Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Education, Law, Politics, Pop Culture, Regulation | Tags: Black Lives Matter, Microaggression, Wrong Direction
Heather MacDonald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. She has made a career of painstakingly going into the nation’s police departments, town meetings and impacted urban neighborhoods to research the facts on the ground about how police practices actually affect lives.
She appeared on July 21, 2015 on the Harvard Lunch Club political podcast. The 35 minute podcast is at the bottom.
MacDonald spoke out against the poisonous influence that the “Black Lives Matter” movement is having on the quality of life in the very neighborhoods where the protests are taking place.
I think this is an even more extreme example of the way this country deals with race and policing, which is to talk fanatically about police in order not to talk about the far more difficult problem of black crime.
This type of policing that pays attention to public order is demanded by the residents of poor communities. They want the police to get the drug dealers off the corner, they want them to get the kids off their stoop who are hanging out there loitering and smoking weed and so that sort of policing is in fact a moral imperative.
Proactive police practices have been the target of protests against “police racism.” In what is called “the broken windows” style of policing, police detain perpetrators for minor violations like turnstile jumping or loitering and smoking weed. Far from being a threat to Black lives and Black communities, the one government agency most dedicated to the idea that “Black lives matter is the police force.”
Maintaining order on the small things makes it clear that the big things will be addressed as well. It demonstrates a low tolerance for crime. Rudy Giuliani’s policy of “broken windows” in New York City cleaned up the city of petty crime and big problems.The complaints from residents currently are getting louder.
The second part of the podcast addresses MacDonald’s recent City Journal essay “Microaggression, Macro Crazy.” It deals with University of California President Janet Napolitano’s asking all deans and department chairs in the ten university system to undergo training in overcoming their “implicit biases” toward women and minorities.
(H/t: Legal Insurrection)
Filed under: Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Iran, Middle East, National Security, Terrorism, The United States | Tags: Social Redeemers, The Conservative Mind, The Progressive Mind
From David Horowitz, who knows the Left intimately:
In confronting the Left, conservatives should not make the mistake of assuming that progressives share our understanding of society’s problems, merely differing about the practical steps needed to address them. No one should think that progressives want to see our communities prosper within the framework that has defined America since its inception and provided its blessings. The nature of the progressive outlook inspires contempt for the American past and disdain for America’s social contract, which it regards as tainted by racism, sexism and imperial ambition. …
A defining characteristic of the progressive outlook is its belief in the doctrine of original innocence. The modern source of this belief is the French radical Jean-Jaques Rousseau, who maintained that private property is the cause of social evils and that “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.” This is a doctrine so obviously false it hardly needs refutation, except that progressives believe it. What they believe is that “society” is the root cause of social problems. In their view, human beings are naturally cooperative and sharing, honest and moral, but are corrupted by social institutions that encourage prejudice and greed and set them against each other. They believe that “social justice” is the model of how human beings naturally relate to each other, that equality and cooperation reflect human nature, and that socialism is therefore the name of a truly human future.
Conservatives believe the opposite. They believe that human beings are the root cause of social problems and that social institutions are corrupt because human beings create and run them. It is the barbarity of the species that requires the intervention of a social order with the disciplines of morality and law to civilize its inhabitants. This is also what the Founders believed. It is why they did not create a pure democracy that would express the popular will, which they regarded as unruly, emotion driven, and dangerous. Instead they devised a system of checks and balances to frustrate the majority’s natural instinct to tyrannize the weak and outnumbered. And they set limits to government. …
Because Progressives see themselves as social redeemers and their goal as saving the world, they regard politics as a religious war. This is why they are intolerant toward those who disagree with them and who stand in the way of their “solutions.” It is why they exclude conservatives from the educational institutions they control. It is why they can commit character assassinations without regrets. Obama never apologized for accusing his opponent of killing a cancer patient during the [2012] election campaign, because saving humanity means never having to say you’re sorry.
This is why Obama has given away the store in negotiations with Iran. He believes that Iran’s leaders have the same care for their families and concern for their citizens as we do, and that they would never even consider using a nuclear weapon. He’s wrong.
American Elephants 