Two global-stage hot spots to keep an eye on

China and India are squaring off in the Himalayas:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India broke his silence on Wednesday over the 20 Indian troopers killed this week by Chinese language forces alongside the nations’ disputed border, warning that his nation was able to “giving a befitting reply.”

In a brief televised speech, Mr. Modi stated that “the sacrifice of our troopers won’t be in useless.”

“The sovereignty and integrity of India is supreme, and no person can cease us in defending that,” he stated. “India desires peace, but when provoked India is able to giving a befitting reply.”

Mr. Modi spoke two days after Chinese language and Indian forces battled with golf equipment and fists in a desolate border area excessive within the Himalayas, the primary lethal border skirmish there greater than 4 many years. The conflict instantly raised tensions between the 2 nations, that are each led by nationalist leaders who need to mission a picture of power at dwelling and to the world.

Both sides has stated it doesn’t need a struggle, at the same time as they’ve blamed the opposite for beginning the conflict and stated they had been able to defend in opposition to additional incursions.

China’s overseas minister, Wang Yi, scolded his Indian counterpart on Wednesday, based on the Chinese language International Ministry. Mr. Wang accused Indian troops of scary the confrontation on Monday by violating an settlement reached days earlier to de-escalate the tensions on the border.

“The Indian aspect should not misjudge the present scenario and should not underestimate China’s agency will to safeguard territorial sovereignty,” Mr. Wang informed the Indian minister of exterior affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, in accordance to a statement released in Beijing.

And North Korea has blown up the joint liaison office that handled inter-Korean relations. Kim Yo Jong had described the building as "useless" just before the demolition. And now it's threatening to mass troops at the border. 

We're up to our eyeballs in crises here at home, but it behooves us to keep these on our radar screen.

Bostock v. Clayton County - initial thoughts

"what matters in the end is the answer to the question . . . How would the terms of a statute have been understood by ordinary people at the time of enactment...?"

- from Justice Alito's dissenting opinion

Brad Polumbo at the Washington Examiner tries to calm conservatives's nerves, saying

. . . they should hear Gorsuch out. His decision is based on razor-sharp logic, and it is entirely consistent with the conservative commitment to textualism — that the law means exactly what it says.

He provides a hypothetical situation the logic of which seems compelling on the surface:

For example, let's say an employer fired me, a gay man, after discovering that I had a husband. That would be anti-gay discrimination, but it would also be a form of sex discrimination because the employer is punishing me for having a husband —something it would be perfectly fine with a female employee doing. Similar logic applies to transgender employees — that by firing a transgender person, such as Stephens, for choosing to follow the women’s dress code, you are applying a standard you would never have enforced against a member of the female sex.

But in a piece for National Review last November, Princeton law professor Robert P. George blows a big hole in that line of reasoning, also using a straightforward hypothetical situation:

In the Title VII cases, Kagan proposes to test for sex discrimination by asking what would happen if an employee’s sex were flipped and all else were held constant. Thus, she would say, a company that fires Riley for being a woman who dates women is discriminating based on sex, because it would have kept Riley on if she were a man who dates women.

Clever, right? But the argument is fallacious. If it seems like a knockdown, that’s only because the objectionable moves were made offstage and then smuggled into the argument’s setup, diverting our gaze from the only fair reading of Title VII.

The whole appeal of Kagan’s argument is that it purports to flow directly from the text (“discriminate”), without any contestable moves along the way. Once you see that this is false, the argument loses all appeal, and its proponents have to fall back on dubious premises that cut against the only reasonable reading of the text. As we’ll see, the “textual” part of Kagan’s “textualist” case is doing no work whatsoever.

The hypothetical scenario described above doesn’t actually hold “all else constant.” In changing Riley’s sex while holding constant the sex of Riley’s dating partners, it flips a second factor, too: Riley’s “sexual orientation,” which has gone from homosexual to non-homosexual (or, if you prefer, from “gay” to “straight”).

As this shows — and here’s the decisive point — it’s impossible to hold all but sex fixed in these cases. In designing a hypothetical to use for comparison, we have two options: (1) change the employee’s sex and her orientation (but not her partners’ sex), or (2) change her sex and her partners’ sex (but not her orientation). Only the first path leads to Kagan’s preferred result, but nothing in the text compels it. On the contrary, only the second hypothetical keeps constant all the details that reasonable readers of Title VII would deem relevant based on the law’s text, logic, and history.

A few other observations:

Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion, and Roberts joined the court's four Democrat-appointed justices. This blows quite a hole in the argument that no matter how unfit a conservative finds Trump, that conservative needs to vote for him to ensure a "conservative" Supreme Court. Federal judges are not nearly as predictable as is often assumed.

Gorsuch assures us that, since none of the three cases bundled into Bostock v. Clayton County involved religious-freedom issues, any such case would be considered based on the "ministerial exemption" Title VII carve-out. The side wanting to knock that down is doing its homework, be assured.

Why culture matters for law: Interest groups lobby legislatures and laws get passed, or lower courts set precedents. Notions such as that just because someone feels - very strongly, perhaps - that he or she is actually of the sex other than the one his or her genitals and DNA indicate that that is so become ever more entrenched. Or consider how much harder it is to get people to take the long historical view with regard to homosexuals marrying since Obergefell v. Hodges. It's still as much a fact as it was before that decision that in no culture in the world, at no time in human history, did anyone entertain the notion that two people of the same sex could enter into the institution of marriage until the last 20 years at the outside.

Atlanta

The following sequence of events is not in any real dispute.

Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old man, was asleep in his car at the drive-up window at a Wendy's in Atlanta. Other cars were having to drive around his. The police were called. Police gave him a field sobriety test, which he failed. He grabbed a taser from one of the cops, ran a short distance, turned around and aimed the taser at him. The police officer fired three shots at Brooks, killing him.

As a result, the Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has accepted the resignation of the city's police chief.

And "protestors" burned the Wendy's to the ground and shut down Interstate 75 in response.

Okay, now, because it's 2020 and everything in post-America is stupid as well as dangerously toxic, we probably ought to look at the "pertinent" demographic classifications of the various players in this scenario. Brooks was black. The cop who shot him was white. Mayor Bottoms is black. The police chief is a lesbian.

The "protestors" who torched the Wendy's? LITD doesn't have that information at this time.

Details beyond what is given above will hopefully be forthcoming. In a situation like this, there are, after all, still questions that will need to be looked into.

Here's LITD's question for right now: What the hell did the employees, management or ownership of the Wendy's do to deserve getting their store burned to the ground?

I defy anybody in this stinking world to attempt a justification for that.

Our civilization is crumbling by the hour. A good place to start with halting that process would be for everybody, whatever his, her or their perceived stake in this - and by this I mean the breakdown of the civil order that's been going on for the last three-plus weeks - no, make that the last 55 years - to agree that that Wendy's should still be standing and serving food.

And for God's sake, do not make a hero out of Rayshard Brooks.

All for naught

Both our current president and his immediate predecessor have had a thing for appeasing America's enemies.

In the case of Barack Obama, the motivation was a mixture of the leftism he was steeped in, which sees the United States as needing to make amends for a supposed world-stage arrogance, as well as Obama's inherent narcissism, which manifested itself as a desire to be remembered as a visionary who ushered in a new era of global harmony. His narcissistic secretary of state John Kerry shared this latter motivation.

Of course, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action into which they convince an alliance of Western nations to enter with Iran was a joke. While Iran may have temporarily reduced its production of  nuclear fuel, it continued apace with missile production, sponsorship of terrorism, belligerent rhetoric and gestures of humiliation. Particularly symbolic was its capture of a US Navy crew the day of Obama's State of the Union Address. The captors made much hay of the photograph it took of the crew members on their knees with their hands behind their heads.

The Very Stable Genius is likewise a narcissist, but, as with any other trait he exhibits, it gets erratically expressed and doesn't lend itself to the kind of analysis that assumes any kind of strategy. In the case of Trump and North Korea, a notion to try cozying up to Kim rather than continue in a mode of tension just popped into his head one day. There resulted two summits, one in Singapore and one in Vietnam. Three, if you count Trump's stepping, for a few minutes, over the border between the ROK and the DPROK while on a visit to the former. There was the Trump-speak gushing about "beautiful letters" and how North Korea had the potential to be a robust player in the international community.

Again, the result is now confirmed to be a joke:

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has no interest in maintaining a good relationship with US president Donald Trump, it is reported on the the two year anniversary of the leaders first summit. 

Amid heightened inter-Korean affairs, the despotic regime has announced it sees no improvement in relations and says US policies prove Trump's administration remains a long-term threat to the secretive state and its people.

North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Son Gwon made statement carried by state news agency KCNA, in which he slams a "hypocritical empty promise" made by Trump at the historic meeting two years ago.

The Singapore summit in June 2018 represented the first time a sitting American president met with a North Korean leader, but the statement that came out of the meeting was light on specifics, and instead gave four general commitments. 

Ri said in retrospect the Trump administration appears to have been focusing on only scoring political points while seeking to isolate and suffocate North Korea, and threatening it with preemptive nuclear strikes and regime change.

"Never again will we provide the US chief executive with another package to be used for achievements without receiving any returns," he said.

"Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise." 

On Thursday North Korea criticised the United States for commenting on inter-Korean affairs, and said Washington should stay quiet if it wants the upcoming presidential election to go smoothly. 

Ri said North Korea's desire to open a new cooperative era runs deep as ever, but that the situation on the Korean peninsula is daily taking a turn for the worse. 

"The U.S. professes to be an advocate for improved relations with the DPRK, but in fact, it is hell-bent on only exacerbating the situation," Ri said.

Ostentatious fawning got the VSG exactly nowhere.

Sucking up to bad guys is never a smart move.

 

Thursday roundup

This first item actually goes back to mid-March, but I recently came across it, and it makes a great deal of sense to me. Plus, the two participants in the conversation bring up From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun, one of my favorite books. Barzun's tome is a look at the 500 year period from 1500 to 2000, through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the Romantic period and the Industrial Revolution to - well, our present time of decadence.

It comes up in the course of this podcast interview by Richard Reinsch of Law & Liberty of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, which also is presented in print form. They're discussing Douthat's new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success.

Douthat's central point is that American inventiveness has slowed down, a resulting ennui has settled in, and, well, you know what they say about idle hands.

A taste:

Ross Douthat:
So the Decadent Society is an attempt to, in a certain way, put a name on the weird anxiety that pervades the developed world, the Western world and the United States of America, where we have this combination of tremendous wealth and technological proficiency, which makes some people argue that these are the best times in the history of the world, but at the same time a lot of discontent, anxiety and ennui, which gets manifested in everything from the sort of populist and socialist rebellions in our politics, to rising rate of depression and suicide, and deaths of despair as they get called and so on. And so the argument I make in the book, is basically that we have entered a very particular kind of civilizational state that I’m calling “decadence” and I’m using that term to mean not chocolate dipped strawberries and weekends in Vegas, though those might be part of it, but a kind of stagnation, repetition, and decay at a high level of civilizational development.

Richard Reinsch:
One of the definitions, to talk about the definition of decadence you give in the book, you build on Jacques Barzun’s book, From Dawn to Decadence, which I think came out in 2000. I remember reading it in 2001 and that book has stuck with me. It’s one of the reasons why I really enjoyed reading your book because building on Barzun’s definition of decadence, Barzun talks about moving in fits and starts, but not really getting anywhere. The Decadent Society sees no path forward and it’s institutions function painfully. Maybe talk more about that because you also dismiss a definition of decadence that on my worst days, I find myself sort of glomming onto which is weak, sort of hedonistic luxuriating, weak and unable to defend ourselves. Unwilling to see the purpose in defending ourselves and so we’ll go into the good night, but maybe talk about that.

Ross Douthat:
Right. So yeah, I am very directly borrowing from Barzun and you could see this book, in part, as a sequel both to his book and in certain ways to Francis Fukuyama’s famous book, The End of History, which came out 10 years earlier. And the combination of those two arguments basically makes the case that Fukuyama was right, in a sense, not permanently and forever, but right that Western civilization has sort of passed beyond some of its great ideological debates and entered into a period of stability, that was also in danger of becoming a period of boredom and disappointment and sterility. And then Barzun, in a somewhat similar way, made the case that this is something that happens generally to civilizations at a certain point.

That they enter into periods where their once vigorous institutions become sclerotic, where their ambitious explorations hit frontiers that they can’t necessarily explore. And for us, I think that’s the most obvious in the demise of the space age basically, that we went from a period where people imagined that the frontier was going to open further into space. And now that’s sort of left to Silicon Valley billionaires to pursue and maybe they’re getting somewhere. But there’s no cultural imagination around space travel the way there was in the 1960s. So frontiers are closed. Institutions don’t work that well anymore. There’s sort of a loss of both pride in the past and confidence in the future and it doesn’t go all the way to the definition that you suggest only because I think that people sometimes underestimate how long a decadence period can last. So there’s an assumption that because you have institutions that don’t work as well anymore because you have a loss of civilizational confidence, there must be a kind of iron logic to history where the barbarians are waiting at the frontier and they’re going to come in and put the palaces to the torch.

And of course sometimes that happens. But you can also have empires and cultures go on a long time in periods that are essentially stagnant. The Roman empire goes 400 years from its Caligulan stage to the actual demise of the empire in the West. And in our case, we’re in this sort of unusual, not sort of, this entirely unusual position of being the first true world civilization, even more so than ancient Rome. And we also have a situation where a lot of empires and countries and cultures that might be seen as our rivals maybe are actually converging with us in decadence in different ways. That they aren’t poised to leap past us. And if that’s the case, then you could imagine what I call sustainable decadence as something that lasts if not centuries, at least some generations past our present moment where I’m writing.

Sheesh. Just about the time I consider that maybe alarm bells about mainstream media leftism are overblown, I run across something like this:

During a wildly offensive segment on Friday’s CBS This Morning, both the hosts and their left-wing guests repeatedly accused all white people of being born with racial “privilege” and taught to be racist as children. The discussion then turned to demanding white people “stop denying their racism” and admit to practicing discrimination.

The conversation occurred late in the 8:00 a.m. ET hour as part of CBS’s one-hour special, Race for Justice, examining race relations in the United States. It was particularly astonishing to watch wealthy co-host Gayle King – Oprah Winfrey’s best friend who once vacationed with the Obamas on a yacht – lead a segment lecturing others about their “privilege.”

“Nationwide protests against inequality are encouraging more people to have discussions not only about race but also white privilege,” King proclaimed. She then eagerly introduced two far-left authors to rant on the topic: “Robin DiAngelo is a sociologist and she’s author of this book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. I love this title. She joins us with the author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, CBS News contributor Ibram X. Kendi.”

“I would like you to explain what white privilege is exactly and why white people have such a hard time seeing it. Because it’s so clear to most black people I know,” King scolded. DiAngelo not only delivered the predictable left-wing talking points on the subject, she made sure to declare that dissent would not be tolerated:

White privilege is the automatic taken-for-granted advantage bestowed upon white people as a result of living in a society based on the premise of white as the human ideal, and that from its founding, established white advantage as a matter of law and today as a matter of policy and practice. And it doesn’t matter if you agree with it, if you want it, if you even are aware of it, it’s 24/7/365. And one of the reasons why it’s so hard for white people to see it – well, there are many reasons – but one is that it serves us not to see it. We come to feel entitled to that advantage. We’re told that we deserve it and that we earned it. And we take great umbrage when that is challenged.

King followed up by matter-of-factly citing an outrageous claim in DiAngelo’s book: “You write, too, Robin, in the book, that kids from the age between 3 and 4 are intuitively taught that being white is better, that you are superior. I thought that that was an interesting thing.” The supposed “journalist” didn’t even question the disgusting claim.

On Monday, the broadcast turned to radical “experts” to insist that white Americans have been “taught” to have “contempt for black life.”Later in the discussion, fellow co-host Anthony Mason turned to Kendi and fretted: “Ibram, you’ve said that to get – to end white privilege you have to deal with racism first, right?” Kendi – who has excused the anti-Semitism of Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and argued that common phrases like “blackmail” were racist – launched into a tirade convicting every white person in America of racism:

And I mean, as Robin, you know, talked about, it is critical for white people, for people in general, to stop denying their racist ideas, to stop denying the ways in which policies have benefited them, to stop denying their racism, and to realize that actually the heartbeat of racism itself is denial, and the sound of that heartbeat is “I’m not racist.” 

David Thornton at The Resurgent on how an agenda is driving the pronouncements of some public-heath officials:

There is a rumor going around on social media that the pandemic is over. That isn’t the case, but you’d never know it from public health officials around the country who seem to have tossed social distancing restrictions out in favor of the right to protest.

“A case in point is a recent article in Slate that details an open letter from infectious disease experts at the University of Washington, who write that “protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.” The letter has been signed by more than 1,000 medical experts from around the country.

Wait. Isn’t there a pandemic on?

Former NFL player and current Congressional candidate Burgess Owens has written a compelling piece at Newsweek entitled "Drew Brees Was Right The First Time."

Another piece from a while back (2018) that is quite relevant at the moment. David French at National Review on why qualified immunity should be ended.

The snowflake/jackboots score another one: a UCLA professor is suspended for refusing to grant some kind of special leniency to black students on their final exams, because George Floyd. 

Barney and Clyde - Episode 11, Season 2

On this installment of Barney and Clyde, we bring you the weighty matters on the nation's plate this fortnight, including: THE FINE LINE BETWEEN CARING AND GRANDSTANDING: Democrats get on their knees for social justice. THEY REALLY SAID THAT?! Andrew Yang, SE Cupp, Donald Trump and Gushers / Fruit by the Foot, and a boo-hooing Karen-in-training take to social media to show the world how dumb they really are. THE STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN A TIME OF CIVIL UNREST: Once again a white people think they know what’s best for black people… a Minneapolis City Council Woman’s quest to deprive minorities of police protection, white kids riot in a black neighborhood and are surprised when they don't get their sjw trophies. ++Plus, surprising statistics on race in America!

The Very Stable Genius thinks he can stamp his foot and his bad poll numbers will go away

He just can't believe that it would be the case that he's trailing. So he has his campaign send this:

President Donald Trump's campaign is demanding CNN retract and apologize for a recent poll that showed him well behind presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

The demand, coming in the form of a cease and desist letter to CNN President Jeff Zucker, was immediately rejected by the network.

"We stand by our poll," said Matt Dornic, a CNN spokesman.

The CNN poll conducted by SSRS and released on Monday shows Trump trailing the former vice president by 14 points, 55%-41%, among registered voters. It also finds the President's approval rating at 38% -- his worst mark since January 2019, and roughly on par with approval ratings for one-term Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush at this point in their reelection years -- and his disapproval rating at 57%. 

Soon after the poll was released, Trump tweeted that he had hired Republican pollster McLaughlin & Associates to "analyze" the CNN poll and others, "which I felt were FAKE based on the incredible enthusiasm we are receiving." McLaughlin ranks as one of the least accurate pollsters in the industry, as measured by FiveThirtyEight. 

Several other polls released over the past few weeks -- including polls by ABC News/Washington Post, Monmouth University, NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist College, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Quinnipiac University and Fox News -- also show Biden well ahead of Trump. These polls, averaged with the CNN poll, find Biden up by double digits, a result well outside any margin of error.
In the letter to Zucker, the Trump campaign argued that the CNN poll is "designed to mislead American voters through a biased questionnaire and skewed sampling."

"It's a stunt and a phony poll to cause voter suppression, stifle momentum and enthusiasm for the President, and present a false view generally of the actual support across America for the President," read the letter, signed by the Trump campaign's senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis and chief operating officer Michael Glassner.

The campaign formally requested that CNN retract the poll and publish a "full, fair, and conspicuous retraction, apology, and clarification to correct its misleading conclusions."

The letter, which heavily cites findings by McLaughlin, makes several incorrect and misleading claims.

"It's a poll of 1,259 adults -- not even registered voters, let alone likely voters," the letter says, citing a McLaughlin memo from earlier this week.

While it's accurate that 1,259 adults were reached on landlines or cell phones by a live interviewer for the survey, the 14-point margin by which Trump is trailing Biden came from a question posed only to 1,125 registered voters. It's typical for polling to sample registered voters rather than likely ones at this stage of the race, as it's difficult to project whether voters will participate in an election that is five months away. CNN, as do most public pollsters, typically reports results from likely voters around Labor Day. 

Reality's a bitch, ain't it, Mr. President? Here's a tip: It won't get any less so between now and November. Time to drastically shift strategy. Or maybe consider dropping out.

The woke jackboots bend the knuckles of another newspaper backwards

The triggered-snowflake phenomenon claims another one:

This story looks suspiciously similar to what happened at the New York Times after they decided to run that op-ed from Tom Cotton. Only this time, the tale is playing out a bit to the south in the City of Brotherly Love. It was revealed this weekend that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Executive Editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer was resigningover yet another “mistake” in the form of the decision to run an offensive article by a similarly prize-winning reporter. Stan Wischnowski was thanked for his many years of service to the paper, but his resignation in the wake of this tragic mistake was accepted nonetheless. (Inquirer.com)

SEE ALSO: Scientist: We could see up to 1,100 additional daily coronavirus deaths from these protests if they’re large enough

Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, has announced his resignation, days after discontent among the newspaper’s staff erupted over a headline on a column about the impact of the civil unrest following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Wischnowski, 58, led the paper over two turbulent periods in recent years, driving it; its sister paper, the Daily News; and its website, Inquirer.com, to reshape themselves as the digital age transformed the news business.

Wischnowski will be out the door on Friday and the search is on for a replacement “who embodies our values, embraces our shared strategy, and understands the diversity of the communities we serve.” Ouch. He must have pulled a really bonehead maneuver here, eh? I suppose we’d better find out what he did that was so bad.

As it happens, Wischnowski approved the publication of an article about the recent riots written by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Inga Saffron. The article, originally titled “Buildings Matter Too,” sent shockwaves through the newsroom. (For the record, Saffron is the newspaper’s architecture critic.) More than 40 reporters decided to “call in sick and tired” over the decision and it led Jenice Armstrong, a female, African-American reporter, to pen a scathing rebuttal. In it, she vented about how she is paid less than most of her colleagues and how Black reporters and editors are underrepresented at the paper.

So what was so horrible about Saffron’s article? She was pointing out that the destruction of businesses in the city negatively impacts communities of color more than anyone else and such actions are counterproductive to the cause. Really controversial stuff, eh? Or maybe it was just the title. The paper later edited it to read, “Damaging buildings disproportionately hurt the people protesters are trying to uplift.” But the more easily offended took the original title as some sort of attack on “Black Lives Matter,” despite the fact that the contents of the article said pretty much exactly what the new title conveyed.  

When this garbage started on college campuses in the previous decade, did anybody think it was going to stay there?

It's one thing to prevent a Ben Shapiro or a Heather MacDonald from speaking in an auditorium. It's quite another to ruin the careers of editors over innocuous decisions

These people mean business.

Just about the time you think you have a tidy take on the national moment

A month ago, I wrote a piece at Precipice entitled"An Absolutist Grapples With Ambiguity." The subject matter was the pandemic and subsequent shutdown and how a guy who rarely blows hot and cold on anything, large or small, couldn't declare that he was in either of the two main camps (open everything up immediately or proceed with extreme caution on a phased approach).

I find myself at a similar juncture with regard to the sociocultural eruption that has occurred in the wake of the George Floyd murder.

I think that, while I still identify as an absolutist, I am so about a narrower range of things than perhaps I'd assumed.

At the core of what's been going on, of course, is the matter of race.

I suppose it was to be expected that Floyd himself would quickly become a symbol rather than a human being with all the complexities that flesh-and-blood individuals contain within them.

One of the artists who created the mural that was displayed at his Minneapolis memorial service described the team's intent thusly:

“We wanted to portray him in a positive light, not as a martyr, but as a hero,” artist Cadex Herrera recently said. “We wanted to make sure that his name was remembered.”

The term "hero" is not only outlandishly inapplicable, it does a disrespect to the memory of him as a full person. It makes a cartoon out of him. He would have told us, at any point during the day of his arrest and murder prior to that, that he was just a guy trying to make his way through life and overcome demons that had led him into many unwise choices and their consequences.

Floyd had a criminal past, including being the ringleader of a home invasion that involved him holding a gun to a pregnant woman's abdomen, and  was on fentanyl and methamphetamine at the time of his May 25 arrest. While this must be part of the entire picture of him presented to the public, it was probably not advisable for the Minneapolis police union head to frame it the way he did, given that the image of law enforcement is not in such great shape in many minds:

The head of the Minneapolis police union says George Floyd’s “violent criminal history” needs to be remembered and that the protests over his death are the work of a “terrorist movement.”

“What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd. The media will not air this,” police union president Bob Kroll told his members in a letter posted Monday on Twitter.

Ah, but about the time that one wants to extend some understanding to those whose view of police is shaky, one encounters developments such as this:

Several members of the Minneapolis City Council this week have expressed support for radical changes to how the city handles law enforcement, including a move to "dismantle" the police department and replace it with "a transformative new model for public safety."

"We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department," he tweeted. "And when we’re done, we’re not simply gonna glue it back together. We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response. It’s really past due."

His call was echoed by Lisa Bender, the president of the city council.

"Yes," she said in response to Ellison. "We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety."

That was not the first time Bender had addressed calls to "dismantle" the city's police force this week, however. On Wednesday she posted a thread about how a "white person" should think about dismantling the police. 

And these people mean sooner rather than later:

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was booed out of a BLM protest on Saturday evening after not committing to defunding the city’s police department over the death of George Floyd.

A protesters asked Frey a yes or no question: would he commit to defunding the Minneapolis Police Department? The mayor’s answer did not satisfy the female protester, prompting her to tell him to “get the fuck outta here.”

David Schuman tweeted out, “Whoa. @MayorFrey is asked ‘Will you commit to defunding police, yes or no?’ Speaker says his re-election hinges on the answer. Couldn’t hear answer but the crowd erupts in boos, chanting “GO HOME JACOB.'”

Now, with regard to the larger matter of whether there is systemic racism in our society, to what degree, and what it looks like, I'd like to start with today's French Press, David French's biweekly newsletter at The Dispatch. It's powerful and heartrending. I'll be excerpting at some length, because what he has to say is supremely important:

 I daresay that only a vanishingly small number of Americans know that this is a term with an academic meaning that’s not entirely obvious from the words themselves. Here’s one definition—“structural” or “systemic” racism is:

A system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with “whiteness” and disadvantages associated with “color” to endure and adapt over time. Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist. 

Yet millions of Americans read the accusation that America is beset with “systemic racism” and hear a simpler and more direct meaning of the term—you’re saying our systems (and by implication the people in them) are racist. But that’s completely contrary to their experience. They think, “How can it be that ‘the system is racist’ when I just left a corporate diversity training seminar, I work at an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, my son’s college professors are constantly telling him to ‘check his privilege,’ and no one I know is a bigot? It seems to me that the most powerful actors in ‘the system’ are saying the same things—don’t be racist.”

Then, when you go online or turn on the television, you’re hardly persuaded to change your mind. If you’re conservative, chances are your social media feed is full of images of rioting and looting. There are viral videos (including one the president retweeted Saturday) that declare “George Floyd was not a good person” and “the fact that he has been held up as a martyr sickens me.” There is the constant repetition of statistics about black-on-black crime, and posts and pieces arguing that police racism and brutality are overblown are shared across the length and breadth of social media.

Even a well-meaning person subject to this barrage of messaging is then apt to look at clear racist injustices—like the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, where the killer allegedly used a racial slur after he fired the fatal shot—and say, “Sure, there are racists still in this world, but they’re not part of any ‘system’ I know.” Moreover, compounding the problem, those voices who are most loudly condemning American racism are also the voices he or she trusts the least on other issues—such as abortion, religious liberty, economics, or health care. Something in the conservative mind and heart rebels, I can’t join with them, can I?

We each like to think we’re not unduly influenced by our immediate environment and culture. That’s a phenomenon that affects other people, we believe. I’m the kind of person who has carefully considered both sides and has arrived at my positions through the force of reason and logic. Sure, I’ve got biases, but that only matters at the edges. The core of my beliefs are rooted in reason, conviction, and faith.

Maybe that describes you, but I now realize it didn’t describe me. I freely confess that to some extent where I stood on American racial issues was dictated by where I sat my entire life. I always deplored racism—those values were instilled in me from birth—but I was also someone who recoiled at words like “systemic racism.” I looked at the strides we’d made since slavery and Jim Crow and said, “Look how far we’ve come.” I was less apt to say, “and look how much farther we have to go.” 

Then, where I sit changed, dramatically. I just didn’t know it at the time. I went from being the father of two white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed kids to the father of three kids—one of them a beautiful little girl from Ethiopia. When Naomi arrived, our experiences changed. Strange incidents started to happen.

There was the white woman who demanded that Naomi—the only black girl in our neighborhood pool—point out her parents, in spite of the fact that she was clearly wearing the colored bracelet showing she was permitted to swim.

There was the time a police officer approached her at a department store and questioned her about who she was with and what she was shopping for. That never happened to my oldest daughter.
There was the classmate who told Naomi that she couldn’t come to our house for a play date because, “My dad says it’s dangerous to go black people’s neighborhoods.” 

I could go on, and—sure—some of the incidents could have a benign explanation, but as they multiplied, and it was clear that Naomi’s experience was clearly different from her siblings, it became increasingly implausible that all the explanations were benign.  

Then the Trump campaign happened, the alt-right rallied to his banner, and our lives truly changed. In October 2016, I wrote a piece describing what happened. It began like this:

I distinctly remember the first time I saw a picture of my then-seven-year-old daughter’s face in a gas chamber. It was the evening of September 17, 2015. I had just posted a short item to the Corner calling out notorious Trump ally Ann Coulter for aping the white-nationalist language and rhetoric of the so-called alt-right. Within minutes, the tweets came flooding in. My youngest daughter is African American, adopted from Ethiopia, and in alt-right circles that’s an unforgivable sin. It’s called “race-cucking” or “raising the enemy.”

I saw images of my daughter’s face in gas chambers, with a smiling Trump in a Nazi uniform preparing to press a button and kill her. I saw her face photo-shopped into images of slaves. She was called a “niglet” and a “dindu.” The alt-right unleashed on my wife, Nancy, claiming that she had slept with black men while I was deployed to Iraq, and that I loved to watch while she had sex with “black bucks.” People sent her pornographic images of black men having sex with white women, with someone photoshopped to look like me, watching.

The attacks got worse and some became overtly threatening, including posting image after image of dead and dying African-Americans in the comments section of my wife’s blog. Suddenly, my understanding that “we’ve come so far” in American race relations was replaced by the shocking, personal realization that “we’ve got so far to go.” 

All this was happening as I had already grown alarmed at the sheer vehemence of conservative defensiveness on matters of race. Before the backlash I received for opposing Trump, the piece that generated the most personal anger from conservatives was a 2012 essay in Commentary called “Conservatives and the Trayvon Martin Case” where I critiqued the conservative media’s seeming rooting interest in George Zimmerman’s innocence, and I critiqued George Zimmerman’s decision to arm himself and pursue a teen whose only “crime” was walking to his father’s girlfriend’s house after dark. I did not judge Zimmerman guilty, but I did signal that conservatives should not reflexively defend the police:
[C]onservatives should not be inclined to trust without question the actions of local law enforcement. There is no evidence that a single national conservative commentator knew the first thing about the competence or character of the individuals who made the initial decision not to charge Zimmerman. They don’t know whether those local officials are wise, foolish, or free from racist taint. But they do know, or should know, that public officials (even public-safety officers) make mistakes even when they have the best of intentions, and they should also understand the need not only for constitutional constraints on police actions but also for public accountability. 

This is when I began to learn about conservative political correctness. If politically correct progressives are often guilty of over-racializing American public discourse, and they are, politically correct conservatives commit the opposite sin—and they filter out or angrily reject all the information that contradicts their thesis.

For example, if you’re a conservative, you’re likely quite aware that the Obama Department of Justice decisively debunked the “hands-up, don’t-shoot” narrative of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. You’re less likely to remember that there was a second Ferguson report, one that found Ferguson’s police department was focused on raising revenue more than increasing public safety, and it used its poor, disproportionately black citizens as virtual ATMs, raising money through traffic stops, citations, and even arrest warrants. It painted a shocking picture of abuse of power. 

If you’re a conservative, you may well be aware of the research cataloged by Heather Mac Donald rebutting claims of systemic racial bias in fatal police shootings. You may be less aware of the recent New York Times report indicating that African Americans make up 19 percent of the population of Minneapolis, 9 percent of the police force and an incredible 58 percent of subjects of police use of force. 

But again, I hear the objection in my head, the sentiment of good friends and thoughtful people—“If racism is this bad, and if the experiences of black Americans are this negative, why don’t I ever see it?”

Let’s perform a thought experiment (I did this on our Dispatch Live event this week, so I apologize to readers who’ve already heard it.) Let’s optimistically imagine that only one out of 10 white Americans is actually racist. Let’s also recognize that—especially in educated quarters of white America—racism is condemned and stigmatized. If this is the reality, when will you ever hear racist sentiments in your daily life? The vast majority of people you encounter aren’t racist, and the minority who are will remain silent lest they lose social standing.

But imagine you’re African American. That means 10 percent of the white people you encounter are going to hate you or think less of you because of the color of your skin. You don’t know in advance who they are or how they’ll react to you, but they’ll be present enough to be at best a persistent source of pain and at worst a source of actual danger. So you know you’ll be pulled over more, and in some of those encounters the officer will be strangely hostile. The store clerk sometimes follows you when you shop. A demeaning comment will taint an otherwise-benign conversation. Your white friends described in the paragraph above may never see these things, but it’s an inescapable part of the fabric of your life. 

This is how we live in a world where a white person can say of racism, “Where is it?” and a black person can say, “How can you not see?”
So now I sit in a different place. But where do I stand? I believe the following things to be true:

Slavery was legal and defended morally and (ultimately) militarily from 1619 to 1865.

After slavery, racial discrimination was lawful and defended morally (and often violently) from 1865 to 1964.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not end illegal discrimination or racism, it mainly gave black Americans the legal tools to fight back against legal injustices.

It is unreasonable to believe that social structures and cultural attitudes that were constructed over a period of 345 years will disappear in 56.
Moreover, the consequences of 345 years of legal and cultural discrimination, are going to be dire, deep-seated, complex, and extraordinarily difficult to comprehensively ameliorate. 

It’s hard even to begin to describe all the ramifications of 345 years of legalized oppression and 56 years of contentious change, but we can say two things at once—yes, we have made great strides (and we should acknowledge that fact and remember the men and women who made it possible), but the central and salient consideration of American racial politics shouldn’t center around pride in how far we’ve come, but in humble realization of how much farther we have to go. 

Moreover, taking the next steps down that road will have to mean shedding our partisan baggage. It means acknowledging and understanding that the person who is wrong on abortion and health care may be right about police brutality. It means being less outraged at a knee on football turf than at a knee on a man’s neck. And it means declaring that even though we may not agree on everything about race and American life, we can agree on some things, and we can unite where we agree.

For example, here’s a thought—you don’t have to be a critical race theorist, agree with arguments about implicit bias, or buy into the radical social platform of Black Lives Matter to reach consensus on some changes that can make a difference.

On the other hand, black columnist and radio host Larry Elder sees the matter quite differently:

Larry Elder

@larryelder

One of the big #FakeNews narratives is that "institutional," "structural" and "systemic" racism remain a major problem in America, when, in fact, race has never been a more insignificant barrier to success in America. 

Then there's the matter of what Black Lives Matter is about as a formal organization. Its aims extend well beyond achieving the same respect accorded to black people from law enforcement as any other demographic. No, it's about as intersectional as they come. It involves the cancellation of student debt and medical debt, defunding the extraction and distribution of fossil fuels and "elevation the leadership" of "queer, trans, femmes [and] gender nonconforming."

The real BLM agenda is a great deal like the real Green New Deal agenda:

[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's] chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti (the brains and the money behind her political operation ever since her 2018 primary victory) divulged in an unintentionally blunt comment in theWashington Post that the Green New Deal was not only not based in the science of climate change, but in fact not even designed with climate change in mind. "[I]t wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” he is quoted as saying. 

In other words, it's not that they looked for a way to save the world, and just happened to find a way that involved full employment pledges, the retrofitting of millions of buildings, income for those unwilling to work, high-speed passenger rail, and the curtailment of plane travel and carnivorousness. That's precisely backwards. The Green New Deal came about because Chakrabarti wanted to transform the U.S. economy into something more primitive, and environmentalism struck him as the best excuse for doing so.

Total upending of the established order. Including the natural order, the hard and fast biological fact that human beings, like most animal species except for a few types of worms, come in one or the other of two sexes, male or female.

So the various truisms on our national plate require some deft handling, lest any of them blur any of the others. They must each be considered on their own.

There are still some bigoted and racist people in our society.

The law enforcement field must be reformed.

It's unhealthy for anyone of any race to think primarily of himself or herself as a member of that race. Other aspects of being a human are much more significant.

The unrest in American cities is going on so long - after the Floyd murder, and after the arrests of the four officers - because a formally organized revolutionary movement sees it as the best opportunity to date to destabilize the basic established order in our society.

George Floyd's death was unjust and horrific.

George Floyd was a career criminal.

Donald Trump is utterly unfit to deal with this crisis as a president ought.

Democrats generally sympathize with the radical view that America is fundamentally unfair.

Many corporations are displaying utter cowardice in the face of radical intimidation.

And, most importantly, short of divine intervention, it's all going to get worse.