Buy American - Then Take To The Streets and Destroy America.
And:
"Dick,You put my thoughts into words!Love your memos! B------"
And:
Time for white Americans to chip in: "Leader in Seattle’s CHAZ demands white occupiers fork over money to black counterparts"
Finally:
Democrats love to pass laws and criminalize behaviour. That way they can chip away at those amendments in our Bill of Rights they don't like, ie. freedom of speech, assembly, possession of guns etc. Now the leader in Congress of The Black Caucus has proposed national standards for police officers. I have no problem with national standards but what about national standards for citizens?
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My own saying: "Black lives are made of matter. So are nuclear bombs!"
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A truckie who has been out on the road for three weeks stops off at a brothel outside Kalgoorlie ..
He walks straight up to the Madam, drops down $500 and says, “I want your ugliest woman and a burnt chop!!”
The Madam is astonished. “But sir, for that kind of money you could have one of my finest ladies and a lovely three-course meal”.The truckie replies, “I'm not horny . . . . ... I'm homesick!”
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Two good articles:
1) What is behind the US protests? Anti-American Intifada
Dexter Van Zile thinks that "that the Third Intifada is happening in the United States".
For more than two weeks the US has been roiling in daily often violent versus peaceful protests over allegations of black racism and white privilege triggered by videos of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody arrested for passing a $20 counterfeit bill.
The nightly protests were set against the background of lurid flames and looting of minority owned businesses and fashionable stores from Manhattan to Santa Monica.
In a Jewish Press opinion article entitled “God Is Dead,” Dan Greenfield illustrated how allies of the Black Lives Matter movement were torching African American and other churches including the President’s Church, St. John’s Episcopal on the periphery of Lafayette Park within steps of the White House.
That episode figured in a dramatic assault with tear gas and rubber bullets clearing the protests. Greenfield cited further evidence of a pogrom in broken windows at the 225 year Reform Temple in Richmond, Virginia and the Pro -Palestinian vandalism on the facade of an Orthodox Synagogue in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles; the latter indicative of “anti-Israelism the new antisemitism.”
Back in 2016, Tablet Magazine headlined a news report, “From Left to Right, Jewish Groups condemn ‘Repellent ‘Black Lives Matter Claim of Israeli ‘Genocide.’” What the media is not reporting is there are ominous signs that behind the “balagan” – chaos in slangy Hebrew- may be a disturbing anti-American Intifada.
To expound on this, Rod Reuven Dovid and Jerry Gordon brought back Dexter Van Zile, Shillman Research Fellow and Christian Media Analyst at the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).
Van Zile says “that the Third Intifada is happening in the United States. What began as a War on Israel and American Jews has become a war on the republic itself? In support of his thesis, Van Zile argues:
• Many of same strategies used to delegitimize Israel and make it harder to defend the country are now being deployed against the US.
• The 2001 Durban Strategy has shifted from Israel to the U.S.
• The goal with Israel was to render the country ungovernable.
• Americans are going to struggling with the same effects felt by Jews in Israel as a result.
• The 2001 Durban Strategy has shifted from Israel to the U.S.
• The goal with Israel was to render the country ungovernable.
• Americans are going to struggling with the same effects felt by Jews in Israel as a result.
Nevertheless, Israelis united and overcame at great cost in blood and treasure the Intifada threats to the destruction of the Jewish nation that are still at the core of the BDS international campaign.
Van Zile says, “the same institutions that facilitated the propaganda war on Israel have been enlisted in the war on the American middle class.”
As evidence of this development, he points to the comments of Linda Sarsour, a US Born Palestinian supporter of Hamas and Sharia Law during a United Church of Christ- sponsored May 31, 2020 webinar on the uprising over the death of George Floyd. She said: “What we’re trying to do in this …televised revolution is that I’m saying this not in the literal sense, but in the sense of “Burn it all down. Start Over”. She called for defunding Police departments and abolishing the USDHS Immigration Control and Enforcement. Van Zile suggests that Sarsour is promoting an Intifada in the U.S. with the goal of overthrowing the system – making it ungovernable. All within the cloak of non-violent action.
Van Zile points out that while the US may not be a perfect democracy, its system of governance is decidedly better than the totalitarian movements it has defeated in its history. He speaks of the belief in equal rights before the law that has served the cause of freedom in America’s foundational events – the Declaration of Independence, the ratification of the Constitution, the abolitionist movement and underground railroad that freed slaves, the Civil War and 13th and 14th Amendments, notwithstanding Supreme Court rulings that perpetrated Jim Crow Laws, reaching a climax in the Civil Rights movement and anti-discrimination and voting rights laws of the 1960’s.
Van Zile is concerned about the undermining of what have been middle class institutions in America. He cites churches, land grant colleges and the media “have become places of Anti-American political indoctrination.” A recent UCC webinar is indicative of the devolution of liberal Protestant denominations. Given his experience fighting “thought control” by a pro-Palestinian communications professor Dr. Jhally at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Van Zile says: “ Colleges and Universities have turned into places where students worry more about being ‘woke’ than being able to ‘work’ when they graduate. Land – grant institutions, great engines for the Middle Class have been hijacked, need to be reformed.”
The resignation of New York Times Opinion Editor James Bennett’s departure was proof to Reason Magazine that “woke scolds were taking over” at the paper. The cause of the scolds was their objection on the grounds of “workplace safety” to an op-ed by US Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton.To Van Zile this was further evidence “that Middle Class ideas – law and order – are no longer acceptable in polite society.”
Van Zile suggests that listeners read: “Taboo: 10 Facts you can’t talk About” by Professor Wilfred Reilly, African American Professor at Kentucky State University and Wall Street Journal commentator, and Adi Schwartz nd Einat Wilf’s The War of Return : How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace.
Despite his dour assessment, Van Zile spoke hopefully of “great awakening” about the Judeo-Christian values of middle class among young Americans, in a chapter in soon to be published book, directed at American Evangelicals.
2)The American Press Is Destroying Itself
A flurry of newsroom revolts has transformed the American press
Sometimes it seems life can’t get any worse in this country. Already in terror of a pandemic, Americans have lately been bombarded with images of grotesque state-sponsored violence, from the murder of George Floyd to countless scenes of police clubbing and brutalizing protesters.
Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat’s theorem. Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers (“only” 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war.
But police violence, and Trump’s daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.
The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.
They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out loud to a data scientist fired* from a research firm for — get this — retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones!
Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who’d made politically “problematic” editorial or social media decisions.
The New York Times, the Intercept, Vox, the
Probably the most disturbing story involved Intercept writer Lee Fang, one of a fast-shrinking number of young reporters actually skilled in investigative journalism. Fang’s work in the area of campaign finance especially has led to concrete impact, including a record fine to a conservative Super PAC: few young reporters have done more to combat corruption.
Yet Fang found himself denounced online as a racist, then hauled before H.R. His crime? During protests, he tweeted this interview with an African-American man named Maximum Fr, who described having two cousins murdered in the East Oakland neighborhood where he grew up. Saying his aunt is still not over those killings, Max asked:
I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?... Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.
Shortly after, a co-worker of Fang’s, Akela Lacy, wrote, “Tired of being made to deal continually with my co-worker @lhfang continuing to push black on black crime narratives after being repeatedly asked not to. This isn’t about me and him, it’s about institutional racism and using free speech to couch anti-blackness. I am so fucking tired.” She followed with, “Stop being racist Lee.”
The tweet received tens of thousands of likes and responses along the lines of, “Lee Fang has been like this for years, but the current moment only makes his anti-Blackness more glaring,” and “Lee Fang spouting racist bullshit it must be a day ending in day.” A significant number of Fang’s co-workers, nearly all white, as well as reporters from other major news organizations like the New York Times and MSNBC and political activists (one former Elizabeth Warren staffer tweeted, “Get him!”), issued likes and messages of support for the notion that Fang was a racist. Though he had support within the organization, no one among his co-workers was willing to say anything in his defense publicly.
Like many reporters, Fang has always viewed it as part of his job to ask questions in all directions. He’s written critically of political figures on the center-left, the left, and “obviously on the right,” and his reporting has inspired serious threats in the past. None of those past experiences were as terrifying as this blitz by would-be colleagues, which he described as “jarring,” “deeply isolating,” and “unique in my professional experience.”
To save his career, Fang had to craft a public apology for “insensitivity to the lived experience of others.” According to one friend of his, it’s been communicated to Fang that his continued employment at The Intercept is contingent upon avoiding comments that may upset colleagues. Lacy to her credit publicly thanked Fang for his statement and expressed willingness to have a conversation; unfortunately, the throng of Intercept co-workers who piled on her initial accusation did not join her in this.
I first met Lee Fang in 2014 and have never known him to be anything but kind, gracious, and easygoing. He also appears earnestly committed to making the world a better place through his work. It’s stunning that so many colleagues are comfortable using a word as extreme and villainous as racist to describe him.
Though he describes his upbringing as “solidly middle-class,” Fang grew up in up in a diverse community in Prince George's County, Maryland, and attended public schools where he was frequently among the few non-African Americans in his class. As a teenager, he was witness to the murder of a young man outside his home by police who were never prosecuted, and also volunteered at a shelter for trafficked women, two of whom were murdered. If there’s an edge to Fang at all, it seems geared toward people in our business who grew up in affluent circumstances and might intellectualize topics that have personal meaning for him.
In the tweets that got him in trouble with Lacy and other co-workers, he questioned the logic of protesters attacking immigrant-owned businesses “with no connection to police brutality at all.” He also offered his opinion on Martin Luther King’s attitude toward violent protest (Fang’s take was that King did not support it; Lacy responded, “you know they killed him too right”). These are issues around which there is still considerable disagreement among self-described liberals, even among self-described leftists. Fang also commented, presciently as it turns out, that many reporters were “terrified of openly challenging the lefty conventional wisdom around riots.”
Lacy says she never intended for Fang to be “fired, ‘canceled,’ or deplatformed,” but appeared irritated by questions on the subject, which she says suggest, “there is more concern about naming racism than letting it persist.”
Max himself was stunned to find out that his comments on all this had created a Twitter firestorm. “I couldn’t believe they were coming for the man’s job over something I said,” he recounts. “It was not Lee’s opinion. It was my opinion.”
By phone, Max spoke of a responsibility he feels Black people have to speak out against all forms of violence, “precisely because we experience it the most.” He described being affected by the Floyd story, but also by the story of retired African-American police captain David Dorn, shot to death in recent protests in St. Louis. He also mentioned Tony Timpa, a white man whose 2016 asphyxiation by police was only uncovered last year. In body-camera footage, police are heard joking after Timpa passed out and stopped moving, “I don’t want to go to school! Five more minutes, Mom!”
“If it happens to anyone, it has to be called out,” Max says.
Max described discussions in which it was argued to him that bringing up these other incidents now is not helpful to the causes being articulated at the protests. He understands that point of view. He just disagrees.
“They say, there has to be the right time and a place to talk about that,” he says. “But my point is, when? I want to speak out now.” He pauses. “We’ve taken the narrative, and instead of being inclusive with it, we’ve become exclusive with it. Why?”
There were other incidents. The editors of Bon Apetit and Refinery29 both resigned amid accusations of toxic workplace culture. The editor of Variety, Claudia Eller, was placed on leave after calling a South Asian freelance writer “bitter” in a Twitter exchange about minority hiring at her company. The self-abasing apology (“I have tried to diversify our newsroom over the past seven years, but I HAVE NOT DONE ENOUGH”) was insufficient. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editor, Stan Wischowski, was forced out after approving a headline, “Buildings matter, too.”
In the most discussed incident, Times editorial page editor James Bennet was ousted for green-lighting an anti-protest editorial by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton entitled, “Send in the troops.”
I’m no fan of Cotton, but as was the case with Michael Moore’s documentary and many other controversial speech episodes, it’s not clear that many of the people angriest about the piece in question even read it. In classic Times fashion, the paper has already scrubbed a mistake they made misreporting what their own editorial said, in an article about Bennet’s ouster. Here’s how the piece by Marc Tracy read originally (emphasis mine):
James Bennet, the editorial page editor of The New York Times, has resigned after a controversy over an Op-Ed by a senator calling for military force against protesters in American cities.
James Bennet resigned on Sunday from his job as the editorial page editor of The New York Times, days after the newspaper’s opinion section, which he oversaw, published a much-criticized Op-Ed by a United States senator calling for a military response to civic unrest in American cities.
Cotton did not call for “military force against protesters in American cities.” He spoke of a “show of force,” to rectify a situation a significant portion of the country saw as spiraling out of control. It’s an important distinction. Cotton was presenting one side of the most important question on the most important issue of a critically important day in American history.
As Cotton points out in the piece, he was advancing a view arguably held by a majority of the country. A Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.” That survey included 40% of self-described “liberals” and 37% of African-Americans. To declare a point of view held by that many people not only not worthy of discussion, but so toxic that publication of it without even necessarily agreeing requires dismissal, is a dramatic reversal for a newspaper that long cast itself as the national paper of record.
Incidentally, that same poll cited by Cotton showed that 73% of Americans described protecting property as “very important,” while an additional 16% considered it “somewhat important.” This means the Philadelphia Inquirer editor was fired for running a headline – “Buildings matter, too” – that the poll said expressed a view held by 89% of the population, including 64% of African-Americans.
(Would I have run the Inquirer headline? No. In the context of the moment, the use of the word “matter” especially sounds like the paper is equating “Black lives” and “buildings,” an odious and indefensible comparison. But why not just make this case in a rebuttal editorial? Make it a teaching moment? How can any editor operate knowing that airing opinions shared by a majority of readers might cost his or her job?)
The main thing accomplished by removing those types of editorials from newspapers — apart from scaring the hell out of editors — is to shield readers from knowledge of what a major segment of American society is thinking.
It also guarantees that opinion writers and editors alike will shape views to avoid upsetting colleagues, which means that instead of hearing what our differences are and how we might address those issues, newspaper readers will instead be presented with page after page of people professing to agree with one another. That’s not agitation, that’s misinformation.
The instinct to shield audiences from views or facts deemed politically uncomfortable has been in evidence since Trump became a national phenomenon. We saw it when reporters told audiences Hillary Clinton’s small crowds were a “wholly intentional” campaign decision. I listened to colleagues that summer of 2016 talk about ignoring poll results, or anecdotes about Hillary’s troubled campaign, on the grounds that doing otherwise might “help Trump” (or, worse, be perceived that way).
Even if you embrace a wholly politically utilitarian vision of the news media – I don’t, but let’s say – non-reporting of that “enthusiasm” story, or ignoring adverse poll results, didn’t help Hillary’s campaign. I’d argue it more likely accomplished the opposite, contributing to voter apathy by conveying the false impression that her victory was secure.
After the 2016 election, we began to see staff uprisings. In one case, publishers at the Nation faced a revolt – from the Editor on down – after articles by Aaron Mate and Patrick Lawrence questioning the evidentiary basis for Russiagate claims was run. Subsequent events, including the recent declassification of congressional testimony, revealed that Mate especially was right to point out that officials had no evidence for a Trump-Russia collusion case. It’s precisely because such unpopular views often turn out to be valid that we stress publishing and debating them in the press.
In a related incident, the New Yorker ran an article about Glenn Greenwald’s Russiagate skepticism that quoted that same Nation editor, Joan Walsh, who had edited Greenwald at Salon. She suggested to the New Yorker that Greenwald’s reservations were rooted in “disdain” for the Democratic Party, in part because of its closeness to Wall Street, but also because of the “ascendance of women and people of color.” The message was clear: even if you win a Pulitzer Prize, you can be accused of racism for deviating from approved narratives, even on questions that have nothing to do with race (the New Yorker piece also implied Greenwald’s intransigence on Russia was pathological and grounded in trauma from childhood).
In the case of Cotton, Times staffers protested on the grounds that “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” Bennet’s editorial decision was not merely ill-considered, but literally life-threatening (note pundits in the space of a few weeks have told us that protesting during lockdowns and not protesting d
Editors begged forgiveness for not being more involved, for not thinking to urge Cotton to sound less like Cotton (“Editors should have offered suggestions”), and for allowing rhetoric that was “needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate.” That last line is sadly funny, in the context of an episode in which reporters were seeking to pre-empt a debate rather than have one at all; of course, no one got the joke, since a primary characteristic of the current political climate is a total absence of a sense of humor in any direction.
As many guessed, the “apology” was not enough, and Bennet was whacked a day later in a terse announcement.
His replacement, Kathleen Kingsbury, issued a staff directive essentially telling employees they now had a veto over anything that made them uncomfortable: “Anyone who sees any piece of Opinion journalism, headlines, social posts, photos—you name it—that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately.”
All these episodes sent a signal to everyone in a business already shedding jobs at an extraordinary rate that failure to toe certain editorial lines can and will result in the loss of your job. Perhaps additionally, you could face a public shaming campaign in which you will be denounced as a racist and rendered unemployable.
These tensions led to amazing contradictions in coverage. For all the extraordinary/inexplicable scenes of police viciousness in recent weeks — and there was a ton of it, ranging from police slashing tires in Minneapolis, to Buffalo officers knocking over an elderly man, to Philadelphia police attacking protesters — there were also 12 deaths in the first nine days of protests, only one at the hands of a police officer (involving a man who may or may not have been aiming a gun at police).
Looting in some communities has been so bad that people have been left without banks to cash checks, or pharmacies to fill prescriptions; business owners have been wiped out (“My life is gone,” commented one Philly store owner); a car dealership in San Leandro, California saw 74 cars stolen in a single night. It isn’t the whole story, but it’s demonstrably true that violence, arson, and rioting are occurring.
However, because it is politically untenable to discuss this in ways that do not suggest support, reporters have been twisting themselves into knots. We are seeing headlines previously imaginable only in The Onion, e.g., “27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London.”
Even people who try to keep up with protest goals find themselves denounced the moment they fail to submit to some new tenet of ever-evolving doctrine, via a surprisingly consistent stream of retorts: fuck you, shut up, send money, do better, check yourself, I’m tired and racist.
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, who argued for police reform and attempted to show solidarity with protesters in his city, was shouted down after he refused to commit to defunding the police. Protesters shouted “Get the fuck out!” at him, then chanted “Shame!” and threw refuse, Game of Thrones-style, as he skulked out of the gathering. Frey’s “shame” was refusing to endorse a position polls show 65% of Americans oppose, including 62% of Democrats, with just 15% of all people, and only 33% of African-Americans, in support.
Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics. White protesters in Floyd’s Houston hometown kneeling and praying to black residents for “forgiveness… for years and years of racism” are one thing, but what are we to make of white police in Cary, North Carolina, kneeling and washing the feet of Black pastors? What about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling while dressed in “African kente cloth scarves”?
There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too paralyzed to wonder at it. In a business where the first job requirement was once the willingness to ask tough questions, we’ve become afraid to ask obvious ones.
On CNN, Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender was asked a hypothetical question about a future without police: “What if in the middle of the night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?” When Bender, who is white, answered, “I know that comes from a place of privilege,” questions popped to mind. Does privilege mean one should let someone break into one’s home, or that one shouldn’t ask that hypothetical question? (I was genuinely confused). In any other situation, a media person pounces on a provocative response to dig out its meaning, but an increasingly long list of words and topics are deemed too dangerous to discuss.
The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains: from James Comey’s firing, to the deification of Robert Mueller, to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, to the democracy-imperiling threat to intelligence “whistleblowers,” all those interminable months of Ukrainegate hearings (while Covid-19 advanced), to fury at the death wish of lockdown violators, to the sudden reversal on that same issue, etc.
It’s been learned in these episodes we may freely misreport reality, so long as the political goal is righteous. It was okay to publish the now-discredited Steele dossier, because Trump is scum. MSNBC could put Michael Avenatti on live TV to air a gang rape allegation without vetting, because who cared about Brett Kavanaugh – except press airing of that wild story ended up being a crucial factor in convincing key swing voter Maine Senator Susan Collins the anti-Kavanaugh campaign was a political hit job (the allegation illustrated, “why the presumption of innocence is so important,” she said). Reporters who were anxious to prevent Kavanaugh’s appointment, in other words, ended up helping it happen through overzealousness.
There were no press calls for self-audits after those episodes, just as there won’t be a few weeks from now if Covid-19 cases spike, or a few months from now if Donald Trump wins re-election successfully painting the Democrats as supporters of violent protest who want to abolish police. No: press activism is limited to denouncing and shaming colleagues for insufficient fealty to the cheap knockoff of bullying campus Marxism that passes for leftist thought these days.
The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of “balance,” i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader’s judgment as the routes to positive social change.
For all our infamous failings, journalists once had some toughness to them. We were supposed to be willing to go to jail for sources we might not even like, and fly off to war zones or disaster areas without question when editors asked. It was also once considered a virtue to flout the disapproval of colleagues to fight for stories we believed in (Watergate, for instance).
Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president, but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?
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Just another day in Democratville:
Just another day in Democratville:
Surely Minneapolis, Of All Places, Must Have Cured Racism By Now
Progressives and Democrats are the people who never tire of accusing their political adversaries of racism, or maybe even of “white supremacism.” Elect us, the message is, and we will do away with these evils for good.
If that proposition were valid, then clearly Minneapolis would be in the forefront of those places that have long since done away with racism. Among bastions of woke progressivism in this country, it is almost impossible to top Minneapolis. The place is currently run from top to bottom and at all levels of government by representatives of the far left wing of the Democratic Party, and that has been true for as far back as human memory stretches. Consider:
- The current Mayor of Minneapolis is Jacob Frey. He won the office in 2017 in a free for all among 17 candidates, of whom 10 were from the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party and not one was a Republican. The candidates competed as to who was the farthest left. Frey out-lefted them all. His big issues were “climate change,” affordable housing, and, yes, reforming the police.
- The last Republican Mayor of Minneapolis was Richard Erdall, who served for one day in 1973. Prior to Erdall, the previous Republican Mayor was Kenneth Peterson, who left office in 1961.
- The City Council consists of 13 members, of whom 12 are members of the DFL (Democratic) Party, and one is a member of the Green Party. There are no Republicans.
- The federal Congressperson is Ilhan Omar: far-left Democrat, Muslim immigrant from Somalia, and member of “the squad.” Omar won her seat in 2018 by a margin of 78-22 over her Republican opponent.
- The Governor (Tim Walz) and both U.S. Senators (Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith) are all Democrats.
- Minnesota’s chief law enforcement officer is Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat of the radical left variety, an African American and a Muslim, who previously held Omar’s Minneapolis Congressional seat for 12 years, and who has recently been Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee.
- The police commissioner in Minneapolis is a mayoral appointee. The current commissioner, Medaria Arradondo, an African American, has been in office since 2017..
Of course, it was on the watch of all of these people that George Floyd died as police officer Derek Chauvin was kneeling on his neck in a horrific incident that we have all seen on video. Demonstrators around the country have appropriately protested the treatment to which Floyd was subjected. But although the demonstrators protest what occurred, it is not clear what kind of change they are seeking going forward. Is what they are seeking more and yet more of the progressive governance model? Minneapolis had already elected the farthest left of progressive leftists to every available office, all with promises to bring about social justice, equality, and the end of racism. And yet it is exactly on the watch of these very people that this incident occurred.
President Trump? In our federal system, the states have their own sovereignty. Officer Chauvin worked for Commissioner Arradondo, who works for Mayor Frey. Arradondo and Frey are the people who are responsible for the conduct of the police in Minneapolis, overseen to some degree by Walz and Ellison. President Trump has no more authority to direct or control the conduct of Arradondo or Frey or Chauvin than you or I do.
Oh, but wait. Is there some impediment that keeps Frey or Arradondo from bringing more accountability to the officers in the Minneapolis Police Department? Actually, there is. That is the police union, here known as the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis. Its status is enshrined in the Minnesota’s Public Employee Labor Relations Act. From the Wall Street Journal, May 31:Among the most deeply embedded problems that departments including Minneapolis face is a difficulty punishing officers who are too often insulated from repercussions, law enforcement experts and community leaders said. Unions like the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis fight to shield their members from punishment, both through contract negotiations and disciplinary hearings, . . .From the Journal’s piece, it seems that Officer Chauvin had some 18 complaints on his record. The details of all of those are shielded from public scrutiny by privacy protections negotiated by the union. All we know is that Chauvin received two “letters of reprimand”; but even as to those, we cannot find out the details of the incidents in question. In any event, Officer Chauvin was certainly not fired, let alone suspended from duty, despite all the complaints.
The idea that public employees should have a right to unionize, and should be able to negotiate, through collective bargaining, protection to shield themselves from accountability — that, of course, is another basic pillar of the progressive government model. The public employee unions are a big part — perhaps the very most important part — of the coalition that supports progressive candidates for state and local offices throughout the country, including Minnesota.
Has any one of the Minnesota Democratic politicians who hold responsibility in this situation — Walz, Ellison, Frey, Klobuchar, Smith, Omar, or the 13 members of the Minneapolis City Council — ever advocated for a change to the Minnesota public employee unionization regime to enable the supervisors to bring accountability to the rank and file? Of course not. The public employee unions are the principal funders of their campaigns. These politicians claim to be seeking “social justice” and the end to racism, but in practice, they do the bidding of their union paymasters, which means holding public employees free from accountability in all but the very most egregious incidents.
Writing in National Review on May 31, John Fund argues that “It’s Past Time to Examine How Police Unions Protect Bad Cops.” Excerpt:Writing in the Stanford Law Review, scholar Katherine Bies notes that ever since “the rise of police unions to political power in the 1970s,” they have succeeded in shielding their members from public accountability. “Police unions have established highly developed political machinery that exerts significant political and financial pressure on all three branches of government,” Bies writes. “The power of police unions over policymakers in the criminal justice context distorts the political process and generates political outcomes that undermine the democratic values of transparency and accountability.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++So are any of the protesters seeking the end to the protections that shield police officers from nearly all accountability? If they are, I haven’t been able to find it. The protesters know that they are outraged, but somehow they are unable to put two and two together to figure out that the progressive politicians that they support are the very same people who are perpetuating the regime of public employee unaccountability that leads to tragic incidents like that of George Floyd.
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