Why Black and White Relations Hit a New Low

The division we’re seeing is driven by Democrats and their Leftmedia mouthpieces.

On a daily basis, we’re told that race relations are worse than ever.

But in the real world outside of the media bubble, millions of black and white Americans work, play, study, worship, and live together in peace. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any issues or problems to be resolved, but today’s media have created an alternate universe that doesn’t reflect reality.

Indeed, in that alternate universe, it sure does feel like something is wrong. And that’s thanks entirely to the divisive efforts of Democrats and their media mouthpieces. Given the 24/7 propaganda, it’s no wonder we’ve seen a shift in the way everyone perceives race in America.

A recent Gallup poll, for example, reveals that as recently as 2013, 70% of U.S. adults viewed race relations in a positive light. Today, that number is only 42%.

No, America hasn’t become more “systemically racist” in the past eight years. We’ve just been led to believe it. The division plays right into the hands of the Marxist Democrats who benefit from a nation in chaos, even if the chaos also hurts people of color in the process (as it almost always does.)

It’s shameful that some of our fellow citizens seek to tear apart the fabric we’ve worked so hard to mend throughout our history. But like anything else that comes from radical leftists, it’s not that hard to figure out their long-term objective.

Leftist race-baiter B. Duncan Moench penned an article, titled “Americans Hate Each Other,” in which he concluded that the only answer to this problem is to dissolve the United States and “start an American Union that works more like its European counterpart.”

As they say, the devil lies in the details.

Moench doesn’t think we’re smart enough to see that the breakdown of our society and institutions is the objective of the radical leftists champing at the bit to take power when it all comes tumbling down. As the inimitable Thomas Sowell wrote a few years back: “Mob rule is not democracy. It threatens democracy, as it threatens lives — black or white.”

Race hustlers like Ibrim X. Kendi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders hope America dissolves so they can create a new world built on Marxist lies. And let’s not forget that it was Barack Obama who promised a post-racial America only to spout identity politics from the White House.

But this is about much more than dividing us along racial lines; it’s about a broader effort to turn America against its history, institutions, and traditions. Americans are now taught to hate those things and seek their remaking, revising, or outright destruction.

The poll isn’t surprising. For too long we’ve been told America is a country built on lies and designed to oppress anyone who isn’t white. Every instance of real racism is exaggerated, while progress is swept under the rug by journalists and politicians.

As Sowell biographer and Wall Street Journal columnist Jason R. Riley writes: “The political left has a stake in overstating both the existence and effects of racism so that it can advocate for more and bigger programs to combat it. And the media has long been willing to do the left’s ideological bidding. Social media allows for wide publicity of statistically rare incidents.‘”

Consequently, the media have the power to frame opinions and conversations and influence the way we think and interact with one another. But we can’t afford to let them divide us any longer.

We’re truly at a crossroads. Americans can either let the powerful media and political elites convince us that we hate each other, or we can ignore them and continue the progress we’ve made toward building a colorblind society.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/81752-why-black-and-white-relations-hit-a-new-low-2021-08-06

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Texas House Speaker Signs Arrest Warrants for 52 Absent Democrats

Extended rent moratoriums and the slow distribution of billions in federal rent assistance are driving many small landlords to call it quits.

“Nobody wants to become a landlord anymore,” said Diane Baird, executive director of the Lake Erie Landlord Association, which represents landlords in northern Ohio, southern Michigan, and western Pennsylvania.

“And we have very few new people entering into the business.”

“Multiple landlords have told me they are selling out,” Jon Frickensmith, president of the South Wisconsin Landlord Association, told The Epoch Times. “They ask us how to get out of the business and how to get the tenants out of their houses. These are mom-and-pop operators, the kind of landlords that are willing to take tenants with bad credit or a criminal history. This will only add to the housing crisis.”

The vast majority of landlords in the United States are individuals, with most owning one or two rental houses.

In Michigan, more than $500 million in federal pandemic emergency assistance funds remain unspent, with thousands of applications for aid mired in state and municipal bureaucracies.

“Everyone in the process agrees the application process is flawed. The problems created by the system are intensified for private owners,” Greg Stremers, an attorney in Port Huron, Michigan, told The Epoch Times.

“Many property owners are selling off their properties, creating an even deeper shortage of rental properties. When I process an eviction, the tenants are having difficulty finding a new place to live, which is driving rents higher.”

Stremers said the system is “undeniably deficient,” pointing out that, of the $46 billion allocated by Congress in emergency rental assistance, only $3 billion has thus far been distributed to applicants nationwide by state and local agencies.

According to the U.S. Department of Treasury, states and municipalities have until Sept. 30 to disburse the funds or they may be reallocated.

The latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eviction moratorium is set to expire on Oct. 3.

The National Equity Atlas estimates that landlords across the United States are owed more than $21 billion in overdue rent.

Don James, president of the Florida Landlord Association in Coral Gables, believes the moratorium is detrimental to renters as well as landlords.

“We as landlords cannot enforce our rental contracts and, this being a seller’s market, [it] is forcing landlords to sell their properties. This is going to cause shrinking of rental facilities, thus hurting renters,” he said.

Mike Bodeis, president of the 450-member Port Huron Area Landlord Association and owner of 40 rental houses, told The Epoch Times: “It’s a myth that 3.6 million Americans may soon be made homeless. Two-thirds of them could be paying their rent, but are not because they choose not to. They didn’t choose to pay their rent or utility bills with all the stimulus money they received.

To illustrate, Bodeis said: “In one eviction, in which I personally participated, we took six flatscreen TVs out of the house. It’s all about priorities.”

President of the Flint, Michigan-area Genesse Landlord Association, Ed Constable, said that the rent moratorium has had little effect on some of the members, but has been “devasting” for others.

“Maybe a quarter of residential tenants have signed the eligibility affidavit for the emergency pandemic rent assistance,” Constable said.

“Some instances can be horrible. One woman was in debt to me for a year’s back rent. Rather than go through the process, I ended up writing her a check for one month’s rent. That’s what it took to finally get her out. After that experience, I have zero interest in more residential rentals.”

The terms of the emergency rent assistance application are supposed to preserve the right of a landlord to evict a tenant for committing a criminal act on the premises, damaging property, threatening the health and safety of other tenants, or violating building codes and health ordinances, and for breach of contract other than non-payment of rent.

“Everything depends on the judge,” Constable said. “We had one landlord with a beautiful, high-end rental home. His tenants moved in, along with six dogs and a potbelly pig! The case came before a liberal judge. It was delayed forever. Ultimately, the landlord could not get a writ to evict.”

In Michigan, emergency rent assistance checks for up to 12 months of back rent, and even three months of future rent, are made out directly to the landlord for the benefit of qualifying tenants, but the tenants must apply for the aid.

While that may sound like a win-win proposition, Stremers said that only a small percentage of tenants apply.

“In fact,” Stremers said, “even the tenants typically don’t apply, and if the owner wants them to, we have to encourage them. The vast majority of the tenants rarely show up for the eviction pretrial, and rarely submit the proper CDC paperwork to start the moratorium process.”

Included in the paperwork is a requirement for the tenant to provide a government-issued identification card.

Stremers said the reason for the card is that “under a prior federal stimulus for renters to purchase homes, there was fraud by the tenants—the money went to tenants, who did not make the payments.”

Baird said that in the Lake Erie region, “tenants are not signing up for help.”

“They don’t seem to care about paying their bills. They have no reason to care. There are no consequences. The government is letting them get away with it,” she said.

One Wisconsin landlord stated in an email: “I don’t know why the government thinks landlords can afford to pay bills when not collecting rent, or why we should be responsible for the tenant’s inability to pay. I think they are taking advantage of the moratorium to not pay on time.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/protracted-rent-moratorium-forcing-small-landlords-out-of-business_3944101.html

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The virtue-signaling stock exchange

The world’s second-largest stock exchange is now officially in the quota business.

The Securities and Exchange Commission this month approved Nasdaq’s new rule requiring the more than 3,000 companies listed on its exchange to meet specific diversity mandates in the makeup of their boards of directors. Henceforth, the companies will be required to have at least “one director who self-identifies as a female” and a second who “self-identifies” as “Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Asian, Native American or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or . . . as any of the following: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or as a member of the queer community.” Companies that fall short of the quota will not be delisted but are required to provide a public explanation for their failure to meet the new requirement.

Nasdaq first proposed this rule last December, in an SEC filing that contained a half-dozen references to “the social justice movement” or “the racial justice movement.” The purpose of a stock exchange is to maintain an efficient marketplace for trading securities and raising capital, but Nasdaq seemed more interested in virtue signaling and identity politics.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/08/14/opinion/virtue-signaling-stock-exchange/

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It’s Time to Purge the ‘Experts’

The United States’ military mission in Afghanistan has collapsed in chaos and ignominy. The catastrophe has many parents. But surely “the experts” upon which our leader relied bear much blame.

They were the ones who often failed to comprehend the power of religious belief and the role pride in Islam played in the Taliban’s unyielding commitment to victory. They were the ones who thought we could remake Afghanistan into a western liberal image. They were the ones who failed to comprehend the intractable tribal nature of Afghan society.

To say the least, Afghanistan has vividly exposed the utter stupidity of our vaunted foreign policy and national security experts. Our hapless Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, for example, assured us that Kabul would not fall from “Friday to Monday.” He was right. It fell from Friday to Sunday.

And what are we to make of the vaunted internationalists at the United Nations? After President Biden’s godawful speech signifying nothing, the State Department held a press briefing, during which spokesman Ted Price reiterated an unintentionally hilarious United Nations Security Council statement urging the Taliban government to be “inclusive and representative—including with the full, equal and meaningful participation of women.” I’m sure the barbarians will get right to including women as soon as they are finished raping them.

The hubris of these whizzes might be tolerable if they were adept at technocracy. But they stink at it. Indeed, every American debacle in my lifetime has “the experts’” fingerprints all over it. There was the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Vietnam. The farce of the missing Iraq WMDs. The list goes on and on.

What’s that you say? The Cuban Missile Crisis worked out very well? Indeed, it did. But that was because JFK ignored the advice of military experts to bomb Cuba.

What about the collapse of the Soviet Union? Once again, that salutary event was hastened because President Reagan ignored experts’ widespread disdain of the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) program and forged ahead anyway, which helped break the communists’ treasury.

Look at China. Our China-hand experts were sure that if we boosted the country’s economy the Chinese people would demand increased freedom to go along with their improved standard of living. Not only did that demand not materialize—except in the now crushed Hong Kong citizens’ reaction to the loss of their once existing freedoms—but we are looking increasingly like China instead of it looking more like us.

Worse, we are now dependent on that tyranny for much of our manufacturing and mining of crucial natural resources like rare earth metals. Great job, experts!

Foreign policy is far from the only field afflicted with debilitating expertitis. The public health failures during COVID could—and no doubt will—fill several books. But the botched investigations and repeated mendacity surrounding the question of whether the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, are particularly enraging—not to mention the U.S. funding of “gain of function” research conducted there championed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Speaking of the hubris of the expert class, Fauci wrote last year that WHO and the UN should be empowered to “rebuild the infrastructure of human existence” in order to avoid future pandemics. Considering their repeated record of abject failure, putting the international experts in charge of such an all-encompassing project would probably return us to the caves

And look what has happened in the medical sector where our experts are helping drive the transgender moral panic. Major medical journals and associations even promote puberty blocking for children despite its being, at best, entirely experimental and potentially physically harmful to the patients. Good grief, the American Medical Association even urges that we stop listing the sex of children on birth certificates!

And we haven’t even yet mentioned the misbegotten California public policies recommended by climate change experts that have reduced the once Golden State to a third world environment of rolling blackouts, out-of-control wildfires, and inadequate water storage because no new reservoirs have been built for decades—this, even though the state’s population grew exponentially. Good grief, farmers in the Central Valley have begun plowing under their precious almond trees!

Failure after dismal failure has caused mass distrust in the expert class and a concomitant collapse of confidence in our institutions. This is a profound crisis. We need expertise. People who know what they are talking about and who can explain complicated issues to policy makers and the people are essential to the proper operation of sophisticated democratic societies.

But to do that job right, experts need to be apolitical. They need to provide as objective advice as they can when wearing their “expert” hats. Most of all, they need to put personal ideology aside in the performance of their duties and welcome heterodox opinions. For example, it wasn’t ideology that created the triumph of the moon landing. It was dispassionate excellence in rocket science and engineering.

The problem is that too many of our current “experts”—in foreign policy, law enforcement, science, education, the medical intelligentsia, the list goes on and on—have become highly politicized. Some even now think they should be deciders rather than advisers. That attitude doesn’t make policy more expertly based, it makes expertise more politically motivated, which is to say, it ceases being expert at all.

Creating a paradigm in which we can again safely rely on experts will require a great culling of the faux specialists now perched in powerful government and think tank sinecures. Frankly, mass resignations or firings may be the only efficacious remedy for what ails us. The time has come for that great sorting out to begin.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/its-time-to-purge-the-experts_3954833.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

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