Our very own Red Guards
What’s happening now in the United States, at an ever-increasing pace, is rule by mob. But it’s a special sort of mob. The internet and social media, especially Twitter, facilitates the process. Its main practitioners are leftists, mostly but not entirely young.
History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes, and this movement bears a resemblance to the Maoist Cultural Revolution’s Red Guards.
I believe the first time I made that comparison was in this post from six years ago entitled: “Robert J. Birgeneau is the latest casualty of our embryonic Red Guards.” Six years! Obama was president, and you’d think they’d be happy. And perhaps they were – with the president. But not with anyone with whom they disagreed.
Before I re-read it, I no longer remembered who Robert J. Birgeneau was. But the pattern was familiar and already set – and in this case that includes the subject matter:
Another would-be commencement speaker bows out in response to pressure from students who deem him insufficiently pure for their tender sensibilities.
Birgeneau refused to say sufficient mea culpas, the price he would have had to pay for the privilege of addressing the august students and faculty of Haverford:
“Some students and faculty members at Haverford, a liberal arts college near Philadelphia, objected to the invitation to Mr. Birgeneau to speak and receive an honorary degree because, under him, the University of California police used batons to break up an Occupy protest in 2011. He first stated his support for the police, and then a few days later, saying that he was disturbed by videos of the confrontation, ordered an investigation.
“Those at Haverford who objected to his being honored asked Mr. Birgeneau to apologize and to meet a list of demands, including leading an effort to train campus security forces in handling protests better; he refused.”
I called the movement “embryonic” at the time – after all, it was six years ago. But looking back, I bet it was a lot more developed than I knew. Later in that post I added:
My comparison is hyperbole. The current crop of American students isn’t killing or beating anyone—yet. Nor is their target their professors, but that’s probably because their professors have for the most part already been purged and are pure. In fact, at Haverford and at other colleges where commencement speakers have been recently driven out, the protesting students are joined by professors. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, with professors leading the way.
Note the word “yet.” And note the participation and even leadership of the leftist professors. Some of them have found the movement has come back to bite them, but that’s what always happens when making a tasty leftist omelet.
Then in 2018, two years ago, I wrote another Red Guards piece. This time I made it clear I was not being hyperbolic.
Roger L. Simon isn’t nostalgic for the 60s, either
As Roger Simon writes in the Epoch Times:
“Off the pig!” Sound familiar? Not quite “Dead cops now” but close. Marx, almost right for once, famously said, “History repeats itself. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Only this second time isn’t really so farcical and may end up more of a tragedy if we’re not careful.
As for how much fun the first version was, I had the proverbial bird’s eye view. My Dartmouth college roommate was one of Leary’s original LSD test cases at Harvard. A year after graduation, a brilliant grad student in semantics at Columbia, my roomie’s car flew off the road when he and the driver were high on acid. He ended up a paraplegic who, not long thereafter, committed suicide.
Another view came a few years later, when I was a very lucky young screenwriter and—to my shame— in my early version of white guilt became a small financier of the Black Panther breakfast program. I did this until I discovered the two of my contacts were heroin dealers and one was wanted for assault with a deadly weapon.
Please read the whole thing.
On this blog, we had a discussion about nostalgia – or lack thereof – for the 60s here (see the NOTE and the comments).
Have you noticed that the attempt to portray the rioters as white supremacists has kind of fallen by the wayside…
…as their leftist agenda is unequivocally revealed?
It was a nice try, wasn’t it? You almost have to admire the MSM’s ability to drop one unworkable mendacious meme like a hot potato and pivot seamlessly to the next.
The politically correct bookshelf
When the Red Guards come to your home to inspect your bookshelf, be prepared:
A woke NPR writer tells us to comb through our bookshelves and make sure we have enough books authored by people of color.
So my question is: does Thomas Sowell count? If so, I’ve got plenty.
Yes, I know, I know: Sowell isn’t an actual black person, even though he grew up in the South and then Harlem when discrimination against black people really was systemic, as well as overt.
Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to read Clarence Thomas’ autobiography. Sounds excellent.
Antifa takes over Seattle police station and environs – what it signifies
Weakness and appeasement on the part of civic authorities are signals that give rise to the empowerment of those who would disrupt and overturn civil society:
Antifa, or their helpers, under the pretense of caring about black people, now has control of a police station, and more.
Seattle’s politicians have ceded control over one of the oldest police stations in the city to a group of leftists, who have used the death of George Floyd, to advance one of their long held goals, seizing government property in the name of a Marxist revolution.
One law enforcement source tells me third-shift officers still have personal belongings in the building:
“Officers went to the precinct, which is now patrolled by armed protesters. They asked if they could go into ‘our’ building to retrieve personal belongs. They were denied entry by the armed factions.”
This group, quite likely members of the Antifa-affiliated John Brown Gun Club, now controls, not just the station, but four blocks of the Capitol Hill area of Seattle, which they have renamed…
Reports are that the police haven’t a clue what to do next. That’s no surprise, either, considering that it’s the “progressive” city of Seattle where the leadership is far more aligned with Antifa than with the police.
It strikes me, and not for the first time, that Antifa has a brilliant name. The left knows that the group is made of leftist anarchists, but liberals think the name simply means what Antifa says it means: anti Fascist. So Orwellian.
The quote I offered from the Legal Insurrection article says Antifa is operating “under the pretense of caring about black people.” Actually, Antifa operates under many pretenses (including the “anti-Fascist” one), but helping black people is most definitely one of them. Make no mistake about it, black communities are being hurt the most right now, and defunding the police is not a popular position there. But Antifa could not care less.
Antifa is about power – and they are drunk with it right now. They will do as much as they are allowed to do. In the manner of Al Qaeda 9/11 planners who were surprised when the twin towers actually came down that day, Antifa is probably surprised that their targets so far have proven to be so soft. Although I doubt they thought that an especially strong fight would be put up – after all, the ground had been thoroughly prepared by the Gramscian march, the leftist mayors and AGs are in place, and Antifa has also wrapped itself in the cloak of anti-Fascism/anti-racism sanctity – I think Antifa was nevertheless surprised at the speed and extent of the capitulation.
It also strikes me that the recent brouhaha over the publication of the Senator Cotton op-ed in the NY Times, a skirmish that resulted in the resignation of the editorial page editor who allowed such heresy to be published in its sacred pages, is notable not just for the fact that it represents the victory of the new Red Guards over the older forces there, but also because of the subject matter of the Cotton piece. In it, Cotton had asserted the rather odinary idea that in times of civil unrest of great magnitude, the president is legally empowered to call out the military to subdue rioters (this has happened before, notably during the Rodney King riots). So it is significant that the group that ousted editor Bennett was also protesting the airing of the very idea that when blue city mayors and blue state governors cannot or will not put down an insurrection and protect ordinary citizens, the federal government can step in.
That leads in a straight line to events in Seattle, in which Antifa claims territory from what is seen as the enemy – the police – and the city government cannot muster the strength or will to stop them. The police are probably thoroughly disgusted by the fact that around the country, blue city governments have abandoned them and allowed them to be demonized for the actions of a very few.
Andrew C. McCarthy has this to say:
The Left’s plan is not to defund the police. It is to denude the police — to strip them of their capacity to act and their legitimacy as keepers of the peace.
The plan is not new. I outlined it many times during the Obama presidency, during which the Justice Department made it a priority to supplant the intelligence-based, broken-windows approach to policing — the approach that gave America an unprecedented generation of record low crime and safe urban streets.
Intelligence-based policing scrutinizes dynamic ranges of data points to deploy the police where the crime is. It is driven by offense behavior. In stark contrast, progressive-fantasy policing pretends that the police encounter minority suspects, particularly black men, because the police are institutionally racist, not because these suspects are responsible for a high percentage of crime — much higher than their demographics’ proportions of the total population.
Consequently, progressives theorize that police should back off from investigative activity in criminal hot spots, which is distorted into “racial profiling.” Instead, cops are told to rely on community leaders — typically allied with big-city Democrats — to be their eyes and ears. In this, Democrats can always rely on a mass of Republicans, who echo their tropes about our “carceral state” and the desperate need for “criminal-justice reform” — as if the prisons were teeming with non-violent marijuana tokers rather than hardened criminals with long records (reflecting the system’s practice of pleading serious offenses down to petty ones, the better to get criminals back on the street more rapidly).
The “defunding” rhetoric aside, the idea is not to make municipal police departments disappear. It is to bludgeon them with federal dollars collected from the taxpayers who most need competent policing. As I’ve detailed, a big part of the strategy is Justice Department civil-rights litigation. The Justice Department uses controversial police incidents as a pretext to open “pattern or practice” investigations and sue municipalities or their police departments under a pernicious Clinton-era civil-rights law. Since municipalities cannot afford to go toe-to-toe with the Justice Department’s $30 billion annual budget, they are pressured into consent decrees, often with federal monitors, in which they agree to adopt the Left’s approved police practices.
This had momentum during the Obama years, but it is a gradual process that can be slowed by the election of a more law-and-order–oriented administration (which tends to happen when the public has had its fill of what progressive policies yield on the streets). The more sweeping approach is percolating in Congress now: Washington-prescribed transformation of the nation’s police departments, using the threat that federal funds will be withheld if the Left’s preferred “reforms” are not made.
Is there a single blue-run city standing against it? I haven’t followed the course of the riots in all the cities they are affecting, so perhaps I’ve missed several exceptions to the capitulation rule, but I don’t think so.
In the meantime, Antifa is small in membership. But it is bold and it is flush with success right now. A small but determined group can do a lot of damage if the opposition is confused, cowardly, and/or not really all that strongly opposed.
Governor Beshear of Kentucky makes a healthcare proposal
Offering few specifics, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said his administration is committed to ensuring that 100% of the state’s black residents have health insurance.
State statistics released Monday indicate black Kentuckians account for 16.5% of Kentucky’s coronavirus deaths but make up just 8.4% of the state’s population, according to Census data.
“Every single individual in our African-American communities is to have a form of health-care coverage,” Beshear (D) said. “We’re going to put money into it, we’re going to put people into it, we’re going to make sure the community anchors are part of it.”
This guy is not only a governor, he’s also a lawyer and was the Attorney General of Kentucky for a while. So he’s not ignorant of what he’s saying here, and how illegal it is.
More:
Beshear didn’t immediately comment on how he would provide coverage to people who don’t currently qualify for expanded Medicaid and don’t have insurance through their employer.
He also didn’t comment on how the state would defend against a lawsuit should someone allege the action is illegal race-based discrimination.
Does he really intend to try to do this? Or is it just BS to placate the masses? I say it’s the latter, a shameless pandering from someone who’s quite aware of what he’s saying.
Should you fly yet? The experts speak
Pocket recommended this article to me today, entitled, “Should You Fly Yet? An Epidemiologist and an Exposure Scientist Walk You Through the Decision Process.”
My immediate reaction: why should I care what they have to say?
That’s the legacy of the COVID pandemic.
The essence of the left: equality of misery
[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan.”]
Jonathan Turley wrote, speaking of the remarks by Minneapolis city council president Lisa Bender that calling the police when your home is invaded “comes from a place of privilege”:
What I find odd is that the fear of being without police is a form of privilege but it is still viewed by Bender as somehow beneficial because it makes non-African Americans experience fear. Wouldn’t it be better (indeed a form of leadership) to seek to remove the fear from the African-American community rather than making the fear universal? It is likely (sic) solving the greater threat of fire in one community by telling another community to go without fire protection. You achieve equity but hardly the equity that you would want.
Yes, it would be better. But Turley doesn’t seem to have absorbed the fact that this is standard on the left – in fact you might say it’s a guiding principle of the left. The effect of their methods to achieve the equality of outcome they so desire is that everyone would be equally miserable (except for the leftist leaders, of course, who have special privileges). Did Turley never read Animal Farm?
Or did he never listen to Margaret Thatcher, who grasped the leftist principle quite well and articulated this critique three decades ago:
Or, if he pleases, Turley can study the words of Winston Churchill, whose statue was defaced in London the other day by rioters, because he’s considered a racist:
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
Yes indeed: failure, ignorance, envy, and the equal sharing of misery. We’re seeing quite a bit of those things these days, aren’t we?
Cities and businesses are not immune to the laws of cause and effect…
…although some mayors and city governments seem to think so.
The most elementary and basic task of city government is to preserve an environment in which people feel safe from attacks on their persons and property. Of course, that safety can never be perfect. Crimes are committed, natural disasters happen, and rogue cops can even go against their charge and do harm. But a municipality must be run well enough that such things are rare, and when they do occur, the response should prevent the worst results and assure the residents that the government is competent at the task.
In the case of Minneapolis and Chauvin and the other three police officers, they’ve been arrested and charged, and they will be tried (I tend to doubt they’ll get a fair trial because of all the publicity, but they certainly will get a trial). How common is police brutality or mistreatment, serious or minor, in Minneapolis? I don’t know, but I have little doubt it’s been studied and will be studied some more. At any rate, deaths such as that of Floyd are rare and I don’t think they will ever be eliminated anywhere despite all efforts, because of the nature of police work and of human beings.
But a city cannot afford to let looting and rioting and arson go on. When I use the word “afford” I mean it literally. Take away all the verbiage about how people feel – their anger and their pain or whatever feelings you ascribe to them – and you are left with the practical matter of a city’s lifeblood, its economy, which depends on creating an environment that favors investment and commerce. Businesses will leave for safer places if they don’t feel secure in a particular city. They are not sentenced to do time in that place – for now we continue to allow businesses to make their own choices about where to locate, although if the left has its way that could change as well.
Any mayor who voluntarily tells police to stand down during a riot is forfeiting that trust and safety and most likely condemning his/her city to a bleaker future. If a mayor does that because he or she actually believes it will placate rioters and make them feel better and solve some of the problem, then that mayor is a fool. But perhaps the mayor just realizes that the police and fire departments are overwhelmed by sheer numbers and that throwing them into the mix would put them at too much risk. If so, then it’s time to call in the National Guard as quickly as possible, because order must be restored.
Mayors in various cities did not do that, and those cities will pay a price. Again, that’s not a metaphor – it’s a literal price. Here’s an example:
Kris Wyrobek, president and CEO of 7-Sigma, decided to move his business out of Minneapolis after rioters burned his plant to the ground.
They don’t care about my business…They didn’t protect our people. We were all on our own.
Why should the business feel any allegiance to a city whose leaders abandoned it?
A mayor such as Frey should understand that there is a cause and effect operating here. In that process, the city ends up losing more than the business – it loses more businesses, people, tax revenue, trust, and quality of life.
And the arsonists? They’re not thinking about attracting business or city revenue. They’re either angry and striking out at targets of opportunity, or (even more likely in this particular case) they are Antifa anarchists bent on destroying capitalism and masquerading as anti-Fascists. They count on the weakness and stupidity (and or alliance) of modern progressive mayors such as Frey.
Glenn Loury offers a great response to all those “mea culpa, I’m with you” emails
It’s an excellent statement. I’ve half a mind to send a copy to my alma mater, the president of which sent me one of those unctuous missives as well.
Will the truth make itself “known in deeds” – and will it happen in time to prevent disaster?
Roger Scruton wrote the following in 2006, almost a decade and a half ago. The subject matter is immigration, but it’s relevant to a lot more than that particular subject:
The destructive effects of liberalism are not usually felt by the liberals themselves—not immediately, at least. The first victim of liberal immigration policies is the indigenous working class. When the welfare state was first conceived, it was in order to provide insurance for poorer members of the indigenous community, by taxing their income in exchange for the benefits which they may one day need. The rights involved were quasi-contractual: a right of the state to levy contributions in exchange for a right of the citizen to receive support. The very term used to describe the deal in Britain—“national insurance”—expresses the old understanding, that the welfare system is part of being together as a nation, of belonging with one’s neighbors, as mutual beneficiaries of an ancestral right. The liberal view of rights, as universal possessions which make no reference to history, community, or obedience, has changed all that. Indigenous people can claim no precedence, not even in this matter in which they have sacrificed a lifetime of income for the sake of their own future security. Immigrants are given welfare benefits as of right, and on the basis of their need, whether or not they have paid or ever will pay taxes. And since their need is invariably great—why else have they come here?—they take precedence over existing residents in the grant of housing and income support. Those with a handful of wives are even more fortunate, since only one of their marriages is recognized in European systems of law: the remaining wives are “single mothers,” with all the fiscal advantages which attach to that label. All this has entailed that the stock of “social housing” once reserved for the indigenous poor is now almost entirely occupied by people whose language, customs, and culture mark them out as foreigners.
It is not “racist” to draw attention to this kind of fact. Nor is it racist to argue that indigenous people must take precedence over newcomers, who have to earn their right of residence and cannot be allowed to appropriate the savings of their hosts. But it is easier for me to write about these matters in an American intellectual journal than in an English newspaper, and if I tried to write about these things in a Belgian newspaper, I could be in serious trouble with the courts. The iron curtain of censorship that came down in the wake of Powell’s speech has not lifted everywhere; on the contrary, if the EU has its way, it will be enshrined in the criminal code, with “racism and xenophobia”—defined as vaguely as is required to silence unwanted opinion—made into an extraditable offense throughout the Union.
And this may be the most interesting part of all [addition in brackets mine]:
The problem with censorship, as John Stuart Mill pointed out a century and half ago, is that it makes it impossible for those who impose it to discover that they are wrong. The error persists, preventing the discussion that might produce a remedy [early], and ensuring that the problem will grow. Yet when truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds. The truth about Hitler burst on the world in 1939, notwithstanding all the pious words of the appeasers. And the truth about immigration is beginning to show itself in Europe, notwithstanding all the liberal efforts to conceal it.
What’s happening in the US now? Perhaps – if we are fortunate – it’s the truth showing itself about the left. And if we’re very fortunate, it’s the truth about the left, showing itself in time to prevent disaster.
I have my doubts that it’s showing itself in time. Or perhaps it’s more correct to say that it would be in time, if so many people weren’t blinded by the incessant propaganda of the left, supported and spread by the MSM and the school system as well as a host of other institutions the left has taken over.
Today I’ve been thinking of this old post of mine, and the words of author Azar Nafisi on the Iranian revolution she had supported when it was happening and she lived in the US, a support she lived to regret when she returned home to Iran after the revolution [emphasis mine]:
I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution. My oppressive yearning for home was shaped into excited speeches against the tyrants back home and their American backers…
When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision. I felt helpless: all the dreams and slogans were coming true, and there was no escaping them…
In later months and years, every once in a while Bijan [Nafisi’s husband] and I would be shocked to see the show trials of our old [Iranian] comrades in the U.S. on [Iranian] television. They eagerly denounced their past actions, their old comrades, their old selves, and confessed that they were indeed the enemies of Islam. We would watch these scenes in silence…I turned and asked Bijan, Did you ever dream that this could happen to us? He said, No, I didn’t, but I should have.