A Sad Legacy of the Culture of Victimhood and Grift

For over a month we’ve seen videos exposing Hamas’s depravity. Its soldiers’ blatant disregard for human life and the seeming joy with which they carried out their depravity was disheartening.

Sadly, this kind of depravity can be found closer to home, too, where videos abound of black crime across America, with people shot, pushed in front of trains, sucker punched, beaten to a pulp, and even killed by individuals, gangs, or groups of “teens.”

In both cases, the perpetrators have an ostensible enemy at whom their anger is directed. For Hamas, it’s Jews, and for blacks, it’s whites. Apologists for both groups claim it’s the actions of the “oppressor” that caused the “victims” to react. For Hamas, it’s Jews “stealing” Palestinian lands. For blacks, it’s slavery and Jim Crow. In both cases, though, the outsized violence against bystanders demonstrates that those are just convenient justifications for evil people to gain power.

Hamas’s soldiers, while blaming Jews for everything, often target Muslims as well. They also carelessly target their weapons, striking their own people, while hiding soldiers and materials behind women and children in mosques, schools, and hospitals. When Israel retaliates and civilians die, the resulting images make great PR.

In America, even as the grifters at BLM and Antifa claim that white racism is the cause of virtually every evil, which inevitably creates black criminals who abuse whites or rob, plunder, and destroy businesses, the reality is that most of the victims of black criminals are themselves black. But that doesn’t matter to the race hustlers who use lies and deception to keep blacks and naive white liberals angry. Democrat race pimps don’t care that far more black blood is in the street because all they need is one video of a white person acting or reacting against a black person, and they’ve won the lottery, as they did with videos of Rodney King and George Floyd did.

In reality, being an oppressed minority is not necessarily a recipe for failure, as Thomas Sowell explains in Discrimination and Disparities. He discusses the relative success of various minorities around the world, including the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews in Eastern Europe, Indians in East Africa, Koreans in America, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and many other groups reviled in the countries in which they live.

The reality is that American blacks and the Palestinians have both had many opportunities to achieve success and usually squandered them away.

First, the Palestinians. Up until the mid-20th century, there was no such thing as Arab Palestinians. In the 2,000 years before the pre-Christian era, the one constant in the land was a Jewish presence, whether as a nation or as a vassal of Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. After the Romans ended the Jewish nation and created a Palestinian colony, there were the Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks and, eventually, the Ottomans, and then the English.

The one constant was the Jews. Aside from Bedouins and the Druze, who have been there for several hundred years, the Arabs who identify today as Palestinians mostly drifted into the land beginning in the 1830s.

For the century preceding Israel’s establishment, much of the area was sparsely populated with towns and tribes in constant battle. In addition, the land was inhospitable, and agriculture struggled (something that changed only when Zionist Jews brought in modern farming techniques and hard work).

Jews were a majority of the population of Jerusalem as early as at least 1875—and in the late 19th century began purchasing land from the Arabs. By 1948, Jews owned 8% of the land that would become Israel, while 3.3% was in Arab hands, and 17% had been abandoned by Arabs planning on returning after Israel was eliminated. Britain owned the remaining 70%, which it took from the Ottoman Turks after WWI. The local Arabs never owned it. Thus, it’s a lie that Israel stole its land from the Arabs.

In 1924, Britain split the land in two, with British-mandate Palestine going to the Jews and Trans-Jordan (modern-day Jordan) going to the local Arabs. That didn’t stick. In 1948, after the Arabs had already gotten Trans-Jordan, the UN split British-mandate Palestine again, creating the State of Israel, which was liberally interspersed with an Arab state. The Arabs responded by attacking the newly created nation to take it all.

In 1999, Bill Clinton negotiated a treaty between the PLO and Israel that would have given the Palestinians 92% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and various concessions within Israel proper. The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, rejected it and instead launched a war against Israel. In 2005, Israel exited Gaza, removing 5,000 of its own citizens, and allowed the area to be self-governing. The citizens elected Hamas.

Since Israel exited Gaza, the world has donated over $10 billion there. Sadly, instead of spending money on building up the infrastructure and industry, Hamas put much of that money into building a “Metro” of tunnels into Israel and buying weapons to attack Israel. Imagine how different Gaza would be had its leaders spent that money building schools and viaducts, training entrepreneurs, or enhancing the agriculture industry.

But alas, they didn’t—their leaders would rather maintain the cult of victimhood as it’s far more profitable. (Just before his death in 2004, Yassir Arafat was said to have had a personal fortune of between $1 and $3 billion – stolen from the gullible Palestinians.) Hamas simply said that Israel was the enemy and was responsible for the Palestinians’ plight and then focused on war. Of course, it didn’t have to be that way. Israel built a thriving nation out of the desert. With global support and money, the Palestinians could have done the same. They chose not to.

Similarly, in the United States, slavery ended in 1865, and Jim Crow was gone by 1965, but that didn’t stop the victim industrial complex from poisoning the minds of many black Americans. For four decades, the Democrat party, the media, and America’s schools have told blacks they can’t succeed because of white racism. (This despite the fact that American blacks have incomes that exceed the average of almost every country on the planet.)

They’ve told blacks that racist whites are waiting to lynch blacks. Since at least 2008, they’ve told blacks that, because of systemic racism, they cannot succeed and aren’t responsible for their conditions or actions. Along the way, grifters like Patrisse Cullors, Ibram X. Kendi, and Barack Obama got rich. When Barack Obama was elected race relations were about the best they’d been in history. Not so much now… Imagine what America would be like today had he been a unifier and tried to empower black entrepreneurship rather than being the race pimp he was.

At home and in Israel, we’re seeing the same thing: People greedy for power and wealth tell specific groups they’re victims incapable of helping themselves, thereby turning them into drones committed to violent struggle. Then, say their alleged oppressors are subhuman beings who deserve what they get. Do all of this, and it’s no surprise that these “victims” embrace a savage mindset without empathy, making them not only willing but enthusiastic about unimaginable and routine cruelty.

While the “oppressors” are the ostensible targets, it doesn’t really matter if innocents get killed, which is exactly what we see. Hamas is sacrificing Palestinians, and blacks are killing blacks along with whites and Asians, all because they believe the lie that they’re victims and their oppressors deserve what they get. Victimhood is a bloody game but, sadly, a profitable one.

What We are Seeing in the Streets and on Campuses is not Fringe...

Like most Americans, I was of course shocked by the vicious inhumanity that the coward terrorist group Hamas carried out in Israel three weeks ago. Unfortunately, organized evil is neither unique nor surprising. The Nazis were equally evil across Europe, as were the Japanese at Nanking and Stalin with Ukraine and Mao with his own people. Sadly, evil happens, devils exist and thankfully they are rarely celebrated.

But rarely doesn’t mean never, and the most shocking thing was not the evil perpetrated, but rather the extraordinary support it has received. Not only is Hamas’s evil finding exuberant support in places like Iran and Qatar where you might expect it, but there were tens of thousands of Muslims – and their liberal comrades – in places like New York, Detroit, and Washington out en masse vocally demonstrating their support for these monsters.  And it wasn’t just on the streets, in places like Harvard and Yale and NYU you had students and professors and organizations blaming Israel for Hamas’s inhumanity.  Even as the full extent of the carnage emerged, days after the world was able to see the barbarity of what the savages carried out, the rallies in support not only didn’t diminish, they seemed to grow.  I couldn’t help wonder what that portends for our future. 

As an American I shook my head, stunned as I watched the scenes play out. I wondered how so many people, with smiles on their non hidden faces, could cheer such evil.  How supposedly intelligent people could put their names in support of such barbarism.  My reaction to a few posts on Twitter was “Send them to Gaza”. Not that it was going to happen, but it’s one thing to cheer the beheading of babies and raping of women from five thousand miles away, it’s another thing to do so when there’s a realistic possibility of the IDF ending you.

Of course that’s not going to happen, but then I wondered to myself, what is wrong with these people and why are they allowed to do this? Before the words even formed in my head I answered my own question:  Free speech… that extraordinary thing we have which most Muslim countries don’t.

All of that led my brain to a quote that is often falsely attributed to Winston Churchill:  “When Muslims are in the minority they are very concerned with minority rights, when they are in the majority there are no minority rights.” The British Bulldog may not have said that, but a look at a map of nations with Sharia law suggests the reality of it.

“But we don’t live in one of those countries” you might say, “these people are just fringe wackos.” Not so much. A 2015 poll of Muslims in America showed the following: “More than half (51%) of U.S. Muslims polled also believe either that they should have the choice of American or shariah courts, or that they should have their own tribunals to apply shariah. Only 39% of those polled said that Muslims in the U.S. should be subject to American courts.” It also found “nearly a quarter of the Muslims polled believed that, ‘It is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam by, for example, portraying the prophet Mohammed.’” and “Nearly one-fifth of Muslim respondents said that the use of violence in the United States is justified in order to make shariah the law of the land in this country.” Anyone watching the thousands of protesters in Atlanta, Chicago, and Tampa could easily see that it’s likely the numbers listed above have only grown worse – from a free republic’s perspective.

Now, support for Sharia doesn’t necessarily equate to support for the actions Hamas took last week, but a Venn Diagram would likely demonstrate a great deal of overlap. 

But then you say, “Muslims are barely 1% of the population, this can’t be a threat.” Maybe, but think about this: trans people are far fewer yet today we find ourselves in the midst of national fights about bathrooms, sports and the “medical” butchering of children. Interestingly, most of the people who support the LBGTQXYZ123 agenda also support “Palestine”, where many would likely be thrown off the top of buildings were they to actually go there.

So the question becomes, how does a pluralistic, secular state that puts value on individual liberty deal with vile ideas that are repugnant to the basic elements of the culture and those who espouse them? Is the Constitution a suicide pact that allows those who object to its foundational principles to use the document’s freedoms to take power in order to eliminate it?

In his autobiography Malcom X talks about being invited to speak at Harvard and other prestigious universities, this at the time he was spewing much of his pre enlightened anti-white racist venom. He marvels that while he was invited to speak and said things that most of the audience disagreed with, they were always courteous and usually engaged in a healthy, respectful dialogue. Contrast that with today’s conservative speakers such as Heather MacDonald, Ann Coulter or Ben Shapiro who have had events cancelled or found themselves drowned out and threatened by leftists who equate speech they don’t like with violence. Not surprisingly, a recent poll showed that 66% of college students find this acceptable while another showed that 65% of Democrats supported censoring “misinformation”.

Now, maybe this vile and public championing of hate will be a tipping point where the Democrat coalition fractures as the various victim classes it has nurtured twist themselves into pretzels trying to be good team players. I doubt it, because Democrats in toto hate America, hate freedom and most of all hate Donald Trump & MAGA and put power above everything else.

Nonetheless, what we saw over the last week causes one to stand up and take notice about those who would use our freedoms to end them for everyone else. The adage of “One man, one vote, one time.” refers to the idea of someone or some group using the democratic norms of a nation to win an election then use that victory to eviscerate freedom. Think Hitler in Germany, Chavez in Venezuela, or Erdogan in Turkey. If we’ve learned anything since the reign of Barack Obama it’s that America is not immune to the danger of political parties weaponizing government for their own purposes. Given that the people cheering on the butchers of Hamas are a core part of the Democrat coalition, we should not be too quick to dismiss them as fringe… we could all live to regret it.  

You Should Listen To The Elites Because They're Smarter Than You... Obviously

I’m a pretty average guy. My SAT was 1010, I earned a 2.7 GPA as an undergraduate and 3.0 for my MBA. Since college I’ve launched half a dozen startups, none of which, made it very far… An objective assessment might suggest my intelligence is slightly above average and my entrepreneurial capabilities somewhat below. When all is said and done, I probably balance out as basically average.

That’s troubled me for years…but probably not in the way you think. I’m not troubled that I’m basically average, I’m troubled by what I must be getting wrong vis-à-vis the world around me.

I say wrong because there’s an entire universe out there of people who are by every objective measure exponentially smarter than I am, but who think exactly the opposite of the way I do on practically every single issue. Guys like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, Pierre Omidyar, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Craig Newmark and so many more.

These guys have more money than God. They all probably scored perfect or close to it on the SATs. They’ve created companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people and generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. They’re showcased in magazines like Forbes and Fortune, lionized on TV and are the subjects of books and movies and of course, success memes.

But somehow these guys and most like them are generally hardcore leftists. They’re animated by and put their money behind things like “Climate Change,” “DEI,” and open borders. Most supported the BLM scam and many of their companies regularly censor speech of conservatives. They support things like the Paris Climate Accords, the WHO, and were largely all in on the COVID scam. Most of all, they support Democrats who push for higher taxes, defunding the police and more government regulations, particularly on businesses.

This is where the trouble comes in. These guys are really smart. They’ve succeeded in ways few human beings ever have. They’ve become rich and powerful beyond belief. And they all did it in the United States…yet they support policies that are not only antithetical to traditional American values, but they also actively subvert the framework that allowed them to succeed in the first place.

America may be a flawed place, but it is the place where Microsoft, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, eBay, Craigslist and countless others were founded and found success. Interestingly, most of them employ large numbers of immigrants, despite their success being rooted in America, not in India, China, or Europe.

Their success was not because of government programs, regulations, or largesse. They succeeded in America because government regulation was relatively low for startups. They succeeded in America because that’s where capital came to find attractive returns. They succeeded in America because of well-trained STEM graduates who brought them a unique set of skills and experiences they couldn’t find elsewhere, because our market is the most dynamic on the planet and the most open to new ideas. And perhaps most of all, they succeeded in America because of our fundamental constitutional rights protecting private property—including intellectual property—and free speech, which foster the exchange of ideas, and because of our fundamental notion of entrepreneurship where anyone can start a business and succeed by creating something sufficiently compelling to entice consumers to freely to pay for it.

These factors don’t exist anywhere else in the world and, as a result, for 100 years, America has created more prosperity and increased the worldwide standard of living more than any nation in all of human history…and it’s not even close. And these mavens all pretend to support increasing prosperity and decreasing poverty.

However, now that they’ve found success beyond imagination thanks to the American system, they’ve decided that the fundamental rules that allowed them to prosper should no longer apply. So-called emergencies like “Climate Change,” “Institutional Racism,” “Gender Equity,” and “Global Inequality” supersede the 18th century anachronisms of the American Constitution and individual rights.

No longer can Americans be allowed to decide how to heat their homes, fuel their cars, or protect their property. No longer can they be allowed to enjoy an American-centric foreign policy or manage America’s economy in a way that empowers Americans. No longer will common miscreants be held responsible for their actions, even as those who challenge mandates are crushed. No longer will students learn objective facts or study the Western canon, but they’ll be taught to change their gender on a whim. Whether it’s algorithms controlling what Americans can say or see, regulations about what they can or must do, or what products or services they are allowed to purchase, these enlightened elites graciously inform us they are applying their intellectual brilliance to make our lives better, and so too the rest of the world. And they should know what’s best because look at how smart and successful they are.

However, these “One World” billionaires’ alleged compassion for the world’s less fortunate is pure fiction. How can you tell? Because their solutions for worldwide inequalities isn’t to encourage struggling nations to adopt the freedoms, protections, and systems that led to their success in America. Instead, they push to erase American borders while championing the policies of Communist China and the increasingly despotic EU while encouraging us to adopt edicts from tyrannical organizations like the UN and the WHO and proffered by Bond villains like Klaus Schwab at the WEF.

And thus my conundrum. If I, with my relatively limited intellectual capacity, can see as clear as day that it was America and her Constitution that drove prosperity’s march for a century and allowed these intellectual giants to succeed in spectacular fashion, how is it that most of them are hardcore leftists whose policies will kill the goose that laid the golden egg? What am I missing? Am I really that dense?

Maybe, but a better explanation might be that these guys believe themselves to be the self-anointed leaders of a new cult. This cult, which replaces traditional religion, has as its God the fiction of Nirvana on earth, which can only be accomplished through the policies of the enlightened elites from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington. They know more than you do, have done more than you have, and achieved more than you have and, therefore, are much better equipped to make important decisions for the “less fortunate.”

Naturally, they may not live by or be constrained by the commandments their new religion dictates, but that’s because, while they were smart enough to navigate and survive a world fraught with free-thinking individuals and potential catastrophic failures, you’re not. You’re too busy with your “God, guns and family” to be equipped to see the big picture. Individual freedom makes for bad collective decisions they’d say, but from the elevated perspectives their intelligence and success allows, they can help you people make better decisions and avoid mistakes…

Nevermind that it’s the lessons learned from failures that often lead men to success, or that it’s often after hitting rock bottom that individuals reach their highest peaks. No, none of that matters because they know best, just ask them.

At the end of the day my SAT scores and bank account may suggest that I’m not quite as smart as those guys, but at least now I understand why…I’m a mere mortal, they’re demigods.

Black Lives Apparently Don't Matter to Democrats Who Use Them As Cannon Fodder in Pursuit of Power

America is being destroyed from within.  The Republic is being demolished by the Swamp, the borg of pernicious politicians, entrenched, politicized bureaucrats, media elites and academics who wield environmentalism and equity as truncheons to obliterate individual freedom, economic opportunity and the rule of law.  The recent episode of hypocrisy onMartha’s Vineyard demonstrates with crystal clarity the universe the elites of the Swamp create as they make laws that apply to peasants but no to the aristocracy.

Columns documenting the machinations of the Swamp are legion, but this is not one of them.  No, this piece is specifically about the destruction of the rule of law that the those elites have unleashed on said peasants, specifically as it relates to violent crime.

This past week New Orleans reclaimed the title of America’s deadliest city after seeing murders jump 141% over the last couple of years.  In New Orleans the murder rate is a staggering 52 per 100,000 people.  That compares to the national average of 6.9, the highest it’s been in a quarter century and the 50 per 100,000 of Venezuela, the most dangerous country in the world.

If New Orleans were an outlier it would be a shame, the fact that it’s not is a tragedy:  New York, Chicago, Portland, LA, San Francisco, Philadelphia and more. Big cities and small, crime is up across the country over the last two years, in most cases, dramatically.

We’ve always had crime in America.  Such is the price of freedom.  But what we are experiencing today is something altogether different.  It’s not just crime.  America can sometimes be a dangerous place.  Everyone knows working the midnight shift at a convenience store carries more risk than working the 9 AM shift at your local library, just as common sense tells you the odds of getting into a fight in a bar on a Saturday night are far higher than they are at church on Sunday morning.   

And just to be clear, this is not Antifa thugs and BLM cultists burning down cities.  Protest, even violent protest has been part of American history since its founding and largely is event driven like Shay’s Rebellion, the Vietnam War protests, or the riots after the killing of MLK or the acquittal of the police in the Rodney King video.

No, this is something different.  It’s one thing to rage against the machine, it’s another to commit violence against citizens, particularly when they are unsuspecting innocents or compliant victims.  And this is the issue today and we see it taking place across the county, from urban jungles like New York City to Midwestern communities like Salt Lake City.

What America’s experiencing today is exponentially worse than the typical crime that America is used to, and the truth is, most of it – but far from all of it – is being perpetuated by young black men, although increasingly, by young black women as well. 

Violence is being taken not only to a new level in terms of its frequency, but in the application as well. It’s not taking place in dark corners or deserted parking lots, but rather right in the middle of regular hustle and bustle of American’s daily lives.  It’s taking place in broad daylight, in full view of video cameras – often with others videoing the carnage to share on social media.  Violent, brutal crime is taking place on main street USA, in schools, drugstores, fast food restaurants, subway platforms, high end retail stores, and of course homes. 

We see large groups of young people blitzing stores and grabbing merchandise off shelves and running out with smiles on their faces.  We see “shoplifters” methodically clear store shelves of merchandise and simply stroll out the door, unconcerned about getting stopped or arrested and often assaulting employees along the way. 

What’s more, there’s an element of violence that seems unprecedented in its scale.  Almost daily we see random innocent people on subways or on stairs or in restaurants getting shoved or kicked or punched. We see fast food workers attacked as customers come over or around counters and spark mayhem.  We see bus drivers attacked and shop owners beaten and cops spit on. Indeed we see countless instances where robbers beat or shoot victims even after they have taken whatever they were after.  We also read daily of innocents of all ages killed in the crossfire while sleeping in their beds, standing in a bar or sitting in their cars. 

There also seems to be a racial element to this new crime wave with black perpetrators targeting a disproportionate number of white or Asian victims… but make no mistake, the single largest group of victims of this crime wave are black citizens. 

The question is, why is all of this this happening?  What is it that has caused an increasing number of black Americans to believe that they can rob and beat and even kill their fellow citizens with impunity? There are no doubt countless contributing factors, from missing fathers to failing schools to social media, but those problems (at least the first two) have existed for quite some time. No, the reason for the sharp jump in violent crime and unhinged behavior on the part of large numbers of primarily young black Americans is the Democrat proposition that everything bad that happens to blacks is a consequence of racism and as such, they’re not responsible for their choices and therefore they should not be held accountable for their actions.

Ronald Reagan once said, “If you want more of something, subsidize it…” and that is exactly what the Democrats have been doing with violent crime.  While they are not yet directly paying criminals to attack their fellow citizens and rob local businesses, they are subsidizing crime nonetheless.   

On the one hand George Soros backed Democrat prosecutors from coast to coast are demonstrating their pro criminal empowerment bonafides by refusing to seek bail for most arrestees, refusing to prosecute countless misdemeanors and simultaneously undercharging countless violent crimes as said misdemeanors. While on the other hand you have Democrats effectively decriminalizing an entire swath of crimes or eliminating bail for almost every offense.  Indeed, the lunatics running Illinois have just passed a law that eliminates bail for virtually every offense below 1^st degree murder and prohibits police from arresting or removing trespassers caught in the act of burglarizing a home or business.  That means that if someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night and you call the police, if you’re lucky enough given the Democrat “Defund the police movement” that they respond while the trespasser is still there, they are literally not allowed to remove them from your home…

All of this is happening exactly when America’s cultural and political elites are telling young black Americans that the system is rigged against them, that they’re incapable of succeeding when playing by the rules, that most white people hate them and if they break the law there are no consequences to be had.  That is literally a recipe for the collapse of society. 

Today in Democrat run America, it’s only the rights of criminals that matter, never the victims… and the fact is that most of the victims of this American renaissance of violence are, in fact, black Americans, the very people Democrats pretend to care about.  Democrats have leveraged the fictions of “systemic racism” and millions of “white supremacists” running around to accumulate power, and Americans of all races are paying the price.  But this is exactly what happens when politicians pursue policies of balkanization and victimization, setting groups of Americans against one another for the purposes of gaining power.  The Democrats thrive, their grifter partners thrive and America’s citizens suffer. 

America was founded on the principle that all men were created equal in the eyes of God and in the laws of man. While the execution of those truths have been imperfect from the beginning, it has consistently improved for over 200 years, bringing Americans freedom and prosperity unmatched in human history, and that includes black Americans, who make up fully 8% of American millionaires.  Democrats, in half a generation have undone 200 years of progress and created a violent cage match between demographics in the public square, and the result has been a body blow to civil society, mayhem in cities, and blood on the streets, and most of it black.  But somehow black America continues to vote Democrat in Stalin like numbers. Perhaps they should reconsider…

Rigged and More: A Chronicle of The Most Successful Coup d'état in Human History... Or At Least American History

The debate is over. After a year investigating claims of election fraud the media has determined that any fraud in the 2020 election was far too small to have changed the outcome and Joe Biden legitimately won.  Now we can get back to our normal lives, or whatever passes for normal now… Except it’s fiction.   

In 44 BC Julius Caesar was murdered by Roman senators who claimed to be acting to protect the Republic but were in fact, simply seeking power. Their coup d'état put the final nail in the coffin of a Republic that had been dead in deed if not name for decades. 

Coup d'états differ from revolutions in that they’re generally orchestrated by or include people within government who seize power – often with a narrow use of or threat of violence – that results in a rapid transition of power. Revolutions are often longer affairs that include much of a country’s population and exponentially more bloodshed. 

A common goal of a coup is to keep much of the society and government apparatus intact, but change who’s in charge.  This illusion of continuity is intended to gain the acquiescence of the population so they don’t think they’ve been plunged into a civil war.

And that’s exactly what we got. While Donald Trump does not lay in a bloody toga on the floor of the Senate, America witnessed a coup d’état equally as viscous. Many will deny one took place because their guy won, but make no mistake, virtually every American knows one did, even if only 56% admit it.

The moment the coup began to reveal itself Americans knew something was amiss.  Many went to bed November 3^rd believing Trump won, leading in enough states to secure an electoral victory, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin.  Strangely however, while much of America slept, densely populated Democrat counties like Fulton in Georgia (Atlanta) and Allegheny in Pennsylvania (Pittsburg) “stopped counting” votes only to “restart” later with Joe Biden having a sufficient number of votes to swing the state blue. Similarly Philadelphia stopped “reporting” at 1 AM and later reported Biden numbers sufficient to take the state.    

The morning of the 4th, as cries of fraud came from red areas across the country, the side that had spent years crying “election fraud” suddenly fell silent.  Apparently 2020 had become the “most legitimate election in American history”.

Joseph Stalin who said “Those who vote decide nothing.  Those who count the vote decide everything.”  That’s exactly how we went from being a Constitutional Republic to a banana republic, but rather than the United Fruit Company or the CIA running the coup, it was Mark Zuckerberg, Democrats, the FBI and the media.

Just after Biden was sworn into office Molly Ball of TIME Magazine wrote a glowing paean to the coup:  “Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.”

And as with any good coup, violence was threatened:  “The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country.”  In this context “protests” is a metaphor for Democrat approved violence unleashed by BLM and Antifa across the country.  Ball points out that following Biden’s victory the threatened violence was called off. “There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.”

While Ball’s homage may be insightful, the definitive account of the coup comes from Mollie Hemingway in “Rigged”.  Unlike Ball, who couches everything about the coup in the fiction of patriots seeking to “protect” America from the fascist Donald Trump, Hemingway exposes exactly how the leftist cabal set the table for the coup, and upon its execution unleashed a propaganda machine to pretend the coup never happened.

Hemingway showcases incompetent GOP functionaries like Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger empowering Democrats led by the treacherous Marc Elias and Stacy Abrams to make unconstitutional voting rule changes. From corrupt jurists ignoring legislation and others explicitly ignoring the Constitution and allowing arbitrary election rulemaking that favored Democrats to the FBI and the media spending years attacking Trump, Hemingway exposes the coup step by step.  She demonstrates how Mark Zuckerberg wrote a $400 million check and financed the coup d'état that undermined our Republic.  

In perhaps the single most telling line in Rigged, on page 221 Hemingway quotes a reporter for the Wisconsin Spotlight:  “The City of Green Bay literally gave the keys to the election to a Democrat Party operative from New York.” Similar dynamics played out across the country.

The model was simple. Red counties in half a dozen states gave their counts while blue counties stopped counting or reporting.  Once the red totals were in Democrats knew exactly how many votes they needed to “produce” and those numbers magically started coming in. Fulton County (Atlanta) gave Biden a 250,000 margin of victory, enough to win the state by 12,000 votes of 5 million cast. Allegheny Pennsylvania (Pittsburg) gave Biden a 150,000 vote margin, enough to take Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes out of 6.8 million. 

When the dust settled, Biden was declared the 46^th President with “81 million votes” to Trump’s 74 million.  But Presidential elections come down to the Electoral College.  Joe Biden won there because of three states and 103,000 votes:  Pennsylvania, 20 Electors, by 80,000 votes, Georgia, 16 by 12,000, and Arizona, 11 by 11,000 votes. 

After two months of being caricatured and called conspiracy nuts or white nationalists, almost a million frustrated Trump voters went to Washington on January 6^th to demand Congress investigate the election.  After a rally where President Trump explicitly said to “peacefullyand patriotically make your voices heard” a riot with a few thousand people broke out at the Capital and suddenly an “Insurrection” worse than anything “since the Civil War” occurred, and anyone questioning the election was a guilty participant.  That riot, which may have been planned or empowered by the FBI suddenly changed the national conversation from investigating November’s coup to the impeachment of Trump for "incitement of insurrection".  And that was it. End of debate. Biden won and Trump tried to incite a coup and any ideas to the contrary were verboten…

But of course Americans know a lie when they see it and the debate isn’t really over.  When the propagandists say there was no way fraud could have impacted an election with 150 million voters, that’s a red herring.  The cabal behind the coup didn’t have to impact 150 million votes.  All they had to do was impact (or create) 100,000 well placed votes, which is exactly what they did, with the help a a Covid driven hysteria and a "bit" of money.  Mark Zuckerberg funded Democrats in a few states merely had to wait until the red areas reported their totals and then magically produce more votes from their stopped or paused machines. And that’s how it’s done, a real life enactment of Stalin’s adage, and it’s just another day at the office for Democrats. 

Mark Anthony could only eulogize Caesar after the Ides of March, but Donald Trump is still very much with us. We still have an opportunity to reverse this treachery and avert the disaster that naturally follows when the Rule of Man subverts the Rule of Law.  But will we seize it before it’s too late?

Do Black Lives Really Matter? It Depends on Who You Ask...

Do black lives really matter? Apparently it depends on who you're asking. In what seems counter intuitive in 2021, the answer from conservatives is generally yes, in that they believe all lives matter, regardless of color.  They will tell you that society and government should strive to be colorblind and that someone should never get less or more based on the color of their skin. The goal is to get government out of the way and let all citizens pursue freedom and opportunity equally, regardless of color.

For liberals however, the answer is quite different.  They say “Yes! Black Lives Matter!” But like the man who kisses his wife goodbye and tells her he loves her before he flies off to Miami for a “business meeting” that’s really just a premise for a romp with his mistress, it’s a lie. And it’s not even close.  Liberals don’t care about black Americans – other than their votes.  Three issues demonstrate it clearly.

First:  Murders.  The “Defund the Police” movement took center stage last summer.  The claim is essentially that police are killing innocent black men across the country, that white cops are hunting down black men and killing them. That is of course a fiction.  It’s not an exaggeration, it’s not hyperbole.  It’s fiction created out of whole cloth.  In 2019, there were a total of 1,089 people killed by police in America, 877 of which race was known. Of that 877 number 259, or 29% were black, 9 of whom were unarmed – although unarmed is not synonymous with innocent.  Given that blacks make up 12% of the population that 29% seems disproportionate.  At the same time however, given that black men make up 6% of the American population but are responsible for approximately 55% of all murders, the 29% of those killed by police doesn’t seem so disproportionate after all. 

But facts be damned!  So Black Lives Matter, Democrats and Antifa got together and pushed the Defund the Police movement.  Across the country police forces faced budget cuts, manpower shortages and the Ferguson Effect where officers subtly pull back from enforcement activities because they’re worried about being scapegoated by administrations that don’t have their backs.

The result of this insanity?  Crime is up around the country and, surprise, more dead black people… How many?  A lot.  Murders increased by 25% in the United States in 2020, more than double the increase in any year since at least 1960.  The total was 20,480, an increase of 4,056 over 2019, and given that blacks generally make up approximately 60% of murder victims, the leftist attack on American policing cost the lives of 2,474 black Americans.  That’s 2,474 funerals, families devastated and opportunities lost.  Those 2,474 black lives didn’t seem to matter.

On October 1^st the New York Post ran a piece about the 21 children who have been murdered this year, triple the number from both 2019 and 2020.  The cover image was heartbreaking… but one notices that of the 18 faces shown, at least 17 of them are black.  Apparently those black lives don’t matter. 

Nor for that matter do the average citizens of urban communities who for years decried the lack of services in their neighborhoods.  Given the rampant crime in cities across the country, hundreds of thousands of small businesses who serve those communities have closed and large businesses are following suit.  In San Francisco the shoplifting has become so rampant that Walgreens has just announced it’s closing 5 more stores, which comes on the heels of 17 already closed due to shoplifting.  That will no doubt make life easier for the elderly black Americans who need to get their medicines or citizens looking for snacks or Band Aids or Halloween candy.  Their black lives don't seem to matter.

Second:  Schools:

Education is one of the most important elements of the lives of Americans.  School is often where young people learn to socialize, follow directions, work hard, pay attention and maybe be part of a team.  Of course all of that is secondary to the primary object of schools, which is teaching math, reading, writing, science and history.  On all of that, public schools in America are failing black students miserably.

Here’s proof.  Below are the 2019 scores in math and reading for black 8^th grade students in eleven of the largest school districts.

Black 8th grade students proficient in:
	Math	Reading
Atlanta	10%	15%
Baltimore	6%	10%
Chicago	15%	16%
Dallas	10%	7%
Denver	13%	14%
Detroit	4%	5%
Los Angeles	8%	9%
Miami	12%	13%
New York	10%	14%
Philadelphia	8%	13%
Washington, DC	11%	14%

Source: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/districts/scores/?grade=4
(Scroll to bottom of page and select the city then 8^th grade)

What are these numbers?  They are the number of black 8^th grade students who are PROFICIENT or above in math and reading.  The average rate of achievement of proficient or above is 10% for math and 12% for reading.  That means that literally 90% of the black 8^th graders fail math and 88% fail reading. 

This is a staggering level of failure on the part of schools.  Education is one of the most fundamental elements in equipping a young person for success in life and the public schools across the country are failing black students, criminally.  And just to be clear, it doesn’t have to be that way.  Watch Stand and Deliver or Lean on Me – both based on true stories – to see that it doesn’t have to be that way.  Or read about the Harlem Success Academy in New York or the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta.  Sadly, in most of America’s school systems young black lives don’t seem to matter. 

Third:  Open Borders

Employment is the single biggest driver of prosperity and financial success. Many, if not most Americans start out working at entry level jobs, often making minimum wage or somewhere close to it.  From there generally, as they gain work experience, confidence and skills, most people advance to different jobs or get promoted in ways that see their incomes increase. 

To the degree that many of the ill educated black students America's government schools are producing can get jobs, those jobs are likely to be entry level jobs.  But for decades the opportunities for those entry level jobs has been undermined by unfettered illegal immigration.  The result is that many of those entry level jobs are filled by illegal immigrants rather than by young black Americans.  As such, the opportunities for employment leading to advancement and financial and social success for those unskilled and uneducated black youth are curtailed dramatically.  Without such entry level jobs, the kind one would use to acquire the skills and experience needed to achieve the American dream, their opportunities are largely nonexistent.  Apparently their black lives don’t matter. 

All three of these areas are owned, lock stock and barrel by Democrats.  Democrats are the ones who want to defund the police.  Democrats control the teachers’ unions and almost every major city in the country where the schools are so bad.  Democrats are the ones who want open borders and refuse to enforce immigration laws.

There are other things as well, like Democrat social programs responsible for the dissolution of the black family and keeping generations of families on government handouts, but these three alone are enough to demonstrate that indeed, black lives don’t matter, at least not to Democrats. 

They want black votes and they use black faces and black stories to increase budgets, grow their bureaucratic ranks and strengthen their regulatory power, but they don’t actually care about black men and women and children.  And that’s the irony here. The worse conditions get for black Americans, the more black Americans vote for Democrats, the very party that played such a central role in the destruction of the black American family in the first place.  It reminds one of the ironic saying: “The beatings will continue until morale improves”.   

Oh Beautiful, For Racist Skies... Forever We Are Doomed...

America’s racist!!! One would think, if America is to considered a racist country, we’d want to know the definition of the word. And who better to get that definition from but a giant of the anti-racist movement, Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist. Here’s Mr. Kendi’s definition of racism: "I would define it as a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas…" Apparently Dr. Kendi missed that day in kindergarten where the teacher said “You cannot use the word you’re trying to define in the definition of that same word.”

In an effort to help Mr. Kendi and others understand the words they’re using, below is a slightly more coherent definition of racism:

Racist: One who believes that one “race” (in this context, members of the human race differentiated by the color of their skin) is genetically superior to another. Often the holder of this opinion believes themselves to be amongst the superior race. (For a bit more on this, click here to read my first ever blogpost:  Racism: America's Original Sin.) 

The point of the above is that if one seeks to use a word to describe something, it helps to use the language properly, something Mr. Kendi apparently has trouble doing.

America is racist! That statement is fundamentally illogical. A country cannot be racist. It can be landlocked, beautiful or on the equator, but it can’t be racist. Its people can be however. Indeed, Americans can be racist, and no doubt there are some among us who are. But how many Americans actually are racists? It’s impossible to know, but we do know that there are whites who are racists and believe in white superiority just as there are blacks who are racists and believe in black superiority. But in the context of the “America is racist” trope, it’s only the white racists who count. So how many are there? Are they increasing in numbers?

It’s hard to tell, but to the degree that Americans are part of the KKK, which is historically a group that counts racist anti-black ideas as one of its bedrock principles, perhaps not quite as many as the left would like us to think.

In the 1920’s at its apogee, the KKK had anywhere from 3 to 8 million members. At the time the American population was approximately 110 million. That would mean that somewhere in the ballpark of 5% of the American population would have been members of the Klan. Included in that group were doctors, lawyers, politicians and even a future Supreme Court Justice.

Today however, the number of Americans who are part of the Klan is estimated to be between 3,000 and 5,000. With our larger population that works out to be .000015% of our population as members of the Klan. Were the number 5% as in 1920 there would be 15 million Klan members in the US today. But there’s not. In fact there’s been a reduction of 99.99% of members of the premier racist organization in American history.

Another way of looking at potential racists in America is people who actually commit “hate crimes” where racism is their probable motivation. According to the FBI data states that in 2019 there were 6,406 “hate crimes” in the US where the offender is known – and approximately 2,000 more where they don’t know the offender. These crimes include Murder – 19 offenders and 51 victims, Aggravated Assault – 1,094 / 1,158, Simple Assault – 2,030 / 2,023, Intimidation – 1,640/ 2,206, Burglary – 64 / 129 and various other crimes. Of those “hate crimes” the number of white perpetrators was 3,365 or 52% of the total while the number of black perpetrators was 1,532 or 24% of the total. Whites make up 62% of the American population but only 52% of the “hate crime” offenders while blacks make up 12.6% of the American population but 24% of the “hate crime” offenders…

Finally, one would expect that racists believe that their race (color) is very important to their image of themselves as that’s necessary in order to think of someone of a different color is somehow below them. Pew Research did a survey asking that very question and the results were: 5% of whites thought whiteness was very important and an additional 10% thought it was somewhat important for a total of 15% of whites thinking that their whiteness was important to their image of themselves. For blacks the corresponding numbers about how important blackness was to their self image were 52% & 22% for a total of 74% of blacks thinking that their blackness is important to their image of themselves.

It’s certain that none of these measures is a perfect correlation with the number of racist white people in the United States, but it’s clear that if white Americans were the racist bigots Democrats keep suggesting they are, proof of that would likely show up in one of these datasets. But they don’t.

Nonetheless, we’re told by Democrats, BLM, Antifa and college professors like Dr. Kendi that America is a racist country. What they really mean is that white Americans are racists, and that they have built a systemically racist nation in which black Americans are subjugated and lack opportunities.

Clearly the former is simply not accurate, nor is the latter. If America was a nation of racism incarnate we’d likely not have had a black president, we’d likely not pour billions of dollars a year into the pockets of black entertainers nor put them on the pedestals or jerseys or wall posters. It’s unlikely that 8% of American millionaires would be black nor that the last two federal holidays created would have been centered on black history.

If you’d really like to know what is going on, Google “How many racists are there in the United States”. It’s unlikely you’ll get an even a remotely accurate answer – or logical attempt to come up with one – within the first half dozen pages. What you will get however are countless studies and articles and statistics demonstrating that America is “systemically racist”, rife with “structural racism”, that race relations are getting worse and polls proving that Donald Trump caused a rise in “white nationalism” and “hate groups”. Virtually everything you find will be support for the left’s lie that America is a racist country: disparity, unequal, disadvantage, etc.

Despite the dearth of data demonstrating that America is made up of actual racists, and indeed extraordinary proof to the contrary, the left persists. The president of the United States stated that white supremacists are the “most lethal threat” to the country, the Attorney General claims white supremacists are the biggest domestic terror threat and the Pentagon is teaching soldiers about Critical Race Theory. This is the equivalent of standing in the middle of a desert and pretending you’re drowning. You’re not, and engaging your fellow lost souls to fight that battle will only make them more vulnerable to real threats like scorpions, snakes and dying of thirst. By proffering the fiction that America is racist Kendi, the Democrats and their comrades are leading the country into an inferno from which escape, in one piece and as one people is highly unlikely.