RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.
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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.

Blacklists are ugly things. They’re how you terrorize and intimidate people. They’re a weapon of hate. And Color of Change, an extremist group, is using blacklists to smear all conservatives as racists.

Color of Change, the organization founded by Van Jones, a 9/11 Truther and former Communist, has circulated a blacklist to PayPal, Discover, Visa, Master Card and American Express that falsely and libelously groups together a black Harlem church, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an ex-Muslim organization, Jihad Watch and others as “white supremacists” alongside actual Neo-Nazis.

But Color of Change’s definition of “white supremacist” is Republican.

“We must hold every enabler of #Trump accountable,” Color of Change boss Rashad Robinson had tweeted. “#Enablers of white supremacist & nazi sympathizers are not neutral, they are complicit.”

In another Tweet, he laid out his real agenda for bringing down Trump. “Continuing to ensure there are consequences for #enablers – corporate, political and cultural – is critical to forcing him out. Isolate him!”

The Color of Change blacklists aimed at President Trump’s corporate council members and his grass roots supporters are part of the same partisan plot to use false accusations of white supremacy to intimidate corporations into silencing his supporters and forcing him out of office.

“There are no sidelines,” Color of Change declared before Trump’s inauguration. Any politicians or executives who worked with him were traitors. “For those in power—whether in government or in corporations—who choose to enable Trump’s plot against our country, we must be just as uncompromising.”

The blacklist is Color of Change’s weapon in its “uncompromising” war against democracy.

Color of Change has a long history of targeting corporations with pressure campaigns based around false accusations of racism in order to silence supporters of the Republican Party and punish critics of the Democrat Party.

When Glenn Beck expressed his disapproval of Obama, Color of Change warned his advertisers that if they didn’t pull their ads, they would be “publicly associated with his racism”. A more recent campaign targeting Bill O’Reilly also accused him of racism. Neither Beck nor O’Reilly are racists, but Color of Change uses false accusations of racism to intimidate corporations into silencing its political opponents.

When McCain campaigned for the White House, Color of Change accused him of allowing his supporters to shout, “Kill him” at Obama. When Romney ran against Obama, Rashad Robinson accused him of “appealing to the basest racisim [sic].” Rashad and COC’s smears have remained dishonestly consistent.

Color of Change used the same tactic when going after ALEC, a pro-business group targeted by leftist activists over its opposition to government regulation. Corporate members of ALEC were warned, “either stop funding ALEC, or become widely known as a company dismantling the gains of the civil rights movement. “

Behind Color of Change’s racism smears are rich white leftists. Its money comes from George Soros, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, the Ford Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Behind its posturing about “white supremacy” are the usual targets, FOX News, ALEC, the Republican Party and conservative activist groups, which the left has always plotted to destroy in its quest for total power.

Hitting corporations with racism smears is just how the left’s racism-smearing subdivision goes about it.

This column verges too closely on equivalence between the alt-right and the violent thugs of Antifa, however a tribute to James Madison is very welcome.
I visited James and Dolly Madison’s restored home and graveside “Montpelier” in Virginia last fall. I walked off a tour which only emphasized his ownership of slaves without mentioning that he was editor of The Bill of Rights, or a co author, with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay of the Federalist Papers. My brother and I walked through the magnificent estate bemoaning the fact that he is so under appreciated as a founding father of our great democracy…..rsk

The broad middle of this country seems caught between a rock and a hard place. On the far left, the “Antifa” movement has taken to protesting — often quite violently — ideas that do not conform to their transitory notions of social justice. On the other extreme, the alt-right has become indistinguishable from white-supremacist and neo-Confederate movements that have their origins in the seedy underbelly of American political history.

In light of this, it is seductive to question the utility of free speech. After all, speech is not entirely free in Europe. There are certain views you are prohibited from publicly expressing there, and they seem to have well-functioning democracies. Why must we hold to such an absolutist view? Are we not giving aid and comfort to the opponents of the republic by allowing them to utter such vile words? Is it not wiser to leaven the First Amendment with a prudent disregard for the fringes?

If we understand free speech in purely liberal terms — i.e. as a self-evident right — then these questions seem to have merit. After all, we restrict other rights for the sake of the public welfare. Most of them can be taken away, so long as it is done so with “due process.” And the process that is due, in many respects, is conditioned by the political, social, and economic climate of the day. Why not speech?

But the First Amendment is not merely an expression of liberal freedom, but of republican freedom as well. The liberal conception of liberty defines it as absence of government interference from your life — or, in its 20th-century evolution, liberty means that the government provides for a certain standard of living. But the republican notion of liberty is different. A free republic is one in which people are governed by laws that they themselves have a hand in making. From this perspective, freedom of speech needs to remain nearly absolute.

To appreciate this, consider the efforts of the man most responsible for the Bill of Rights, James Madison.

Madison was not so much the author of the Bill of Rights, but its editor. He was initially opposed to the project; the structure of the Constitution offered sufficient protection for civil liberty, he thought, and he feared that an enumeration of rights would imply a limitation to them. But the ratifying conventions in many states had approved the Constitution, with suggested revisions. Madison, who viewed these conventions as tribunes of the popular will, took their recommendations seriously. As George Washington’s de facto prime minister during the first session of the First Congress, he refined the wide array of proposals into what ultimately became the Bill of Rights.

The thing to understand, what has always been the most important thing to understand, is that Jim Comey was out in front, but he was not calling the shots.

On the right, the commentariat is in full-throttle outrage over the revelation that former FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference.

The news appears in a letter written to new FBI Director Christopher Wray by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham. Pundits and the Trump administration are shrieking because this indicates the decision to give the Democrats’ nominee a pass was clearly made long before the investigation was over, and even long before key witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed.

It shows, they cry, that the fix was in!

News Flash: This is not news.

Let’s think about what else was going on in April 2016. I’ve written about it a number of times over the last year-plus, such as in a column a few months back:

On April 10, 2016, President Obama publicly stated that Hillary Clinton had shown “carelessness” in using a private e-mail server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the [criminal statutes relevant to her e-mail scandal]). The president acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, its importance had been vastly overstated.

This is precisely the reasoning that Comey relied on in ultimately absolving Clinton, as I recounted in the same column:

On July 5, 2016, FBI director James Comey publicly stated that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in using a private email server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the relevant criminal statute). The director acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, it was just a small percentage of the emails involved.

Obama’s April statements are the significant ones. They told us how this was going to go. The rest is just details.

In his April 10 comments, Obama made the obvious explicit: He did not want the certain Democratic nominee, the candidate he was backing to succeed him, to be indicted. Conveniently, his remarks (inevitably echoed by Comey) did not mention that an intent to endanger national security was not an element of the criminal offenses Clinton was suspected of committing – in classic Obama fashion, he was urging her innocence of a strawman crime while dodging any discussion of the crimes she had actually committed.

As we also now know – but as Obama knew at the time – the president himself had communicated with Clinton over her non-secure, private communications system, using an alias. The Obama administration refused to disclose these several e-mail exchanges because they undoubtedly involve classified conversations between the president and his secretary of state. It would not have been possible to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for mishandling classified information without its being clear that President Obama had engaged in the same conduct. The administration was never, ever going to allow that to happen.

What else was going on in May 2016, while Comey was drafting his findings (even though several of the things he would purportedly “base” them on hadn’t actually happened yet)? Well, as I explained in real time (in a column entitled “Clinton E-mails: Is the Fix In?”), the Obama Justice Department was leaking to the Washington Post that Clinton probably would not be charged – and that her top aide, Cheryl Mills, was considered a cooperating witness rather than a coconspirator.