Defend America’s History—and Retake Its Institutions

The country hasn’t passed from great to evil in 20 years. But elites have failed and betrayed us.

At the end of the 20th century, the US had won World War II and the Cold War, liberated half the planet from history’s most dehumanising ideologies, advanced a free-market capitalism that had led more humans out of poverty than any economic system ever devised, and given the world the richest bounty of intellectual, cultural and scientific capital since the Enlightenment.

Americans could — and did — look at themselves and the nation they had built with immense pride.

Twenty years later, much of the country’s political leadership, almost its entire academic establishment, most of the people who control its news and cultural output, and a good deal of its corporate elite view the US as an irredeemably malignant force for enslavement and oppression, a uniquely evil power founded on an ideology of racial supremacy. These Jacobins demand that Americans repudiate most of the nation’s history, tear down the icons of its creation and engage in a collective cultural expurgation of its sins.

Only four years ago, senator Bernie Sanders, a man not noted for a surfeit of patriotic fervour, visited Mount Rushmore and pronounced: “It really does make one very proud to be an American.” On Friday (Saturday AEST), when President Donald Trump made the pilgrimage, we were told that he was appearing, in the words of a CNN reporter, “in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans”.
If the self-image of Americans a generation ago was that of a smiling GI receiving flowers from liberated peoples, today we’re told it’s a police boot stamping on a human face forever. What happened?

We can hope that the present mania is in part one of the baleful consequences of the lockdown lunacy. If you’ve been stuck at home mainlining the distortions of the media for four months, your tolerance threshold for fiction has doubtless been raised.

But the roots of the current insanity are more profound than the inch-deep scholarship of the sophomores now in control of America’s newsrooms.

With hindsight, it’s clear that the US in 2020 was ripe for the kind of mindless Maoism that demands fealty to its gospel of ideological cleansing. The nation has reached a combustive moment. The rot in America’s cultural institutions was spread for more than half a century by a self-loathing cultural establishment. Now it has matured amid a public malaise induced by 20 years of elite-driven political and economic failure that has undermined faith in the system that made America great.
The cultural corrosion has been evident for decades. Perhaps what we should have seen better were its consequences:

generations of students fed a steady diet of critical race theory and postcolonial gender studies — all delivered in safe spaces protected by an intolerance of dissent — poured out of college campuses into the world, waving their white-fragility texts like little red books.

But they graduated into an America that has been convulsed by two decades of unaccustomed failure and loss. In 20 years, wars and foreign-policy failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; financial breakdown; and now the pandemic have exposed a hollow political leadership.

All the while the capitalism that had produced so much opportunity for so many has become increasingly a vehicle of power for a few. Megacompanies in finance and technology have grown unchecked. The modern woke corporation publicly disdains and derides the values on which the nation — and its profits — were built, even as it pursues global opportunities at the expense of American communities.

It won’t be enough to reassert America’s great historic virtues. It will require weakening the power of the totalitarians on campus, ensuring fair access for all voices on tech platforms, holding to account the lawless mobs defacing and defaming the nation’s legacy.

But it will also require addressing the rot in American capitalism, reining in the power of bloated monopolies and ensuring that corporations prioritise Americans over their globalist, progressive agendas.

This is personal for me. I came to this country as that great American century was closing. Like millions of immigrants I was drawn by the irresistible allure of a nation forged in pursuit of a universal ideal it had actually succeeded in achieving. Of course, we knew there was a sharp tear in America’s vibrant fabric, a legacy of racial prejudice that mocked the ideals of the founding. But the nation’s demonstrated ability to advance beyond that, to mend and improve itself, makes America even more admirable.

This country hasn’t passed from great to evil in two decades. America hasn’t failed. But Americans have been failed — misled by inept and deceitful political leaders, deserted by predatory and mercenary corporate chiefs, and, above all, betrayed by a parasitic cultural elite that exploited American freedom to trash the country. It isn’t America’s history that needs to be repudiated. It’s its present.

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JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood among 150 authors and academics united over fear for free speech

JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood have united to voice concern over the deterioration of public debate despite finding themselves on opposite sides of the transgender row.

They are among 150 leading authors, academics and thinkers who signed a letter published on Tuesday that condemns “cancel culture” for stifling freedom of expression in higher education, journalism, philanthropy and the arts.

Along with Noam Chomsky and Sir Salman Rushdie, they warned that a “stifling atmosphere” was restricting the “exchange of information and ideas” and public debate.

Atwood, 80, who has twice won the Booker Prize, has expressed support for transgender campaigners, saying “biology doesn’t deal in sealed either/or compartments”.

Rowling, 54, has angered trans rights activists, most recently by describing hormone treatment as a “new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people”.

Earlier, she took issue with the use of the phrase “people who menstruate” to describe females, and wrote an essay clarifying her fears that women risk being degraded as a political and biological class. Rowling’s position has divided the literary world. The cast of the Harry Potter films and some fan sites have distanced themselves from her.

Atwood tweeted a link to a YouTube video “addressing what was said by JK Rowling in her essay”, adding: “Gender and sex are two different things.”

Tuesday’s letter in Harper’s magazine reads: “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”

It continues: “It is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.

“Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organisations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.”

SOURCE 






Police Unions and Officer Privileges

On the evening of June 28, 2008, Officer Paul Abel of the Pittsburgh Police Department was celebrating his wife’s birthday. During the celebration, he consumed four beers and two shots of liquor. After leaving the party, Abel claimed to have been sucker punched in his car while stopped at a stoplight. He retrieved his Glock pistol from the trunk of his car and drove in pursuit of his attacker. Driving around the block, he spotted Kaleb Miller, a person he knew from the neighborhood and believed to be the one who punched him. Abel then pistolwhipped Miller on his neck and accidentally shot him in the hand. Witnesses testified that the assailant who punched Abel looked very different from Miller. Abel was later arrested.

Common Pleas judge Jeffrey A. Manning found Abel not guilty of aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, and driving while under the influence of alcohol. Chief Nate Harper, however, considered his conduct to be unacceptable and fired him. With the aid of his employee union, Abel was able to successfully appeal the decision to an arbitrator, who reinstated him to his position as a Pittsburgh police officer within a year of the incident (Sherman and Lord 2009).

In addition to having the benefit of engaging in arbitration to appeal disciplinary actions by his employer, as an officer in the Pittsburgh Police Department and a beneficiary of the contract between the city and the Pittsburgh Fraternal Order of Police, Abel has the benefit of having citizen complaints against him expunged from his record after a certain amount of time,[1] being protected from discipline by civilians, retaining his pay while suspended, and having his legal defense paid for him by the City of Pittsburgh in the event he is sued during the performance of his duties.

Although the fact that police unions[2] have a large impact on police practices and management is widely acknowledged, they have been neglected as a research topic (Walker 2008). The National Academy of Science’s comprehensive review of the literature on policing in America in 2004 contains one reference to police unions: “State laws also regulate the collective bargaining rights of organizations representing police employees. State laws regarding the appeal or arbitration of police officer discipline cases have an impact on accountability in local departments” (Skogan and Frydl 2004, 55). Furthermore, Marcia McCormick notes, “Discussions in the legal literature about the way that police culture contributes to misconduct or efforts to stymie reform mention unions mostly in passing, without considering them separate from law enforcement officials” (2015, 59).

However, the relationship between police unions and accountability[3] has begun to receive more attention in the academic literature. Rachel Harmon, for example, recognizes that in the thirty-six states in which police departments are required to bargain with unions prior to imposing any new rule that could affect the terms or conditions of employment, any internal reform meant to address accountability issues, such as requiring the use of body cameras, must be approved of by the unions. “Collective bargaining therefore functions like an immediate tax on these internal department reforms” (2012, 799). Seth Stoughton argues that many of the rules that affect police practices, such as state laws that govern collective bargaining by public-sector employees, are incidental in that they are not intended to have any effect on police practices. The incidental effects Stoughton considers police unions to cause include rank-and-file officers embracing a more legalistic approach to policing and collective bargaining agreements specifying grievance procedures that “both discourage and frustrate attempts to discipline individual officers” (2014, 2211).

Stephen Rushin (2017) compiled union contracts for 178 cities with populations greater than 100,000, noting that these contracts cover about 40 percent of municipal officers in states that allow police to collectively bargain. He found that 156 of the 178 contracts studied contained at least one provision that make it more difficult to legitimately discipline officers engaged in misconduct. Some empirical research suggests that provisions in these collective-bargaining agreements may result in greater amounts of misconduct. Dhammika Dharmapala, Richard McAdams, and John Rappaport (2017) exploited a quasi-experiment in Florida where in 2003 the state Supreme Court extended to sheriff’s deputies the collective-bargaining rights already enjoyed by municipal police. Employing a difference-in-difference approach, they found that collective-bargaining rights led to a 27 percent increase in complaints of misconduct against the typical sheriff’s office.

This paper aims to explain why politicians would find protections an attractive way to compensate police officers, to provide evidence that unionized departments have been more successful in obtaining protections for their members than have nonunionized departments, and to explain how these protections affect the mechanisms for disciplining officers.

The first section provides a brief history of the development of police unions in America and an explanation of why they have obtained the aforementioned privileges. In the second section, I discuss how the privileges obtained by unions undermine the ability of the criminal justice system, civil law, and civilian oversight to hold officers accountable and compare the prevalence of these privileges in large police departments with and without collective-bargaining agreements. The final section looks at the privileges that inhibit the ability of police management and police officer standards and training commissions to discipline officers.

SOURCE 






Roof Koreans: How Civilians Defended Koreatown from Racist Violence During the 1992 LA Riots

The riots of the spring of 2020 are far from without precedent in the United States. Indeed, they seem to happen once a generation at least. The 1992 Los Angeles Riots are such an example of these “generational riots.” And while most people know about the riots, less known – though quite well known at the time – were the phenomenon of the so-called “roof Koreans.”

The roof Koreans were spontaneous self-defense forces organized by the Korean community of Los Angeles, primarily centered in Koreatown, in response to violent and frequently racist attacks on their communities and businesses by primarily black looters and rioters during the Los Angeles Riots of 1992. Despite their best efforts, over 2,200 Korean-owned businesses were looted or burned to the ground during the riots. It is chilling to imagine how many would have suffered the same fate had the Koreans not been armed.

Images of Korean shopkeepers and their families defending themselves from the rooftops of their buildings soon became one of the most iconic images of the riots. Live footage of gun battles were circulated on cable news and elsewhere. The images still resonate with freedom lovers to this day – what image could be more powerful than an ethnic minority refusing to subject itself to a pogrom, instead taking to the rooftops to defend themselves with deadly force, if necessary?

The Republic of Korea’s military is another key part of the story with regard to the Roof Koreans. Far from an untrained mob of men who took up with arms sans training, the Roof Koreans were, by virtually any definition, “a well-regulated militia.” Many of them had experience in the South Korean Army, as South Korea has conscription with very few exceptions.

It’s worth noting that virtually every weapon used by the Roof Koreans to defend themselves, their businesses, their communities and their families would be against the law or, at least, highly restricted today. “High capacity magazines” (anything over ten rounds) are against the law and there is a 10-day waiting period for all firearms purchases. As the riots lasted five days, this would have put anyone who had not already purchased a firearm in a seriously precarious position.

The Lessons of the Roof Koreans

Kurt Schlichter was in Inglewood at the time of riots, one of the hardest hit areas. He speaks eloquently on the topic of the Roof Koreans (or “Rooftop Koreans” as he calls them) and the need of communities to defend themselves. His account of defending Los Angeles against riots is worth reading, despite the fact that he was not in Koreatown.

He makes the case that it is not just wise, but the responsibility of all Americans to prepare themselves for such events. And while we would not go as far as him to suggest that people ought to be legally required to prepare for such an event, we do agree with him that everyone is their own first responder. More than that, there is a solid argument to be made that we have a duty to our community to prepare for those times when individual defense is not enough, but a common defense is necessary.

The Roof Koreans provide a perfect, real-life counter argument to the idiotic question of gun grabbers that free men justify why they “need” certain arms to defend themselves. If ever anyone “needed” a fully automatic rifle with a 100-round magazine, it was the Korean community of Los Angeles.

SOURCE 

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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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