her comments reveal the corrosive core of identity politics, its cultural Marxist premise that affirms that the most fundamental feature of social reality is the domination and exploitation of the weak by those who are privileged. Hillary’s politics is a North American Peronism, making needy, “have-not” voters into grateful clients by punishing those reluctant and selfish “haves.”  It is also, as noted above, a malignant moralism, a quest for victims who fall under her protection and patronage, and the “outing” of the victimizers, very bad people who deserve to have no power, influence, or opportunities to participate in civil society. These people, as she noted are “not America”, and presumably, should not be allowed to be a part of America.  The ominous and threatening implications of her remarks reek of the persecution and purges in the last hundred years coming out of movements that represented progress and promised equality for everyone.  That they barely stirred a comment suggests how deeply embedded Hillary-style Peronism is in mainstream American culture. There is no doubt that she truly believed what she said, and though she lost the election, the party that nominated her will continue to promote the same kinds rising from the ranks, even more open and aggressive in their antagonism for the imaginary haves.

After his defeat George Forman went on to become a charming sort of guy, a minister and well known TV pitchman for his grills. Also he regained his heavyweight crown at age 45, the oldest man to hold the title. Hillary?  Hopes are not so high.

  

Angela Merkel, Stalin in Drag

 Back in the Pleistocene era in 1989 the Berlin wall went down.  Most of the East Germans, who had likely contemplated with envy the “freedom” enjoyed by the Jurgens and Gretas next door in the West, must have wondered with great anticipation what life in a post-Stalinist world would be like.  No Stasi knuckle crushing snoops in every crevice to monitor and record what you read, said, or might be thinking, no need to pretend that the stupid government propaganda was anything more than attempted manipulation and control.  How relieved and optimistic they must have been, and no one trying to peer into the future then, even with the wildest imagination, could likely have conjured up as a Frau-Fuhrer so ghastly a phantasm as the Teutonic Stalin-in-drag, Angela Merkel. 

A Stalinist world, such as the USSR, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, or Erich Honecker’s DDR, is an alternative universe, one where everything is the opposite of what it is said to be and where just pointing that out amounts to a serious crime.  “Democracy,” majority rule, is the imposition of diktats by the bosses in the Politburo. “Equality” is rigid caste system of privileged party overseeers.  “Freedom” is a one-way ticket to forced labor in the Gulag for those unenthused about life in the workers’ paradise, getting shot trying to escape from East Berlin, or sliding off a crude raft and drowning in the waters off Havana.    

Which bring us to today’s Germany where Boss Merkel has resurrected and summoned the Stalinist Stasi who now pursue the unenlightened ones who exhibit, shall we say, inappropriate emotions.  No room for Germans who do not like the way that they are told to feel about what the apparatchiks are doing to them, a bit like it was in back in the DDR.  Consider, below, this Orwellian description of what German politicians and German police do to German people who fail to understand the proper boundaries of expression.  From a report on recent German government crackdown on social media users.

“In a coordinated campaign across 14 states, the German police on Tuesday raided the homes of 36 people accused of hateful postings over social media, including threats, coercion and incitement to racism. The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action,” Holger Münch, president of the Federal Criminal Police Office, said in a statement. “Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.”

As officialese goes, this is hard to top for its sheer self-contradictory stupidity, and its bullying, sinister intonations. To begin, “The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action.”  "Hate posting"?  Well, this does sound serious: police action must ensue to stamp out, yes, hate posting. The German people are in grave danger.  But then, try not to laugh, as we learn that the Federal government launched a “coordinated campaign across 14 states” in a country of no less than eighty-one million people, to ensnare a grand total of 36 folks plunking away on social media. Sounds eerily like the Stasi of the DDR, searching far and wide, making sure that no one steps out of line with the approved thinking and guidance of Walter Ulbricht or Erich Honecker.  This does not describe the action of a government protecting the security and interests of its citizens: it is the work of a propagandizing regime of ideocrats chasing down a few hapless, harmless dissenters. With highly publized punishment for the recalcitrant few, you can cower the many.

These 36 people were “accused of hateful postings over social media” and please note the anonymity, a Kafkaesque nameless specter which accuses but cannot be identified, questioned, countered or even understood.  Who were the accusers and what was the exact nature of the accusations beyond the big old umbrella of “hateful”?  Vague and general works best for government enforcers.  “Hateful” in its normal usage is pretty subjective, but Merkel and the German political establishment have politicized the word so that it is objective, precise and, most important, applicable – “hateful” is disapproval or criticism of state-defined victims – but yet conveniently vague and abstract – producing “a climate of fear” – so as to be able to criminalize whomever they have determined has dissented from the state-imposed multi-cultural orthodoxy.  “A climate of fear” is a nice tool for the government bosses. They can pull it out when needed, supplemented with the lexicon of invectives – “xenophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “nativist” “fascist” -- and unleash their repressive organs, selectively, on whomever offends the the noble sensibilities of the moment.  

“Incitement to racism” as a crime is particularly troublesome to contemplate since “racist” is now applied so promiscuously, particularly by leftwing politicians all over the planet, as to be meaningless beyond its intent as an insult, shorthand for “a stupid, mean-spirited right-winger, lacking in compassion for the unfortunate who has no place in our progressive society.”  In the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton claimed that half of Donald Trump supporters were “racists” and hence, “irredeemable,” which to a lot of people sounded rather hateful, not to mention, threatening. Unlike other crimes, e. g. murder, assault, burglary, jury tampering, it is impossible for one to prove that he is not a racist (no one I have ever heard of has of yet ever pulled off this feat), which makes it so handy and versatile.  Safe to say, no leftwing politician in the U.S in the last twenty years has not at some time resorted to calling someone he or she didn’t like a racist. And, speaking of “incitement,” and “hate speech,” reeved up on a steady stream of Trump-hatred from the likes of the NYT scribblers and CNN, MSNBC talkers, a leftist from the Bernie Sanders camp recently attempted to murder a couple of dozen Republican congressmen in suburban Washington DC.  

Let us now hear from the head German policeman, Herr, Holger Münch, speaking like he was trained by the editors of Pravda.  “Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.”  Orwellian Newspeak like this leans toward first-person plural pronouns – “Our free society…” –  there is, of course, no “our”, in possession of a "free society."  This is an intentional misdirection which camouflages the master-slave relationship of the German people and their German governors, the actual power exerted by an elite, privileged class over those whom they regard as their inferiors, some of whom, many perhaps, who resent the imposed mass migration of needy third-worlders and who don’t feel free to complain about it. Of course, we don’t know what the “threats,” “criminal violence” and “violence” are that filled the social media messaging of these now 36 criminals tracked down by the German Feds, but one suspects that the laws upon which the prosecution will be based have been written with  a maximum, "enemy of our freedom" scope and flexibility as to assure conviction and that the presiding magistrates will spare no effort to inflict maximum punishment.  Examples must be made.   

One “climate of fear” that does not seem to trouble Holger Münch much comes from the spectacle of secular, liberated German women accosted in mass by young immigrant Muslim males whose views of women are shaped by the texts of a seventh century prophet from a desert, and whose behavior, coming from German men, would put them for long stretches in prison.   From New Year’s Eve, 2016:

“The world reeled following reports that as many as 1,000 women had been sexually assaulted - groped, robbed, intimidated and separated from their friends - at Cologne's central train station on New Year's Eve. Many of the perpetrators, it was alleged, appeared to be of North African or Arab descent…”  

Oh, yes, no jumping to conclusions too quickly: the “alleged” North African and Arab-descendent robbers, gropers and sexual assaulters numbered at least 1,000.  They collected around one gathering place in a single city in contrast to the 36 Die Herren und Damen in 14 different states at home on laptops posting mean, angry stuff on their Facebook pages, probably read only by the flunkies in the governments' PC surveillance department who sicced the policemen on them.  Who, really, should be afraid of whom?  In the new DDR only Angela and her Handlangeren get to say.  But let’s pursue the conversation about fear.  There was a lot of it on the streets of Cologne and elsewhere in Germany from the criminal violence of Merkel’s protected class of victims.  The perpetrators, however, are not the concern or target of the nouveau Stasi Federal police chief.  Instead, room for more of them must be made so that Frau Merkel’s globalist, multicultural, bona fides remain in tact.  This is a “climate of fear” that the Germans will be expected by Merkel and her crew to get used to.

The hate-speech/hate crime legislation that Germany, France, Great Britain, Canada and other western European countries have put into place is a predictable, logical extension of their capitulation to third world mass migration.  In the U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, who was instrumental in the passage of the 1965 immigration law that led to the flooding of the country with third world immigrants, later became a strong advocate in the Senate of hate-crime legislation.  Mass immigration and hate-crimes are hand in glove measures for leftists. First you flood the towns with aliens and then punish the locals when they complain.

In the same news release cited above, Heiko Mass, the German Justice Minister, is now said to be pushing for a new law that targets “hate speech” on social media.  As the elites’ strategy of the ethnic replacement of their native populations becomes a painful reality to them, it becomes politically necessary to ramp up the criminalization of the inevitable expression of resentment that results, and to punish resistance and opposition to the planned destruction.  The criminalization of speech based on emotion is one more step toward completing the soft totalitarian society desired by the left with its coerced uniformity of thinking and behavior.  Somehow, somewhere down the road we will all be equal the way, God, no, sorry, history intended.  Don’t worry, be happy.

Edward "Teddy" Kennedy: How the Lecher became the Lion

Let us cut to the chase.  Edward “Teddy” Kennedy was one miserable, contemptible excuse for a human being.  But happily dead he has been for eight years, so why bother now sifting through the sordid details, the mountainous offal strewn in the wake of his long and epically degenerate life?   

It happens slowly, but at some point you consciously begin to feel it and convulse.  You are chocking on one more chunk of the thick stew of distortion of America’s heritage, the smearing of the greats and elevation of frauds and profligates. Time to pause and reflect on how we have come to this sorry state. In full throttle is the Bolshevization of American history, an ideologically motivated démarche to de-moralize and ultimately criminalize resistance and dissension to the forced march to equality.  The left through its capture of America’s culture-shaping institutions – the schools, the universities, the media and vast entertainment complex, and the courts – rewrites American history as a vast and singular expression of racial and ethnic exploitation and oppression. The ubiquity and pervasiveness of “racism” means that our language must be constantly monitored to repress this impulse (which according to Barack Obama is in our DNA), and that our public spaces – the statuary, monuments, the names of buildings, schools, streets, etc.  – must be purged of any historical references, symbols or imagery that might offend the delicate sensibilities of social justice warriors: nothing can remain in any form that does not depict the suffering of their selected victim classes and excoriate the oppressors, who are?  Well, go to a local school or university and discover “white privilege.” Confederate monuments are being torn down, schools are being renamed, speakers who fail the test of orthodoxy are banned and sometimes assaulted: soon the conformity and uniformity will be complete.

How then does the defunct Teddy, “the Lion of the Senate” Kennedy fit into this scene of wreckage and ruin?  He was a principal agent, a man who performed far above his meager talents.  But this answer leads to a more complicated and fundamental question.  How was he able to do it? How was this arch hypocrite, a man so intellectually mediocre, so personally dissolute and debauched able to rise to this pinnacle of political power, eulogized at his death as a champion of the disadvantaged and downtrodden, officially “lionized” as a great Senate statesman?   

One might reasonably argue that Chappaquiddick was for Edward Kennedy his defining moment both as a man and as a politician.  The decades that followed were merely exposition and commentary on this shameful episode of moral immolation. As a man?  A coward, a libertine, a liar, a fraud, complicit in a homicide from one of his countless alcohol fueled, philandering escapades.  He abandoned a young woman in his submerged Oldsmobile he had driven off of a bridge, then fled the scene and sobered up.  She could have been saved, but the Senator was busy huddling with his handlers with the more important task of concocting a story to thwart the law and to salvage his political career, letting his girlfriend of the moment slowly drowned.  As a politician? He used the wealth and influence of his family and the power of his office to suborn the local authorities, buy off the Kopechne family and ultimately to evade responsibility for actions that would have sent any other man to prison.

He was never completely able to escape the shadows and shame of Chappaquiddick, but the voters of Massachusetts had to have a Kennedy in Washington, perhaps to keep the women in the Bay state safe, and with the passage of time and the crafting of a fashionable leftish championing-the-underdog image, his abandonment of Mary Jo to die became a mere peccadillo, collateral damage of the sort happily overlooked so as to keep a playboy with a magic name in a high place. Here then is the beginning of the answer to the question posed above:  how did the lecher become the lion? 

With gusto Kennedy positioned himself firmly on the left embracing its antinomian trends and leading the charge of American identity politics.  Rewarded with the unconditional support of its pandered-to beneficiaries, he was thus in large part able to immunize himself from the sharper edges of the contempt he deserved.  Teddy never came to endure what should have been an outpouring of disgust and repudiation for a man with the moral fiber of a bunko artist and the life-style of Caligula.

The easy life of a protected rich wastrel and reprobate was, however, not enough for Teddy. He was, after all, a Kennedy, committed to what he liked to call “public service” a laughable, crude piece of unintended irony for someone wholly self-indulgent in his gross personal conduct and self-serving in his public role.  A life devoted to beakers of Johnny Walker and whoring was not enough to, as they say, “make a difference.”  Kennedy needed to inflict himself on the nation. And so he did … make quite a difference. Two of his signature pieces of mischief, that pushed the country toward its current state of anguish, deserve mention here.  First, his support and active selling of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 which produced the opposite of what he promised.

From the Center for Immigration Studies

 Although the 1965 bill was intended only to end discrimination, some people feared a major increase in immigration and a change in the source countries of immigrants. Supporters of the measure assured doubters that this would not happen. Senate immigration subcommittee chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA.) reassured his colleagues and the nation with the following:

“First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same ... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset ... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia ... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.” [emphasis added]

In the “final analysis,” we are talking about the word of Teddy Kennedy.  Most apropos is a single phase -- Kennedy “reassured his colleagues and the nation,” the same sort of reassurance, perhaps, he gave Ms. Kopechne in watery bowels of his Oldsmobile – “don’t worry, honey, I’ll get you out of here.”  He lied with the verve of a true Bolshevik – “everything is the opposite of what I say it is.”  The country was “flooded with millions of immigrants” who dramatically changed “the ethnic mix of this country.” America, thanks in large part to his man, has been transformed, ethnically, culturally, economically by this law. California, once a competitive and healthy two-party state is now because of the immigration influx unleashed after 1965 entirely controlled by a single party.  Hillary Clinton’s nearly three million vote margin over Donald Trump in the 2016 election came out of California, a Democrat clientele of Kennedy’s creation.  Her plan, upon election, was to turn the rest of the country, politically, into California. Aside from the increasingly isolated, gated, tony enclaves of the predominately rich white Democrats such as Hollywood, Silicon Valley, parts of San Francisco, and Palm Springs, California will increasingly come to resemble a vast enlargement of Tijuana with the drug trafficking, the crime and the poverty.

Catering to a burgeoning, resentment-laden set of victim classes and importing lots of needy people into the country along with the extraction and redistribution of resources from its largely middle class citizens to support them would create a cultural and political backlash that would threaten the power structure and its overseers.  Thus, the second piece of the Teddy Kennedy legacy: “hate” legislation.  From a peroration in the Senate in 2007, “Standing Against Hate.” 

I'd like to speak … regarding the Hate Crimes Amendment -- at a time when our ideals are under attack by terrorists in other lands, it is more important than ever to demonstrate that we practice what we preach, and that we are doing all we can to root out the bigotry and prejudice in our own country that leads to violence here at home. Now more than ever, we need to act against hate crimes and send a strong message here at home and around the world that we will not tolerate crimes fueled by hate…..  Since the September 11th attacks, we've seen a shameful increase in the number of hate crimes committed against Muslims, Sikhs, and Americans of Middle Eastern descent…..  Hate crimes are a form of domestic terrorism…. Like other acts of terrorism, hate crimes have an impact far greater than the impact on the individual victims. They are crimes against entire communities, against the whole nation, and against the fundamental ideals on which America was founded. [emphasis added]

What a vapid collection of useless abstractions and non-sequiturs from a man who ceaselessly preached but never practiced.  “At a time when our ideals are under attack from by terrorists in other lands”?  Terrorists do not attack “ideals”: they attack and kill defenseless people which is what makes them so terrible.   Not clear as well is why terrorists would be attacking our ideals in other lands, but this is Ted Kennedy talking, oblivious to minimal standards of evidence and coherence. Why, a rational person might ask, do we need to send this “message” to the world that “we will not tolerate crimes fueled by hate”?  Since there was absolutely no evidence that we did tolerate such crimes, why was he talking like this?  To distract people from the obvious fact that so much of the terrorism going on around the world was being done by people of “Middle Eastern descent,” and to hope people might not wonder why politicians like Kennedy were so eager to put more of them in their neighborhoods.  No one in the political establishment from President Bush after 9-11 on down was speaking of Islam as anything other than the “religion of peace.”  One has also to ponder: how America had managed to stave off collapse until 2007 by ignoring these crimes, now morphed into “domestic terrorism” against, first, “entire communities,” then, “the whole nation” and then, yikes! America’s foundational “fundamental ideals.”  Once again, we are supposed be traumatized by terrorists attacking those wonderful “ideals” – what specific ideals he doesn’t bother to say, but the more nebulous and vague the abstractions, the easier it was to keep his multicultural scam going.  And the scam?  Import millions of third world people, many of whom are resistant to assimilation, some of whom are hostile to American norms.  Then, stigmatize the resentment of the American hosts who bear the cultural, financial burden as “bigotry and prejudice.”  Gotcha! Welcome to twenty-first century America where lechers are lions and where the politicians have christened half of the citizens as “irredeemable” racists, xenophobes and bigots because many of them believe that it is not a good idea to let anyone and everyone into the U.S. who simply wants to come. 

The mumbo-jumbo of “Standing Against Hate,” late in a career of pretending to be a statesman was unfortunately one of Teddy’s many signature incoherent episodes of Senate oratory. Since his death in 2009 it can be said in fairness to him that he did leave his mark; he did make a difference: to the American people he did figuratively what he did literally to Mary Jo Kopechne fifty years earlier.