RUTHFULLY YOURS

Most of the news bulletins I’m exposed to are on the radio, as I’m tootling around hither and yon. So it took me a while to discover that what the media call “peace activists”, “anti-racists” and “anti-Nazis” are, in fact, men and women garbed in black from head to toe, including face masks. Thus, as I pointed out on the radio last month, the violence on American streets derives from today’s paramilitary wing of the Democrat Party – antifa – working itself up over yesterday’s paramilitary wing of the Democrat Party – the Ku Klux Klan. Both have stupid pseudo-exotic self-romanticizing names and, as many commentators have observed, both have strict dress codes intended to conceal their identities. From white sheets to black bandanas is a mere fashion evolution: the purpose is the same – to do ugly things one could not confidently do with one’s face known to all.

Yet, as disturbing as antifa is, its romanticization by the respectable classes is even worse. My swaggeringly obtuse compatriot Warren “Catsmeat” Kinsella tweeted:

‘Antifa’ is short for anti-fascist. The only ones who should oppose antifa are fascists.

To which Charles C W Cooke responded:

Exactly. This is why I don’t understand anyone who is critical of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

But you’d be surprised how far a name can take you. Why, only a fascist would be anti-antifa! As Todd Gitlin explains in The New York Times:

Despite the spurious rhetoric of equivalency, supporters of antifa have, to date, killed no one.

Click below to see Mr Gitlin’s finely calibrated distinction in action on the streets of Berkeley last weekend:

Clip is from live chopper feed by @kcranews in #Berkeley. No cops seen, this is #Antifa. https://t.co/vQHUculNTX pic.twitter.com/AJvowKzbev
— Nick Short

Or as a CNN headline unironically cooed:

Activists Seek Peace Through Violence

So violent thugs who “have, to date, killed no one” are peace activists, and peaceful citizens who made the mistake of voting for Trump are the real violent threat. From Todd Gitlin’s New York Times colleague Nicholas Kristof:

We’re Journalists, Mr Trump, Not the Enemy

Mr Kristof is worried that the President’s contempt for the American media may egg on his supporters:

I’ve lost reporter and photographer friends in war zones all over the world, and have had other friends kidnapped and tortured. When Trump galvanizes crowds against reporters in the room, I worry that we may lose journalists in the line of duty not only in places like Syria but also right here at home. Trump will get people hurt.

In fact, it’s Kristof, Gitlin, CNN et al who are getting people hurt, right now – including reporters and photographers. Their willingness to cover for brute thuggery has incentivized antifa, who, entirely reasonably, have concluded they’re free to punch the lights out of any fascist who gets in their way. And, happily, if you’re deluded enough to believe that the principal threat to the United States in the year 2017 is “fascism”, why then everyone and his l’il old spinster auntie looks like a “fascist”. In that video up above, that’s a cameraman getting beaten up by antifa. Here’s a female journalist for The Hill getting punched in the face by an “anti-fascist”. Oh, and here’s a CBS reporter antifa put in the hospital. What’s your problem? In America today, Democrat state senators urge the assassination of the President and pay no price. To be fair, Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal was at pains to point out that she had no plans to kill Trump herself, merely that she wouldn’t be averse to some John Wilkes Booth type volunteering his services – like that Bernie Sanders supporter who pumped those bullets into House Majority Whip Steve Scalise the other week and left him with injuries that will afflict him for the rest of his days. And without Nicholas Kristof fretting that “Bernie will get people hurt”. After all, Scalise is out of intensive care, so, as Mr Gitlin would point out, his shooter has “to date killed no one”.

This then is the good violence – the violence that brings peace. Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, says that “antifa isn’t concerned with free speech or other liberal democratic values” – because “fascism cannot be defeated through speech”.

One reason “fascism cannot be defeated through speech” is because the desiccated plaints of the left so hollow out speech that they render it so meaningless a graduate of “journalism school” can find himself typing up the headline “Peace Through Violence” and never stop to think, “Hang on a minute…” That CBS reporter antifa beat up? Who cares? He was “perpetuating rape culture”:

He intentionally ignored the denial of consent, still without identifying himself (though we still wouldn’t care), which was a threat to safety and should be considered in a context of perpetuating rape culture. Denial of consent by the media is still a denial of consent and is disgusting and parasitic behavior.

If the “rape culture” shtick doesn’t do it for you, well, he’s a white man with a telephone:

Due to the intensity and context of this time people are very scared of white men running full speed at them with iPhones as this is the exact behavior of a white supremacist trying to out identity of people of color and anti fascists in order to invoke fear.

I don’t know what that last bit means, but, if that Liberty Bell is named after Alexander Graham, the sooner they blow it up the better. White men with telephones cannot be defeated through speech!

Two leading anti-Trump resistance groups, Refuse Fascism and the Workers World Party, are siding with the gulag-filled Stalinist hermit state of North Korea that has threatened to incinerate the American homeland with nuclear weapons, evidence suggests.

Both of these extreme-left organizations have organized demonstrations against the Trump administration that have turned violent, including those around Inauguration Day. Both groups are also part of the violent “Antifa” coalition of leftist groups that portray themselves as anti-fascist but embrace fascistic tactics like beating up political adversaries to intimidate them into silence.

Both groups are also spouting pro-North Korean propaganda talking points, and in at least one case, copying and pasting official North Korean statements into communiques.

Last month, masked Antifa thugs in Berkeley, California, called for the destruction of the United States. “No Trump, no wall, no USA at all!” the large gathering of black bloc-attired protesters chanted at a conservative “No to Marxism” rally. The same weekend Antifa worked with San Francisco officials to prevent the innocuous conservative group Patriot Prayer from holding a small rally at a federal park. As this writer previously observed, thanks to Antifa, the Left now has the power to dictate what is and is not acceptable speech in California and many parts of the country.

After the UN Security Council unanimously resolved August 5 to slap North Korea with more sanctions, both groups stoutly defended the nightmarish Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Daily Caller reports.

Leaders of Refuse Fascism indicated at a recent conference that the group hopes to deprive U.S. leaders of “international legitimacy” as a means of driving President Trump from office, an objective that would no doubt please North Korea.

Refuse Fascism has announced plans to try to overthrow the U.S. government through occupations and crippling strikes. The Trump-resistance organization plans to organize demonstrations in urban centers across the nation later this year, according to Politico.

Leftist currency speculator George Soros has ties to Refuse Fascism. He funds the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ), a group that took in donations on behalf of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The AfGJ now serves as a fiscal sponsor for Refuse Fascism, accepting donations on behalf of unincorporated or small groups and deducting a modest administrative fee so that donors can deduct the donations from their taxes.

Soros’s friends in the Democracy Alliance, a donors’ collaborative of wealthy left-wing one-percenters, may also be funding Trump-resistance groups like Refuse Fascism.

Refuse Fascism has characterized the situation between the U.S. and North Korea as “the largest military power in the world bullying a small, isolated country and terrorizing the people of that entire region.”

The month before, the group accused the U.S. of acting based on a “playbook of demonization” against dictator Kim Jong-un. Sounding like the seditious peaceniks of the pro-Soviet unilateral disarmament movement in the U.S. and the U.K. in the 1980s, Refuse Fascism appealed to Americans to forget about their country’s interests and “act in the interests of humanity instead.”

“Stop thinking like an American,” the group said. “Start thinking about humanity.”

Refuse Fascism asked Americans to resist what it called the U.S. media’s “lies and distortion” that put the DPRK — the most oppressive, totalitarian state in the world — in a negative light.

“No, we should not be comfortable with the disgusting media frenzy, full of lies and distortion, that marches us toward not just another invasion of a small country but a nuclear attack that can wipe out millions of people in one day and threaten the future of life on earth,” the group said.

The NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice, in its annual report on crime, finds that the murder rate in America’s 30 largest cities rose 13.1 percent in 2016—an alarming figure, especially considering last year’s identical increase. Striking a calming note, the Brennan Center’s press release accompanying the report begins by reminding us that “Americans are safer today than they have been at almost any time in the past 25 years.” But downplaying the recent uptick in the homicide rate distracts from the fact that there is more than one America when it comes to violent crime: indeed, 51 percent of all U.S. murders are committed in just 2 percent of the nation’s counties, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center.

No city more starkly illustrates this disparity than Chicago. Many scoffed at President Trump’s tweets about federal help to stop the “carnage” there. “Chicago’s murder rate wasn’t even in the top 10 among large cities,” tweeted USA Today law and justice reporter Brad Heath in response. The Atlantic observed that “there are a number of cities . . . that have much, much higher homicide rates.” A CNN column argued that “a deeper dive into the numbers shows fears over the city’s violence can be overblown when compared to cities much smaller.”

But Chicago—which, the Brennan Center concedes, “accounted for 55.1 percent of the total increase in urban murders” in 2016—deserves its reputation as an American murder capital, or at least a significant part of it does. If policymakers, journalists, and others really wanted to take the “deeper dive” into the numbers that CNN suggests, they should try looking at neighborhood crime statistics. Doing so reveals that, within Chicago, a large sub-city exists that is, in fact, the most dangerous big city in the United States.

It’s true that Chicago, with a citywide homicide rate of 27.9 per 100,000 people, has relatively fewer murders than seven other large cities, including St. Louis, Baltimore, Memphis, and Detroit. Much of Chicago sees few murders. A better way to understand Chicago homicides is to break them down by police district. To see how concentrated the city’s murders are, I isolated the precincts in which approximately 75 percent of the homicides occur and compared that area—call it Sub-Chicago—with the U.S. cities that are supposedly more dangerous than the Windy City.

During the 365-day period beginning June 7, 2016, Chicago had 711 first- and second-degree homicides. Of those, 556 (or 78.1 percent) occurred in just ten of the city’s 25 police districts. Those districts—which are contiguous—constitute a geographical area almost half the city’s size and house 40.3 percent of the city’s nearly 2.7 million residents. With a population of almost 1.1 million, Sub-Chicago would itself be one of America’s largest cities, and, with a homicide rate of 51.2—almost double Chicago’s 2016 citywide rate—it would be in the running for the title of America’s most dangerous, as it is just shy of surpassing the 2016 citywide rates of Baltimore and St. Louis. Nowhere else in the country is there an area so large and so heavily populated with a murder rate this high.

Even when you look at the areas of concentrated homicide in other cities—i.e., those that encompass close to 75 percent of a city’s murders—Sub-Chicago stands out. In St. Louis, for example, 184 murders were committed during the period beginning May 1, 2016, and ending April 30, 2017. Of those, 136 (or 73.9 percent) occurred in three of the city’s six police districts (Sub-St. Louis). Those three districts cover 50.6 percent of the city’s 63.8 square miles, which, according to the city website, house 135,920 (or 42.5 percent) of the city’s 319,294 residents. A similar tract of Sub-Chicago, made up of police districts 11 and 15, with 140 murders and a population of 129,932, posted an annual murder rate of 107.7 per 100,000 during the 365-day period studied—slightly higher than the area constituting Sub-St. Louis (100.05).

Disillusionment with government and popular culture arises at anger over two entirely different realities. One truth is politically correct and voiced on the news and by the government. It is often abstract and theoretical. And the other truth is empirical, hushed and accepted informally by ordinary people from what they see and hear on the ground.

Public orthodoxy signals virtue, private heterodoxy ensures ostracism. So Americans increasingly make the necessary adjustments, modeling their lives in some part as those once did in totalitarian societies of the 20th century. The reality they live is the stuff of the shadows; the falsity they are told and repeat is public and amplified.

Cynicism and eventual anger at the schizophrenia are always the harvests of such bipolarity.

Chasing Symbols, Ignoring Realities
The official Narrative postulates that mute stones of the Confederate dead in public places is proof of continuing racism; their removal then will promote healing and empower the oppressed.

In contrast, the unofficial and popular consensus is that when street thugs deface or destroy public property and panicky mayors issue executive orders to remove them in the dead of night, the issue has little to do with strengthening democracy and even less to do with reconciliation with victimized groups. It has everything to do with redefining democracy as street theater.

The war against mute stones is more a show of the power of activists who hope to bully the country into accepting their various identity politics agendas, even if they have little practical therapeutic effect on the challenges of those they claim to defend.

To create a cultural atmosphere that holds it shameful and a crime against humanity for known gang members to shoot at inner city youths with near assured impunity is apparently impossible; to scream that a long dead Robert E. Lee is a living and hurtful racist is rather easy. Yet the cynical public concludes that such virtue signaling about the dead ignores felonies against the living because, for some reason, those cannot be addressed.

The LGBT community now argues that gender-neutral restrooms are the civil rights issue of our era. Soon, it will be the absolute duty of society to change by fiat public protocols allowing one to “transition” from one gender to another.

Perhaps such special facilities may relieve the anxieties of those troubled about their sexual identities, while not commensurately causing equal or greater anxieties for far more numerous people when those of a biologically different sex share their private spaces. But either way, the chief health threat in 2017 to young non-heterosexuals is a more likely a sudden and potentially deadly epidemic of syphilis, civilization’s bane of the ages, once thought almost eradicated but now reemerging with a terrible vengeance.

The liberal Los Angeles Times notes that the terrifying epidemic is almost entirely expressed among the young, male, and homosexual population. It suggests that the outbreak is a result of a resurgence of promiscuous sex—in part a result of our larger pan-sexual culture of promiscuity; in part an artifact of smartphone apps and instantaneous electronic dating hookups; and in part a false sense of security that successful remedies to HIV have now made frequent and unprotected sex with a multiplicity of partners once again part of the cultural exuberance of the gay community.

President Trump is taking flak from all sides for ending his predecessor’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, thus putting some 800,000 young immigrants—so-called Dreamers—in legal limbo. Though the President and Barack Obama share responsibility for instigating the crisis, Mr. Trump and Congress now have an obligation to fix it and spare these productive young adults from harm they don’t deserve.
***

Mr. Trump was at his worst during the campaign when he assailed DACA as an “unconstitutional executive amnesty,” though to his credit he later evinced a change of heart toward these immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. The White House continued DACA despite legal misgivings. But in June, 10 GOP state Attorneys General presented an ultimatum: Kill DACA or we’ll sue.

They could make this threat because President Obama unilaterally issued the policy in June 2012 putatively because Congress failed to reform immigration, but the end-run was timed to galvanize his base before the election. He also knew that Dreamers have widespread public sympathy, including among Republicans who otherwise support strict immigration enforcement. He figured Republicans would harm themselves politically by opposing the compassionate policy and that a GOP successor couldn’t roll it back without a public backlash.

This was Mr. Obama at his most cynical, and it takes gall for him to scold Mr. Trump as he did Tuesday for making a “political decision” about “a moral question” and “basic decency.” Mr. Obama’s “political decision” to act as his own legislature teed up this moral crisis and created the legal jeopardy.

DACA allows undocumented immigrants under age 36 to apply for legal status and work permits, which can be renewed every two years. Applicants cannot have a serious criminal conviction. They must attend school, have a job, or serve in the military.

As America’s problems go, these young adults shouldn’t even be on the list. And it shows the Republican Party at its worst that the state AGs and Attorney General Jeff Sessions want to make this an urgent priority, rather than let Congress take it up when it has a less crowded schedule. They are pandering to the restrictionist right that is a minority even within the GOP.

But as a legal matter, they are right that Mr. Obama’s DACA diktat presents legal problems. The Constitution gives Congress the power to write immigration law, and issuing work permits confers a right that is the purview of the legislative branch.

The GOP AGs led by Texas’s Ken Paxton threatened to amend their lawsuit against the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), which Mr. Obama issued in November 2014. That sweeping order granted legal protections to four million or so undocumented immigrants and stretched far beyond any reasonable definition of prosecutorial discretion.

In 2015 the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed DAPA, holding that the order usurped congressional authority. The Supreme Court left the injunction in place last year. Mr. Sessions is probably right that DACA “is vulnerable to the same legal and constitutional challenges that the courts recognized with respect to the DAPA program.”

But DACA presents distinct humanitarian and economic concerns—as well as a government promise that carries a moral if not legal obligation. Unlike DAPA, which was never implemented, some 800,000 Dreamers have used DACA to reorder their lives.

The Obama Administration invited Dreamers out of the shadows and asked them to submit personal identification and records that could now allow the feds to track them down. These young immigrants have committed no crime and trusted the federal government to protect them. A study last year by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center found that 87% of DACA beneficiaries are employed.

The events in Charlottesville raised many questions about national cohesion. If a national government is to exist, it requires political loyalty that causes neighbors to treat each other as fellow citizens. Without a legacy of social trust derived from a sense of belonging, political stability is impossible. Those on either side of the barricades in Charlottesville were not united in common sympathies and could not in any meaningful way offer their fealty to government.

In fact, these were warring parties, diverse in every sense of the word. No matter how seemingly secure the conditions in a nation may be, the nation state is still vulnerable to external antagonists and internal struggle. Discriminating against people on the basis of race means, in effect, denying equal rights. Clearly the organizers of the Charlottesville riot had this concept in mind.

Both groups claim they are revolting against tyranny. For the alt Right, it is the tyranny of political correctness and the assertion of free speech; for the alt Left it is yet again hostility directed at the Establishment, the will of the sovereign. In both instances, there is the desire to be liberated from the constraints of nature, albeit the methods are different. The Left deplores the Founders of the nation as those who sought the legitimacy of racial inferiority. The Right deplores the emergence of a new ontogeny that resists the idea of human differences.

At the moment, the demonstrators have forgotten that they are citizens in a body politic that produces a modicum of order as opposed to revolutionaries who live for disorder. Unifying under these circumstances is a mission impossible. What is not impossible, of course, is recognizing the vast majority of Americans who argue for a plague on both sides of the current debate. Americans still aim for logical consistencies, ridding themselves of extremist pretensions.

Most Americans find disagreeable behavior upsetting. Civility, the quality of character meant to smooth relations roiled by disagreements, is a mitigating factor in political exchange. For Thomas Hobbes civility is “a means of peaceable, sociable and comfortable living.” However, civility is not a trait of modern verbal warfare. In fact, warring ideological parties test the limits of toleration even though civil discourse was once organized along the premise of “difference without disagreement.”

Christian doctrine has advocated the virtue of civility. But this too has fallen into a memory hole in which religious matters are inconsistent with civil peace. As a result, civility now means conforming to contemporary liberalisms requirements, e.g. safe spaces and micro aggressions. Real diversity of opinion is a casualty of these demands. Though we may hold political opponents in low regard, the argument goes we should listen and attempt to dissuade them from their erroneous views. But how is this to be done in an increasingly intolerant culture?

After the election of Donald Trump, there arose a self-described “Resistance.” It apparently posed as a decentralized network of progressive activist groups dedicated to derailing the newly elected Trump administration.

Democrats and progressives borrowed their brand name from World War II French partisans. In rather psychodramatic fashion, they envisioned their heroic role over the next four years as that of virtual French insurgents — coming down from the Maquis hills, perhaps to waylay Trump’s White House, as if the president were an SS Obergruppenführer und General der Police running occupied Paris. Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone wrote admiringly about the furious Resistance’s pushback against Trump, with extravagant claims that his agenda was already derailed thanks to a zillion grass-roots and modern-day insurgents.

Hillary Clinton belatedly announced that she too had joined up with the Resistance (“I’m now back to being an activist citizen and part of the Resistance”), apparently in approbation of both its methods and agendas.

Appropriating the name of heroic World War II fighters to characterize a loosely formed alliance of Trump resisters has since proven a mockery of history — and creepy as well.

Resisters of various sorts have made use of repugnant assassination pornography: a Shakespearean troupe ritually stabbing Trump-Caesar every night, a widely viewed Trump decapitation video, loud boasts by Hollywood’s stars such as Robert De Niro and Johnny Depp of their desires either to beat Trump to a bloody pulp or to do a John Wilkes Booth hit on him, street demonstrations where the likes of multimillionaire exhibitionist Madonna dream out loud off blowing up the White House, while various state legislators, professors, and activists talk of presidential assassination. Is there a new division at the Secret Service whose sole task is solemnly informing the media that it is “investigating” the latest celebrity’s threat?

In more mainstream fashion, Democrats in Congress have often stalled Trump’s appointees, blocked Obamacare reform, and talked of removing Trump through impeachment or the 25th Amendment or the Emoluments Clause. The Resistance has gone from melodramatic charges of Trump’s collusion with the Russians, to amateur diagnoses of his mental incapacity, to fear-mongering about his supposed wild desire for a Strangelovian nuclear war with North Korea, to castigating him for his apparently callous and uncaring reactions to Hurricane Harvey victims.

The Democratic National Committee leaders in their speeches resort to scatology to reflect their furor at Trump’s victory. The media, led by CNN in its visceral hatred of Trump, has given up past pretenses of disinterested reporting. Indeed, a number of journalists have sought to ratify their prejudices by claiming that Trump is so toxic that old-style protocols of fairness can no longer can apply.

Street brownshirts such as those of Antifa (too rarely and belatedly disowned by a few mainstream Resistance leaders) justify their anti-democratic and anti-constitutional violence on the grounds that Trump is found guilty of being a Nazi — and therefore those alleged to be Nazis have to be resisted by any anti-Nazi means necessary.

In the olden days, demonstrators decked out in black, with masks and clubs, would have been deemed sinister by liberals. Now are they the necessary shock troops whose staged violence brings political dividends? Antifa’s dilemma is that its so-called good people wearing black masks can find almost no bad people in white masks to club, so they smash reporters, the disabled, and onlookers alike for sport — revealing that, at base, they perversely enjoy violence for violence’s sake. As the cowardly Klan taught us in the 1920s and 1960s: Put on a mask with a hundred like others, and even the most craven wimp believes he’s now a psychopathic thug.

For the most part, the Resistance leadership is not the modern version of a group of grass-roots idealistic outsiders living hand-to-mouth between missions in the scrub. Their announced leaders, such as Hillary Clinton, are often the embodiment of the status quo rich, influential, and elite America. The Resistance sees nothing incompatible in attacking Trump while working out of a townhouse in Georgetown, living in a Malibu compound, flying in a private jet, making a quarter-million a year as a university-endowed professor or a Southern Poverty Law Center grandee, or being a life-time Washington fixture or corporate CEO.