On Our Elitist's Secular Moralities and Moralisms

John McWhorter,  "End Race-Based Affirmative Action: “has been controversial since it was instituted in the 1960s”

It’s Time to End Race-Based Affirmative Action

Back in 2009, I and the sociologist Dalton Conley debated affirmative action with N.A.A.C.P. chairman Julian Bond and Columbia University president Lee Bollinger. In my closing statement I suggested a scenario in which I had a daughter who got into nearly every college she applied to while her similarly credentialed white friends got into schools only here or there. If that happened, I said, the reason, “given the fact that she will not have grown up under anything you could call disadvantage,” would be that:

There are administrators beaming at the fact that by admitting my daughter they are sticking a thumb in the eye at white people who don’t feel guilty enough about their supremacy. If the idea is that the administrators are beaming because my daughter is going to make the campus more diverse; if they are beaming because by admitting my daughter, they are showing that racism is not dead … I will feel that my daughter is being condescended to. I will feel it as a mark of disrespect to me and my ability to get past the ills of the past and to pass on those abilities to my daughter.

The debate was civil in a way that debates, sadly, frequently no longer are, and it was part of a long line of such debates over affirmative action that has since continued, and soon promises to return the issue to the fore. 

Affirmative action — broadly speaking, policies that seek, affirmatively, to achieve racial and gender balance in areas such as hiring, contracting and university admissions — has been controversial since it was instituted in the 1960s. It’s frequently thought to have originated, in a formal sense, with President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 and has proliferated throughout American institutions over time. It was controversial at the time of that 2009 debate and it still is, such that in its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will be considering challenges to affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

I now have that daughter. (I don’t remember what made me so sure I would have a girl, since she wasn’t born until a few years later, but here we are, and she’ll be applying to college in eight years, I assume, with my younger daughter doing so three years later.) And not only do I stand by what I said more than a decade ago, I feel it more deeply now.

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...Donald J. Trump!

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SOS

Jazz Shaw, ""Safe streets worker" (replacing police) gunned down in Baltimore"

During the course of the madness that promoted “defunding” or abolishing the police, there was an emphasis placed on replacing police in some circumstances with “community safety” workers who would supposedly act as unarmed “violence interrupters” and reduce the number of lethal use of force incidents by police officers. In Baltimore, Maryland’s violent gang territories, an existing organization known as the “Safe Streets Program” gained a lot of attention and municipal support in this effort. The goal of the program is to deploy former gang members (or “former”) into areas controlled by the gangs to negotiate nonviolent resolutions to conflicts. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with other proposed “violence interruption” programs in major cities, sending someone with a clipboard out to resolve a beef between gang members isn’t always effective. That was sadly this case this week when one of Baltimore’s Safe Streets workers was shot to death along with several other people on the East side of Charm City. (Baltimore Sun)

A quadruple shooting in East Baltimore on Wednesday night left three people dead, including a Safe Streets worker, and one person injured, police said. Three others were injured in separate shootings in West and South Baltimore.

At about 7:25 p.m., Eastern District patrol officers responded to a ShotSpotter alert in the 2400 block of E. Monument St. Once there, officers located four men suffering from apparent gunshot wounds.

A 28-year-old man was pronounced dead on the scene. Medics transported three other victims to area hospitals, where a 24-year-old man and another man were also pronounced dead.

Just to be clear, I am not an opponent of the Safe Streets Program and this murder was particularly appalling, even in a city where murders are literally a daily occurrence. Tragically, the murder rate in Baltimore is still higher than what you see in Kabul, Afghanistan during any given week. If they can find people who are able and willing to go out there and talk some of the gang bangers back off the edge instead of settling their beef with illegal firearms, God bless them. They need to be willing to try anything at this point.

And it’s not as if the program has been wholly ineffective. In the specific neighborhoods that Safe Streets focuses on, there have been some measurable (if not drastic) reductions in shootings and homicides at times. Last summer, the Cherry Hill neighborhood was able to celebrate a solid year without a single gun death on the streets, though that winning streak sadly ended a short time later.

But this killing also underscores the fact that violent crime, particularly when we’re talking about gang violence, sometimes requires a legal, violent response. The Baltimore Police have been cut down in numbers and in a type of retreat ever since the Freddie Gray riots. The city’s government has spent more time trying to prosecute its own cops than the gangs that have largely retaken control of the streets in many parts of Baltimore. When law enforcement is viewed as being weakened or ineffectual, the gangs move in to fill the power vacuum.

Further, while I applaud the efforts of the Safe Streets Program, it also serves as an unpleasant reminder of the bizarre nature of the crime problem in Baltimore and how the city government chooses to address it. We’re at the point where a municipally-endorsed program is actually negotiating with the gangs in an effort to convince them to stop killing people right and left. This is an absolutely dystopian situation. Lawful citizens expect the government to keep them safe and law enforcement is supposed to not only deter, but investigate violent crime and bring suspects in for prosecution. When did we reach the point where the government has to send out negotiators to try to convince them to behave like decent human beings rather than murderous animals?

The new Mayor and the new City Council President have now been in office for more than a year. (Though the City Council President is probably a bit distracted at the moment by the legal problems he and his wife are caught up in.) Both of them, like most of their predecessors over the past couple of decades, ran for office on a promise to get the gang violence under control and reduce the rate of bloodshed. The people of the city need to hold them accountable and demand their right to step out of their homes without the constant threat of being immediately gunned down. And if these people can’t get the job done, replace them with someone who can.

Populists Beware...

 

Brian Chau, "The Rule of Midwits"

A set of decentralized, ideologically driven selection mechanisms is propelling the decay and collapse of American institutions.

While Republican intellectuals are finally facing the problems created by the Democratic Party’s institutional capture of colleges, the HR bureaucracy, and public education, the Democratic campaign to defend these redoubts is proving remarkably unpopular with the electorate. Take the recent Virginia governor’s race between Republican Glenn Youngkin and Democrat Terry McAuliffe. The Youngkin campaign could be summed up by an attack ad that simply quoted McAuliffe: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach.” Consequent polls found overwhelming support for Youngkin among parents of K-12 students, up to an estimated 17-point gap. Youngkin won.

With administrators seemingly so unpopular with the public, one might wonder why Democrats are so eager to defend them. The reason appears to be little more than a dogma, a crude mimicry of the Reagan Republican emphasis on free markets. Instead of the free-marketeer, the Democrats’ figure of affection is the bureaucrat, the middle manager, the good-old insider who knows how an institution works and is tied everlastingly to it. The threat of greater democratic participation in setting school curricula or determining COVID measures leads Democrats to cry “authoritarianism,” “fascism,” and “coup,” just as reflexively as Reaganites once called the public provision of services “socialist.” The New York Times captured this well when it portrayed laws establishing some degree of parental control over public school curricula as “a War on Democracy.”

The key term for understanding the ferocity of the Democratic attachment to mid-level managers is “midwit.” A midwit is typically described as someone with an IQ score between 85 and 115; more colloquially, it describes a person with slightly above-average ability in any domain—someone who is able to pass basic qualifications and overcome standard hurdles but who is in no way exceptional. For a dominant political party, this is an obvious constituency and exactly the type of person you want on your side. While midwits often are preferable to dimwits for obvious reasons, they’re also preferable to an elite (those with exceptional abilities but who may not wield power) that might one day decide to overturn existing structures and ways of doing things.

While competition for authority might, in some contexts, be well worth the value that a member of the elite contributes, this is rarely the case in incumbent political institutions, most of which depend for their survival on restricting intellectual input. Even if incumbent institutions could attract elites initially, elites would eventually abandon them, either to work in institutions less burdened by historical constraints or else in fields that are dominated more by objective rather than subjective measures of skill and accomplishment.

To understand this phenomenon better, it helps to look at a chart of college majors ranked by average IQ.

IQ is also not an all-encompassing measure, but a reasonably predictive, best-for-now heuristic without many alternatives. This chart also provides averages only: There are of course geniuses in early childhood education and dimwits in economics. But some fields, on average, clearly skew toward midwits.

These degree breakdowns can also be projected forward into the labor market: Software engineering jobs frequently require computer science or mathematics degrees, doctors require medical degrees, and so on.

But what really give teeth to this observation are the selection systems that dominate particular fields, explicitly filtering out candidates from both the top and bottom of the IQ scale. Job qualifications typically filter out candidates from the bottom, while restricting opportunities for free, creative, lucrative, and independent work filters out those from the top.

Software companies, for example, have a high demand for elite labor and compensate accordingly. They explicitly brand themselves as solving difficult problems in fast-paced environments staffed by “A-player” colleagues, engage actively to recruit top talent from top universities, and subject applicants to difficult technical tests. Naturally, they tend to attract people who studied computer science, natural sciences, and mathematics, or even just iconoclasts who have both the ability and ambition to solve abstract and highly technical problems.

In each subgroup of the political class—candidates for office, staffers, activists, journalists—the primary selection mechanism is not technical competence but strict ideological conformity, as it is in the aforementioned incumbent institutions: It takes some basic degree of ability to learn the mantras, avoid missteps, and punish dissenters. Thus was the data scientist David Shor fired from his progressive analytics firm for sharing peer-reviewed research demonstrating that violent protests have a history of hurting progressive electoral prospects; and when the University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was invited to give a lecture at MIT on climate change, his lecture was canceled because of his opinions on affirmative action. Restrictions on freedom of conscience can be a sticking point even if they don’t result in getting sacked or canceled, as demonstrated by the trajectory of liberal dissenters like Bari Weiss, Peter Boghossian, and Zaid Jilani. That their message has drawn large, sympathetic audiences is a significant development.

On the empirical side, while there don’t appear to be direct measures of, for example, the average IQ among granular ideological factions, we do have some indirect evidence. Significantly, the professional fields that are most politically touchy, and which are also (uncoincidentally) left leaning, fall neatly into the midwit range: journalism (communications), education, social science, business administration and management, and public administration.

This is not a new phenomenon. The historical analogs for this effect are often referred to as “Lysenkoism,” named after the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko. Rejecting well-evidenced genetic findings, Lysenko made absurd, demonstrably false claims about farming, including the hypothesis that exposing crops to poor conditions would increase future yields because “future generations of crops would remember these environmental cues,” and nearby seeds would not cause resource scarcity because “plants from the same ‘class’ never compete with one another.”

Lysenko is the standard bearer for pseudoscience driven by confirmation bias. But his false claims were not at all random or founded in ignorance: Each of his lies formed part of a coherent argument for communist assumptions. He denied that genes exist on the basis that believing they do could prove a “barrier to progress.” He dismissed contrary evidence presented by Western scientists as “tools of imperialist oppressors.”

There is no shortage of this phenomenon in contemporary times. Think of the denial of diversity in human intelligence, of physical differences based on biological sex, of standardized testing as race-neutral, and of the empirical data behind the efficacy of corporate diversity training and measures to combat the “gender pay gap.” With the benefit of hindsight, it is widely known how Lysenkoism ended: The implementation of his “research” in reality helped facilitate the starvation of tens of millions of people from Ukraine to China through manmade famines.

Of course, not all Democrats hold Lysenkoist beliefs, just as not all Republicans are anti-vaccine or deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change. But the salience of these beliefs across U.S. political, corporate, nonprofit, journalistic, and academic institutions demonstrates that ideologically convenient Lysenkoism persists on both sides of the aisle. The main difference between liberals and conservatives, as the political scientist Richard Hanania points out, is organization. As Hanania says:

There are two ways to lie in politics. Let’s say Side A wants to spend more on government, and Side B wants to spend less. Side A might exaggerate the benefits of investing in poor communities, and Side B might tell a story about how tax cuts for the rich will pay for themselves. This can be called directional lying, with each side trying to convince you of something, and this is how politics pretty much worked until the last few years.

Republicans, because they are tribal and not ideological, do not punish their politicians for non-directional lying, or simply making things up … Trump mostly governed like a typical Republican, and his administration pushed for things like less spending on entitlements. Republicans meanwhile have been running ads accusing Democrats of wanting to cut Medicare. …

Liberals say really false things like “men can get pregnant,” “police are killing large numbers of innocent black men,” and “poor people are more likely to be fat because of food deserts.” Yet these are lies (or more usually, kinds of self-delusion) that you would expect from people who’ve adopted crazy ideological commitments.

An existing model of institutional power describes institutional decisions as arising from conflicts between factions. Recruiting, HR policy, and governance are not just procedures for choosing the best person for the job or promotion; they are means of choosing the person who would most benefit the faction making the choice. In other words, it’s politics all the way down.

With this in mind, midwits and the ideological conformity they favor can spread through incumbent institutions fairly easily even without any organized effort. How? First, incumbent institutions disproportionately select for midwits; second, ideologically conformist midwits select for others of the same ideology, which can be done through hiring decisions, HR law, or employee activism; third, the selection process is amplified further by incentives—because ideological conformity benefits midwits, they change procedures to elevate themselves over their less conformist but more productive colleagues; fourth, the increase in ideological conformity skews selection further toward midwits.

This cycle helps explain why incumbent institutions become stagnant or decline, and eventually become incapable of doing what they were created to do.

The vast majority of these processes do not require Machiavellian planning, but they are responsible for consequences that benefit no one. Take the attacks on advanced classes and specialized programs in primary and high school education occurring in blue areas like New York City, California, Boston, and Oregon. In service of the ideology that demands equality of outcomes between demographic groups, self-proclaimed progressives are seeking to eliminate redistributive, public sector education programs that have been shown in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere to benefit primarily poor students and immigrants.

Unlike what some prominent conservatives seem to think, this doesn’t really represent “a plan to take over America.” Instead, it’s mostly a case of incentives aligning for midwits to act according to their own emotional and political biases, which also happens to advantage their political benefactors.

This model helps explain how left-wing ideology and incumbent institutions have become almost synonymous, just as Democratic politicians and media figures have become closely associated with ideas like “bureaucracy” and “stagnation.” And in a sanitized political bubble like this one, there is very little need to engage in formal democracy. Sure, there are primaries and elections every couple of years, but these tend to make up a fraction of a bureaucrat, professor, NGO staffer, think-tanker, or journalist’s time. Instead, their engagements with “democracy” are mostly relational—filling out paperwork, putting arguments in writing, arranging meetings, and so on. Their idea of democracy is shaped not by the democratic process itself (i.e., public deliberation), but by feedback from bureaucracy, an often artificial and unnecessary appendage of democracy. Consequently, when movements push policy that circumvents this appendage, they are actually completely right to perceive it as an existential threat to their way of life. This mentality, more than “wokism,” “neoliberalism,” or any other ism, cost Terry McAuliffe his chance at reclaiming the governor’s mansion.

On the Republican side, this theory helps explain why most of their attempts to address institutional disadvantages are failing. It’s actually much easier to reverse the consequences of an organized plan than to reverse an emergent process: Simply remove the leaders from power and wield political force. So far, that’s exactly what Republicans have been trying to do.

Republicans put both Donald Trump and Glenn Youngkin into office. They’ve passed broad anti-critical race theory (CRT) laws, threatened to break up Big Tech companies, and have even proposed legislation to make it easier. But as Marshall Kosloff put it, “If you broke up Amazon into six different companies, AT&T stock from the 1980s, all six of those companies would also not serve Parler ... It’s just the fact that a certain part of the country that is realigning away from their political beliefs has control over these institutions.” Similar arguments can easily be made for other Republican ideas. Even if anti-CRT laws are passed, left-wingers who would have taught it have plenty of other ideologies to choose from, which they can use to educate students the way they want.

So: Are Republican elites just stupid? Well, no. Firstly, elites—whether Democrat or Republican—can easily shelter themselves. Anyone in at least the upper middle class, with an average income around $200,000 per year, can pay for private schools or whatever other pathways lead away from the problems caused by the rise of midwits. More importantly, the United States is a two-party system, which means that Republican coalitions enjoy the inverse of what Democratic coalitions get. This is the one exception to the idea that midwits are always preferable to dimwits in a political movement. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote in reaction to Hanania’s argument:

One arguable takeaway from this analysis is that being an intellectual attached [to] the GOP is a really depressing business *unless* your faction can seize control of a GOP WH, in which case you’ll face relatively few constraints on action from your base.

The most important takeaway from this model might be that the American status quo is not really in all that much danger; it is actually incredibly stable. This doesn’t mean that polarization won’t increase, or that elected offices won’t continue flipping back and forth. What it implies is that the incentives and institutions that caused this cycle of institutional decline and failure will continue to self-perpetuate, despite the efforts of third parties and intellectual movements, whether elitist or populist, to take over. This cycle will perpetuate itself because it is driven by an incredibly resistant set of decentralized incentives that incorporate built-in reactions to the most common challenges. The common mistake of the “anti-woke,” “depolarization,” and “never-Trump” factions is in underestimating the phenomena they claim to oppose.

Why Populations Stall in Corporate Capitalized Societies

Mosby Indicted

Brad Dress, "Baltimore state's attorney indicted on perjury charges"

A Maryland grand jury on Thursday indicted Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby on two counts of perjury and two counts of filing false mortgage applications.

Mosby faces a hearing at an unscheduled date in the U.S. District Court of Maryland in Baltimore. If convicted on the charges, Mosby faces up to 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine for each count of filing a false mortgage application and up to five years in prison for each perjury charge.

The perjury charges stem from Mosby's application for pandemic relief money in May and December of 2020, when the attorney filed for federal relief dollars even though she "had not experienced any of the enumerated financial hardships she claimed to have experienced," according to court documents.

Mosby was earning more than $247,000 annually at the time of both filings, but collected more than $9,000 in biweekly installments from the relief money.

The state's attorney was also indicted for filing false mortgage applications when she purchased two vacation homes in Florida. In January and February of 2021, Mosby bought a $428,000 condo in Long Beach but did not disclose — as is required in mortgage applications — that she owed the IRS more than $45,000.  Mosby was indicted on another count for similar reasons when she purchased a vacation home in Kissimmee, Fla, in July and September of 2020.

Mosby was first elected to the state's attorney's office in 2014 and was reelected in 2018. She garnered national attention in 2015 when she charged six officers in connection to the death of Freddie Gray, who died while in Baltimore Police Department custody.

The Baltimore attorney is also under investigation in a separate federal probe into her personal business and tax records, along with her husband Nick Mosby, the city's council president.

Mosby's indictment follows that of other high-profile Baltimore politicians and office holders, including former Mayor Catherine Pugh, who in 2019 was indicted on corruption charges.

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Democrat's, Deep States, and American Bureaucracy's New Tower of Babel

Matthew Sinnicks, "Leadership after Virtue: MacIntyre’s Critique of Management Reconsidered"

What-If?

Victor Davis Hanson, "What Makes Riots, Conspiracies, Cabals, and Insurrections ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’?"

Shut up and keep quiet; that is all ye need to know.

"Indeed, men too often take upon themselves in the prosecution of their revenge to set the example of doing away with those general laws to which alike can look for salvation in adversity, instead of allowing them to subsist against the day of danger when their aid may be required.”

—Thucydides, on the stasis at Corcyra

If the Republicans take the House or perhaps even the Senate, what new norms will they inherit from the Democratic majority of 2019-2021?

Will Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on national television ritually tear up the text of Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address and grimace while he speaks? Was that Speaker Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) intended vision of her new “narrative” for the 21st-century Congress?

Will the new majority, calling back to 2018, almost immediately begin impeaching an unpopular Biden? And will Republicans likewise dispense with a special counsel’s report, or with formal hearings with an array of witnesses with spirited cross-examinations?

Will they establish a special committee to investigate the rioting of summer 2020? Perhaps, in the new cannibalistic spirit of the age, will they dig into which national political figures—or colleagues—communicated with the Antifa or Black Lives Matter riot leaders, or offered them bail?

Will Speaker McCarthy veto Democratic committee members and instead appoint his own Democrats—on three criteria: one, that they have previously voted to impeach Biden; two, that either they cannot realistically again run for, or cannot conceivably be reelected to, the House; and three, that in advance they publicly praise and agree with McCarthy on the unwarranted virulence of the 2020 riots?

Will Republicans claim as reason to impeach Joe Biden that he failed to execute the laws as he swore to, by nullifying U.S immigration law? Was he not also guilty of an “abuse of power” and “obstructing Congress,” as he allowed 2 million aliens unlawfully to cross the southern border, during a pandemic without either testing or vaccinations, helping to spread the disease with reckless disregard? Will the new Congress subpoena generals to investigate the surrender and flight from Afghanistan, and especially who ordered it and why?

Would the Republicans follow the new norms and thus impeach a once-impeached and acquitted Biden a second time as he leaves office, and have the Senate try Biden in 2025 as a private citizen—again with neither a special counsel nor formal report—nor with the chief justice presiding over the trial, as the Constitution demands?

Will they appoint a special counsel to appoint a dream team of conservative lawyers? And would they allot a budget of $40 million and a lifespan of 22 months to get to the bottom of the Biden family pay-for-play syndicate, as federal investigators try to square Biden family expenditures and lifestyles with reported incomes?

Would such a counsel subpoena all the records of the Biden family, especially those concerning the financial labyrinth of Hunter Biden, to determine whether the Bidens registered as lobbyists for foreign governments, declared to the IRS their entire incomes, told the truth while under oath, or contacted public officials to influence U.S. foreign policy?

As far as “domestic terrorists”—who, according to Vice President Kamala Harris, rival the Imperial Japanese Navy’s killing of 2,400 Americans at Pearl Harbor or Bin Laden’s 9/11 hit team that murdered 3,000 civilians—should a bipartisan Warren Commission of distinguished citizens, without politicians of either party, be convened and entrusted to look at both the January 6 and summer 2020 riots?

The goal would be complete transparency: the FBI would turn over all records concerning the use of informants in both riots. Former Attorney General Merrick Garland would be called in to detail what the FBI did and did not do—as the investigation also queried the agency’s other efforts monitoring parents at school board meetings or serving as the Biden family clean-up and retrieval service.

All communications during days of riot between law enforcement and politicians, and within law enforcement, likewise would enter the public domain.

The violent deaths of Ashli Babbitt and more than 30 victims of the 2020 riots would be fully reinvestigated: who were the parties responsible for their deaths? Were they arrested, indicted, convicted, and incarcerated—or exempted? Would there be dozens of indictments, in Kyle Rittenhouse fashion?

Which social media platforms were used during both the 2020 and January 6 riots, if any, to coordinate violent activity? Did public officials or candidates contribute to the violence by encouraging exemptions, or offering to bail out offenders?

Did demonstrators in the violent weeks before the election and in the street modulate their high profiles and calibrate violence on the prompt of “powerful people” in politics and the media, as seemingly suggested in a recent Time magazine braggadocious article (e.g., “There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.” [emphases added])

“Good” and “Bad” Riots?

“Now too many see the protests as the problem. No, the problem is what forced your fellow citizens to take to the streets: persistent, poisonous inequities and injustice . . . And please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful. Because I can show you that outraged citizens are what made the country what she is and led to any major milestone. To be honest, this is not a tranquil time.”

—CNN anchorman Chris Cuomo

What if there had been a quite different national reaction following the shooting of military veteran Ashli Babbitt, the petite woman who was killed by an unnamed law-enforcement officer while unarmed and committing the crime of unlawfully entering the U.S. Capitol?

What if from January to May 2021, 120 days of looting, arson, and violence had followed the killing of the unarmed Babbitt by a policeman whose identity federal police would not divulge? As a result, what if right-wing thugs and criminals for four months in late spring and summer of 2021 had engaged in rioting, arson, and looting that resulted in over 30 deaths and $2 billion in property damage, flame-seared police precincts and torched federal courthouses, and caused 2,000 police injuries?

What if red state governors gave the rioters and protestors a pass to violate quarantines, given the outrageous killing of an unarmed woman? What if national figures such as a Republican vice presidential candidate bragged of contributing to bail funds for any rioters and looters and arsonists who were arrested?

Yet what if most of those hypothetical right-wingers in 2021 reacting to the Babbitt killing and responsible for trying to burn down government buildings were either not arrested, or subsequently released after being arrested, or had their charges dropped? And imagine if such exemptions accorded to right-wing thugs and miscreants stood in contrast to the hundreds of summer 2020 rioters still sitting in jail—often in solitary confinement, without recourse to bail—and watched by abusive right-wing deplorable guards?

What would be the reaction if local law enforcement were ordered by red state mayors not to stop such post-January 6 violence, as governors refused to call out their National Guards? What if the top retired military echelon in 2021 had libeled a Democratic president for even suggesting that federal troops were necessary to reestablish calm? What would happen if for days on end, zany armed right-wingers carved out a swath of downtown Phoenix, declaring it their own autonomous zone, and warned police not to dare enter their domain?

Beautiful Conspiracies, Lovely Cabals?

“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs . . . Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears . . . That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

—Molly Ball, Time

So left-wing Time journalist Molly Ball wrote in obvious admiration of the supposed real “heroes” of the 2020 election.

But what if in the next election, copycat, private citizen, right-wing billionaires likewise in “secret” and through a “shadow campaign” pull off a successful “conspiracy”?

What if in this new normal a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” on the Right managed to “influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information”? What would the Left say of all that after their candidate lost the 2024 election?

What if right-wing journalist hacks bragged post facto that their successful effort was the epitome of a “conspiracy,” and “well-funded” cabals—given their noble efforts to modulate and calm down right-wing protests in the streets before the election, and get their allies in the media “to control the flow of information”?

Would leftists allege that right-wing looters and arsonists obeyed commands from colluding right-wing billionaires and politicians to clean up their act, temporarily, given the bad pre-election media optics? Would that be racketeering across state lines or a conspiracy or an insurrection turned off and on? Would right-wing freelancers be praised for trying to warp the media and channel the “flow of information”? Perhaps, the noble conspiracy would succeed, with the aid of the media and FBI, to squash any embarrassing story about a Trump family diary or laptop?

What if Joe Biden was not just dealing with his own self-created disasters that have dropped his polls below 40 percent, but also simultaneously with such a right-wing cabal suing in the courts, after failing to persuade purple-state legislative majorities to overturn existing voting laws? What would Biden do if dozens of right-wing funded lawsuits, adjudicated by right-wing Trump-appointed judges, began systematically altering purple-state balloting procedures passed by their legislatures?

What if suddenly and mysteriously in 2024 there were no longer 102 million early and mail-in voters, but a more typical 30-40 million voters casting ballots outside of Election Day? What if the abnormal and surreal 2020 ballot disqualification rate of 0.1 to 0.4 percent in many states, returned to a more normal two to four percent?

Would any on the Left object if a single right-wing billionaire stealthily channeled $419 million into preselected swing-state red precincts, effectively to take over public oversight of the balloting? Would Hillary Clinton then again say the Republican winner was “illegitimate”? Would celebrities once more appear in videos urging the electors not to honor their states’ voting tallies?

All Ye Need to Know

The point of these hypotheticals is that there is no point, no consistent theme, no constant principle concerning riots, conspiracies, cabals, and insurrections—except one.

There is only the left-wing desire through any means necessary to obtain, increase, and use power to alter the Constitution and our long-held traditions and customs of governance, especially when the majority in a constitutional republic opposes such efforts. The lesson then is that all means are justified to obtain morally superior ends—with the caveat that only leftists can be morally superior.

As a result, sometimes “dark money” cabals and “unfolding” conspiracies of “powerful people,” who vow to rid the world of Trump, successfully can and should “change rules and laws” and again “control the flow of information” and modulate “protests” and coordinate private enterprise “ resistance.”

But what of the supposedly clueless public? What of the non-powerful people, the clingers, the dregs, and the irredeemables, the smelly in Walmart, and the toothless who have no inkling of such a smug, hip “shadow campaign”? What of those without Mark Zuckerberg’s billions, or Silicon Valley’s control of “the flow of information” or vast sums of “hundreds of millions in public and private funding”?

They are left with only the surreality that sometimes elected legislatures passing laws to require a voter to present an ID is “racist” and “voter suppression,” but at other times private “cabals” and conspiracies of “powerful people,” who outside of government and in secret, should certainly be “changing,” “steering,” and “controlling” voting procedures and the media coverage of such efforts.

In their deplorable ignorance, they are to accept that sometimes 120-day big riots are admirably not “tranquil,” but smaller one-day ones are terrorism and insurrection. Sometimes unarmed suspects, with a long record of meritorious military service, lethally shot by a policeman deserved it, as the law enforcement shooter becomes heroic and the victim demonized and slandered, as the killing is no indictment of policing. But then again, sometimes unarmed suspects, with lengthy arrest records, who die while in police custody are deified, as the death contextualizes ensuing riots and mayhem.

Sometimes renegade impeachments without rules are wonderful to behold; sometimes they would be hateful, vindictive, and destructive of American democracy.

A cynic who knew nothing of politics, nothing of the contemporary American Left or Right, might instead conclude in Orwellian fashion that big, lengthy deadly riots, are “good,” smaller, shorter, less-lethal ones “bad”; that bigger, more secret, and more successful cabals are good; but smaller, more open, and less successful ones would be bad.

Also good is a Congress going to unprecedented lengths to destroy an effective president with a successful record. Bad is a Congress impotently attempting to block a failed president with a catastrophic record.

And so shut up and keep quiet, since that is all ye need to know . . .

Is Omicron Just More "Proof" that COVID Came from a Wuhan Lab Created from Genetically Modified Mice?

...or just another AMAZING statistically improbable COINCIDENCE?

Bruce Golding, "Chinese military helped create ‘humanized’ mice to test viruses: report"

Chinese military researchers were part of a project that created mice with “humanized” lungs — apparently to test the infectiousness of various viruses, according to a blockbuster report Thursday.

The bio-engineered rodents were developed using gene-editing technology known as CRISPR and are mentioned in an April 2020 study that US government virologists flagged for National Security Council officials investigating the origin of the coronavirus, Vanity Fair said.

The study’s 23 co-authors include 11 who work for the Chinese army’s medical research institute, the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, and their project involved determining the mice’s susceptibility to the virus that causes COVID-19.

But when the NSC investigators worked backward to establish a timeline for the study, they realized that the critters were created sometime during summer 2019 — before the coronavirus pandemic exploded, according to Vanity Fair.

That discovery reportedly led NSC officials to suspect that the Chinese military was using the mice to test whether various viruses could infect humans — and that they’d uncovered evidence supporting the theory that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak.

But when they reached out to other agencies with the information, “We were dismissed,” Anthony Ruggiero, the NSC’s senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense, told Vanity Fair.

“The response was very negative,” he added.

Meanwhile, the lead coronavirus researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — Shi Zhengli, also known as “Bat Woman” for her work with the flying mammals — appears to have tested two novel but undisclosed coronaviruses on humanized mice to gauge their effectiveness, Vanity Fair said.

The magazine cited as evidence comments Shi made to a scientific journal, as well as information contained in a Chinese government database.

Shi has adamantly denied that the coronavirus leaked from a WIV lab or that the facility conducts military research.

But in January, a fact sheet released by the US State Department disclosed that researchers at the WIV had collaborated on secret projects, “including laboratory animal experiments,” since at least 2017.

China has denounced the State Department’s fact sheet as “full of fallacies” and the “last madness” of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who it called “Mr. Lies.”

The document was issued five days before President Biden was inaugurated and hasn’t been disavowed by his administration.

Last week, Biden also ordered a 90-day probe by the US intelligence community into the origins of the coronavirus, with a spokeswoman saying that nothing has been “ruled out” — including the possibility it was deliberately released.

Neither Shi nor the director of the WIV responded to repeated requests for comment, including a list of detailed questions, Vanity Fair said.

Government to the Rescue...

On Baltimore Public Schools...

Silvio Canto, Jr., "What happened to reading in Baltimore public schools?

Is Baltimore a failed city?  What do you call a city where kids graduate without minimum reading skills?

This is from Baltimore:

An alarming discovery coming out of a Baltimore City High School caught up in a scandal. Project Baltimore has obtained student assessment data from Augusta Fells Savage in west Baltimore, showing just how far behind some students are in that school.

The discovery is that kids are graduating but can't read.  Remember the student with a 0.13 GPA and ranked 62 of 120 in his class?  What happened to the 61 below that student?  By the way, the student with the 0.13 GPA passed three classes in four years!

It gets worse, if that's possible.  An 8th-grade teacher said: "I would say around half of them couldn't read to the point where they could fully understand what they were supposed to be doing."

This is terrible, and I understand why so many teachers are frustrated.  They get no support from the local leadership.  I guess the mayor and the city council just want to graduate kids to get their federal grant or whatever they get.

Back in the late 1970s, I went to college in Maryland, and I lived and eventually got my first job in the Baltimore area.  I knew people who graduated from the public schools and never heard anything about kids graduating who can't read.

No fathers.  No reading.  Wonder why Baltimore is a failed city?  Sadly, no one cares about these young men and women being thrown into the real world without the ability to read a newspaper ad.

Blood on My Hands...

The Mosby-Hogan Feud Flares Up....

 

After ceding local control of Baltimore City Police Department to federal DOJ and OCR monitored Court Supervision via consent decrees, the Baltimore City Attorney now complains about the lack of State funding...

Marilyn Mosby, "Republican Hypocrisy on 'Blue Lives Matter'"

With recent national concerns about public safety, many conservatives believe they have found a winning political issue. Conservatives across the country seem intent on tying the “defund police” movement to spikes in crime, despite there being no evidence of any connection. Never ones to let facts get in the way of a good attack ad, they are intent on seizing the mantle of law and order to “back the blue.” Undercutting their claims that “Blue Lives Matter” are incidents that have taken place on the watches of these conservatives.

Perhaps the clearest example of this double standard is in my state, Maryland. There, Gov. Larry Hogan styles himself as a moderate, the rare type of Republican who can win election twice in a blue state. Hogan quite clearly has aspirations to take on Donald Trump in the next Republican primary, and has used his position in Annapolis as a springboard to boost his profile among the right-wingers who are key to the nomination.

Being an ally of law enforcement is essential for Hogan, and he often holds events with police, and has even hung the “Blue Lives Matter” flag in his official residence, Government House. His new initiative is a campaign to “re-fund” the police. Hogan has announced millions of dollars in additional support for state and local police to counter the impact of the “defund police” campaign. Hogan followed the campaign with an ad that would make Lee Atwater blush, complete with images of crime scenes, ominous headlines, and a clip of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Muslim member of Congress who is the subject of regular racist attacks by Republicans, speaking at a protest.

Less than two months after Hogan launched his “re-fund” campaign, a young female Baltimore police officer, Keona Holley, was shot in her patrol car. She subsequently died. City and state leaders were outraged. As is his tendency as he builds his national profile, Hogan appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and was asked about Officer Holley. Hogan responded, “We have a prosecutor in Baltimore City that refuses to prosecute violent criminals, and that’s at the root of the problem.”

But none of that was true. In fact, the truth is that the lead suspect in the killing of Officer Holley was supposed to be under the supervision of a state agency at the time of that horrific offense. The suspect was on state-run pretrial supervision at the time of the homicide, yet managed to evade that supervision.

This was not an isolated incident. Indeed, Hogan’s tenure has been permeated by poor management of dangerous individuals on parole and probation. A recent report, which Democrats forced Hogan’s staff to publish, noted that since 2019 there have been 509 individuals under the supervision of the Department of Parole and Probation who were involved in gun violence in Baltimore City, as a victim or a perpetrator. Last year alone, there have been at least 70 people who were under state supervision when they were charged with a homicide. Almost 85% of them had pending violations at the time the homicides took place. In a recent editorial, the Baltimore Sun noted the governor’s failures on these issues and urged him to step up.

Similarly, in 2018, the secretary of Hogan’s Department of Juvenile Services erroneously attempted to blame my office for the release of a juvenile who ultimately killed a Baltimore County police officer. In fact, the department pushed for the juvenile’s release over the objection of both my prosecutors and his own mother. So yet again, Hogan’s state agency failed to properly supervise an individual, who then took the life of a police officer.

The governor’s response to all these failures has been to withhold millions of dollars in funds from my office, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney. As with Ilhan Omar, Hogan has found another woman of color who is a convenient foil for him to rally the right. In what world does “refunding” police and defunding prosecutors make sense? Only in a world in which you are uninterested in public safety and are only interested in animating an increasingly racist conservative base.

How Hogan squares his professed adulation of police with this level of incompetency is a question voters in Maryland have asked for years, and one which voters across the country should soon ask a man who wants to be president.

The reality is that Republicans like Hogan do not care any more about police or public safety than they care about criminal justice reform or racial justice. Their shameless double standard on police and prosecutors shows that the only guiding value they have is political opportunism. Democrats must be unafraid to call them out on this hypocrisy.

Marilyn J. Mosby is the Baltimore City state’s attorney.

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