As AG Barr noted in his opening statement, the most basic job of government is to preserve the rule of law. The rule of law holds sway only when it is impartially applied. Mob violence has no place in a country governed by the rule of law, but mob violence is now sweeping the country. The Democrats refuse to acknowledge this, describing the mayhem and looting as ‘peaceful protests’, lawful exercises of the public’s First Amendment rights.
Jim Jordan, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, put paid to that canard with a video juxtaposing the media’s mindless repetition of the mantra ‘peaceful protest’ with shocking scenes from the burning streets of Portland and other sites of insurrection. As Groucho Marx put it, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
I assume that Barr’s Democratic questioners huddled beforehand to work out an obfuscating strategy, because nearly all of them bombarded him accusations masquerading as questions and then, when he attempted to answer, rudely interrupted him and informed him that they were ‘reclaiming’ their time. It all seemed like a comic skit until you realized that these malevolent clowns are the people we have elected to govern us. Hank ‘Guam’ Johnson, Eric Swalwell, Pramila Jayapal, David Cicilline, Zoe Lofgren, Steve Cohen: I am not sure who gave the most despicable performance on Tuesday. They are all horrible people.
Victor Davis Hanson: 2020 Election Is A “Manichean Choice” Between Civilization And Anarchy
Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson told “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Monday that the continuation of civilization is at stake in the upcoming presidential election.
“That’s the choice we are looking at,” Hanson continued, “and I’m going to vote for civilization.”
“I don’t want to get political, but this election no longer is about Donald Trump’s tweeting,” Hanson said. “It’s not about Joe Biden’s cognitive impairment. It has nothing to do anymore with a lockdown, the virus, the economy.
“It’s an existential question, a Manichean choice between whether you want civilization and you believe that America doesn’t have to be perfect to be good and we are not … going to destroy all that people died for, or [whether] you feel it was inherently flawed with a cancer and we have to use radiation and chemotherapy and kill the host to kill the cancer.”
What do heart disease, stroke, arthritis, colitis, fibromyalgia, lupus, MS, diabetes, chronic fatigue, and Alzheimer’s have in common? Well, yes, they’re all diseases, but the A-plus answer is that they are all caused by or associated with inflammation.
Scientists are finding that the common cause in a long list of illnesses is an inflammatory process that’s run out of control. Inflammation is an important way the body deals with injury or disease. It is one way the body combats pathogens and burns off dying or infected cells. It is controlled by a group of hormones called prostaglandins, some of which promote, and others that reduce inflammation. You can affect these hormones through a number of factors, including emotions, lifestyle, and especially through diet.
In Chinese medicine, inflammation tends to be associated with heat. Heat is also a primary sign of inflammation. This heat can be very apparent when you have an infection of red and warm arthritic joints. The heat, however, may not be so obvious and can cause more subtle symptoms such as a mild sensation of feeling warm, chronic thirst for cool drinks, irritability, lots of sweating, restlessness, and constipation.
This inflammatory heat can come from a variety of sources. One is through improper diet, which according to Chinese food therapy includes too many spicy, greasy, or rich foods, and sweets. Similarly, eating unhealthy foods can aggravate the body and stir inflammation from a western medical perspective as well. Heat also occurs from stagnation in Chinese medicine. This simply means that when things don’t move well, it creates a buildup that causes heat.
In your body, anything from your energy or digestion to your emotions can stagnate. If you’ve ever seen someone get hot with anger, that’s an emotional stagnation causing a little heat. While this way of thinking can seem foreign to western minds, this is more than symbolic symmetry. For instance, one common cause of lingering anger is when someone cannot let go of an incident, like an insult. Instead of accepting the situation and moving on with their life, they keep thinking about the situation, fixating on it in an unhealthy manner that stokes their anger.
Western scientists have found that the foods you eat can be pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory. Fats are strongly linked to inflammation because your body makes prostaglandins from fatty acids. Similar to Chinese food theory, the fats that promote inflammation include partially hydrogenated oils/fats, and polyunsaturated oils, such as corn, peanut, and safflower. Also, trans fats, such as margarine or vegetable shortening, and saturated fats, as found in animal products (except fish) promote inflammation.
Now you may be thinking that there’s nothing you can eat, but there are actually one or two healthy choices. Just kidding! There are lots. Anti-inflammatory foods include fish (especially deep-sea fish), fish oils, olive oil, nuts (especially walnuts), ground flax seeds or flaxseed oil, and soy foods.
Other anti-inflammatory foods include colorful fruits and vegetables, known for their high antioxidant content, which also decreases inflammation. In addition, ginger and turmeric, which are both important Chinese herbs, are effective in taming inflammation.
There is a blood test that measures inflammation in your arteries through looking at your levels of C-reactive protein, or CRP. However, if your health insurance plan tends to deny more than approve, a fasting blood insulin test is more likely to be covered and is also an indicator of inflammation. In general, higher insulin levels in your blood means greater inflammation.
Keeping Inflammation in Check
There are several things you can do to keep inflammation under control, or at least reduced.
Maintain an appropriate weight. Fat tissue is an accumulation of dampness, which over time will ultimately turn to heat. Western research specifically links belly fat to inflammation.
Get regular exercise. It gets energy moving and relieves stress, both of which can contribute to inflammation. Exercise also improves the health of your heart and lungs. You don’t need to sign up for a triathlon; walking for 20–30 minutes at least four times a week will do the trick.
If you’re a smoker, quit now. Today. In case you haven’t noticed, smoking creates heat in your body, inflames your lungs, and inhibits your circulation.
Take processed foods off your shopping list. In most cases, processed foods are made with lots of sugars, trans fats, and chemicals—all of which can contribute to inflammation. If an item has a long list of ingredients that you can’t pronounce, put it back on the shelf and roll your cart to the produce aisle.
Get your stress under control. Take a yoga class, do some deep breathing, or visualize your happy place—whatever it takes. Stress is a killer in its own right. Take note of your thinking, as your thoughts have a powerful influence on your emotions and stress reaction.
Floss. That’s right, pull out the dental string or floss sticks and go to town. There is a direct relationship between gum disease, inflammation, and heart disease.
Get medical care for any infection that doesn’t heal quickly. Again, there’s a direct link between chronic infections and systemic inflammation.
Pay attention to food sensitivities. These can cause inflammatory symptoms, not only in your gut but throughout your body. Some common culprits include grains that contain gluten, dairy foods, and nightshade plants, like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. Sugar is a prime culprit as well. If you suffer from digestive problems, you may want to experiment with eliminating those foods that you suspect are causing problems.
Conservatives are right to take the coming election seriously, for a Biden victory could be a true “extinction event,” rather than the usual shift leftward.
A friend recommended that I watch the last few minutes of Scott Adams’ July 13 show. Her recommendation was illuminating, for Adams had a very interesting observation about voter enthusiasm. According to Adams, his sense about many Democrats is that, while they despise Trump and know that they ought to vote for Biden, watching the Black Lives Matter / Democrat party agenda go into effect is frightening them. This level of fear might keep them away from the polls or even lead to their voting for Trump.
Meanwhile, Republicans know what will happen if Biden wins: They will be facing what Adams calls an “EXTINCTION EVENT.” If the Democrats win this election, betweenopen borders and amnesty, a shift to permanent voting by mail, andthe end of American suburbs, the Democrats will ensure that a Republican never wins again. The video below is set to start with Adams’ discussion:
Adams is correct, but he doesn’t go far enough. There will be more things extinguished than a mere political party. We’ve already seen how the Jacobins on the left are busy purging their party of people who are insufficiently passionate in their support. The daily firings and forced resignations are, for now, the left’s guillotine.
Think of the McCloskeys, stalwart leftists who are being persecuted for exercising their Second Amendment right to defend their home when a mob marched onto their property. Think of Gary Garrels, a very left senior curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art who wasforced outbecause he said that the museum still had to accept works from white artists to avoiding engaging in racial discrimination.
Think of Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, both forced out of their jobs in the New York media because they were soft leftists, rather than hard. (Weiss and Sullivan were laughably categorized as “conservatives.” Neither is. They are conservative only to the extent that they are not from the hard left.)
Think of Leo Terrell, a lifelong Democrat and civil rights attorney, who happens to be black. He is now being ostracized by everyone who was once part of his world because he’s called out the Black Lives Matter movement for its criminal acts, whether destroying cities, killing cops, executing fellow blacks, or shaking down corporations for millions of dollars.
If the Democrat party and its fellow leftists are willing to do this to the people already on their side, just wait to see what they have in store for “the enemy” (that’s you — the white man, the white woman, the Jew, the Trump supporter of any race, sex, or faith).
I can see the notices go up now: The government will no longer deliver mail to people who openly supported Trump. They committed treason because he was colluding with Russia (never mind that even Mueller admitted there was no collusion), and they need to be grateful that they’re merely losing mail service. Oh, and did we mention that no Republicans can use Medicare or receive Social Security. Hey, that’s what happens to traitors. We’re just being fair to those Americans who honored black and transgender lives. And did you really think you could keep your job? America has too many new immigrants looking for work to allow traitors to hold precious jobs.
And again, if you think I’m exaggerating, look at how the left is upping the attacks against Trump supporters and other conservatives.
Think of Nick Sandmann, a 16-year-old boy, who was slandered across America and now lives under constant threat because he wore a MAGA hat. He was targeted because, after being insulted by racist Black Israelites and then having a scarily unkempt man pound a drum in his face, he offered a tentative smile to the man, trying to defuse the situation.
Think of Goya foods, which Democrats in Congress targeted for a boycott aimed at destroying a company that employs thousands of people, simply because the company’s president expressed a preference for the Republican candidate instead of the Democrat candidate.
Pay attention, as well, to how Democrats and their fellow leftists are “other-izing” and “demonizing” whole groups of people. We all thought “Well, that’s just leftist Seattle” when we learned that white city employees were being pushed into a “class” that would tell them how foul their whiteness is. That joke stopped being so funny when we learned that the U.S. Treasury Department used our tax dollars for a different seminar telling whites how vile they are. It became even less funny, if possible, today when Judicial Watch revealed that the Obama administration was already pushing this indoctrination on the American military.
Speaking of tax dollars, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is a branch of the taxpayer-supported Smithsonian, has dedicated a page at its blog to telling all visitors to the site that whiteness is a form of irremediable and irredeemable racism. The horrible irony of its approach is that, having defined whiteness as evil, the webpage includes a poster talking about white attitudes, values, and actions.
Aside from the insulting items on the poster (whites still believe in a 1950s-style subordination of women in the home and like their women to look like Barbie dolls), the other ones are profoundly insulting to blacks. According to the poster, things such as ambition, hard work, punctuality, self-reliance, a home with a father, politeness, rational thinking, etc., are all uniquely white traits.
(After drafting this post, I learned that this was also what the Obama administration told people in the military. I was too lazy to change the post, but check out this link.)
In other words, taxpayers are paying to tell blacks that they do not have these traits, values, and habits — nor should they cultivate them because buying into those traits means selling out. But all those beliefs and behaviors, which have nothing to do with skin color, are a necessity for achieving success in all aspects of American life.
That point — about discouraging black success in America — leads directly to the rising, openly-expressed anti-Semitism amongst black celebrities. Keep in mind that anti-Semitism has been at the heart of leftism since Marx. Despite being (or perhaps because he was) genetically Jewish, every fiber of Marx’s being despised Jews. (He was also a black-hating racist.) Hitler fused Germany’s ancient Christian anti-Semitism with Marx’s socialist anti-Semitism to create genocidal anti-Semitism.
Genocidal anti-Semitism has also been at the heart of Islam since Mohammed’s time. The Koran is filled with indictments against the Jews and exhortations to devout Muslims to slaughter Jews.
Black Lives Matter represents a fusion of these two strands of anti-Semitism: It’s Marxist and it’s closely connected with the Nation of Islam, which has long been led by the white-hating, anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan, incidentally, is no longer a fringe figure. Remember where he sat at Aretha Franklin’s funeral.
Farrakhan’s brand of anti-Semitism has been roiling under the surface of black American life for a long time. What’s frightening now is that it’s coming to the surface with a vengeance through the mouthpiece of black celebrities who are untouchable. For example, Disney is standing by Nick Cannon, who mouthed classic, terribly dangerous anti-Semitic tropes. (Fox is in on this too.) And Nancy Pelosi is endorsing Ilhan Omar, who perfectly blends Islam and leftism into open anti-Semitism.
Moreover, when it comes to the black community, these anti-Semitic words fall on fertile soil, and that’s because of the kind of race-hating crap in that handout at the Smithsonian’s black history museum (or the U.S. military).
After all, those handouts are marching orders to American blacks to fail. If you, a black person, follow the leftist advice you will not work hard, have ambition, create a nuclear family with a mother and a father, be polite, be punctual, be self-reliant, or get educated. In other words, if you are a black person who follows the race hustlers’ advice, you will have a life of virtually assured failure, as will your children.
And here’s where it’s get really clever: No matter what the self-destructive behaviors in which blacks engage, they are told that anything bad that flows from those behaviors is not their fault.
It’s not that you guys are murdering each other with abandon (which may be a byproduct of a leftist abortion culture that doesn’t value life); it’s that darned Second Amendment.
It’s not that your culture encourages kids to fail in school lest they appear white; it’s the school’s fault because the teacher’s are racist.
And it’s not that the welfare culture has stripped black families of father figures, a situation that pushes boys into crime and girls into promiscuity; again, it’s racism.
Indeed, we’ve been hearing for a long time about “systemic racism.” What’s different now, and very frightening, is that the fusion of leftism and Islam is encouraging blacks to be specific about the source of that systemic racism: It’s the Jews. Indeed, when “Charlamagne tha God” heard that Nick Cannon was getting grief for his openly expressed racism, his first response was that Cannon’s getting called out was proof that Jews have too much power, while other blacks with power in the Democrat party offered similar sentiments.
I’ll be the first to admit that there are some Jews who have too much power. You know which Jews? The leftist Jews in politics and culture, the ones pushing this intellectually corrupt, factually dishonest “systemic racism”crap on blacks who don’t realize they’re being played.
I’m thinking of people like Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, Jeffrey Toobin, Noam Chomsky, George Soros, and all the other high-profile leftist Jews whose religion has nothing to do with the Torah and everything to do with Das Kapital. Their malevolent power resides in their abandonment of Jewish doctrine, with its focus on the worth of each individual, the recognition that we’re all God’s children, and a belief in the sanctity of the family. Just as evil is the refusal of these non-Torah, leftist Jews to share with blacks the cultural values that Jews have developed over the century: Hard work, ambition, rational thinking, etc.
So yeah, we’re facing an extinction event. What’s in the path of the oncoming political meteor is bigger than the Republican party. We’ve had a preview of the Marxist / Islamic policies heading our way — violence, racial division, purges, thought crimes, the erasure of our constitutional rights, and the type of dehumanizing anti-whiteness and anti-Semitism that put Nazi Germany on the path to the Holocaust. If you think it can’t happen here, you’re wrong. It can — unless we stop it at the polling place on November 3, 2020.
As for the polling place, remember that in this election there are no “wasted” or “safe” votes. Every conservative in a Blue state must vote just in case moderate Democrats have decided that their future safety lies in supporting Trump. If those Democrats make the effort to support Trump, their votes will be meaningless if you can’t be bothered to cast your own vote because “we’re gonna lose anyway.” That negative is how we lose the chance to turn a Blue state Red.
Likewise, every conservative must vote in a Red state, no matter how assured the Republican outcome has been in past elections. Expect voter fraud on an unprecedented scale. If you don’t bother to vote because “we’re gonna win anyway,” you may find that the graveyard votes are sufficient in number to turn a Red state Blue. The only way to prevent that from happening is for conservative Red staters to abandon complacency and show up in overwhelming numbers.
You’re always told that you need to vote because “this election,” whichever election it happens to be, is pivotal. As with listening to the boy who cries “wolf,” you’ve learned over the years that the elections have never really been pivotal. Instead, they’ve been predictable. Whether Democrats or Republicans control Washington, D.C., the outcome is always a leftist shift in American federal politics. The only difference is that the shift left is faster during Democrat ascendencies and slower during Republican ones.
This year, however, we truly face an EXTINCTION EVENT. The left is no longer keeping it secret that it wants you dead. Your choice, therefore, is the choice that, if made wrong, always precedes a country’s collapse: VOTE OR DIE. (By the way, Noam Chomsky understands this too, which is why he’s trying to revitalize climate change extermination panic.)
And just to give this whole post a musical vibe, a friend sent me the perfect video showing what the Jacobins have in store for those who don’t support their program:
UPDATE: The Trump team has been looking at Biden’s proposals. Just so you know what’s in store, this is a distillation of what the Trump team claims Biden is advancing.
At City Journal, a wide ranging interview with black professor of economics, Glen Loury, a fact-driven contrarian in the mold of Thomas Sowell.
Glen Loury is a professor of Economics at Brown Univ. — and since we are playing in a world of racial politics, let’s take note that he is black. He recently sat for an interview, since republished in City Journal, regarding the current hysteria. A fact-driven contrarian, his responses are enlightening. It felt very much like reading an interview of Thomas Sowell. Below, I have tried to organize the Professor’s statements by topic. Topic headings are mine. All else is quoted from the Professor.
Argument by Personal Identity:
. . . I happen to be suspicious about the assertion of authority based upon personal identity, such as being black. Let’s take this example. Were the actions we’ve all seen of the police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, expressions of racial hatred? I happen to think that we have no reason to suppose that about him, absent further evidence. There are plenty of alternative explanations for his actions that could be given, from negligence to him just being a mean son of a bitch. Sure, we could project a motive onto him, onto the expression on his face, onto his smirk; we could feed thoughts into his head that make him symbolically emblematic of a certain trauma or sickness in American society, and this all may or may not be true. It might be true. But it might not be.
You may or may not have an opinion about that, but suppose the question were to arise in the dorm room late at night. Suppose you have the view that you’re not sure it’s racism, and then someone challenges you, saying, “you’re not black.” They say, “you’ve never been rousted by the police. You don’t know what it’s like to live in fear.” How much authority should that identitarian move have on our search for the truth? How much weight should my declarations in such an argument carry, based on my blackness? What is blackness? What do we mean? Do we mean that his skin is brown? Or do we mean that he’s had a certain set of social-class-based experiences like growing up in a housing project? Well, white people can grow up in housing projects, too. There are lots of different life experiences.
I think it’s extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative-authority move when it’s played. It’s ad hominem. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity? I want you to think about that for a minute. Were you to flip the script on that, you might see the problem. What experiences are black people unable to appreciate by virtue of their blackness? If they have so much insight, maybe they also have blind spots. Maybe a black person could never understand something because they’re so full of rage about being black. Think about how awful it would be to make that move in an argument.
Suppose someone, a white guy, is arguing about affirmative action with you. Suppose he thinks that affirmative action is undignified because he thinks that positions should be earned, not given, but he allows that he doesn’t expect someone like you to understand that argument because you’re black. That would be terribly unreasonable— even “racist.” Yet I’m hard-pressed to see the difference.
Black Lives Matter Organization
. . . Americans disagree about Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter is not axiomatic. The group represents a thrust in American politics. We can talk about it. I’m not without sympathy for the struggle for racial justice, but I have disputes with people when it comes to interpreting what’s going on in American cities. [But BLM supporters don’t] mention the fact that it’s dangerous on the streets of many inner-city neighborhoods where police have to operate every day, that there are a lot of weapons out there, or that the homicide rate is extraordinarily high and that most of the people committing the homicides in these places are black.
Thought Control as Tyranny
. . . I object to the soft tyranny of having political postures put forward as self-evident truths to which every decent member of this community should subscribe. I object to that. That’s the last thing that a university should be doing. It’s malpractice. It is administrative malpractice of this precious institution to be swept along by political fad and fancy, and then demand the assent of every administrator, in lockstep, without any dispute among themselves. This is horrible, . . .
Single Parent Families
Something like seven in ten children born to an African-American woman in this country are born to a woman who doesn’t have a husband. I don’t have an opinion about whether that’s right or wrong morally. But I do have a question about whether that’s at all relevant to aggressive behavior by male adolescents in American cities. I’m not making a claim that it is. But let’s just say I’m asserting that it could be. Suppose it’s the case that most incidents where police violence has been used against black men are incidents where there was resistance to arrest. No, you did not hear me say that his resisting arrest justified killing him. But aggressive behavior is relevant to the dynamic of social interaction that may result in him being killed.
Structural Racismis a Canard
People cry, “structural racism.” Is that why the homicide rate is an order of magnitude higher among young black men? They say structural racism. Is that why the SAT test-score gap is as big as it is? They say structural racism. Is that why two in three black American kids are born to women without a husband? Is it all about structural racism? Is everything structural racism? It has become a tautology explaining everything. All racial disparities are due to structural racism, evidently. Covid-19 comes along and there’s a disparity in the health incidence. It’s due to structural racism. They’re naming partners at a New York City law firm and there are few black faces. Structural racism. They’re admitting people to specialized exam schools in New York City and the Asians do better. This has to be structural racism, with a twist—the twist being that this time, the structural racism somehow comes out favoring the Asians.
This is not social science. This is propaganda. It’s religion. People are trying to win arguments by using words as if they were weapons. They point to history. But the history is complicated. Yes, there was slavery. Yes, there was segregation. Yes, there was redlining. There were other things, too. A lot has happened in American history. Is the relatively marginal position of African-Americans taken within American political economy a causal result of Jim Crow segregation? Nobody knows the answer to that question. I’m not saying that you won’t find many patterns or practices of racial mistreatment in history, but I’m saying that the link between them and the contemporary circumstances of African-American communities, especially at the bottom end, is woefully inadequate to explain what we see. . . .
Structural racism . . . is a bluff. It’s not an engagement with history. It’s a bullying tactic. In effect, it’s telling you to shut up.
Take structural racism’s narrative of incarceration. It’s supposed to be self-evident that if there’s a racial disparity in the incidence of punishment from law-breaking, then the law is illegitimate. Well, an alternative hypothesis is that, for reasons that we could perhaps spend lots of time pursuing, behaviors are different. Behaviors that bear on lawbreaking are different between races, on average. Violence is one behavior, but it’s not the only one I’m talking about. People have tried to do these studies. They’ve examined whether policing practices can accommodate disparity in arrest rates. They’ve examined whether court dispositions are somehow structurally biased, finding blacks guilty when whites would have been found innocent; whether judges systematically pronounce longer sentences for blacks than for whites. The net finding was no.
You cannot get off first base trying to account for the racial disparity in incarceration rates, or in the purported behavior of police courts or parole boards, by reference to Michelle Alexander and the thesis behind The New Jim Crow. I’m not saying that there’s nothing there, but you can’t get anywhere close to explaining the outsize disparity with the explanations she and others provide. There are many disparities, and for every disparity, there are alternative explanations that one can bring to bear, but structural racism doesn’t even attempt to provide an explanation. It attempts to maneuver you into a corner rhetorically so that you must concede it’s not the fault of the people who suffered the condition at hand.
The Danger of Portraying All Problems As A Result of Structural Racism:
Interviewer: What if you’re growing up in Chicago? You’ve got crime all around you. No one in your family can hold down a job. There’s lead in the walls. School is a waste of time for six hours a day. There are no books in your house. That’s certainly not the same upbringing that I had.
Loury: Sure, it’s not. But what’s racial about that? Aren’t there white people in that situation? And Latinos? As I said, if structural racism explains everything, then it doesn’t explain anything. There’s lead in the water because the municipality hasn’t been properly maintained; because the tax base is too scant to be able to support the kind of infrastructure investment needed to get decent water delivered to people, and the teachers’ union blocked the effort to try to reform the schools to charter schools, and the local school district is strapped because of the low values of the properties surrounding it, and the state is unwilling to help.
Those are all problems. I agree with you that those are problems, but they are American problems. To construe them as the consequence of something called structural racism, in my opinion, is not only to get causality wrong but, more importantly, to impede the kind of politics that would end up effectively addressing that problem, which would be a working-class politics on behalf of a decent provisioning to Americans, period. I don’t dispute the fact that there’s unequal opportunity in society.
Data on Police Use of Force
Let’s take the question of the police use of lethal force. Do they use lethal force in a manner that is systematically racially biased? There are studies out there, and it’s not the kind of question you’re going to definitively answer with a single study, but the accumulation of people’s careful investigations should bear on what we think about the question. Nevertheless, I don’t think people care what’s in the appendices of these studies. I don’t think they care what attention went into the accumulation of the data set at the basis of the statistical analysis. I think they cherry-pick.
Here’s Roland Fryer, for instance, who has this controversial paper regarding police use of force in American cities, where he finds no racial differences between police use of lethal force once you’ve controlled for the circumstances of the situation. As I follow the discussion on Econ Twitter, Facebook, and popular media, Fryer is portrayed in two distinct ways. He is either, from a Heather Mac Donald point of view, a white knight riding in with the facts that finally prove what she’s been saying all along, or he’s a traitor sensationalist who wants to get famous by telling the white people what they want to hear. After some engagement with the details, I personally think Fryer has the better of the arguments. I think he raises very legitimate questions about how important the circumstances are of each encounter that lead police officers to use deadly force.
Consequence of Shutting Down Debate
. . . it may be that, for a while anyway, there’s not going to be a whole lot of effective talking. It may well be that we have to imagine a world where effective deliberation and consensus is not within reach for us, and we’re going to have to manage that situation. It could get very bad. It could go to violence. This is what Sam Harris always says, and he’s got a point. He says that if we can’t reason together, then the only alternative for dispute resolution is violence.
Protection of Personal Property
. . . the writer is saying, “America was founded on looting. What did you think the Boston Tea Party was?” Or, “You’re talking about looting when George Floyd lies dead? Oh, I see, black lives don’t matter as much as property.” These are, to my mind, incomprehensibly idiotic. I don’t mean that to cast aspersions. The civilization that we all enjoy rests upon a very fragile foundation. Look. I’m in my backyard. It’s very nice. I’ve got a lot of space. There’s a fence. The birds come. I have a lawn. It’s mine!
Now, if a homeless person comes and squats in my backyard, I call the police. I have him removed, forcibly. There should be no lack of clarity about whether George Floyd’s death somehow excuses or justifies burning a bodega to the ground that a Muslim immigrant spends his whole life building. Being confused about that, equivocating about that, splitting the difference about that—I don’t understand how we’re going to have a reasoned discussion. My thoughts go back to, protect civilization. Again, I know how that sounds. It’s hyperbolic. It’s exaggerated—but only a little! My gut response is that this is not the time for argument. This is the time to protect civilization and protect institutions. When people start toppling statues of Abraham Lincoln and spray-painting on statues of George Washington, “a slave owner,” things fall apart. The center cannot hold. We teeter on the brink of catastrophe.
I think Fryer’s studies give us good evidence of the Ferguson Effect’s validity. This most recent paper is only one study, but the numbers are stunning. It looks at Ferguson, Riverside, Chicago, and Baltimore as cities where there were Michael Brown- or Freddie Gray-type viral incidents of police brutality, which caused a big public stir that then drew in a federal investigation of each respective local police department. He compares those to other cities, similar in demography and economic structure, but where there was no viral incident, or there was a viral incident, but it was not followed by an investigation by the federal government of the local department.
Fryer finds that violent crime is significantly higher in those cities that were investigated than it is in comparable cities in the years after the federal investigations. It’s a very comprehensive regression-discontinuity study. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s compelling. They estimate that these investigations caused an additional 900 homicides and an additional 30,000 or so felonies. Why? Because, he says, the amount of policing activity in those places diminished significantly with the onset of the federal inquiry, which he shows by documenting the decrease in stops made by police in those places. So he’s got two findings, really. First: police engagement with citizens seems to be sensitive to the extent to which police are placed in jeopardy by the scrutiny of the federal government. Second: the amount of violent crime in those places depends on the amount of police engagement because violent crime goes up when police engagement goes down. That’s an association, not a demonstration of causality, but it’s a very suggestive association.
The Legacy of Slavery and Jim Crow
. . . I’m black. Yeah, these people are black. And we descend from Africans, and the Africans were enslaved. But how determinative is that fact of history on the condition of my community today if I’m an African-American? How determinative is that on the condition of my family today, for what happens in my life today? Left out of your litany was the civil rights era. Left out was the advent of affirmative action. Left out was the elaboration of an extensive welfare state with vast reach; I’m talking about support for indigent families; Medicaid; food stamps and unemployment insurance. Each of those has had its own consequences on the development of social life.
Left out of your story are causal mechanisms. I’m talking about the family. I’m talking about how children are raised. This is not relevant? Human development doesn’t just take place in a school building. It takes place 24/7, 365. The values of the peer group with whom young people affiliate matters. Differences between ethnic groups in the social outcomes we’re interested in, like performance in educational institutions, surely have some relationship to patterns of culture, values, behavior, and the organization of families and communities from which these youngsters emerge, okay? You left some stuff out.
Things are not what they were in 1860, in 1910, in 1950, or even in 1980. Things are different now. Now, you get fired from your job if you’re a prominent person if you merely use the wrong word. Now, if you are a university administrator known to be hostile to affirmative action, your chances of employment outside of Liberty University in Virginia are essentially nil. There’s a vast middle class of African-Americans that didn’t exist a half-century ago. Compared with where else on the planet are your prospects better, even as a person of African descent, born from nothing? Where has the practical implementation of government resulted in a more dynamic, more open society than the one that you and I are privileged to live in right now? Does that sound like some kind of “America’s all great” ideology? Perhaps it does. But I’m willing to take that chance because I think it’s an empirical assessment. The question must always be: “Compared to what?”
. . . Say you’re a black kid with working-class parents. You’re reasonably smart. You couldn’t get into Stuyvesant or Bronx High School of Science, but you got into the Ivy League anyway because you had a good record and your SAT scores weren’t half bad. Are you telling me that the streets of this country are not paved with gold for you? Are you telling me that you’re not going to end up at a good law firm? Are you telling me that if you want an MBA, you’re not going to end up with a job in a Fortune 500 company?
Tax Policy
. . . I’m somewhere in the center of the policy spectrum. I confess to a certain degree of neoliberalism. I don’t want to kill the golden goose. The goose has laid golden eggs in terms of the prosperity of the society. I don’t think we should soak the rich because I believe in incentives, and you don’t want to discourage creativity, productivity, and whatnot. In a situation where you’re leaving behind a gazillion dollars to your kid and the government wants to tax that away—okay, you can have your philosophical argument about whether that should happen. I don’t think that’s a first-order economic question. But an 80 percent marginal tax rate on incomes above $300,000 a year? That’s a very bad idea.
Equality of Opportunity Resulting in Disparities versus Totalitarian Equality of Outcome
. . . I’m channeling Thomas Sowell now. You have two alternatives. You can live with disparities, or you can live in totalitarianism. Again, hyperbolic, I know. No, I’m not talking about Eastern Europe circa 1960, but look at it this way: there can’t be a disparity without somebody being on top. People don’t recognize this.
What groups are on top? What about the Jews? You could say, “There are too many Jews in positions of influence.” If there are too few black lawyers who are partners in big law firms, doesn’t it follow that are too many Jews who are partners at these big firms? If there are too few blacks who are professors of mechanical engineering at places like Carnegie Mellon, why aren’t there too many Korean professors at these places?
If the system is structured to deny the potentiality of black humanity, then the system is structured as to affirm the humanity of the particular groups that are overrepresented in the prized venues of American life. People don’t realize that they’re playing with fire when they take these disparities as ipso facto evidence of systemic failure. They insist on wholesale interventions into people’s exercise of their liberty in order to enact a reduction or elimination of disparities, yet a world without any disparities is a world where you don’t have so many—name your group—who’ve got so much money or so many prizes. There are only so many positions. There is no under-representation without over-representation. This is arithmetic.
What is the nature of the world that we live in? Why would I ever expect that there would be parity across the board between ethnic, racial, cultural, and ancestral population groups in an open society? It’s a contradiction because difference is a very fact of groupness. What do I mean by a group? Well, it’s genes, to some degree; it’s culture; it’s networks of social affiliation, of intermarriage and kinship. I mean the shared narrative, the same hopes, the dreams, the stories. I mean the practices of parenting and filial piety and whatever else there might be.
A group is a group. It has characteristics. Those characteristics matter for whether you play in the NBA. They matter for whether you learn to master the violin or the piano. They matter for whether you pursue technical subjects or choose to become a humanist or a scientist. They matter for the food that you eat. They matter for how many children you raise and how you raise them. They matter as to the age when you first have sex. They matter for all those things, and I think everyone would agree with that.
But now you’re telling me that they don’t matter for who becomes a partner in a law firm? They don’t matter for who becomes a chair in the Philosophy Department somewhere? Groupness implies disparity because groupness, if taken seriously, implies differences in ways of living life. Not everybody wants to play the fiddle. Not everybody wants to dunk a basketball. Not everybody is frightened to death that their parents are going to be disappointed with them if they come home with an A-minus. Not everybody is susceptible to being swayed into a social affiliation that requires them to commit a violent crime in order to prove their bona fides. Groups differ. Groups are not evenly distributed across society. That’s inevitable. If you insist that those be flattened, you’re only going to be able to succeed by imposing a totalitarian regime that monitors everything and jiggers everything, recomputing and refiguring things until we’ve got the same number of blacks in proportion to their population and the same number of second-generation Vietnamese immigrants in proportion to their population being admitted to Caltech or the Bronx High School of Science. I don’t want to live in that world.
. . . [Equality of opportunity is] the ideal. And, insofar as we can give people opportunity through public action—for example, funding schools—yes, I think we should do so. But, insofar as opportunity is also a consequence of informal associations among people—for example, what goes on in their families—again, I repeat: You can get equality only at the cost of tyranny. You’re going to make every parent spend the same amount of time reading to their kid? Is every parent going to make sure that the television is turned off and make sure that the kid is studying at night to the same degree? No, they’re not. Some parents are going to do more. The kids who have parents who are attendant to the nutrition of their child during the gestation period before they’re born, who read to the child while the child is in the crib, who insist that their child does their homework and monitors the kind of friends have and knows where they are at 10 o’clock on any given night—those kids have greater opportunity. How are you going to equalize that?
CHICAGO—The U.S. government has awarded Novavax Inc $1.6 billion to cover testing, commercialization, and manufacturing of a potential coronavirus vaccine in the United States, with the aim of delivering 100 million doses by January 2021.
Novavax shares jumped 35 percent in premarket trade.
The award is the biggest yet from “Operation Warp Speed,” the White House program aimed at accelerating access to vaccines and treatments to fight the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
“What this Warp Speed award does is it pays for production of 100 million doses, which would be delivered starting in the fourth quarter of this year, and may be completed by January or February of next year,” Novavax Chief Executive Stanley Erck told Reuters.
It will also cover the cost of running a large Phase III trial—the final stage of human testing, which could begin as early as October.
The announcement follows a $456 million investment in Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate in March, a $486 million award to Moderna Inc in April, and up to $1.2 billion in support in May for AstraZeneca’s vaccine being developed with Oxford University. The U.S. government also awarded Emergent Biosolutions $628 million to expand domestic manufacturing capacity for a potential coronavirus vaccine and drugs to treat COVID-19.
A safe and effective vaccine is seen as critical to ending a pandemic that has claimed over half a million lives globally, about a quarter of them in the United States.