The Cabal That Cried Wolf and Undermined a Republic

Jussie Smollett, Crystal Magnum and Susan Smith are three names that at various times over the last 25 years have riveted America’s attention.  Smollett is a black man who lied about being attacked by two Trump supporting white racists in 2019.  Magnum is a black woman who lied about being raped by three white Duke Lacrosse players in 2006.  Smith is a white woman who killed her two boys in 1994 and blamed it on a fictional black carjacker.

While race was central to the first and incidental to the last two, as is with much news in America, the media focused on it extensively.  But race was not the issue that makes these three cases so despicable.  What makes them so heinous is that they sought to play upon the sympathies of the American public.  In the end they failed and all three ended up disgraced and Magnum and Smith ended up in jail.    

From Al Sharpton & Tawana Brawley 30 years ago to countless hate crime hoaxes across the country today, the consequence of these hoaxes is that when exposed to enough of them, people become inured to the issue such that when real crimes take place, the victim’s stories are often given little credence or are outright rejected.   

As despicable as these hoaxes are, they are simply individuals seeking to evade responsibility for their actions or attract attention, and largely don’t impact significant numbers of people beyond those targeted or involved. 

What is a much larger problem however is when such hoaxes are perpetrated by government.  And we’ve had a great deal of that.  Manmade environmental hoaxes have evolved from the Coming Ice Age to Acid Rain to Global Warming to Climate Change, with each one being manipulated to scare citizens and implement government policies and programs that never die, despite the fact that posited catastrophes never actually emerge.  Think about the “Peak oil” fears of the 70s and the ethanol programs we’re still stuck with today, despite the extraordinary increases in oil production and reserves.

Democrats have been manipulating Americans fears and goodwill for decades and today we are watching the culmination of that treachery.  It’s called Covid and it’s easily the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. 

In reality, Covid is nothing more than a really bad case of the common cold.  Bad, certainly, but but basically the common cold nonetheless. From an epidemiology perspective that may not be completely accurate, but from a societal one it most certainly is. 

Like the flu – which kills about 36,000 people annually, Covid is largely transmitted from one person to another via airborne particles.  Over the last 18 months 42 million Americans have gotten Covid and 682,000 Americans have died from it.  The former number is likely much higher – possibly over 100 million – and the latter number is likely much lower, with many of those reported as dying of Covid in reality dying with Covid.  Keep in mind of course that that’s 682,000 people in a country of 350 million, and 95% of the dead had on average 3 or more co-morbidities and the average age was almost 75.

A little more perspective:  Heart disease annually kills 650,000 Americans while cancer kills 600,000.  We spend $350 billion a year on heart disease and $158 billion on cancer.  That works out to be $538,000 spent per person who died of heart disease and $263,000 per person who died of cancer.  Covid is a bit different.  Through March of this year the US spent $13 trillion on Covid and will likely reach $20 trillion by the end of the year.  By the end of the year the death total “from” Covid will likely hit 800,000.  That works out to be approximately $25 million per death.

Now these numbers are not exactly apples to apples in that much of the heart disease and cancer money went to research that would not benefit the people who died, while ostensibly Covid dollars went to ameliorating the virus and its associated impact on the nation.  Then of course there’s the fact that heart disease and cancer aren’t contagious while Covid is. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the survival rate from Covid is 99% or higher for men below 57 and women below 62 while the average 5 year survival rate from cancer is below 50%. 

The point here is simply that while Covid is certainly a cause of concern, it’s nothing close to an existential threat to the nation. But one wouldn’t know that from listening to the Democrats, traditional media, big tech and the healthcare industry.  For purely political and control purposes, they have conspired against the American people to hide facts about potential treatments, lied at almost every turn and sought to harness the police power of government to control virtually every aspect of American life over the last 18 months. The results have been catastrophic, from a fraudulent election to millions of failed businesses to an array of restrictions and mandates that don’t even pretend to be Constitutional.

As bad as all the obvious negative outcomes from this unprecedented destruction of freedom and staggering amount of debt will bring about, possibly the worst part of the last 18 months (besides the deaths, obviously) is that the cabal has basically wrecked what little confidence Americans had in their government.  After being manipulated, persecuted, prosecuted and insulted for the better part of 18 months, how much confidence does the average American have in their government today?  Practically none. Actually, now that a Democrat is back in the White House Democrats have embraced their inner statists and their trust has ticked up while Republicans have the lowest trust level in Government since Barack Obama’s first term – and that was back in May, which seems a lifetime ago.

And that undermining of government could very well come back to bite Americans of all stripes.  What happens when we get a real existential threat from something as deadly as Ebola and as easily transmitted as the Delta variant?  Will Americans believe that their government has suddenly become honest and responsible?  Probably not, and their skepticism grows as they see more hypocrisy and are saddled with a growing array of mandates that are demonstrably ineffective or worse, dangerous. 

The odds of a real virus borne existential threat are likely pretty low, but a visceral distrust in government is very much an existential threat to freedom and the Republic. Once before Americans were similarly distrustful of government and skeptical about its intentions and thirst for power.  The result was the Declaration of Independence.  I wonder what similar distrust in 2021 will engender... 

The tragic irony of turning Michael Brown and Eric Garner into martyrs

It seems like it’s almost impossible to get through a day without reading or hearing something having to do with the killing of black men by cops. Whether it’s endless Facebook posts or NFL players running out on the field with their “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gestures or protests blocking rush hour traffic, it seems to be everywhere. From what you see one would think that black men in America are being killed like dogs in the street across the country. While they might be, it’s not by racist white cops, but rather, by other black men.

One example was a video a friend posted on Facebook of a man named McKenzie Cochran, a black man who died at the hands of three white mall security personnel in Detroit last January. Like the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, a grand jury decided not to indict the security officers.

According to the Huffington Post, Cochran had returned to the mall after being requested to leave, threatened to kill someone, refused when asked by security to leave once again and then continued to struggle with officers after being pepper sprayed.

Brown, Garner and Cochran were indeed black, and all three ended up dead at the hands of white police officers or security personnel. But this is far from a war on black men that Al Sharpton, Mayor De Blasio and Eric Holder seem to suggest exists.

The reality is, there were numerous opportunities for Brown, Garner and Cochran to change the outcomes of their interactions with police. Does anyone imagine that had Brown simply moved out of the street when told that he would have been shot? Does anyone imagine that had Garner simply allowed the police to arrest him that he would have suffocated? Does anyone who reads the story about Cochran imagine that he would have ended up dead at the hands of security officers had he simply left the mall when asked?

As painful as these situations are for the families, one wonders what might have happened had the police been more differential? Might Michael Brown have robbed another store – and maybe this time pushed someone so that they fell and struck their head on the floor – or might McKenzie Cochran have actually carried out his threat to kill innocents? Eric Garner is slightly different in that his crime was selling untaxed “loosies” or loose cigarettes, a viable pursuit because of New York’s $6.00 a pack taxes. Doing so is illegal. You can complain about the law being stupid, but it was the law and Garner was breaking it. The cops could have let him go, but just days before Garner died the city’s highest-ranking uniformed cop, Philip Banks, issued an order to crack down on loosie sales.

The point is, none of these cases, nor most of the cases the left throws up to demonstrate the institutional racism rampant in America, hold up to scrutiny. They simply demonstrate a confluence of events where people who chose to act badly had outcomes that resulted in their deaths. But such are the odds when someone chooses to act badly, regardless of the activity. Most drunk drivers don’t die behind the wheel, but some do. Most recreational drug use doesn’t result in an overdose, but some does. And the truth is, while police encounters sometimes turn out bad for black men – just as they sometimes do for whites, Hispanics, Jews, etc. – they also sometimes turn out badly for cops. This can be seen by the fact that fifty officers were shot and killed in the line of duty in 2014, a jump of 56% from 2013. The difference is, unlike Brown or Garner or Cochran, these officers were killed while seeking to serve and protect their communities rather than resisting arrest or threatening innocent civilians.

The tragic irony about the rioting and demonstrations and accusations seeking to turn Michael Brown et. al into martyrs for a false cause is the fact that it diverts attention from where it should be. There are no doubt bad cops out there. In any group numbering in the hundreds of thousands you will find some number who have betrayed their oaths. But when the left characterizes all cops as racist killers it makes it impossible to find and focus on the real bad actors. That’s the irony of the whole thing… by wrongly accusing the entire police establishment of being bad, protesters actually empower the cops who are to continue doing business as usual because their actions are lost in a sea of fictional claims of racism and oppression. It’s called hiding in plain sight… by ignoring the difference between bad actors and bad outcomes – admittedly, sometimes tragic outcomes – activists make it that much more difficult to truly weed out the bad cops that really exist. By making everyone a racist, then no one is a racist and real racism has no fear of detection. The result is that activists actually increase the odds of the exact outcomes they are seeking to eliminate by giving them camouflage with a sea of false accusations. But then this is liberalism… where rhetoric is more important than results.

A Little Sugar Coating and Bit of Demagogy is a Recipe for National Suicide by Regulation

One of the most odious aspects of regulation is the fact that it usually comes in a sugar coated package. Typically they are the result of a law that is intended to “help” everyone or “protect” some group or to give an advantage to a group whose members are perceived to be disadvantaged.

It’s that sugar coating that makes regulations so difficult to challenge. If you oppose pouring more money into a failed school system you “Don’t care about the children”. If you oppose solar power funding or excessive energy regulation, you “Don’t care about the environment”. If you oppose a minimum wage increase you are a shill for big business and “Don’t care about workers” and if you oppose Obamacare you don’t care about the poor and you’re racist to boot.

Of course once those regulations are in place, once they’re on the books, they almost never come off. Regardless of their ineffectualness in actually solving whatever problem they were theoretically supposed to solve, or despite their actually making the problem worse, the answer is almost never to repeal the law and send the staff out into the world to find jobs in the private sector. Instead the solution is almost invariably more laws or regulations to try and patch over the “minor” problems with the first law or regulations.

The Head Start program is a perfect example of this problem. Started during the heady progressive days of LBJ as part of his “War on Poverty” the program has been a consistent failure, showing no material benefits, yet it still exists. Not only that, its supporters continue to push for increased funding for the program. But it can’t be killed “because of the children”. Of course, that is just one of the thousands of programs costing hundreds of billions of dollars each year that were put in place to stamp out poverty. Yet, somehow, despite the distinctly changing nature of the definition of poverty, there remain more people characterized as living in poverty in the US today than at any point in our history.

Another aspect of this tyranny of regulations is the fact that that sugar coating is usually delivered via a bullhorn. Whether its teachers unions striking for more education spending or the SEIU picketing for the right to organize virtually anyone who still has a job to illegal immigrants demanding amnesty to the Democrats and the media conspiring to convince the country that the GOP wants to throw grandma off a cliff, the facts about the costs and consequences of regulations are rarely ever discussed. It’s hard to carry on a fruitful discussion when one side simply shouts platitudes and refuses examine the actual causes of the problems. If throwing money at education were the solution, the United States would have the smartest kids on the planet… Alas we don’t. If the only choice is between throwing grandma off a cliff and spending more money on a Social Security system that will crumble at some point in the future… everyone will want to save grandma.

There are few issues in life that whose salient points can be easily captured on a picket sign. Of those, none are solved by government legislation or regulation. Much to America’s shame that fact apparently doesn’t matter. “What do we want... (Insert relevant liberal trope here)” “When do we want it... NOW!”

It’s no wonder that virtually everyone in America knows the name of Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson but few know Jenny Beth Martin or Thomas Sowell. Sharpton and Jackson are snake oil salesmen with no interest in actually solving problems other than how to increase their media exposure while Martin seeks to solve the country’s problems by shrinking a dysfunctional government and Sowell, as the most lucid and articulate economist in America, simply explains the world as it really is and lets the reader choose their path to solving problems.

Finally there is the single most pernicious aspect of this sugar coated world of laws and regulation: Control. More regulations provide politicians and government bureaucrats with ever more opportunities to persecute those they don’t like and benefit those they do. Not sure about that? Just ask the conservative groups who were targeted by the IRS. How about Gibson Guitars or the insurance companies who criticized Obamacare in 2010. On the other side of the ledger are the green energy companies who’ve just been given carte blanche kill Golden Eagles, illegal immigrants the President has decided not to deport or “community organizing” groups the Justice Department is forcing banks to fund. Not to mention the various unconstitutional delays and waivers President Obama has handed out relating to Obamacare. And those are just federal laws, of which there are tens of thousands. There are hundreds of thousands more at the state and local level. When laws can be implemented arbitrarily the rule of law is gone.

Obamacare is the perfect example of legislation which was sold with sugar coating and whose opponents were pilloried as racists or who didn’t care about the poor. Today, simply because Obamacare was so overarching and so spectacularly dysfunctional, Americans are beginning to see that more laws can’t make everything better. Indeed some are even starting to understand that government action can and often does make things worse. The problem is however that most legislation is not of the supernova sort, but of the rather pedestrian sort that is passed and simply blends into the disordered order of the universe of regulations we’re expected to obey. Eventually the stars of regulation will become too numerous and will block out the dark matter in between them, i.e. the freedom upon which America was founded. At that point we will become a nation where every move, every step, every thought are regulated by the state. We are not quite there, but we’ve seen the future and it is North Korea. When we finally get there we’ll wonder what how we got there because all of the “solutions” we were swallowing tasted so sweet.

How the Trayvon Martin case showcases the plight of black America... but probably not in the way you think.

It’s been 20 years since Maxine Waters coined (or at least popularized) the phrase “No Justice No Peace”. The time was after the LA Riots in 1992 when the freshman Congresswoman from Los Angeles was defending looters as simply “women who wanted shoes for their children and bread". Of the violence that eventually claimed the lives of 53 people, Waters said: “The anger that you see expressed out there in Los Angeles, in my district this evening, is a righteous anger, and it's difficult for me to say to the people, ‘Don't be angry.’" She even went on use the threat of further violence around the country to try and extort action of some sort out of the White House. "Many other cities could go the way that Los Angeles went last night unless the president is willing to step in and take some strong action in terms of letting people know that he cares about this issue." The White House listened and indeed a new trial was brought about, double jeopardy be damned. This time two of the officers were convicted. Finally some justice! For those Constitutional sticklers out there… The argument was that double jeopardy didn’t really apply as the four were charged with civil rights violations the second time rather than assault and excessive force, so, no problem at all.

So now here we are, two decades later and again race and crime intersect to put American cities on edge. “Justice for Trayvon” has been the ubiquitous call for much of the last year. This is easily one of the most high profile – and consequently political – trials in decades. The original prosecutor declined to press charges, believing there was not sufficient evidence for conviction. Enter race pimps Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson and judicial frivolity ensued.

While one’s heart has to go out to the parents of Trayvon as their grief and sadness is very real and they have comported themselves with dignity in the most trying circumstances a parent will likely ever face, the “Justice for Trayvon” signs across the country have little to do with what went on that fateful night last year or what went on in that Sanford courtroom over the last month.

But then that doesn’t really matter because in America of 2013 the only thing that does matter is satiating the demands of raucous mobs or favored demographic groups. Just on cue, now that the verdict is in the demands for federal civil rights charges have already started. Prior to the verdict, as the Miami and Sanford police departments prepared to deal with the consequences of a potential not guilty verdict, one couldn’t help but wonder how we had arrived here in the first place.

I remember watching the OJ trial and verdict as it was read aloud. To say I was dumbfounded is an understatement. More stupefying however was the scene from a college student union filled with black students who erupted into joyous pandemonium when the verdict was read. How was it even possible that anyone could cheer a ruthless murderer getting off, just because of his skin color?

One has to wonder how did race affinity ever come to replace common sense, or self preservation among so many people? The perfect example of the latter is the movement in New York City to ban “Stop and Frisk”. Stop and Frisk has been a tremendous success in helping to drive down and keep down crime rates in crime ridden neighborhoods of the city. Nonetheless, many blacks have objected to the policy because blacks are disproportionately stopped. Perhaps, but those neighborhoods have a disproportionate number of blacks and black lives are disproportionately saved as well. And the neighborhoods in which many of those black citizens live are safer than they might be without Stop and Frisk. Safer neighborhoods help with jobs, schools and quality of life. But let’s get rid of it, regardless of the lives saved or improved.

Just as knee jerk white racism a half a century ago was irrational and ignorant, so too is the knee jerk black racism of today. The difference is, the black racism of today is part of the liberal & media fiction that the state of black America is the result of white racism. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Blacks may indeed be victims, but they are largely the victims of other blacks, not whites. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics points out – via Walter Williams – that between 1976 and 2011 279,000 blacks were murdered in the United States, 94%, or 262,000 of them, by fellow blacks. That compares to a 3,446 blacks being lynched by whites in the 86 years between 1882 and 1968!

This irrational focus on the relatively insignificant (not to be confused with nonexistent) white racism at the expense of a focus on the far greater danger to members of the black community, the black predators preying on them, is an extraordinarily expensive mistake. By focusing on the mirage of widespread white racism, many blacks cease to address the dangers and issues within their own communities, with devastating consequences. It has led to over a quarter of a million dead young black men over the last four decades. Perhaps even more damaging more is the fact that tens of millions of black Americans live in poverty, 45% of black teens cannot find a job and over 75% of black children are born out of wedlock.

If the so called black leaders of today were really concerned with the state of black America, and young men like Trayvon while they are still alive, they would put down their “No Justice No Peace” posters and turn their focus on saving black America from itself. Stop supporting murders like OJ Simpson and Mumia Abu-Jamal and start honoring men like Herman Cain, Dr. Ben Carson, McDonalds CEO Donald Thompson, American Express CEO Ken Chenault and US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, all of whom chose to build successful lives for themselves rather than bleat about the oppressive nature of a majority white society.

Instead of clamoring for never ending government programs, special dispensation in jobs and college admissions or seeing every crime or political issue through race tinted glasses, they should instead focus on reducing unwed and teen pregnancies, demanding quality education for their children and seeking relief from government regulations in order to make black communities compelling places for businesses to invest.

Don’t hold your breath however, because leadership in solving real problems is much harder work than just picking up the racism flag and waving it about so that people pay attention to you and call you a “black leader”. The civil rights movement helped destroy the scourge of white racism that had constrained the lives of blacks in America for centuries. One wonders what it will take, or how many more dead young black men it will take to remove the shackles of black racism that keep so many black Americans from enjoying the fruits of liberty that that people like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks and Medgar Evers fought so hard to give them access to?