Arguing with Leftists is an Exercise in Futility...

Last week Dan Bongino talked about the pointlessness of arguing with the left. He said something like “We think the left are simply people with bad ideas while the left thinks we are simply bad people…” He went on to say that while pointless in terms of trying to convince the person with whom you’re “arguing”, it’s worthwhile because others, who may be open minded and paying attention, might be persuaded.

This was driven home to me via a Facebook discussion that started out with a friend’s cartoon suggesting CRT is an innocuous addition to the teaching of American history that shows some of the darker chapters.

My response was: “No one opposes teaching history, warts and all. I studied slavery, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, Chinese workers basically in servitude to build the RR and more. You keep mischaracterizing CRT as just teaching the negative side of American history. It’s not. The heart of CRT is that the US is systematically racist and minorities can’t succeed. That’s fiction and you know it.”

Which started a firestorm from a friend of my friend, from which I’ve excerpted:

It’s apparent that you gained little insight from your studies. If they didn’t touch on the racist systems that led to those events occurring, you obviously got the sanitized, white washed version where the savagery and downright inhumanity to any non-white man BY white men was totally excluded. Just like your fellow GOP white Supremacists, there is NO reality that y’all can’t bend to save your false sense of identity that you’re superior to all non- whites and European genius and goodness is the only reality there is.

American Slavery was different and worse than any other slavery in the History of the World. It’s the only slavery where the slaves were dehumanized. No other slavery treated the slaves like a horse or a chicken.

To which I responded:

It’s true slaves were treated as property, but in fact, slaves in the American south were largely treated better than slaves in South America and the Caribbean. One major reason for that was the Constitution’s ban on the importation of slaves after 1808. Slaves therefore became far more valuable than they were in the rest of the Americas and it was to nobody’s benefit to work them to death. That is, very unlike Brazil, the Caribbean and elsewhere where slaves were cheaply imported and therefore expendable. The truth of this can be seen in the fact that 94% of the slaves brought to the New World went somewhere other than the United States, but by 1860 2/3 of the slaves in the New World were in the American south.

He continued: The effects are still being felt today when George Floyd’s murderer gets 22.5 years for killing a black human being but a black man killing a Police DOG recently was sentenced to 45 years. That just shows that the dehumanization of black folks specifically males is baked in to American society. The ONLY ones who are treated like human beings are the exceptional negroes who make it through systemic racism baked into every institution in America or those who entertain white folks in music, TV or sports. And even they can’t say anything bad about America or their lives could get turned upside down.

Wouldn’t it be nice if American Europeans tried to dismantle this system and rectify the damage? The boost to our economy through reparations alone and the good will gained worldwide as America denounces its past and pledges to make amends would truly place this nation at the top as it stones for its sins. But, white America collectively isn’t interested in any of that. It’s only interested in the maintenance of white supremacy for various reasons, not the least of which is white genetic survival, power and greed.

After more futile back and forth, I decided to take a different tact:

Let’s try a thought experiment... Imagine everything you said is true about programs being stacked against minorities. What do you do to fix them? Reverse discrimination? How about reparations? Who pays? Who gets what? Who decides? Does Obama pay or does he get money? Do recent African or Caribbean immigrants get money too or only people who can trace their lineage back to slavery or even Jim Crow? What about black families who owned slaves? Do the million or so black millionaires get money too? When are things as they should be? What's the measure? Will every company or classroom or board have to reflect the pigment hue of the country as a whole? Will it apply to everything from police to janitors to ditch diggers to the NBA and the NFL? Will all of this change the unwed birth rate in black America? Is murder still to be considered a crime as half of the offenders in the US are black males despite the fact that they make up only 6% of the population? Since reparations will make everything even do we do away with welfare programs that disproportionately benefit minorities?

Or, maybe all of us could be grateful for the fact that today virtually every one of us is extraordinarily lucky to live in a country that allows so much freedom and opportunity that millions of people literally risk their lives to come here every year and probably half or more of the rest of the world would happily change places with almost any American.

He responded: In other words, you’re just another psychotic white Supremacist and it makes NO sense trying to REASON with a psychotic.

To seek to evade all responsibility or accountability for the greatest crimes against Black humanity in history is the mindset of a Savage…PRETENDING to be civilized. Someone who cares nothing about Honor, truth, civility, fair-play OR in obeying their OWN laws, let alone those of God.

White Supremacy has made most white folks, LIKE YOU, spiritual MONSTERS to be able to say stuff like that with a straight face and sleep like a baby at night. There lies the entire problem of Racism in America which is a power dynamic that only WHITE AMERICANS have. Blacks can’t be racist towards you because we haven’t set up systems of power that can destroy the lives of you or your family. White folks do that to blacks ALL the time.

It was clear he was not really interested in ideas focused on making life better for black Americans,  but rather extracting revenge in the form of reparations from the whites who by definition are racists and guilty.

This is why Biden is in the White House, other than the fraud, obviously. Democrats have become the party of grievance, the party of victimization. If they can convince a group they’re victims, they never have to actually accomplish anything. The focus is always on past failures or some other strawman that rational policies simply cannot be allowed to address. It’s the ultimate in maintaining a grip on power. Why ever address policy failures or “unintended” consequences, when it’s so much easier to simply craft a grievance that can simply never be addressed. For Democrats that’s a recipe for success. For America it’s a recipe for disaster.

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.

Book Burning, Sticks & Stones and the Democrats' Praetorian Guard

Back in 2008 when Barack Obama was running for the presidency I was virulently opposed to his candidacy. I was not a huge fan of John McCain, but given the two I voted for McCain. McCain was a war hero by any stretch. Not only did he fight for his country and survive five long years in the Hanoi Hilton, but when given the opportunity to leave before others who’d been there longer because the North Vietnamese wanted to curry favor with his father, he refused. I disagreed with much of what McCain did as a Senator, but I knew he had America’s best interests at heart, something I never felt Barack Obama did. When Romney ran my reservations about him were similar to those about McCain, but once again I voted GOP.

I disagreed with Barack Obama on almost everything over the course of his eight years. From Obamacare to DACA to GM to DADT to virtually everything having to do with race relations. I disagreed with his trading for Beau Burgdahl, his pardon of Chelsea Manning and his commutation of the sentence of FLAN terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera. I disagreed with his signing the Paris Climate Agreement, the Iran deal and his servile posture towards China for their designs on the South China Sea, among other things. I disagreed with his policies on housing, on education and on energy. Essentially, there was nothing I agreed with Barack Obama on. He could have been Chinese or Italian or Jewish or Klingon… I didn’t care, I thought everything he was doing was simply wrong.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2008… I apparently had magically transformed into a racist. Who knew? With the rise of the Tea Party movement, I, along with anyone who disagreed with the first black President of the United States was branded a racist. Somehow, because Barack Obama was black, my fundamental differences with “mainstream” Democrat policies made me a racist. Nevermind that I would have disagreed with the exact same policies had they been proffered by Joe Biden or John Kerry or Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton or anyone else. No, suddenly it’s wasn’t my opinions or my actions that made me a racist, but simply the fact that I opposed the policies of a black president. Unimportant is the fact that I believe the smartest man in America and one of the most admirable human beings I’m familiar with is Thomas Sowell, a black man. Unimportant is the fact that I think Justice Thomas is easily one of the most brilliant men ever to sit on the Supreme Court. Unimportant is the fact that one of the most respected men in my life personally was a black man. I disagreed with Barack Obama’s policies and therefore I was a racist…

If that sounds strange, it should. Because words actually mean things. When they stop meaning things then we lose our foundation for a coherent society. And that is exactly what is going on today with the Democrat party. Disagree on policy? You’re a racist. Support Donald Trump? You’re a cultist. Assert election fraud? Suddenly you’re a terrorist.

Democrats have taken to defining their political opponents not only as the enemy, but they are using the English language as a tool to literally destroy the United States. Racist actually means something. According to Webster, it means this: A belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. That is a pretty specific definition, and it’s one that likely very few Americans actually believe and act on. There are indeed racists among us, but until 2008 racism was a tiny problem in America. Hate crimes had plummeted over the 20th century to become almost nonexistent by the dawn of the new millennia. Then came 2008, 2016 and finally 2020.

From “The police acted stupidly” to Kaepernick to Ferguson, America took a giant step backward in race relations during the presidency of Barack Obama… but the worst was yet to come. Donald Trump added an entirely different element to the storm. He’s a guy who seems to have no filter and often insulted delicate snowflakes with language that often sounded more like what you’d hear in a locker room or on the factory floor of a steel mill rather than on a dais at the UN. But more than his words, it was his ideas that were abhorrent to Democrats and establishment Republicans alike: Get the government out of people’s lives. Reduce government power! Allow citizens to be free and keep more of their own money. Stop endless wars. Those words are Kryptonite to career government apparatchiks, contractors and the universe of sycophantic lobbyist and media pilot fish that swim around them and feast on their scraps.

And so today we find that Democrats, having fraudulently eliminated the single biggest threat to the leviathan of government power in a century, have decided to eliminate all potential for a resurrection of any such threats. Not only is the left seeking to bar Donald Trump from ever running again, they are seeking to demonize and ostracize his supporters… fully half the population of the United States. How? Language. You’re labeled a racist or a terrorist or a fascist on social media, where friends, friends of friends and potential employers can see. (That should help you getting your next job.) Most pernicious of all is the assertion that Trump supporters are “terrorists”. The terrorist designation used to be reserved for people who blow up planes, kill innocent people in discos or set fire to churches or synagogues. Today however that is no longer the case. Simply stating that you believe the Democrats stole the 2020 election is sufficient to get you labeled as such. Stating you support Donald Trump is sufficient. And voicing support for Congress to investigate anomalies in the election is apparently sufficient.

This wouldn’t be a catastrophic problem if it was limited to social media because you can always leave the platforms or try and build another… but, being designated a terrorist and landing on a government watchlist has enormous consequences for actual people, from the inability to fly to risking the custody of your children to your ability to exercise your 2nd Amendment rights.

Make no mistake, that is exactly where we are headed and exactly what they want. Democrats discussed throwing out of Congress members who supported the president in his calls for a review of the election. They’ve talked about making lists of his supporters and even “reprogramming” white supremacists, which is what all Trump supporters apparently are. And based on this fiction of widespread “white supremacism” the Biden administration is “standing down” the American military in order for commanders to address “extremism” in its ranks… So essentially one political party is seeking to eliminate all supporters of their opposition from within the ranks of the military – despite soldiers taking an oath to uphold the Constitution, not a man or party – so that should they call on the military to support their purges, they will face less resistance from soldiers who understand the Posse Comitatus Act and who might be adverse to raising their weapons against law abiding American citizens. The Democrats are essentially using the fiction of Trump supporters being terrorists to craft the military into a Praetorian Guard for use against the American people when and if necessary. Anyone with a familiarity with the Roman Empire understands why that might not be conducive to a free society.

Supplementing all of the machinations within the government is the takeover of the town square, Vis-à-vis the blocking of Trump and his supporters from social media platforms, banking or even being tracked.  And with the cancel culture seeking to keep Trump supporters out of colleges, jobs, and the quashing of publishing contracts you have the modern equivalent of book burning. What’s more, the authors, readers and supporters of such unapproved content will be figuratively stoned in the public square until they surrender their minds to the majority.

And so here we are, in February 2021, two weeks after Joe Biden and the Democrats took total control of Washington and on the eve of an Impeachment trial so unconstitutional it would be laughable if it were not so indicative of what it foretells for freedom. The goal of the Democrats is to eviscerate any opposition and that starts with the man who inspired 75 million Americans to seek to Make America Great Again.

Regardless of the outcome of the Impeachment trial, the die has been cast, and it is indeed dark. The Democrats seek complete control of the American government, unlimited authority over every aspect of American life and most of all, total domination of the American people. They will of course use their traditional tools of regulation and taxation, but it’s not enough. They have new tools: name calling, book burning, intellectual fascism and focusing of the military on domestic enemies. Those policies didn’t end particularly well in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, and I wouldn’t expect them to end well here either.

The Speech Donald Trump should have given last week...

The events of this past Saturday in Charlottesville were indeed tragic. A young lady lost her life peacefully exercising her 1^st Amendment rights.  She was protesting a rally of white supremacists / Nazis and the KKK when one of those white supremacists drove his car into a group of protesters and killed AAA and injured numerous others.

Let me perfectly clear, while those groups do indeed have the right to rally and express their views, I abhor everything they stand for.  America is not a nation about hate, rather it is a nation about freedom and it is a nation built on liberty and opportunity for all.  While such groups do exist, thankfully their numbers are tiny.  Whether the number of white supremacists in America is 100,000 or 1 million, in a nation of 330 million people they are by any stretch, a fringe element, a tiny fraction.  America has mostly turned away from such hate so that such views, while protected, are, thankfully, largely absent from the public square.

That being said, I must also point out that those white supremacist groups were not the only bad actors at that rally.  While many good people were in Charlottesville to peacefully protest the white supremacist groups, there were many others who were there to instigate trouble and cause violence.  As we have seen over the course of the last few years groups such as Antifa, or others have become well known for creating violence around the country.  That was true on Saturday in Charlottesville as well.

At the end of the day, wherever the violence comes from, whether from white racists or anti capitalist anarchists, it is wrong and Americans of all stripes should condemn it.  This is particularly true because the fact of the matter is that Americans, whoever they are, have far more in common with their fellow Americans than they do with others outside of the country, regardless of what group they identify with.  White Americans likely have far more in common with black Americans than they do with most white people from Europe. By the same token, blacks in America generally have far more in common with their fellow white Americans than they do with practically anyone living on the continent of Africa.  The same holds true for Hispanics in America vs. Hispanics in Latin America or gays in America vs. gays in the middle east or many other places in the world.

For all of our differences, the United States of America is a nation built on freedom, liberty and opportunity.  Most certainly our history is not pristine, but then as with all nations of men, none is.  From European colonization to African tribes selling members of other tribes into slavery to the tyrannies of Communism or socialism, no nation or heritage is pristine.  But here in the United States our Founding Fathers gave us the tools to advance our society, to make it better as we pursue life, liberty and happiness.  They gave us a Constitution that gave us the 13^th and 14^th Amendments which in turn gave us the civil rights bills of the 1960s.  And the 19^th Amendment.

They also left us with something unlike anything found anywhere in history… Our bill of rights, which promises a freedom of speech unprecedented in human history. The 1^st Amendment isn’t necessary to protect popular speech, as no government would try and suppress a speech about puppies or teddy bears.  No, the 1^st Amendment exists specifically to protect speech many fine abhorrent, such as we heard in Charlottesville last Saturday.  That is the point.  It is only by protecting such fringe speech do we protect all speech.  Freedom of speech is not freedom to commit violence however, and that is exactly what happened on Saturday, from both the permitted groups and some of the counter protesters.  While the freedom of speech should be respected, violence should not be accepted. The 1^st Amendment, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution were written specifically to protect the republic from being taken over by mob rule… which is exactly what the those who seek to incite riot desire.  We will not allow that. 

America is most certainly not perfect, and the events in Charlottesville clearly demonstrate that, but thankfully, events such as those are an anomaly, far from the norm.  Most Americans are not racists, are not fascists, not part of violent mobs and do not seek to shut up those they disagree with.  On the contrary, most Americans busy living their lives, they are interested in having a good job, providing a good life for their families, getting their children a good education and of course enjoying their freedoms.  They are not out to cause trouble, to spout racist chants or throw Molotov cocktails through a Starbucks widow.  And for that we should all be grateful. 

And in closing, I would like to say, if we as Americans spend more time focusing on the things that bind us, focusing on the broader things that make America great, like industry, innovation and strengthening our communities, events like those that took place in Charlottesville will be but a tiny blemish on the spectacular vista of our lives.  America is not perfect, but it possibly as close as humans have seen and it is truly a gift from God.  As we go through our daily lives, if we remind ourselves to focus on her opportunities, on her many advances and on the fact that most Americans are good people, tensions might subdue and we can all get back to the business of pursuing happiness for everyone.