Happy Valentine
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One of my dear friends and fellow memo readers agrees:
Dick.
Couldn't agree more with your comment re: the half time "show" at the Super Bowl. Disgusting display of crude, inept, juvenile exhibitionists with no discernible talent. Where were Frank, Andy, Bing and Perry when you needed them? If this display doesn't kill the Super Bowl nothing will. I haven't watched the half times of the Super Bowl in many years and apparently will never do so again.
Ed
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Last night Pepsi Cola decided to sponsor a rapper who is vulgar, against police and most of how a civilized society should function. I shook my head and said if this is what our culture and capitalism has sunk to we have no claim against the thugs of the world.The deadly consequences of Defund the Police
How a woke slogan caused mayhem in America’s working-class communities.
Brendan O'Neill
The deadly consequences of Defund the Police
Brendan O'Neill
chief political writer
Remember ‘Defund the Police’? It was the slogan du jour of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was being hollered on every street during the protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota cop Derek Chauvin. In those riotous days in the summer of 2020, everyone seemed to be waving a placard or wearing a t-shirt demanding defunding. The entire in-crowd posted those three words on their social-media accounts. Even here in the UK, where cops aren’t armed and where the police-funding model is very different to America’s, the right-on lined up behind the vague, strange call for police forces to be starved of funds. A headline in the impeccably middle-class Guardian declared: ‘The answer to police violence is not “reform”. It’s defunding.’
Yet now, ‘Defund the Police’ seems to be a fast fading idea. You don’t hear it very much anymore. It might linger among the white antifa oafs who stomp around in cities like Portland and among well-to-do radical students on quiet, handsome campuses in the UK where there’s very rarely any need to call the cops. But on the streets, in politics, in the press, ‘Defund’ seems to have fizzled out. The old woke roar is barely a whimper now. And it isn’t hard to see why. This slogan has proven lethal. It has been an unmitigated disaster in numerous US cities. The cutting of cops’ budgets did not give rise to the new dawn of flowery peace and racial justice that the virtue-signalling defunders fantasised it would. On the contrary, it helped to stoke violent crime, further destabilise city life, and make life even harder for poor black and brown communities in particular. The lesson here is clear: wokeness kills.
The idea of ‘Defund the Police’ has been around for a couple of decades. But it exploded into public view following the killing of Floyd in May 2020. It’s a simple-sounding proposition: you take public money away from police departments that are too often heavy-handed and racially prejudiced and plough it instead into fairer non-policing forms of ‘public safety’, like mental healthcare, youth services, improvements to housing, and so on. And hey presto, there’ll be fewer trigger-happy cops on the streets and more happy citizens no longer tussling with mental problems and crappy living conditions. The reality, of course, as could have been predicted by anyone who doesn’t live in a gated community and get all their news from the New York Times, has been rather different.
‘This US city was working to cut its police budget in half – then violent crime started to rise’, said a headline in the Guardian in March 2021, less than a year after that very same bastion of liberal correct-think was telling its readers that defunding cops is the ‘answer’ America is looking for. The March 2021 piece was about Oakland in California, where local officials took the post-Floyd anger of 2020 to heart and made plans to cut police spending by a whopping 50 per cent – around $150million a year. Then the killings started. And other forms of crime. In 2020 there were 107 murders in Oakland, compared with 75 in 2019. The spike in violence led five black members of Oakland’s taskforce on public safety to write a letter warning officials that ‘even more lives will be lost if police are removed without an alternative response being put in place’.
There have been similar rises in violence in other American cities that have planned or actually made cuts to police budgets. Throughout America, homicides rose by 30 per cent in 2020. And they continued rising in 2021. ‘Cities across the US are breaking all-time homicide records this year’, reported CNN in December. CNN reports that more than two-thirds of America’s most populated cities experienced more homicides in 2021 than they did even in 2020. Last year some American cities broke their all-time homicide records. Philadelphia suffered 513 homicides, smashing its previous annual high of 503 in 1990. Indianapolis had 230 homicides, breaking its previous record of 215 – which was in 2020. Things have gotten so bad that even the New York Times has been moved to ask: ‘Why are so many Americans killing one another?’
Speaking of New York, crime is surging in NYC, too. Already this year things look bad. An extraordinary 72 of the city’s 77 police precincts have experienced more crime in the first few weeks of 2022 than they did in the same period in 2021. And that’s saying something, given how strange and fraught 2021 was. So far this year there has been a 35 per cent rise in robberies, a 35 per cent rise in rapes and a 30 per cent rise in shooting incidents in NYC compared with the same period in 2021 (killings, however, are down, by 13 per cent). ‘No neighbourhood is safe’, says one Brooklyn cop. Is it a coincidence that this is happening in a city where right-on officials responded to the political tumult of 2020 by agreeing to cut police funding by a whopping $1 billion? Many NYC residents are pretty certain it isn’t. Marisol Sanchez, whose son was shot to death in the Bronx in August last year, slammed the Defund the Police movement, saying that poor communities like hers ‘just don’t see [cops] no more’.
In numerous cities, there seems to be a pretty clear relationship of causation, or at least of inflammation, between ‘defund’ policies and blow-ups in violent crime. So in Austin, Texas, officials cut $20million from the police budget. This led to the dissolution of some law-enforcement units. ‘In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests this summer [2020], we made a significant cut to policing dollars’, boasted once council member. What happened in 2021? Austin experienced its highest number of homicides in 20 years. Aggravated assault rose, too. ‘Austin police chief says city doesn’t have enough officers’, said a news headline in December. There were cuts to police funding in the city of Los Angeles, too: $89million was taken away from the LAPD and rerouted to other services. With depressing predictability, there were 397 murders in LA in 2021, the most it has experienced in 15 years.
Not surprisingly, the focus is now turning in many US cities, away from ‘defunding the police’ to, in the words of The Economist, ‘refunding the police’. ‘As violent crime leaps, liberal cities rethink cutting police budgets’, The Economist soberly reported last month. LA cops are now set for a budget boost. San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, initially supported the idea of defunding the police – now she says she will be ‘less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city’. That’s a remarkable turnaround. The Economist says many ‘liberal’ city officials across the US have twigged, finally, to a fairly obvious fact – that ‘if a city wants to drive down its murder rate, hiring more officers seems a reasonable place to start’.
But even as defunding turns to refunding, and even as woke politicos start to recognise that cops can be useful in crime-ridden communities, the question remains – how was this ‘bullshit’ allowed to ‘destroy cities’? Why did so many accept and promote the preposterous idea that cutting police resources and having fewer officers on the streets would help to make communities – especially black communities – safer? Many people warned against the slashing of police budgets, and yet still it happened. In NYC, for example, in August 2020 – right around the time of the BLM and Defund uprisings – influential people of colour were sounding the alarm about defunding the police. City councilwoman Vanessa L Gibson, a representative for the Bronx, said her constituents ‘want to see cops in the community’. Numerous black New York officials counselled against Defund. One described this woke belief in trimming cop numbers as a form of political ‘colonisation’ pushed by white progressives. Another said it had the whiff of ‘political gentrification’.
Polls over the past year have shown that many working-class Americans are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of defunding the police. Some surveys show that black Americans oppose Defund more than white Americans do. In Minneapolis, for example, where George Floyd was killed, three quarters of black respondents to a poll about policing said the city should not reduce its police force. Black respondents were ‘considerably more opposed [to Defund the Police]’ than white respondents were. In a similar survey in Detroit, a majority of white respondents said ‘police reform’ was the major issue facing their city, whereas a majority of black respondents said ‘public safety’ was their main concern. For them, police reform was the lowest priority. As Slate says, this seemingly incongruous racial disparity can be seen in various parts of the US, where ‘many white people are open to police reform, and many black people are wary of curtailing law enforcement’. A Pew Research survey found that growing numbers of black Americans now want police funding to be increased. Strikingly, black and Hispanic Democrats are more likely than white Democrats to want more spending on cops. Thirty-two per cent of white Democrats want increased police funding, compared with 38 per cent of black Democrats and 39 per cent of Hispanic Democrats.
So, given the warnings from political representatives – who were in many cases representatives of the very communities that white liberals claim they want to protect from cops – and given all the survey findings showing that the American people ‘want more spending on police in their area’, how on earth did the Defund the Police idea take off? How did it make its way even into sections of the Democratic Party and into council chambers and high-up political decision-making? How did it come to be swooned over by every supposedly respectable observer from the Guardian to the NYT to, of course, the Twitterati and Instagram influencers?
It’s because the new elites, these noisy purveyors of ‘woke’ thinking who have come to dominate the political and media classes, are now phenomenally removed from ordinary people and from the needs and interests of working communities. To such an extent that they couldn’t even see that there might be a problem with withdrawing police from poor, isolated, atomised communities in which crime and anti-social behaviour are significant problems. The story of Defund, the spectacular collapse of this toxic woke slogan, the hardship this eccentric ideology has caused in many communities, is really a story of the unbridgeable chasm that now separates the decadent new establishment from the reasoned public that wants to enjoy a safe, good, fruitful life.
To be sure, the recent surge in crime in the US is a complex phenomenon. There are many contributing factors. Defund was one – with its physical reduction of police resources and, in some cases, actual law-enforcement units – but there were others, too. As an interesting analysis in the New York Times says, we are not living in normal times. The Covid pandemic, for example, was a ‘mass death event that ruptured the fabric of American life’. Schools and other community institutions ‘evaporated’, meaning many young people were no longer as focused and disciplined as they once were. The space for problematic behaviour grew.
There is also the problem of ‘general anomie’, says the Times. That is, the ‘unravelling of the social contract’ that we have witnessed in recent years, which could very well reduce ‘pro-social and relational’ behaviour and create the conditions for more anti-social and even criminal forms of behaviour instead. (Perhaps the NYT will now pay more attention to those of us who think genuinely progressive politics means challenging anomie through solidarity, strong communities and gainful employment, and ditch its addiction to the hyper-atomising cult of identity politics.) Yet as even the NYT must admit, in addition to this mix of virus and anomie – and very possibly exacerbating this mix – there is the problem of ‘changes in police behaviour’. ‘Protests against police brutality [make] officers more afraid or unwilling to do their jobs’, says the NYT in its analytical explanation for why ‘so many Americans are killing one another’, which is about as close as this newspaper, which was so sympathetic to the BLM mayhem, will get to admitting that the ferocious and often fact-lite demonisation of American cops over the past two years may have had negative consequences for many communities, especially poorer ones.
So, two things seem to be happening here. First, there’s the rupturing of social bonds, a much-discussed phenomenon these past few decades, which could be inflaming community breakdown and crime. And second, there is the far more conscious, politically motivated decision to withdraw or at least problematise certain forms of police activity, which will have given a green light to criminal opportunists and created more arenas for violent behaviour. This latter phenomenon is a product of one of the most curious political events of our times: the upper middle classes’ turn against law and order; the elites’ growing agitation with the idea of maintaining social order and with all the tools that are necessary to such an endeavour – policing, force, judgement and control.
It is remarkable how much more pronounced anti-police sentiment is among middle-class graduates and the professional elites than it is in many working-class communities. As the African-American mayor of Newark Ras Baraka said in the summer of 2020, Defund was a ‘bourgeois liberal’ ideology, pushed by out-of-touch members of the observing class. The African-American former mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, was even more cutting. There is an ‘audacity of ignorance and white privilege’ in those who support anti-police policies and who refuse to acknowledge the spike in crime that these policies can cause, he says. In response to Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s liberal, police-critical DA, who has denied that Philadelphia is experiencing a crisis of crime, Nutter says: ‘It all goes back to supremacy, paternalism. “I’m woke. I’m paying attention. I spend a lot of time with black people. Some of my best friends…” All that bullshit.’ Defunding the police is very often a case of privileged white liberals positioning themselves as the saviours of black communities, says Nutter, while in reality causing more disarray in those communities.
The upper middle-class turn against law and order can be seen in the UK, too. As in the US, anti-police sentiment, as a political position, seems stronger among graduate leftists and the commentariat than it is in working-class communities that want more bobbies on the beat. Indeed, the slogan ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) has gone from being the cry of working-class football fans four or five decades ago to being the intellectual property of university-educated middle-class radicals. The signalling of anti-police virtue seems to be a higher priority for the British cultural elite than tackling crime. Witness their unwillingness seriously to grapple with problems like knife crime, urban violence and Islamist extremism. They would rather let those problems carry on blighting mostly poor and ethnic-minority communities than acknowledge there is a role for the authorities in tackling such crime and protecting the integrity of community life. Just as in the US, anti-police posturing in the UK is now a largely ‘bourgeois liberal’ ideology.
It is essential to note that this elite turn against law and order is not motored by a belief in freedom or by trust in ordinary people’s ability to govern their communities for themselves. Indeed, a great contradiction of our time is that the woke elites continually signal their disdain for ‘authoritarian’ policing while expressly supporting new, even more insidious forms of policing – of speech, of thought, of personal behaviour. They disdain traditional applications of law and order, while demanding more intimate forms of control in the shape of cancel culture and nanny statism. They bristle at supposedly old-fashioned ideas about maintaining social order while seeking to enforce cultural order – that is, intellectual order and lifestyle order. That’s because the driver of the bourgeois embrace of the Defund ideology is not trust in liberty and community, but rather the upper middle-classes’ growing alienation from the values that underpin traditional forms of policing in the community.
It is not surprising that elites who see racism everywhere, who have convinced themselves that crime is a natural byproduct of poverty rather than something people also choose to do, who believe that less well-off people cannot be held entirely responsible for their actions, and who have adopted a paternalistic attitude towards black and ethnic-minority communities in particular, are turning against traditional ideas of policing and order. And it is not surprising that their hyper-relativistic, pseudo-radical policies have caused so much harm. Working-class victims of crime, ethnic-minority communities struggling with rising violence – this is the debris of the woke derangement, the collateral damage of a cultural elite’s fashionable abandonment of the belief that it is good and important to tackle crime. Wokeness isn’t only annoying – it’s dangerous.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
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According to the author of the book I am reading, Soros is an enormous sponsor and patron of BLM:
Who is BLM’s leader and where are donations going? No one can say
By Charles Love
Kelly Dolan, Karen E. Knudsen, Jonathan Reckford. These are the respective CEOs of the Ronald McDonald House Charities, the American Cancer Society, and Habitat for Humanity. Their jobs are to offer leadership and guidance and to be responsible, along with their board members, for the direction and financial transparency of their organizations.
Black Lives Matter is another major nonprofit in this country. But who is running it, and how are their donations being spent? The answers are hard to find.
In 2020, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) raked in $90 million – a handsome sum for an organization that was only awarded nonprofit status in December of that year. Soon after, the group came under fire for not clearly showing how it spends its money. The attorneys general of California and Washington are now demanding that BLMGNF stop taking donations, citing a lack of financial transparency and delinquent registry of charitable trusts. (In response, an unidentified spokesperson for BLMGNF told the Washington Examiner: “We have shut down online fundraising as we work quickly to ensure we are meeting all compliance requirements.”)
But while these concerns coming from the government may be new, the warning signs have been with us for some time.
Immediately following George Floyd’s death in police custody in May 2020, donations started flooding into the BLMGNF coffers, ostensibly to fight police brutality. But the organization then had no financial reports on its website, even though it had existed for seven years. There were also no leaders visible or accomplishments listed on the site.
By April 2021, BLMGNF co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors was accused of going on a property buying spree, snapping up four homes worth a combined $3 million in the US alone. This, despite the organization’s claim that she only made $120,000 from 2013-2019 – an average of $20,000 per year – and received no income from the group since 2019.
After Khan-Cullors stepped down in May 2021, she handed the reins to two other members, Monifa Bandele and Makani Themba, who then gave a statement “clarifying” their status:
“Although a media advisory was released indicating that we were tapped to play the role of Senior Co-Executives at BLMGNF, we were not able to come to an agreement with the acting Leadership Council about our scope of work and authority. As a result, we did not have the opportunity to serve in this capacity.”
Who sits on this “leadership council”? Who is running BLMGNF now? Bandele and Themba aren’t saying and you won’t find the answers on the organization’s website either.
Critics of BLM have been coming forward over the last year, and some are even believers in the cause. Rashad Turner, who founded the BLM chapter in St. Paul, Minn., left the group because, he said, it “doesn’t care about black families.” BLM10, a group of 10 former BLM chapters, gave a public statement accusing the larger organization of a lack of accountability, structural disorganization and hoarding resources.
According to a February 2021 financial report, BLMGNF says it now has $60 million on hand after accounting for expenses and grant disbursements. In the report, you will find mentions of Twitter impressions, conversations, and the creation of its political action committee – a PAC that supports radically left candidates like Jamaal Bowman (NY) and Cori Bush (Mo.). It also claims that the organization has disbursed $21.7 million and proudly proclaims: “We selected 30 local organizations to be our first cohort of official BLMGNF grantees. Of the 30 organizations selected, 23 of them are led by Black LGBTQIA folks and/or directly serve these communities...” It continues: “We have committed a six figure grant to each of these organizations.”
Meanwhile, the issue of police brutality — the ostensible reason why BLMGNF has raised so much money in the first place — is mentioned only briefly. The report states that BLMGNF “supported the unveiling” of the BREATHE Act, a federal bill calling for divestment from our policing systems, in June 2020. “In 2021,” it adds, “we will be pushing elected officials at the federal and local level to pass the BREATHE Act.”
BLMGNF’s supporters will likely have no issue with its lack of accountability at the top. They would say that since the group still has $60 million on hand, and it disclosed where the remaining dollars went, what is the big deal? But this should concern anyone who believes in the Black Lives Matter cause, especially those who donated money assuming it was all going toward police reform.
The bottom line is that Black Lives Matter is not, and likely never was, an organization focused on improving policing in America. Advocates for the cause must ask themselves some fundamental questions: Why would the leaders of such a powerful force for good want to remain faceless? If police violence is such a huge problem – and the organization’s main reason for being – why is there so little mention of it on the Web site or in the financial report?
But getting answers to these questions, as well as finding out how LGBTQIA folks became the priority of an organization founded to address police brutality, is almost impossible from a nonprofit that’s hiding in the shadows.
Charles Love is the executive director of Seeking Educational Excellence, host of The Charles Love Show, and the author of “Race Crazy: BLM, 1619, and the Progressive Racism Movement.“
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I don't know how long it will take for Durham's noose to slip around Hillary's neck, or if it will, but she has to be sweating.
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Most Democrats want Hillary Clinton investigated for any role in Russiagate scandal: poll
By Paul Sperry
A surprisingly large share of Democrats wants to see Hillary Clinton investigated over her possible role in manufacturing dirt to try to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, a new poll shows.
The survey, conducted by TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics in New Jersey last month, polled 1,308 Americans about the mushrooming investigation by Special Counsel John Durham into the FBI’s probe of Trump’s alleged links to Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Nearly three out of four of those polled who are following the story said they think it’s important prosecutors investigate Clinton for her role in the Russiagate scandal along with her top campaign advisers.
That includes two-thirds — or 66 percent — of the Democrats polled who said they have been keeping up with the case.
That’s up 20 points from this past October, when TIPP asked the same question of a national panel, and indicates the Durham probe may be turning Democratic opinion regarding Clinton and the controversy.
Meanwhile, 91 percent of Republicans in the same group and 65 percent of Independents also called for Clinton to specifically be investigated.
Durham has already charged Clinton campaign subcontractor Igor Danchenko for allegedly lying about the sourcing behind the debunked so-called Steele dossier he helped compile, which attempted to frame Trump as a Kremlin agent.
Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst, completely fabricated the source for the dossier’s most explosive allegations, according to the indictment. It turns out he also allegedly used a Clinton campaign adviser as another key source for other dirt he gathered. Danchenko was arrested in October and has pleaded not guilty.
Michael Sussmann, the former law partner of Clinton campaign general counsel Mark Elias, was indicted in September for allegedly lying about his work for the Clinton campaign on a scheme linking Trump to a Russian bank. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty.
As part of the probe involving Sussmann, Durham said in a legal filing Friday that he discovered Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid a Web firm to “infiltrate’’ servers at Trump Towers and the White House to try to tie Trump to Russia.
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Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, nominated for Nobel Peace Prize a second time. Were he not related to Trump he would have already won.
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De Santis quite qualified to seek higher office and has been a great Governor of his state. The Democrats will smear him because they fear him.
Subject: Gov. Ron DeSantis of F
60 Minutes had a hit piece on DeSantis - the Governor of Florida - but failed to disclose these facts:
Ronald Dion DeSantis was born on September 14, 1978, in Jacksonville, Florida, the son of Karen (née Rogers) and Ronald DeSantis.
[1] He is of Italian descent.
[2] His family moved to Orlando, Florida, before relocating to
Dunedin, Florida, when he was six years old.
[3] In 1991, he was a member of the Little League team from Dunedin National that made it to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
[4] After graduating from Dunedin High School in 1997, DeSantis attended Yale University. He was captain of Yale's varsity baseball team and joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity.
[5] On the Yale baseball team, DeSantis was an outfielder; as a senior in 2001, he had the team's best batting average at .336.
[6] He graduated from Yale in 2001 with a B.A.
magna cum laude in history.
[7] He then spent a year as a history teacher at the Darlington School.
[8] DeSantis then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 2005 with a Juris Doctor cum laude.
[9] DeSantis received his Reserve Naval officer's commission and assignment to the Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG) in 2004 at the U.S. Naval Reserve Center in Dallas, Texas, while still a student at Harvard Law School.
[10] He completed Naval Justice School in 2005.
[11] Later that year, he received orders to the JAG Trial Service Office Command South East at Naval Station Mayport, Florida, as a prosecutor
[12] In 2006, he was promoted from lieutenant, junior grade to lieutenant. He worked for the commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO), working directly with detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Joint Detention Facility.
[13] In 2007, DeSantis reported to the Naval Special Warfare Command Group in Coronado, California, where he was assigned to SEAL Team One and deployed to Iraq with the troop surge as the Legal Advisor to the SEAL Commander, Special Operations Task Force-West in Fallujah.
[14] DeSantis returned to the U.S. in April 2008, at which time he was reassigned to the Naval Region Southeast Legal Service.
[15] The U.S. Department of Justice appointed him to serve as an Assistant U.S. Attorney at the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Florida.
[16] DeSantis was assigned as a trial defense counsel until his honorable discharge from active duty in February 2010.
[17] He concurrently accepted a reserve commission as a Lieutenant Commander in the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the US Navy Reserve.
[18] He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and the Iraq Campaign Medal.
[19 He represented Florida's 6th congressional district in the US House of Representatives from 2013 to 2018.
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| A Retired Russian General's Criticism May Signal A Larger Problem For Putin |
| by Paul R. Gregory quoting Michael McFaul via The Hill Retired Russian Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, the head of the All-Russian Officers Assembly, has gone public with a statement that calls for Russian President Vladimir Putin to resign over the confrontation involving Ukraine. +++ |
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