RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump vigorously defended law enforcement during his presidential campaign. He pledged to restore order to the nation’s cities—where violent crime is surging—and to reinvigorate the rule of law. His appointment of conservative Republican senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general was a strong signal that Trump’s words were more than campaign rhetoric. Now that the Trump administration and the Sessions-led Justice Department are up and running, where should they focus their efforts?

The most immediate goal of the Trump administration should be to change the elite-driven narrative about the criminal-justice system. That narrative, which holds that policing is lethally racist, has dominated public discourse since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. In response, officers are backing off of proactive policing, and violent crime is rising fast: 2015 saw the largest one-year spike in homicides nationwide in nearly 50 years. That violent-crime increase has continued unabated through 2016 and into the early months of 2017. A Trump administration official—perhaps Attorney General Sessions, or the president himself—should publicly address the question of what we expect from police officers: Do we want them to be proactive and to try to stop crime before it happens? Or do we want them to be purely reactive, responding to crime only after someone has been victimized? The administration should explain that data-driven, proactive policing made possible the country’s 20-year, 50 percent violent-crime decline that began in the mid-1990s.

In February, Sessions made a good start in turning around the false narrative about policing, addressing the National Association of Attorneys General. Sessions warned that the nation’s violent-crime decline is now at risk, while acknowledging that the crime increase is not happening in every neighborhood. Yet we are diminished as a nation, he said, when citizens “fear for their life when they leave their home.” (To be blunt, the violent-crime increase has hit almost exclusively in black neighborhoods. Nine hundred additional black males were murdered in 2015 compared with 2014, bringing total black homicide deaths that year to more than 7,000. It is a marker of the perversity of elite rhetoric about race that both Trump and Sessions have been fiercely attacked as racist for pledging to save black lives.)

Sessions noted that officers have become reluctant to get out of their cars to conduct discretionary stops and other “up-close” preventive policing. The administration should go further: it should convey the charged, hostile atmosphere in which officers in many urban areas now operate, thanks to the hatred spread by the Black Lives Matter movement. Gun murders of officers increased more than 50 percent in 2016, led by the targeted assassinations of cops.

A frontal assault on the dominant narrative about a racist criminal-justice system will require laying out the stark racial disparities in criminal offending and victimization. The public has been kept in the dark for decades about how vast those disparities are: blacks commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, for example, and die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Lifting that veil of ignorance is necessary to explain why officers operate more actively in minority neighborhoods—in order to save lives. The public must also understand that it is law-abiding members of high-crime communities themselves who beg the police to maintain order, and that such public-order policing was central to the now-jeopardized 20-year crime decline.

The Atlantic’s May cover features Alec Baldwin covered in orange makeup holding up a Trump wig. The cover asks, “Can Satire Save the Republic?”

What is satire saving the Republic from? Republicans. While making America safe for Socialism.

After Bush won, Democrats fought back by doubling down on the ridicule. Before long they were getting their news from Jon Stewart’s smirk. Stewart spawned a whole range of imitators. Today you can find numberless clones of the Daily Show across cable and even on CBS and, soon, on NBC.

The left is devoutly convinced that this snickering can save America. That it’s better than the news.

The Peabody awards celebrated the Daily Show as “a trusted source of news for citizens united in their disappointment and disgust with politics and cable news”. But the media was the first in line to anoint the politics of contempt, ridicule and disgust as the future of journalism. Now the future is here.

The Washington Post, once a paper of record, swarms with snarky Stewartesque headlines like, “Jeff Sessions doesn’t think a judge in Hawaii — a.k.a. ‘an island in the Pacific’ — should overrule Trump”. Journalism is dead. And replacing it with snarky lefty spin hasn’t saved the Republic. Or anything else.

But the left’s faith in the power of its contempt has nothing to do with its tactical effectiveness.

The left remains convinced that Jon Stewart brought down Bush and Tina Fey brought down Palin because ridiculing the right isn’t just an ugly tactic. Instead it carries an almost religious meaning. Mocking Republicans can save us. Every ideology expresses its superiority through its own triumphalism. Sneering is the left’s own invocation of its own superiority. These are the grown up politics of kids who were convinced that they were better than everyone else because they looked down on them.

Unless you are scheduled to appear on a college campus, that is, for example, at Berkeley, to deliver a culinary-themed lecture on the best way to prepare an egg and ham quiche, Antifa thugs and Social Justice Warriors (thugs-in-training) are not likely to appear to riot, destroy or damage property, and physically assault anyone in protest of your presence. But then who knows what mildewed nihilism, undigested grunge, and ideological sewage pass for thought in the minds of “activists” anymore?

Also, remember that the original “triggered minds” also include Muslim minds, who are the paramount “victims” of micro-aggressions by Western culture, such as freedom of speech, imaginative images of Mohammad, hijab-less women and women in alluring garb, and blasphemous talk about Islam and Allah. Jihadists and Islamic activists are also nihilists, whether they wear $1,000 suits or jeans and T-shirts and flash knives or machetes.

The poster boy victims of micro-aggression:

Triggered Muslims, brothers in

Spirit of Antifa

Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Insitute, in her Wall Street Journal article of April, wrote:

Student thuggery against non-leftist viewpoints is in the news again. Agitators at Claremont McKenna College, Middlebury College, and the University of California’s Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses have used threats, brute force and sometimes criminal violence over the past two months in efforts to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and me from speaking. As commencement season approaches, expect “traumatized” students to try to disinvite any remotely conservative speaker, an effort already under way at Notre Dame with regard to Vice President Mike Pence.

And then there is Pomana College, whose sociology students are demanding the firing of a white professor who teaches “black communities.” Addressed to the school’s sociology department, the dean, and the college president, it complained – nay – demanded the immediate firing (or not hiring) of Alice Goffman. The brave students ended their demand:

(128 names redacted for individual safety in recognition of the violence inflicted on communities of color by various publications, namely [and apparently solely] by the Claremont Independent) (square brackets mine)

Reviewing her subject of “black communities,” one is at a loss to understand why the students would object to her Pomana appointment. She is of the Left, as “her PhD dissertation on the impact of mass incarceration and policing on low-income African-American urban communities… when she immersed herself in a disadvantaged neighborhood of Philadelphia with African-American young men who were subject to a high level of surveillance and police activity….” She is a product of that bastion of Progressive causes, the University of Wisconsin.

Jonathan Marks agrees with my assessment of Goffman his Commentary article of April 24th, “New Rule: White Women Should Not Study Black Communities.”

Alice Goffman, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, is a controversial scholar. Her book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is based on Goffman’s six year immersion in a black neighborhood in West Philadelphia.

The book was published in 2014 to wide acclaim. But it soon attracted critics, including the estimable Steven Lubet, who thinks that Goffman embellished her experiences, repeated as fact things she had heard from her subjects though they were unlikely to have been true, and, most sensationally, became so caught up in the lives of the people she was writing about that she could have been charged with conspiracy to commit murder under Pennsylvania law. Goffman replies here, and Lubet takes up part of Goffman’s reply here. Suffice it to say that there is enough to the controversy to make it unsurprising that when Goffman’s hire as McConnell Visiting Professor of Sociology at Pomona College was announced, some people were disappointed.

Abraham Lincoln noted poignantly that a “House divided cannot stand.” Recent events indicate the Republican party has much to learn from the past. A party divided cannot govern. And a president with his majority party split cannot exercise his Constitutional authority.

The inability of the Republican leadership to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was a set back for President Trump. Freedom Caucus members in the House refused to pass legislation that they regarded as little more than tinkering with Obamacare. And despite the urging of President Trump and Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan consensus could not be achieved.

Then there is the schism over the border tax. A host of conservative organizations are launching a furious campaign against a new tax on imports proposed by many House Republicans, imperiling a Republican plan for a tax overhaul. Much like the failed repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the import tax is dividing conservatives, the business sector and deep pocket members of the party. Along the way, it is exposing the ideological divide between nationalist policies Trump has advocated and the free market – small government movement ensconced in the party.

For Trump, the free market generally benefits wealthy elites at the expense of American workers. For free traders, the border tax is a burden on consumers and a hidden factor in rising prices.

A profusion of strategic and political motives also divide Republicans. For Paul Ryan, who is a conventional free trade advocate, the new tax is a way to satisfy Trump’s protectionist impulse without imposing punitive tariffs. Free traders contend the new tax and a tariff represent a distinction without a difference.

It is also instructive that recent foreign policy decisions have encouraged the federal government’s GOP to look and sound like Democrats that have turned inward. Trump’s America First speech on foreign policy, came right out of the Charles Lindbergh playbook. Would Trump be willing to challenge the unilaterally established air perimeter zone in the South China Sea? Would a significant number of Republicans reject such an initiative?

President Trump is criticized for things he has done and for things he has left undone. What is unreasonable is the additional arbitrary standard to which he, like all modern presidents, is held liable: what he has accomplished, and failed to, in his first hundred days in office.

Why is the figure of 100 days so important? As though Franklin D. Roosevelt doesn’t have enough to answer for, here is another of his legacies.

FDR spoke of “the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal” in his fireside chat of July 24, 1933—142 days after his March 4 inauguration. He was referring to “the historical special session of the Congress” he had convened, which opened March 9 and adjourned June 16. That is, the Hundred Days were legislative days, not executive days.

Today’s Congress commonly leaves Washington three days a week. If you wanted to apply Roosevelt’s implicit criterion of 100 congressional days, you’d be counting not to April 30, but into July or August—or even September or later, since Congress is in recess the whole month of August.

It’s true that in 1933 Roosevelt put the 73rd Congress through its paces. But the reason, or excuse, for the rush of legislation was an economic emergency, signaled by the steadily worsening bank panic. To get the closed banks open again was the aim of the first piece of legislation submitted, the Emergency Banking Act—introduced on March 9 at 12:37 p.m., and on its way to the president at 7:23.

Absent the bank panic, the Hundred Days would not have started with such a bang. Without a similar emergency, why should we expect a president’s (or Congress’s) first hundred days to have anything like the same urgency and focus?

Congress did enact leading elements of the New Deal during the Hundred Days. But within two years the Supreme Court had gutted the National Industrial Recovery Act. The administration never attempted to revive it. In 1936 the same fate befell the Agricultural Adjustment Act, though in less sweeping fashion. Haste makes waste. Perhaps the most famous piece of legislation associated with the New Deal, the Social Security Act of 1935, had nothing to do with the Hundred Days.