RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the wee morning hours of July 5, a Bronx police officer, 48 year-old Miosotis Familia, was shot dead as she sat in her patrol car.

Familia was a 12-year veteran of the New York Police Department and the mother of three children. She was murdered by 34-year-old Alexander Bonds, a career criminal with a record for violence, including violence against police officers.

Officer Familia, judging from her name and photograph, is a dark complexioned Hispanic.

The scumbag who robbed her of her life is black.

This last point bears mentioning, for there is no way to divorce this cold-blooded, unprovoked assassination of one of New York’s Finest from the anti-police Zeitgeist to which forces on the left have given rise. It’s true, of course, that there has long existed in America, especially since the emergence of leftist “liberationist” movements in the 1960’s, hostility toward those entrusted with maintaining the thin blue line between civilization and savagery.

Yet it’s equally true that this hostility accelerated considerably during Barack Obama’s second term as President, particularly since the shooting death of Mike Brown and the Black Lives Matter movement that arose in its wake.

Leftists are forever excusing non-white actors for their conduct, however atrocious it may be. It is to “the root causes,” the context of “social conditions” or “institutions,” that we must turn to account for why, say, blacks, though comprising no more than 13% or so of the American populace, are responsible for over half of all murders.

In other words, non-whites are never, ultimately, accountable for those of their behaviors that are undesirable and destructive (it is always and only their bad behavior from which nonwhites are exempted of responsibility). It is “society,” i.e. whites, who bear accountability for the bad deeds of nonwhites.

Never, though, do leftists look upon their own words and deeds as “root causes.” Indeed, while the search for “root causes” and the specific excuses that the left invokes are almost always fundamentally wrongheaded for more than one reason, to understand patterns of conduct larger contexts must be sought.

And the shooting death of a police officer by a black criminal does in fact belong to an all-too extensive—and established—pattern.

The former Soviet Union possessed many imaginative mechanisms to deal with the problem of enemies of the people who obstructed the path to socialist utopia — now known as “social justice.” One of those mechanisms was the practice of confining individuals who were thinking the wrong thoughts to insane asylums. Indeed, if you caused any trouble for the commissars, a good inoculation of neuroleptics (powerful drugs used to “quiet” the symptoms of schizophrenia), forcibly administered through a tube in the nose, could do wonders in bringing your politically incorrect behavior to a halt.

Dissidents such as Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pyotr Grigorenko, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Esenin-Volpin and Joseph Brodsky were all among the brave freedom-fighters who bore the brunt of the Soviet practice of institutionalizing dissidents in mental hospitals and force-feeding them mind-shattering drugs. Gorbanevskaya was committed to a psychiatric hospital for attending the 1968 Red Square demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Grigorenko suffered the same fate for criticizing the Khrushchev regime. Bukovsky was confined to a psychiatric hospital for “anti-Soviet agitation.” Brodksy was sent to mental hospitals for not writing the right kind of poetry; his treatments involved “tranquilizing” injections, sleep deprivation and forced freezing baths. Esenin-Volpin was institutionalized in the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital for his anti-Soviet thoughts.

Today’s progressive Democrats are also faithfully journeying on an uplifting odyssey. Horrified by Trump’s opposition to Obama’s “fundamental transformations,” they have found their own neuroleptics in the form of the 25th Amendment and a bill seeking to impeach the president for being mentally unsound. Indeed, Trump has to be mentally deranged and unfit for office, because what other reason could possibly explain his frightening disagreement with the Left’s un-American creed of identity politics — race and gender uber alles? What other factor could possibly be at play in his embrace of individual freedom and responsibility — and in his rejection of group privileges and racial/gender hierarchies that, as David Horowitz has noted, can only be manifested after America’s Constitution is null and void?

Confronted by Trump’s shocking blasphemy against their anointed plan, several Democrats, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), have now signed onto a bill that seeks to remove Trump by invoking 25th Amendment powers. The bill cites section 4 of the amendment, created in 1967 after JFK’s assassination, that allows for an independent body to remove the president based on the determination that he has been mentally or physically incapacitated to carry out his duties. Raskin’s initiative would activate a probe into whether Trump has been too far “incapacitated” to continue as president.

This effort is, actually, even sicker than the Soviet practice, since the amendment does not refer to psychiatric problems, but to actual incapacitation through assassination or stroke.

Raskin claims he is concerned that “something is seriously wrong” with Trump, citing a “sustained pattern of behavior” and several “errant and seemingly deranged tweets,” which he believes are damaging to U.S. interests. But to anyone who hasn’t drunk the progressive Kool-Aid, it is obvious that Trump’s sustained pattern of behavior is not damaging U.S. interests. Instead, it is unhinging his political enemies and damaging the progressive assault on America’s social contract. Trump’s tweets do not warn, for example, that the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam (an Obama meme) or that you can keep your doctor if you like him. They are singing the praises of America and calling out a corrupt media for its brazen lies and political partisanship.

The assassination of NYPD officer Miosotis Familia, who was sitting in her vehicle doing paperwork when she was shot in the head, is the latest instance of the national “War on Cops.” Her murderer, Alexander Bonds—subsequently gunned down by cops—was a career criminal who boasted of having attended “Attica High School,” and had previously beaten up a police officer with a pair of brass knuckles.

Bonds, whose Facebook page displays a picture of him wearing a T-shirt reading “Coming Out Hard,” hated the police and blamed them for his problems. He posted a video of a young man assaulting a female officer, agreeing with a comment that she was a “lil bitch” who had “to prove something.” Bonds also called for the release of leftist hero and convicted cop-killer Judith Clark, a participant in the notorious 1981 Westchester Brinks robbery on behalf of the Black Liberation Army. Depicting himself as a vicious pit bull straining at the leash, wearing a spiked collar, Bonds described “vengeance” as his most “deadly” characteristic: “If someone hurts you, they have to feel the full force of your wrath and your vengeance is swift and merciless.”

Officer Familia, the tragic target of Bonds’ twisted sense of justice for the miserable consequences of his bad choices, was by all accounts a model citizen and heroic public servant. A former Red Cross worker and registered nurse, the mother of three had served on the NYPD for 12 years. At the time of her murder, Officer Familia was guarding a corner that had been the site of a recent shooting, in a demonstration of the NYPD’s commitment to “flooding the zone” to restore order to neighborhoods afflicted by criminality.

The murder of Officer Familia is only the most recent of a deadly series of attacks on law enforcement officers around the country. The murders of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in December 2014 by a gunman apparently seeking revenge for the death of Eric Garner; the killings of seven police officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas by a radical black separatist in July 2016; and the murder of two Des Moines cops last November by a disgruntled “loner” are three of the most prominent ambush killings of cops in recent years. But these incidents only scratch the surface of what San Antonio police chief William McManus described earlier this week as general “hatred” toward police officers.

That hostility arises largely from a media-fed narrative—promoted cynically by liberal politicians—that black men are unjustly targeted and killed by police. In fact, incarceration rates by race, age, and sex largely track criminality, and research demonstrates that black men are actually less likely than whites to be killed during police confrontations, when adjusting for crime rates.

Anti-police sentiment has led to “de-policing” across America, though not yet—thankfully—in New York. But in Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit, murder rates have shot up as law enforcement has retreated from proactive policing of high-crime neighborhoods. The Black Lives Matter movement and its rhetoric of victimhood have thus helped lead to more black deaths. And now the killing of Officer Familia by Alexander Bonds can be added to that sad and growing list.

Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal and project director of the NYC Initiative at the Manhattan Institute.

WASHINGTON — House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) underwent another surgery today after an infection dealt a setback to his recovery from a gunshot wound.

Scalise’s office said Wednesday night that he had been “readmitted to the Intensive Care Unit at MedStar Washington Hospital Center due to new concerns for infection,” with his condition downgraded to “serious.”

The congressman was gravely wounded in the June 14 attack on a Republican congressional baseball game practice, and had been moved out of the ICU on June 23.

In an update this evening, Scalise’s office said he “underwent surgery for the management of infection” earlier. “He tolerated the procedure well. He remains in serious condition. We will provide updates as appropriate.”

Tyson Foods lobbyist Matt Mike, who was shot multiple times in the chest, was released from the hospital on June 23. Capitol Police Special Agent Crystal Griner is recovering from a gunshot to the ankle.