More than ever, victimhood-mongering is all the Left is offering America

Two opinion pieces are currently generating a lot of buzz.

One is Jessica Valenti's New York Times op-ed on how "real feminists" need to prevent conservatives from "appropriating" feminism.

Particularly rich is this assertion:

Now we have a different task: protecting the movement against conservative appropriation. We’ve come too far to allow the right to water down a well-defined movement for its own cynical gains. Because if feminism means applauding ‘anything a woman does’—even hurting other women—then it means nothing.

Would she care to attempt to justify the role hijab-wearing Muslim Linda Sarsour played in organizing and leading the pussy-hat march?

The message is pretty obvious: real feminism of necessity implies buying into the entire "progressive" worldview. It's also a tacit acknowledgement that real feminism is about raging with resentment that nature equipped the female gender to be the the half of the human species in which newly-conceived human beings gestate. That's what is meant by statements such as Valenti's characterization of conservatives having an "abysmal record on women's rights."

She cites the examples of Gina Haspel becoming CIA chief, trotting out the very tired and banal "torture" red herring, proving the above point that this is really about signing on to the entire leftist agenda, and Suzanne Scott's appointment as Fox News head.

Then there is Indy Star reporter Justin Mack's column  entitled "NFL New National Anthem Kneeling  Policy Enslaves Black Players, Fans."

Let's start with that. A person becomes an NFL player, an employee of a team which, by extension, adheres to certain league rules, of his own volition. In fact, a person has to want it pretty badly. The odds of making it are daunting, and the work of honing one's skills through high school and college is hard. So no one is forced at gunpoint to to become an NFL player. And it's a universal given that a person agreeing to be employed anywhere agrees to the conditions attendant to that employment.

Then there are two particularly offensive phrases in Mack's piece that require some examination: "The only thing missing from that directive is the word 'boy' at the end," and "You can have fame and riches too if you fall in line."

Look, pal, the directive applies to all NFL players. It's colorblind. The only way to racialize it is to say, as Mack pretty explicitly is, that it targets blacks because there is some set of special circumstances surrounding them.

And that's a lot of hooey.

Heather MacDonald has done the exhaustive research that rebuts the notion that there is some kind of systemic prejudice against blacks on the part of America's law-enforcement entities:

Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks. In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest. Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males. Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243. 

Violent crime has now risen by a significant amount for two consecutive years. The total number of violent crimes rose 4.1 percent in 2016, and estimated homicides rose 8.6 percent. In 2015, violent crime rose by nearly 4 percent and estimated homicides by nearly 11 percent. The last time violence rose two years in a row was 2005–06.  The reason for the current increase is what I have called the Ferguson Effect. Cops are backing off of proactive policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened. Having been told incessantly by politicians, the media, and Black Lives Matter activists that they are bigoted for getting out of their cars and questioning someone loitering on a known drug corner at 2 AM, many officers are instead just driving by. Such stops are discretionary; cops don’t have to make them. And when political elites demonize the police for just such proactive policing, we shouldn’t be surprised when cops get the message and do less of it. Seventy-two percent of the nation’s officers say that they and their colleagues are now less willing to stop and question suspicious persons, according to a Pew Research poll released in January. The reason is the persistent anti-cop climate. 

Four studies came out in 2016 alone rebutting the charge that police shootings are racially biased. If there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. That truth has not stopped the ongoing demonization of the police—including, now, by many of the country’s ignorant professional athletes. The toll will be felt, as always, in the inner city, by the thousands of law-abiding people there who desperately want more police protection. 

The whole leftist enterprise is about stripping the individual of all agency.

The overlords who derived their power from an all-pervasive state want to reduce people to the level of cattle, and they get a lot of help from the glib and rage-filled denizens of the self-appointed cultural arbiters of post-America.

They talk a good game about "empowerment," but they will brook no chiming in from those who point out that all this indignation is about keeping blacks, women and any other group that wears its demographic classification like a badge utterly dependent on them for some kind of collective "liberation" that is always just beyond reach.