RUTHFULLY YOURS

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article is adapted from Heather Mac Donald’s new book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.

Often accompanying the spurious claim that blacks are disproportionately imprisoned because of the war on drugs. An even more audacious argument is that incarceration itself causes crime in black neighborhoods, and therefore constitutes an unjust and disproportionate burden on them because blacks have the highest prison rate. This idea has gained wide currency in the academic world and in anti-incarceration think tanks. Professor Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia Law School (whom we met as in “expert witness” in earlier chapters) offered a representative version of the theory in a 2003 law review article coauthored with two public-health researchers. Sending black males to prison “weakens the general social control of children and especially adolescents,” Fagan writes. Incarceration increases the number of single-parent households. With adult males missing from their neighborhoods, boys will be more likely to get involved in crime, since they lack proper supervision. The net result: “Incarceration begets more incarceration [in] a vicious cycle.”

A few questions present themselves. How many convicts were living in a stable relationship with the mother (or one of the mothers) of their children before being sent upstate? (Forget even asking about their marriage rate.) What kind of positive guidance for young people comes from men who are committing enough crimes to end up in prison, rather than on probation (an exceedingly high threshold)? Further, if Fagan is right that keeping criminals out of prison and on the streets preserves a community’s social capital, inner cities should have thrived during the 1960s and early 1970s, when prison resources contracted sharply. In fact, New York’s poorest neighborhoods — the subject of Fagan’s analysis — turned around only in the 1990s, when the prison population reached its zenith.

Fagan, like many other criminologists, conflates the effects of prison and crime. Neighborhoods with high incarceration rates suffer disproportionate burdens, he claims. Firms are reluctant to locate in areas where many ex-convicts live, so there are fewer job opportunities. Police pay closer attention to high-incarceration zones, increasing the chance that any given criminal within them will wind up arrested. Thus, incarceration “provides a steady supply of offenders for more incarceration.”

But if business owners think twice about setting up shop in those communities, it’s because they fear crime, not a high concentration of ex-convicts. It’s unlikely that prospective employers even know the population of ex-cons in a neighborhood; what they are aware of is its crime rates. And an employer who hesitates to hire an ex-con is almost certainly reacting to his criminal record even if he has been given community probation instead of prison. Likewise, if the police give extra scrutiny to neighborhoods with many ex-convicts, it’s because ex-cons commit a lot of crime. Finally, putting more criminals on probation rather than sending them to prison — as Fagan and others advocate — would only increase law-enforcement surveillance of high-crime neighborhoods.

Orlando’s Pulse nightclub terror attack will go down in U.S. history as the single largest case of mass slaughter ever conducted by a lone gunman in the nation’s 240-year history. Barack Obama’s shameful but predictable response to the carnage can best be characterized as deceitful spin involving a two-part strategy of obfuscation.

The first part involves deflection. Divert America’s attention from the main culprit – Islamic terrorism – to forwarding dual strawman/red herring arguments designed to confuse and mislead. By doing so, he hoped to draw America’s attention away from his own flawed foreign and domestic policies which enabled the ISIS-inspired Muslim terrorist to commit mass slaughter.

Obama cleverly but disingenuously framed the issue as a gun control matter, cynically exploiting the tragedy to advance his agenda for further eroding Second Amendment rights. In his eyes, it was the AR-15 sporting rifle (which turned out not to be the gun that was actually employed) and the National Rifle Association that bore direct responsibility for the killings. He then referred to the carnage as a “hate crime” directed against the gay community, completely glossing over the central role played by a malevolent political ideology that seeks to dominate and impose Sharia law on the West.

In fact, Omar Mateen never expressed anti-gay animus during his 911 rants to police though he did express disdain for U.S. foreign policies and unambiguously professed his Islamic leanings and allegiance to the Islamic State. Moreover, he scouted other locations, having no nexus with the LGBT community, before finally settling on the Pulse nightclub to execute his diabolical plans. Perhaps he did so because he was familiar with the club’s layout, having been there on multiple prior occasions as a patron. Or perhaps he viewed it a soft target in which he could easily inflict mass carnage. No one will know for certain why he chose Pulse but Obama has already set the agenda and charted a course for its trajectory. That trajectory places Americans on a thought process that deliberately diverts attention away from the main causes and culprits.

ATTEMPTS TO LEGISLATE AWAY INCORRECT OPINION ARE SIGNS OF ENCROACHING TOTALITARIANISM

My friend Kathy Shaidle has recently posted a no-holds-barred article on the disaster of “hate speech” legislation, focussing on a proposed Liberal bill to punish “anti-transgender speech” by up to two years in prison. She reminds us that such totalitarian interventions into a presumably democratic society are by no means unique to Canada. As she writes, “bear in mind that New York state, for one, already has similar laws on the books, and they carry fines of up to $250,000. And [an] Oregon ‘transmasculine’ teacher got $60,000 because her colleagues wouldn’t refer to ‘it’ as ‘they.’”

The notion of “hate speech” has begun to infect an entire culture quivering under the aegis of political correctness, with the result that multitudes of subjects are increasingly off limits. But are there not things in this world that are truly hate-worthy? Should we not hate a racially supremacist ideology like Nazism or a totalitarian philosophy like Communism? Should we not hate individuals like Hitler or Haj Amin al-Husseini or Stalin or Pol Pot or Mao or Che Guevara or any mass murderer who comes to mind? Should we not hate tyrants who subjugate entire populations? Should we rather pity or love or labor to make excuses for those who blow up buildings and massacre thousands of ordinary citizens going about their daily lives? Are such movements and people not genuinely hateful? And is there not, as the Preacher exhorts, “A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak?”

When we observe pervasive cultural trends which are based on demonstrable falsehoods, like the global warming boondoggle or the feminist distortion of sound tradition and common sense or the epidemic of dodgy rape claims in a gynolatric culture or the Middle East Studies flagrant revisions of the historical archive or the politicization of the educational system as occurred in the Germany of the 1930s, is this not “a time to speak”?

If we are dismayed by the concerted attack on biological reality that leads to grotesque bodily mutilations and social policies that favor violations of the natural order while stigmatizing the skeptical and, as Robert Reilly cogently argues, promoting “the substitution of pure will as the means for unshackling us from what we are as given,” should we not be permitted to voice our outrage or express our beliefs, however unseasonable? If we object to the “slaughter of the innocents,” aka pro-choice abortion, which has given us the atrocities of Planned Parenthood’s craniotomies-for-profit, why should a free society not allow for debate and discussion?

Why should morally responsible convictions be tarred as “hate speech” and become socially rebarbative or even prohibited by law? It is the very essence of what we are as human beings that will have been rendered offensive or repugnant—a shrivelling of the self that is the signet of despotic societies everywhere. Indeed, where does “hate” enter into the equation? Or if we insist that it does, why should those on the side of repression not be equally accused of “hate speech” or, for that matter, outright hatred against those whom they would ostracize or imprison?

The term “hate speech” is like a kind of verbal spandex taken off the rack that can stretch to fit any intended wearer. If I should make a joke of the inherently preposterous identity category of transgenderism and refer to it as “transJennerism,” would I be liable to prosecution under Canada’s tendered Bill C-16? It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. “Hate speech” has come to mean anything one wants it to mean, just as “sexual assault” in the repuritanized West may encompass nothing more than a flirtatious look or compliment. The notion of “hate speech” is a convenient, multi-purpose strategy for silencing opposition to the shibboleths of our current political and cultural mandarins, subjecting us to what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze dubbed the “microfascism of the avant-garde.” In the last analysis, it is the broad and malleable concept of “hate speech” itself, which has developed into a license to abuse, that is hateful.