Operation Legend Takes Dozens of Killers Off the Streets, Tracks Down Thousands of Fugitives

Speaking from Kansas City, Missouri Wednesday afternoon, Attorney General Bill Barr gave an update on Operation Legend and efforts by the federal government to solve violent crimes.



"Three weeks ago we substantially expanded Operation Legend and we are now underway in nine U.S. cities...the Operation is named for Legend Taliferro, a four year old boy who was shot while he was asleep in his apartment. For us, Legend is a symbol of the many hundreds of innocent lives that have been taken in the recent upsurge in crime in many of our urban areas," Barr said, flanked by Taliferro's mother and father. "His life mattered and the lives of all of those victims matter. His name should be remembered and his senseless death, like those of all the other innocent victims in this recent surge should be unacceptable to all Americans. Through Operation Legend the federal government has dispatched to these nine cities more than 1000 additional agents to work shoulder to shoulder with our state and local partners."

"Operation Legend is the heart of the federal government's response to this upturn in violent crime. Its mission is to save lives, solve crimes and take violent offenders off the streets before they can claim more victims. Rather than demonizing and defunding our police, we are supporting and strengthening our law enforcemcent partners at the state and local levels," Barr continued. "So far federal and state task forces involved in Operation Legend have made almost 1500 arrests, 1485 to be precise. Many of those arrests are for violent state crimes including 90 homicides like Legend's murderer. That's more than 90 suspected killers who might still be on the streets without Operation Legend and in many cities, as I said, the Operation is just getting started."

In Kansas City alone, Operation Legend has resulted in the arrest of 18 homicide suspects and the seizure of over 70 illegal firearms.

In cities across the country, results are also pouring in.

"As part of Operation Legend we have apprehended over 1000 fugitives," Barr said. "One of the most important developments has been the seizure of hundreds of hundreds of guns." "Getting them off the streets is saving lives," he continued.

SOURCE 





The dangerous rise of race consciousness

The Evergreen affair was a harbinger of the hyper-racialised politics we now live with.

Race is at the forefront of today’s discourse. Academia, journalism, and government have become influenced by a ‘social-justice’ worldview, sometimes referred to as intersectionality, applied postmodernism or neo-Marxism. While we wrestle to understand these cultural trends, there is one relatively unknown sociologist whose work offers deep insight into what is happening today.

In 1981, Anne Wortham published The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness. The book sought to understand the psychological and intellectual drivers of civil-rights activism.

While the civil-rights movement undoubtedly made fantastic and necessary strides for liberty, some of the ethno-collectivistic ideas that Wortham studied persist today, and have become thoroughly entrenched. Her concept of ‘ethno-race consciousness’, developed decades ago, gives a great deal of insight into how many understand race today.

Consider the Evergreen State College affair of 2017. A large group of protesting students confronted biology professor Bret Weinstein over his objection to a ‘Day of Absence’ demonstration, which expected white students and faculty to leave campus for a day in order to ‘centre’ students of colour and allow them to discuss social justice. During the protests, students coerced administrators, barricaded the library and effectively captured the institution. The protests resulted in a number of lawsuits, with Weinstein leaving Evergreen as part of a settlement. This affair is a perfect example of the ethno-collectivistic attitudes and behaviour that characterise a contemporary social-justice worldview.

I recently finished my master’s thesis on the Evergreen affair, and part of my analysis of this extraordinary event relies on Wortham’s idea of ethno-race consciousness. She defines this as ‘a psychological, conscious, and volitional level of awareness at which an individual perceives himself and others according to characteristics of the racial categories to which they belong and the ethnic groups with which they are affiliated’.

An ethno-race conscious person perceives himself first and foremost as his race. As one Evergreen graduate said, ‘I am a black woman before my name is [Ava Johnson], I am a black woman before I am a student, I am a black woman before I am a citizen of the United States of America’.

This kind of thinking replaces the idea of the individual with a view of oneself as part of a larger ethnic collective. Accordingly, this means that any interaction between people of different ethnicities is fundamentally a diplomatic exchange between ethnic groups. This is one reason why people often preface their opinions with their group identity, saying things like ‘speaking as a white woman’ or ‘as a person of colour’.

Ethno-race consciousness, Wortham explains, is not just a passing interest in one’s ethnicity, but the belief that race is the basis of cognitive authority. You can see this manifesting at Evergreen, and in wider society, in the idea that there are truths that can only be accessed by certain ethnic groups. Consider the work of Robin DiAngelo, author of the bestseller White Fragility, who argues that white people in ‘white’ society are like fish unable to perceive the racist water in which they swim. Indeed, this is often a justification behind diversity initiatives, in that white people cannot perceive or understand the workings of race, and so should defer to others whose ethnicity grants them authority on the topic.

Another apparent aspect of this worldview is what I call ‘ethnohistorical determinism’, the idea that it’s not the content of one’s character but the historical character of one’s race that determines a person’s virtue. This means that a black person today is himself considered a victim of centuries of slavery and monstrous oppression, while a white person today is himself responsible for this victimisation.

A tragic consequence of this is de-facto and de-jure segregation, like black-only university dorms or Evergreen’s now-infamous Day of Absence. Equally troubling is the intellectual apartheid that this kind of thinking imposes. Dissent can be rendered invalid based on group identity, which makes dialogue impossible. We can’t have a ‘conversation about race’, as is often demanded, if people’s opinions are rendered invalid based on the colour of their skin.

This worldview, which has permeated many social, political and educational institutions, rejects the nuance and tolerance necessary for a pluralistic society to function. This kind of collectivism, as Wortham has argued, ‘seeks to reinforce the boundaries that divide hereditary groups and to promote solidarity within those groups without regard for what individual group members may desire’. But we must be permitted to disagree and associate with one another separate from our group affiliations, otherwise we risk exacerbating these artificial divisions.

Wortham’s concept of ethno-race consciousness was very useful in my Evergreen research, and I suspect it may help us to understand our increasingly racialised politics. It’s clear that many people today are indeed adopting an ethno-race consciousness, and turning a superficial characteristic of their identity into the fundamental basis of their person, while simultaneously regarding their individual characteristics (or biological realities such as sex) as arbitrary social constructions. They are essentialising the superficial and externalising the essential. They are turning themselves inside out.

SOURCE 





The left’s shameful abuse of ‘the science’

Many on the left today peddle the narrative that they are more scientifically minded than those on the right. They market themselves as the heirs to the ideals of the Enlightenment – reason, progress and truth – while pillorying the right as a collection of creationists, climate-change deniers and anti-vaxxers.

This narrative is false, and increasingly so.

It is a useful fiction, however. It allows the left to dress up its moral and political views as scientific. To question them, therefore, is to question the authority of the science. It is tantamount to secular heresy. When the Democrats in the US present themselves as ‘the party of science’, they are really saying ‘do not question us’.

Left-wingers used to invoke the authority of science mainly to justify their views on how we should respond to climate change. But the left increasingly uses the same scientific, moral authority to justify its views on an ever-expanding range of issues, from race to gender.

Part of the problem here is due to just how broadly we use the term ‘science’. Traditionally, it referred to the fields of natural science, which rely heavily on quantitative methods and have an exceptionally high threshold for new ideas to enter the consensus.

Yet the authority of ‘science’ has now been appropriated by the social sciences – academic fields that are dominated by leftists. This means that social scientists’ left-wing views of class, race and gender are treated much the same as, say, biologists’ understanding of DNA – that is, as authoritative, objective and truthful.

But this is misleading. Science is based on the scientific method, which is intentionally very limited in what it can say about the world. Outside of the logical framework of mathematics, we cannot conclusively ‘prove’ any natural law (even within mathematics it gets a bit vague). Hypotheses must be put forward and tested under a range of experimental methods.

If the hypothesis is not disproved under those conditions, we say that the findings were consistent with our hypothesis. With time and multiple repeats of an experiment validating an idea, we come to accept a hypothesis as true (though, importantly, we never prove it to be true; we only fail to prove that it is false).

And if the hypothesis predicts a hitherto unobserved phenomenon which is eventually observed, that’s an added bonus. This high bar means only the strongest hypotheses survive. This is Darwinism applied to intellectual discourse.

Societal hypotheses about class, race, gender and hierarchy cannot be rigorously tested or refuted in the same way as hypotheses about, for example, the standard model of particle physics. We cannot force people to partake in experiments as we can quarks. The social sciences are plagued by these fundamental limitations and methodological weaknesses.

The social sciences have thus taken on the mantle of ‘science’ without the seriousness of the method. Moreover, the lack of political diversity within the overwhelmingly leftish milieu of the social sciences means that dissenting views are resisted while conformist ones are accepted.

Social-science findings are based on politically motivated studies, produced by an ideologically unrepresentative academy, to support the social narratives of their like-minded colleagues. The search is not for objective truth, but for that which supports pre-existing beliefs. Seek, and ye shall find an oppressive capitalist patriarchy.

The number of subjects in which certain lines of academic inquiry are considered unacceptable is increasingly broad. Research in gender studies is acceptable so long as it does not conclude that variations in outcomes between men and women could be the result of innate differences between them. Social psychologists were ferocious in their fight to banish evolutionary psychology, which suggested that not all the sins of man might be a result of the corrupting influence of society. And IQ research flies so directly in the face of the dogma that we are all created equal that it is essentially untouchable.

To question these narratives would risk destabilising the assumptions on which ‘progressive’ movements are built, so leftists engage in these games of intellectual gerrymandering.

Political biases are driven by perverse incentives in both academia and the media. So, in fields in which one’s colleagues are overwhelmingly of a specific political persuasion, there is a strong incentive not to rock that boat lest it jeopardises career advancement.

There is also a misconception that research is a dispassionate reporting of factual findings. But that’s not the case. Social scientists, whose prime (and often only) readership is other social scientists, understand that a paper which draws far-reaching conclusions suiting an established narrative is more likely to be supported and cited.

Media outlets might then draw on such research to lend their own political views the aura of scientific and academic legitimacy. Left-wing media outlets, in particular, act as if policy proposals follow naturally from academic studies, which are themselves beyond reproach.

This means that left-wing media outlets, drawing their authority from left-wing social scientists, act as if their political worldview is coming from a place of truth. The Guardian describes itself as ‘free from political and commercial bias’ and engaged in the ‘struggle for truth, humanity and justice’, as though the three must invariably align with their left-wing discourse. The Washington Post adopted the absurdly histrionic slogan ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ in 2017, as though the election of Donald Trump signalled a constitutional crisis instead of merely being politically unpalatable.

The implication, of course, is that the right-wing media are little more than scientifically illiterate fake-news machines. It is the left-wing media who are the keepers of knowledge and the protectors of scientific (and moral) truth. This despite the fact they are no less inclined to exaggerate reporting of scientific literature in the pursuit of clicks.

The left has pushed for decades to expand the remit of scientific knowledge without accepting the limitations of the scientific method. They are now entirely comfortable side-lining inconvenient truths which challenge their a priori beliefs.

Science is wielded by those on the left as a stick to hit those who ask reasonable questions. They have opted for expediency over intellectual seriousness. In doing so, they encourage the politicisation of scientific knowledge and the scientification of morality. In abusing science, the left is destroying political debate.

SOURCE 






Gender reassigned to the ideological sin bin

The ACT is set to become one of the first jurisdictions in Australia to cement into law the triumph of gender ideology over common sense. It is be­ing achieved under the guise of a bill outlawing conversion therapy, which was supposed to be debated on Thursday but was postponed, due in part to unexpected public reaction.

The reason is that this bill, which ostensibly outlaws “conversion” therapy for sexual and gender identity issues, is not really about outmoded and cruel conversion therapy; it is about stopping any therapy for gender dysphoria, even in minors, other than to affirm transgender identity. This has been achieved by a clever sleight of hand. There is no real definition of conversion therapy in the bill. Instead, the bill endorses any therapy that validates transgenderism and criminalises anything that doesn’t.

By using the word conversion, and deliber­ately conflating outmoded and unethical techniques of gay conver­sion with legitimate therapies aimed at easing a young person’s anxiety about gender identity that enable them to accept their biological sex, it compounds opacity with deceit.

The bill is about ideology, not welfare, which is clear in the opening statements, which affirm the validity of all sexual and gender expression. One may well ask why it is the business of a government to tell us this, and the ideological purpose becomes clearer when it gives examples of the types of therapies that would be considered legitimate: only those that affirm sexual expression and identity — so, by extension, criminalising any therapies that don’t.

This would encompass even the most benign forms of open-ended psychotherapy for gender-confused children, many of whom have other psychological problems.

The proposed ACT bill goes much further than the similar Queensland law and is potentially far more damaging to fundamental human rights, particularly the rights of parents.

This is because the ACT bill, unlike the Queensland law, is not aimed solely at psychotherapists and other medical personnel. It is aimed at everybody, even parents. Any parent potentially could be charged with an offence if they try to prevent an adolescent or a child — even an underage child — from seeking trans-affirmative treatment, and there is even a provision to allow underage children to agree to their own treatment without parental consent. What is more, it penalises anyone who wishes to remove a child to another jurisdiction for treatment. The penalties are harsh, including incarceration and unlimited fines.

Outmoded and sometimes cruel gay conversion therapies, often based on aversion techniques, are universally rejected in psychiatric circles. However open-ended therapy, particularly for children displaying transgender traits, which helps them to conform to their biological sex and usually attempts to treat their underlying psychological disorders, such as autism, is perfectly valid. But this is not what the transgender lobby wants — it wants one route only, the path to a gender reassignment clinic.

Dianna Kenny, formerly professor of psychology at the University of Sydney and currently in private psychotherapy practice, has pointed out that the legislation is fatally flawed by virtue of its “illogical and ill-founded ideological base”. It is based on the ideology of gender identity rather than gender-related psychological treatment. Consequently it is a minefield, particularly for those treating children and adolescents.

“The legislation does not specify how these proposed changes to clinical practice in transgender therapy will be administered, or how professional bodies overseeing the work of health practitioners will interact with those administering the proposed legislation,” Kenny says.

She warns it is “steeped in errors” but, most important, it also has not defined the term conversion therapy with any rigour or accuracy and “deceitfully conflates lesbian and gay issues with transgender issues”.

The transgender lobby seeks to make the validation of gender identity at all costs the only approach and has used suicide statistics to bolster its claims. Lately, however, this ideology has had a few setbacks.

The Tavistock in London is being sued by adults who underwent reassignment surgery as children, and Swedish research claiming children who underwent gender reassignment surgery were less prone to suicide, which has been used as evidence by clinicians in Australia to make surgery more easily available, has been proved false.

The August 1 edition of the American journal of Psychiatry had to publish a rare correction, an editorial and letters from a dozen psychiatrists, clinicians and researchers in four countries identifying multiple flaws in the 2019 Swedish paper, with the conclusion that the data showed “no improvement in mental health after surgery or hormonal treatment”.

It is obvious that the ACT government pushed this bill under the COVID radar. It has ploughed on with this legislation while the federal government is distracted by the crisis and the federal Health Minister’s inquiry into gender reassignment for very young children has not begun. A cross-section of stakeholders, including independent schools, was sent a fact sheet describing the proposed ban but was given only 18 working days to submit feedback. This was said to be in lieu of the standard public consultation “due to the ongoing impact of COVID-19”.

However, the uproar during the past week when news of the bill became widespread has, one hopes, allowed the ACT government time to put in acceptable amendments and clearer definitions. As the independent schools rightly state: “This approach is unacceptable for a law which allows for complaints to go through the ACT Human Rights Commission, as well as the creation of criminal offences, the regulation of health practitioners, and the treatment of ‘conversion’ prac­tices as a form of child abuse or neglect.”

Those of us who live in the territory have become almost blase about the never-ending quest of the Labor-Green alliance, with a majority of one, to refashion the way we live, and now the way we think. But the legal tactics of the trans lobby mean the rest of Australia also may have to get used to it — sooner rather than later.

SOURCE  

********************************

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. 
`
************************************