RUTHFULLY YOURS

What happens when a city combines body cameras, a “model” law requiring independent investigations of police shootings, and a police chief so committed to reforming the way cops interact with the black community that he’s profiled on public radio’s immensely popular program This American Life? What happens in that same city when a black cop shoots an armed black suspect toting a stolen gun — a gun the suspect reportedly refused to put on the ground despite repeated commands? Do the legal reforms increase community trust? Or does the city erupt in riots and violence?

If you chose “riots and violence,” you’re correct. That’s exactly what happened in Milwaukee this weekend in response to the police shooting of Sylville Smith. Police pulled Smith over on Saturday afternoon, he fled from the scene, and police gave chase. Smith was carrying a stolen handgun. An officer with six years’ experience caught Smith, reportedly ordered him to drop the gun, and opened fire when Smith failed to comply, shooting him the in the chest and arm. Smith died.

According to police, the shooting was caught on camera. (The footage has not yet been released.) But rather than wait for the evidence or for any semblance of an investigation, hundreds of Milwaukee residents rioted, burning police cars, looting stores, and attacking police. Indeed, to listen to some of the protesters and political leaders, the shooting was merely the excuse for the riot, not the justification. Here’s one protester telling reporters that riots are happening because “rich people, they got all this money, and they not . . . trying to give us none.”

Technical progress is often associated with moral and political regress, a theme as ancient as Hesiod’s seventh-century b.c. poem Works and Days.

In 200 b.c., not a male could vote freely in Hellenistic Greece, but the so-called Antikythera analogue computer could predict astronomical cycles in a way unimaginable 250 years earlier in Periclean Athens.

The uncanny ability to craft the great dome of Hagia Sophia did not imply that the people of Constantinople in a.d. 537 had retained many freedoms from the impoverished Roman Republic of 700 years earlier.

We are in such a period of rapid breakthroughs in technology, consumerism, and scientific advancement — equally matched by cultural, social, and political ruin.

Take the question of free speech. Fifty years ago leftist student activists — without iPads and Facebook pages — fought for “free speech areas” in university plazas where they could voice unpopular and even uncouth expression.

Not today.

We may be able to communicate in a nanosecond and send photo images in real time on our cell phones, but someone who was a student at UC Berkeley in the 1960s would today be shocked that there is less free speech on campus than a half-century ago — unless he is a tenured dean who helped to implement the censorship he once opposed.

If a junior faculty member were to write a paper on the racialist undertones of Black Lives Matter, the lack of factual evidence for a campus rape epidemic, or the connection between radical Islam and terrorism, he would likely have to struggle for tenure.

It is not just that a John Ford western could not pass current PC muster, but even modernist raunchy satire such as the 1980s TV hits In Living Color and Married with Children, or the comic career of a Teri Garr or Victoria Jackson, or a movie like True Lies simply could not pass today’s Ministry of Truth.

Free-speech activists, homosexual-rights advocates, feminists, and democracy reformers all privately accept that they are as free to attack the fundamentalism of the Christian Right as they are in real danger — both to their persons and to their careers — should they question Koranic support for widespread current Muslim discrimination against women, gays, and religious reformers. Political correctness has become synonymous with either cowardice or careerism — or both. We damn “Islamophobia” to win social brownie points, but we tune out when there is mention of honor killings or female circumcision. Cheap silence is always preferable to principled but risky dissent.

Orwell was wrong only on his dates. Had he entitled his novel 2016, we would immediately have recognized his parallels to the present “overseas contingency operations,” “violent extremism,” “undocumented immigrants,” and “man-caused disasters.” The campus diversity czar is our Big Brother. Imagining that all lives matter is a thought crime. Due process on a campus today is counter-revolutionary, and proper sexual congress among students is to be scripted as a politically correct act, as if we were all Orwell’s Winston Smith and Julia. Is the Junior Anti-Sex League with its red sashes far behind?

Violence continued for a second night in Milwaukee, as protestors fired shots and attacked police with rocks and bricks.

One victim was shot during the Monday unrest and rushed to a hospital in an armored vehicle. A police officer was injured and also taken to the hospital after a rock broke the windshield of a squad car, according to Milwaukee Police. The damage was not as extensive as the protests from the previous night.

Riots erupted on Saturday night, following the police-involved shooting of a black 23-year-old armed suspect. Sylville Smith fled from police and then turned around and pointed a gun at the officers before he was shot twice.

On Saturday, “protesters torched six businesses, including a gas station, burned cars and threw rocks at officers. During the first night of protests, four officers were injured and 17 people were arrested,” Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said.
Governor Walker Calls Out National Guard to Assist Milwaukee Cops

The unrest continued into Sunday when shots were fired in at least three locations. A police car was hit with bricks, rocks and glass bottles. Another car was set on fire.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

Just after midnight, lines of police began moving down Burleigh St. telling people they were in an unlawful assembly. Several protesters were handcuffed and taken into custody after they refused repeated requests to leave the area.

Early Monday morning, police responded to a car fire at 45th St. and Hadley St.

Order was restored to the area around 2:30 a.m. Monday morning.

Milwaukee police revealed that the officer who shot Smith was also black. Chief Edward Flynn also said the suspect had a “lengthy arrest record” and that a still image from the police officer’s body cam shows “without question” that Smith was armed with a gun in his hand when he was shot.

Much has been said and written about the deleterious effects of political correctness, which makes it next to impossible to speak truth without meeting volleys of censorship and defamation.

Another cognitive tendency, however, is now reaching massive proportions, namely the pervasive refusal to learn, to ferret out facts from the welter of conflicting claims and competing opinions that obscure or deform the exchange of ideas on which the health of a democracy depends, in short, to seek truth. No less destructive to the existence of an informed public than the scourge of political correctness, the lassitude that afflicts us is no doubt, or at least in part, owing to an increasingly dysfunctional educational system at all levels from primary to post-graduate, and operates in conjunction with a widespread cultural propensity to a sort of epicurean laziness that comes with prolonged affluence and an entitlement mentality.

Three recent instances of willful ignorance got me thinking once again about this noxious contagion from which we suffer.

The first was a personal encounter on a Facebook chain in which I misguidedly sparred with an academic colleague on the subject of Islam. My colleague took exception to an article I had posted, “How to Defeat Terrorism,” in which I put forward a series of severe but sensible measures to reduce the incidence of jihadist attacks. I had set terror squarely in the camp of canonical Islam and provided textual evidence to support my contention. My interlocutor accused me of proposing a Nazi-type “final solution,” of thinking in black hat/white hat terms, and of mischaracterizing Islam, which he asserted was 90% based on the bible and which honored the prophetic figures of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

When I pointed out that he was quite mistaken, that Islam had misconstrued these august personages and substantially perverted the message of the holy scriptures, and that he had little accurate knowledge of either the authoritative sources of Islam or the bible in any detail, he was affronted. My knowledge of these matters, while by no means panoptic, is the fruit of 15 years of study, as my correspondent knew from books and articles I had published; nonetheless, he dismissed my information as amounting to nothing more than “ten minutes on Google.” He offered no counter-argument or substantive engagement. He had obviously gleaned his comfortable point of view from watching TV, reading our liberal newspapers, and conversing with his academic peers — and maybe, from ten minutes on Google. And he wore his ignorance proudly.

But he was not yet finished. He proceeded to contradict himself, stating that the Judeo-Christian tradition, which a genial Islam had duly respected, was responsible for atrocities like the Third Reich. When I responded that one can’t have it both ways — the Western tradition is either benign or culpable — and that Nazism was a pagan incursion into the democratic life of the West, he could only resort to evasion, once again displaying a profound lack of investigative grounding. He then signed off, ending our correspondence with an offhand insult. Why should I have been surprised? After all, the academy has proven to be among the most remiss of our institutions in the pursuit of truth.