RUTHFULLY YOURS

Perhaps it will turn out that the latest assassination of police officers, this time in Baton Rouge, is unrelated to the hatred fomented by the Black Lives Matter movement. Perhaps the gunmen were members of militia groups aggrieved by federal overreach, say. But the overwhelming odds are that this most recent assault on law and order, taking the lives of three officers and wounding at least three more, is the direct outcome of the political and media frenzy that followed the police shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, less than two weeks ago. That frenzy further amplified the dangerously false narrative that racist police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today.

President Barack Obama bears direct responsibility for the lethal spread of that narrative. In a speech from Poland just hours before five officers were assassinated in Dallas on July 7, Obama misled the nation about policing and race, charging officers nationwide with preying on blacks because of the color of their skin. Obama rolled out a litany of junk statistics to prove that the criminal justice system is racist. Blacks were arrested at twice the rate of whites, he complained, and get sentences almost 10 percent longer than whites for the same crime. Missing from Obama’s address was any mention of the massive racial differences in criminal offending and criminal records that fully account for arrest rates and sentence lengths. (Blacks, for example, commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at about 11 to 12 times the rate of whites alone.) Instead, Obama chalked up the disparities to “biases, some conscious and unconscious that have to be rooted out . . . across our criminal justice system.”

Then five Dallas officers were gunned down out of race hatred and cop hatred. Did Obama shelve his incendiary rhetoric and express his unqualified support for law enforcement? No, he doubled down, insulting law enforcement yet again even as it was grieving for its fallen comrades. In a memorial service for the Dallas officers, Obama rebuked all of America for its “bigotry,” but paid special attention to alleged police bigotry:

When African-Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment, when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently. So that if you’re black, you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested; more likely to get longer sentences; more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime. When mothers and fathers raised their kids right, and have the talk about how to respond if stopped by a police officer—yes, sir; no, sir—but still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door; still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right might end in tragedy.

When all this takes place, more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.

The irresponsible zealotry of this rebuke was stunning. Obama was fully on notice that the hatred of cops was reaching homicidal levels. And yet his commitment to prosecuting his crusade against phantom police racism trumped considerations of prudence and safety, on the one hand, and decent respect for the fallen, on the other. Of course, Obama also uttered the mandatory praise for officers who “do an incredibly hard and dangerous job fairly and professionally,” and he warned against “paint[ing] all police as biased, or bigoted.” This was self-indulgent hypocrisy. A passing denunciation of stereotyping hardly compensates for the insane accusation that black parents rightly fear that any time “their child walks out the door,” that child could be killed by a cop.

In the hours and days after terrorist massacres of police, one cannot justify violence and remain a member of polite society. Indeed, polite progressive society is even now engaged in the project of propping up Black Lives Matter — of spoon-feeding its activists opportunities to declare that they reject violence in all its forms even as their protests continue to be marked by violence and calls for violence. Anything good and peaceful? That’s Black Lives Matter. Anything violent or destructive? That’s not, even when it’s perpetrated at Black Lives Matter rallies, by people professing the same ideals as Black Lives Matter.

Worse yet, there’s a subset of radicals that refuses to completely disavow violence even when given the opportunity. The trick is to find a way to use the violence without exactly condoning it. How can one condemn it and exploit it?

In a (since-deleted) tweet Think Progress’s Zack Ford wrote: “Given how police haven’t been held accountable for murdering black people, it’s no surprise some are taking justice into their own hands.”

What an extraordinary statement. It’s “justice” to kill law-enforcement officers who had nothing to do with any single controversial police killing? If police have been “murdering black people” with no accountability, why not talk about specific cases? Why not deal with specific facts? It is much easier, apparently, to indulge in the crudest sort of moral equivalence, imbued with just enough distance (he’s not explicitly justifying; he’s just not surprised) to ensure you keep your job and your public voice.

The sophisticated approach comes (of course) from white-progressive America’s favorite black intellectual, MacArthur Genius Grant-recipient Ta-Nehisi Coates. Writing in The Atlantic after the Dallas massacre, Coates called the murders an “abhorrent act of political extremism,” but then immediately added this:

A community consistently subjected to violent discrimination under the law will lose respect for it, and act beyond it. When such actions stretch to mass murder it is horrific. But it is also predictable.

According to Coates, the son of a Black Panther, the police represent nothing but force, and are thus just another “street gang.”

For if the law represents nothing but the greatest force, then it really is indistinguishable from any other street gang. And if the law is nothing but a gang, then it is certain that someone will resort to the kind of justice typically meted out to all other powers in the street.

The Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, doesn’t start until July 25, but a look at the party’s draft platform reveals one fact: Democrats remain hopelessly unserious when it comes to greenhouse gases and climate change.

To be sure, the platform contains plenty of phrases that aim to inspire voters, including references to income inequality, “greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street,” and the need to protect civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, LGBT rights, and so on.

While the Democrats are right to favor voting and civil rights for everyone, including women, transgendered people, and homosexuals, they are intolerant of any heterodoxy on the issue of nuclear energy and its pivotal role in the effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

The draft platform includes 24 mentions of the word “nuclear,” but that word is never followed by “energy” or “power.” Instead, it’s followed by words like “annihilation,” “weapon,” and “warhead.” It’s as though the Democrats have pledged to ignore America’s single largest and most reliable source of low-carbon electricity.

Alas, this isn’t new. In the party’s 2012 platform, the phrase “nuclear energy” appears just one time, and that mention occurs in reference to nuclear proliferation. The 2008 platform mentions “nuclear power” only once, and again, refers to nuclear weaponry. This years-long conflation of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons comes straight out of the green Left’s anti-nuclear playbook.

In the draft platform, the Democrats claim that “America must be running entirely on clean energy by mid-century.” The phrase “clean energy” — which is enviro-speak for wind and solar energy (and only wind and solar) — appears 18 times and is regularly followed by words like “jobs,” “economy,” “superpower,” and “leadership.”

What makes the Democrats’ see-no-nuclear-energy, speak-no-nuclear-energy stance so astounding is that the party’s leaders continually claim that anyone who dares differ from the orthodoxy about catastrophic climate change is a “denier.” Furthermore, high-profile climate activists insist that we should “do the math.”

Okay. Let’s do some math.

In 2015, America’s nuclear plants produced 839 terawatt-hours of electricity. (That’s nearly twice as much energy as was produced last year by France’s reactors.) America’s fleet of nuclear reactors is now producing about four times as much low-carbon electricity as all domestic wind projects (193 terawatt-hours last year), 21 times as much as all U.S. solar (39 terawatt-hours), and three times as much as all U.S. hydropower facilities (253 terawatt-hours).

Big Green groups continually claim that we don’t need nuclear because wind and solar are getting cheaper. That might be so, but how soon could wind and solar replace nuclear? Over the past five years, domestic wind-energy capacity has been growing by about 7 gigawatts per year. Each gigawatt of capacity produces about 2.6 terawatt-hours per year. Therefore, at current rates of growth, it will take about 46 years for wind energy to replace the electricity we are now getting from nuclear.

Hillary Clinton has outspent Donald Trump in unprecedented fashion. Her endorsements bury Trump’s. The Obama administration is doing its best to restore her viability. The media are outdoing their 2008 liberal prejudices. And yet in John Connally delegate fashion, Clinton’s vast expenditures of $100 million plus have so far earned her only a tiny, if any, lead in most recent polls. If each point of approval is calibrated by dollars spent, Trump’s fly-by-night campaign is ahead.

Nor has Trump matched Clinton’s organization or voter-registration efforts. He certainly has blown off gifts from a number of Clinton gaffes and misfortunes, usually by gratuitously riffing on off-topic irrelevancies, from the Trump University lawsuit to the genocidal Saddam Hussein’s supposedly redeeming anti-terrorist qualities. Pollsters, gamers, insiders — everyone, really — have written his political epitaph for over a year. Rarely have conservative voices at mainstream-media outlets vowed not to support the Republican nominee. And yet the longer he stays viable, the more likely it is that Trump has a real chance at winning the presidency, which may already be a veritable 50/50 proposition. So why is the supposedly impossible at least now imaginable?

1. Not a Typical Populist

When critics are not slurring Trump as Hitler or Mussolini, they write him off, in sloppy fashion, as a dangerous populist — at worst an hysterical, demagogic Huey Long, at best a quirky Ross Perot: in other words, a flash in the pan who capitalizes on occasional but brief surges of Neanderthal isolationism, protectionism, nativism, xenophobia, and collective insecurity among the lower middle classes.

That diagnosis is rehashed groupthink. By any definition, Trump is not a classical populist. His traction derives from opposing unchecked and cynical illegal immigration, not diverse and measured legal immigration. And he is rebelling not so much against a flabby, sclerotic status quo as against a radical, even revolutionary regime of elites who are now well beyond accustomed norms. It is hardly radical to oppose the Confederate doctrine of legal nullification in more than 300 sanctuary cities, or a de facto open border with Mexico, or doubling the national debt in eight years, or ruining the nation’s health-care system with the most radical reconstruction in the history of American health-care policy, or systematically running huge trade deficits with an autocratic China that does not adhere to international norms of free trade and predicates expanding political and military power in the South China Sea on its commercial mercantilism. Trump seemed incendiary in the primaries, but as he is juxtaposed to the official Clinton extremist agenda, he will likely be reinterpreted increasingly as more mainstream — a probability enhanced by his selection of Mike Pence as his running-mate.

2. Obama Nihilism

Do not underestimate the volatility of Barack Obama’s popularity. As long as Obama keeps silent and out of the limelight, he nears 50 percent in approval ratings. The moment he returns to the fray (and he always does, as a June bug to a patio light), he instinctively reverts to his natural divisive and polarizing self, as evidenced in his disastrous reactions to the Dallas police shootings, and his politically suicidal post-Dallas courting of Al Sharpton (who used to call on supporters to “off” police) and of the architects of Black Lives Matter. It is likely that Obama, to cement a hard progressive legacy in the next four months, will only double down on his gratuitous pandering, and therefore will see his poll numbers return to the low or mid-40s. That may help Trump seem an antidote rather than an obsequious continuance.

3. Two Sorts of Elitists

Both Trump and Clinton are elitists in an anti-elitist year. But elitism is not all the same. The popular furor is not directed at the rich per se, but rather at the perception of cultural snobbishness and hypocrisy among those who romanticize the always-distant poor, as they favor the always-proximate rich, and caricature the despised middle class that lacks the taste of the latter and the appeal of the former. Trump’s in-your-face tastes and brashness are vulgar in the pure Roman sense, and his accent and demeanor are not those of the cultural elite, or even of the dignified Mitt Romney–type moneyed bluestockings. In contrast, Hillary, like Obama, talks down to Americans on how they ought to think, speak, and act. Trump seems to like them just as they are. In turn, middle-class hatred of the elite is not aimed at Trump’s garish marble floors or the narcissistic oversized gold letters plastered over the entrances to his buildings, but rather at the rarified self-righteous. Like it or not, Trump can square the ridiculous circle of a raucous billionaire as man of the people far better than Hillary can handle the contradictions of a Wall Street–created crony multimillionaire pandering to the Sanders socialists.

No sooner are the bloodstains and bits of human flesh hosed off the concrete from the latest Muslim or #BlackLivesMatter terrorist attack and the grieving families ushered through the cold metal doors of impersonal morgues to identify the bodies of their loved ones that the vultures of the media rise above a wounded city and begin spinning the same old lies.

The propaganda, the artful selection and deselection of facts, have become as familiar to us as they were to any of the residents of the Soviet Union or North Korea. Anyone who pays attention knows not only that they are being lied to, but can easily predict the lies that they will be told on the evening news even before they actually hear them being spoken out loud.

We always knew that the Muslim terrorist, even before he was identified, would turn out to be a secular loner who was depressed over his family life. All the media had to do with Mohammed Bouhlel, the Islamic terrorist who murdered 84 people in Nice, France was to replay the same exact narrative as the one that they had fed us with Omar Mateen, the Islamic terrorist who murdered 49 people in Orlando.

Irreligious, depressed loner with family problems. Check. No connection to Islamic terrorism. Suggestion of mental illness. Check and check. Insistence on his lack of interest in religion? One final check.

Mohammed shouted “Allahu Akbar,” the ancient Muslim battle cry that originated with Mohammed’s murder of Jews whose meaning is that Allah is greater than the deities of non-Muslims, but the media persists in its dedication to burying the truth in a shallow unmarked grave at midnight behind CNN headquarters.

Gavin Eugene Long aka Cosmo Setepenra, who murdered three police officers in Baton Rouge, was also unstable. Much like Dallas cop-killer Micah Johnson, who was also another “unstable loner.”

What do Mohammed and Gavin, Micah and Omar all have in common? They’re inconvenient killers.

The left supports the ideologies, black nationalism and Islam, in whose name they carried out their crimes so the media has to redirect attention away from the ideology to the individual.

It doesn’t matter that the killers were very clear about their motives. What matters is hiding the truth.

The most recent horrific terror attack, this time in Nice, France on Bastille Day, is the latest of a string of attacks overseas as well as inside the United States. It has shaken people around the world, causing them to question what their governments need to do to protect them.

Our leaders are forever reacting to the latest attack, placing us on an elevated defensive posture, whenever and wherever it may occur. Often news reports are aired that show video clips of heavily armed police officers patrolling our airports and other venues in response to the latest attack no matter where the attack was carried out, to create the illusion of protecting us.

This perspective can most generously be called folly. The terror threats we face do not go up and down like the stock market. While it makes sense to marshal snow plow drivers and those that drive the trucks that spread salt on highways when a blizzard is forecast for the region, in preparation for the impending storm to quickly clear the roads, terrorism presents a constant threat.

The only questions are how, when, where, and how many will be killed or injured. We are in this battle for the long haul and failure is not only not an option but would spell the catastrophic demise of our nation.

While some have simplistically said that our military alone, combatting ISIS overseas can protect, the reality is that we must fight this war on two fronts- overseas and within our borders. Domestically this battle must be waged by many elements of the law enforcement apparatus- including, especially, immigration law enforcement authorities.

This was my focus in my recent article, “Fighting The War On Terror Here, There and Everywhere.”

The 9/11 Commission was created to determine how terrorists were able to carry out deadly attacks in the United States to make certain that it would never happen again. This is comparable to the way that the NTSB and the FAA investigate plane crashes to make the appropriate fixes.

The preface of the official report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel – Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” begins with this paragraph:

“It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.”

CLEVELAND — Hillary Clinton’s appalling address to black activists yesterday suggests that she may be an even more fanatical supporter of the dangerous, violent Black Lives Matter movement than Barack Obama.

Clinton is clearly now the Black Lives Matter candidate. Spewing lies and half-truths, she has become increasingly radical on the issue of race relations in recent months. The former secretary of state, U.S. senator, first lady, and now presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, speaks warmly of those black criminals who kill police, claiming that there are root causes that somehow at least partly justify those murderers.

In her speech at the NAACP annual convention in Cincinnati yesterday, Clinton said “systemic racism,” something that doesn’t exist in America, needs to be eliminated. She perfunctorily denounced the recent spate of cop killings that her party has otherwise cheered on by endorsing Black Lives Matter. (A transcript is available here.)

“This madness has to stop,” she said, while demanding that the prisons be emptied through so-called criminal justice reform.

But Clinton is not a natural orator.

Obama, by contrast, is expert at bouncing between rhetorical reverence for nonviolent action and a refusal to condemn violent activism, which is tantamount to endorsing violent activism. Obama pronounces the activist’s cause just and the rest follows. No matter how terrible the political violence perpetrated, if Obama agrees with those perpetrating it, he soothingly rationalizes the evil conduct away. For the most part Obama sounds good while lying to your face, at least when he is being guided by a teleprompter.

Clinton may be a practiced, pathological liar, but she is not the smooth talker that Obama is.

She is a screamer and an annoying one. When giving speeches she is wooden and shrill even when the coughing fits that signal her poor health shut her down in mid-speech. The fact that professional feminists shriek that calling Hillary shrill is sexist in no way changes the fact that she is shrill. She has trouble modulating her voice, unable to build up to an emotional crescendo. She just suddenly gets angry and strident reading her prepared text and starts shouting. Her voice and her delivery grate on the nerves of normal people.