Cancel the White Men -- And What's Left?

"Can we all just get along?"  That was the plea of Rodney King after a Simi Valley jury failed to convict any of the four cops who beat him into submission after a 100-mile-an-hour chase on an LA freeway.

King's plea came after the 1992 LA riots, the worst since the New York City draft riots in 1863 when Lincoln had to send in federal troops.

In the aftermath of today's protests and riots after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, we hear similar calls. President Donald Trump must "reach out" and "unify the nation." But how?

Many of these calls for unity come from the same elites who are all-in on tearing us apart by pulling down statues of the famous men of American history whom they most detest.

A second war on the Confederacy is underway, to disgrace and dishonor all who fought for Southern independence in the war of 1861-65. A second Reconstruction is being readied.

The St. Andrew's Cross, the battle flag of the Confederate Army, though seen as a banner of heroism and honor to millions, is henceforth to be treated like the Nazi swastika. It has been already been banned at Nascar races, where it has been widely popular.

Liberals will fight for the right of Marxist radicals to burn the American flag to show their hatred of it but cannot tolerate working folks flying the battle flag of the Confederacy to show their love of it.

A second front in the campaign to cancel history is the renaming of U.S. Army bases in Southern states that bear the names of Confederate generals, such as Forts Benning and Bragg. Trump has pledged to veto any defense appropriation bill that contains such a provision.

Third is the drive led by Nancy Pelosi and her allies to remove statues in the Capitol of any of those men of "violent bigotry" who were connected to the Confederacy.

First among them is General Robert E. Lee.

Gen. David Petraeus has put succinctly the crime of which Lee is guilty. Though "West Point honors Robert E. Lee with a gate, a road, an entire housing area, and a barracks," writes Petraeus, "Lee... committed treason."

The goal here is to impose the one-sided view of American history that is now ascendant, as official truth -- that the cause of Southern secession was unlike the cause of American secession from Britain. It was an act of treason rooted in the ideology of white supremacy.

To have that sole acceptable view predominate, our elites believe they must remove from public display the statues of any associated with the cause of Southern independence and stigmatize them all as traitors.

They have, however, a problem: Where do the elites stop when the radicals demand more?

If support of slavery disqualifies one from the company of decent men, does it disqualify George Washington, who owned slaves his entire life? What Washington fought for, independence, was what Lee fought for.

Lee did not challenge Lincoln's election. He did not seek to overthrow the government Lincoln headed. He resigned from the U.S. Army to go home and defend the people among whom he had been raised from an invasion to force-march them back into a Union the state's chosen rulers had voted to leave.

Not only does our national capital, Washington, bear the name of a lifelong slave owner, so does the capital of Missouri, Jefferson City. So does the capital of Mississippi, Jackson. So does the capital of Wisconsin, Madison. The capital of Ohio is Columbus. The capital of South Carolina is Columbia. Both are named for now-vilified Christopher Columbus whose statue still stands outside D.C.'s Union Station.

None of these men appears, from how they lived their lives, to have shared modernity's belief in democracy, diversity or social equality. Yet, it was they who cobbled together the United States of America.

Washington led us to independence and ownership of all the land from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the U.S. Andrew Jackson added Florida. James K. Polk added the Southwest and California. Slave owner Sam Houston won Texas' War of independence and brought his Republic of Texas into the Union in 1845.

Two of the three greatest Senate statesmen of the 19th century, Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun of South Carolina, were slave owners. Both have statues in the Capitol. Do they go, too?

The newest bridge over the Potomac, like the premier dam in the TVA, is named for Woodrow Wilson, who resegregated the government.

These were among the decisive figures of American history. If all are dishonored, with their statues pulled down and their names taken off cities, counties, towns, rivers, canals, bridges, buildings, highways, roads, streets and dams, then what is left?

Detest all those white men if you will, but they were the ones who created the nation we inherited.

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Canceling Our History

It's no wonder that young people don't love our country when they're told to hate it.

Buried beneath news about sorry Supreme Court decisions and rebranded autonomous zones was this clear-cut sign of a sick society: a new Gallup poll indicating that U.S. national pride has fallen to a record low.

Most alarming of all is the poll’s finding that our young people — our future — are today less patriotic than ever, with just one in five adults between 18 and 29 declaring that they’re “extremely proud to be an American.”

But this isn’t a new phenomenon. Our Mark Alexander pointed it out a few years back when he recalled the words of our 44th president: “I believe in American exceptionalism,” declared Barack Obama back in 2009, “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

A fish rots from the head. Or, as Jonah Goldberg put it back when he was still Jonah Goldberg, “Ultimately, it’s not that liberals don’t believe in American exceptionalism so much as they believe it is holding America back.”

So it’s no wonder that we find ourselves in this dismal spot. After all, we’ve spent the last three weeks deifying thugs, demonizing cops, and denying our shared past. We’ve been overcome by a Cancel Culture that sees “white supremacy” and “systemic racism” behind every tree and around every corner; a culture that declares our Founding Fathers irredeemable, and even our abolitionists unworthy.

“BLM,” said the spray can to John Greenleaf Whittier — the poet, Quaker, and anti-slavery activist for whom the California city is named. The rest of the graffiti is unprintable. But if you think this sort of vandalism is indefensible, you’d be wrong. Here’s Swarthmore College archivist Celia Caust-Ellenbogen: “It is important to acknowledge the reasons why the protesters are so frustrated. While Whittier is celebrated for his poetry and his activist legacy, there are numerous African American poets and activists of his era … who have received too little recognition. The statues in this country over-represent the influence of White people and under-represent the importance of people of color, especially African American people, in our nation’s history.”

Got that? It’s okay to vandalize our nation’s monuments if you’re “frustrated.”

The original Vandals were a Germanic tribe that spent 14 days plundering Rome toward the end of its empire days. This sacking of the Eternal City by barbarian tribesmen, and their wanton defacement and destruction of Rome’s magnificent statues and monuments, should give us pause. So should the lengths to which our academics and our elected officials will go to justify the vandalism in our midst today.

Today, it’s Robert E. Lee. But what about tomorrow? Will we rename our nation’s capital because its namesake, The Indispensable Man, was a slaveholder? What about renaming that trendy state to the northwest, the one with that same slaveholding Founder featured foremost in its flag?

Make no mistake: This effort to whitewash our nation’s history by defacing and destroying its statues and monuments will do lasting damage. Indeed, it already has. As Matt Walsh put it recently in The Daily Wire, “If we cannot be united around tradition, language, or heritage, and we also cannot be united around a shared belief in freedom and human rights, then what is left? We would appear to be, already, two different countries.”

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Virtue Signaling Maryland Officials Ignore Brutal Killing By Their Own Cops

They boast outrage over George Floyd, but refuse to tell us why Duncan Lemp was shot sleeping in his own bed.

Perhaps the most outrageous police killing of the year continues to be almost completely ignored by the American media.

Montgomery County, Maryland politicians and government officials have loudly lamented police killings in Minneapolis and elsewhere while continuing to cover up a no-knock raid that is difficult to distinguish from an extrajudicial killing. Since banning so-called no-knock raids has been included in the new House Democratic proposal for police reforms, let’s take a look at a recent one that ended in the death of a 21-year-old man.

At 4:30 a.m. on March 12, a Montgomery County police SWAT team commenced a no-knock raid by firing into a bedroom window and fatally wounding Duncan Lemp as he lay in bed next to his pregnant girlfriend.  Police then stormed the house, using flash bangs to intimidate Lemp’s mother and other relatives living in the house.  Lemp bled to death while family members were handcuffed on the floor nearby.

Lemp was a savvy I.T. guy who was volunteering to assist gun rights groups in setting up secure websites and communications systems. But Lemp had no security to protect himself against police bullets coming through his bedroom window before dawn that morning.

During the raid, police officers repeatedly shouted at family members that everything they said and did was being recorded. However, Montgomery police may have either destroyed any videos or never made a recording. On June 5, lawyer Rene Sandler, representing the Lemp family, sent a letter to Montgomery County prosecutor Haley Roberts: “We have been advised that Police Chief Marcus Jones made an ‘on the record’ statement that no body cameras existed for the raid of the Lemp home and the killing of Duncan Lemp.”  Sandler sought confirmation that the raid video footage existed and requested its immediate release.  She received no response.

After seeing the Sandler letter, I emailed Montgomery County chief executive Marc Elrich and Montgomery County Police Chief Marcus Jones asking: “Can you confirm or deny that there is no body cam footage of the Lemp shooting?” I received no reply. I sent the same question multiple times to county prosecutor Roberts, the same lawyer who threatened Lemp’s parents if they attended a protest over his killing at County police headquarters in April. Roberts replied on June 12: “This matter is an open criminal investigation being handled by the Howard County State’s Attorney’s Office, and as such any inquiries should be directed to that office.”

The coverup of the Lemp killing is being aided and abetted by the Orwellian-named “Law Enforcement Trust and Transparency Act” which the county council enacted last year.   Montgomery County  and Howard County have an agreement to conduct reciprocal investigations of police shootings. Individuals I have spoken to involved in this case have zero confidence in the independence of the Howard County investigation—which conveniently permits Montgomery County officials to shirk all questions. Perhaps some months or a year or two from now, an “official report” will reveal the following: “We investigated our  law enforcement friends and neighbors and found out that they did nothing wrong except for a glitch where one policeman’s finger accidentally bumped a trigger and inadvertently killed a dastardly gun owner who was also guilty of tweeting ‘The Constitution is Dead.’”

Montgomery County officials are offering endless dollops of piety in lieu of revealing how and why Duncan Lemp was killed, while the state government is perpetuating a “stay-at-home” dictate that is one of the nation’s strictest and has helped destroy tens of thousands of jobs. But county officials have nonetheless cheered mass rallies to protest the Floyd killing and the racial injustice. The county police shut down a major road to assist protest Black Lives Matters marches in the heart of Rockville, Maryland, right outside of D.C..

In a June 4 Washington Post op-ed,  county chief executive Marc Elrich declared, “The killings committed by members of the police force are truly horrible, without justification, often explained away and seldom punished appropriately.” But his fervor on this issue does not extend to revealing facts about killings by police under his command. Elrich has said nothing on the Lemp case.

On June 8, Chief Jones and the police chiefs of Rockville, Gaithersburg, and the chief of the National Park Service local division, issued a joint statement:  “We…are angry and outraged over the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota….We realize that we must work toward greater transparency and accountability in order to hold the public trust.”

The police chiefs then declared that they “hereby commit” to a set of reforms, including a pledge to “improve training in cultural competency for our officers.” “Transparency” was nowhere in the reforms.

Two days later,  Chief Jones bewailed: “Over the past couple of weeks, I have been beyond angry. I’m sick to the core of my soul” over Floyd’s killing. But there is no evidence he has lost a moment’s sleep over a killing by his own SWAT team. While Jones has had plenty of time to publicly condemn the action of the Minneapolis police, he has refused to meet with the mother and father of Duncan Lemp, who his own officers killed.

Selective outrage extends to the top law enforcement official in the state. On June 10,  Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, speaking on a Montgomery County panel organized by Communities United Against Hate, lamented that “these past few weeks have been awful,” referring to the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville.  Frosh declared, “It’s not a surprise that many members of our community have lost trust in law enforcement when they see live, on videos, these events occurring.”

Floyd was brutally killed by an eight-minute-knee-on-the-neck after police sought to arrest him for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. Breonna Taylor was killed during an unjustified no-knock raid in the middle of the night. Police charged into her apartment  seeking a drug suspect who she had dated years earlier but was nowhere near the scene. Taylor’s boyfriend fired at the police, hitting one officer in the leg.  Police fired a volley of shots that left Breonna dead.

People are justifiably outraged by Taylor’s killing. But in the Lemp case, there were no shots fired at police who apparently began their assault by shooting into a bedroom window. On June 12, I emailed an inquiry to Frosh’s press office, asking whether he had made any public comments on the Lemp case and why he would “publicly comment on a Kentucky case that sounds similar to a case under his own jurisdiction?” Frosh’s office did not respond.

For the Lemp case, not a single County Council member has requested body cam footage. Actually, not one Council member has shown any interest in the case. The Council has a Public Safety Committee but they appear to have never heard of Duncan Lemp. But the Council did take decisive action on June 11 to declare racism a “public health emergency.”

Who actually killed Duncan Lemp? Nobody in Montgomery County appears to care.    The police have not even disclosed the name of the officer or officers who killed Lemp. In a season when vast protests have occurred alleging racial bias by police, Montgomery County has gotten away with refusing to disclose whether Lemp’s killer(s) was white, Black, Hispanic, Asian, or native American. Montgomery County preens over its progressiveness but its police department procedures on disclosing the names of officers who kill are worse than Philadelphia, long renowned for police brutality.

Even more important than the name of the cop who killed Lemp is the question: Did the SWAT team intentionally turn a search warrant into a death warrant? If not, then why did they start the raid by firing into Lemp’s bedroom?  Will we ever learn the facts?

We hope that liberal Maryland hasn’t adopted some kind of warped double standard in which the color one of one’s skin determines whether there is a fierce investigation into a police killing or officers get away with murder. Duncan Lemp deserves more. As American citizens, we all do.

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Australia: Censoring history makes the past impossible to grasp

By Tom Switzer and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price

Much of history is a story of unintended consequences. What began as a protest at the brutal treatment Minneapolis police meted out to George Floyd has turned into an international movement, hijacked by manipulative people – more often than not white – who appear for the most part to be experienced anarchists. They are seeking to impose their values and political ideas on the rest of society.

We don't doubt that those involved in the movement genuinely oppose the evils of racism. America, after all, has a toxic history, not just because slavery ended there less than 160 years ago, but because African Americans won full civil rights only in the mid-1960s. It's just that the fully justified desire to end police brutality in America can only be clouded by aggressive acts of vandalism and violence.

For too many of the present protesters, opposition is not an end in itself, but rather the means to a greater end: the reordering of a political and social settlement accepted by the vast majority of people in Western nations. For example, the anti-fascist movement Antifa makes no secret of the fact that it wants to redesign American society according to its own recipe of proto-Marxism, identity politics and anarchism.

What these protesters lack in numbers they make up for in noise and intimidation. As a result, they attract media attention.

However, it is not just the present and the future that these anarchists propose to change. Like Pol Pot, with his Year Zero, or Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution, they wish to change the past.

In university history departments across the Western world in the last decade or so, there has been a determination to "decolonise the curriculum". This is an approach that politicises the subject by imposing a Marxist slant on it. Far from paying attention to the main facts of history, it concentrates on imposing the "woke" values of a noisy, self-advertising minority on a very different past.

Without attempting to understand the dynamics of the 19th century, these demonstrators want to remove evidence of imperialism and imperialists. In Britain, the Black Lives Matter leaders also direct their guns at capitalism, and it is a short step from there to a movement for anarchy.

Context is irrelevant to these people: historical figures who had attitudes or performed deeds of which today's society rightly disapprove are to be vilified and despised, with no quarter given. That is why statues and monuments are being ripped down or defaced around the world. For these people, the purpose of history is not to seek the truth, but to deploy it as a weapon – however crude and distorted – to manipulate the present.

It doesn't matter how you dress this act up: it is the imposition of the views of a minority of agitators on the rest of society without any attempt at consultation or respect for democracy. Then again, the whole point of being an anarchist is to reject democracy and to seize any excuse to attack manifestations of the establishment – whether they are statues, other monuments or police officers.

Just look at some of the statues that have been attacked. Winston Churchill, who fought against fascism at a moment when Britain could have gone under the Nazi jackboot, had "racist" daubed on his statue in London's Parliament Square.

In Ballarat, busts of John Howard and Tony Abbott were vandalised with red paint, which suggests that monuments to anyone who failed to advocate leftist politics is now fair game.

In light of that, it is perhaps inevitable that Sydney's Captain Cook statue should become a target. Australia has certainly had distasteful episodes in its treatment of our Indigenous people, especially in the 19th century. But our nation, admirable by almost every international standard, only exists because of James Cook.

Colonisation of Australia's land mass was inevitable, and as Howard has all too often argued, British settlement was a far better outcome than other possibilities. Think of the English language, rule of law, representative democracy, a free press and a market economy. Context is everything.

Defacing the statue of Cook will make no difference whatsoever to the plight of Aboriginal Australians. How would eliminating Cook from our history reduce the rates of family violence, youth suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, welfare dependence and incarceration in Indigenous communities?

History cannot be undone; its legacies are in every society, everywhere. Censoring the past – by removing statues, or stopping the showing of Gone with the Wind or even an episode of Fawlty Towers – only makes a proper comprehension of history (and what the past was really like) impossible to grasp.

To us, much of history was horrible, but it is why Western society is as it is. Removing evidence of that history is the construction of an alternative reality. It is not reality itself.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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