Yesterday, there was this news: “This is the greatest 50-day
rally in the history of the S&P 500.” You didn’t hear that? Hmm.
It was good news. When there’s a sudden drop, you can expect
a sudden recovery—unless interference keeps the bounce back from happening.
Some people don’t want a bounce back.
That’s why you’re not hearing about it. And maybe that’s why
you are hearing about what is in the news.
In Part I we started talking about the difference between the protesters and the rioters. Let’s cover three related things today.
· Your house is not on fire (unless the rioters
have gotten to you).
· Riots are not a reaction to racism; they are a
reaction against freedom, free markets, and civilization.
· Chaos, like other forms of tyranny, brings oppression, poverty, and savagery.
Your House Is Not on Fire
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| cartoon frame, by chainsawsuit.com found on Facebook |
There was a cartoon meme going around, attempting to describe
what people mean when they say “black lives matter” and won’t accept “all lives
matter” as a response. There are two people, each with a house behind them. The
first one’s house is burning down. The second guy is holding a
hose, spraying his own house, because “all houses matter.” He seems unaware of
how useless that statement is when clearly his neighbor’s house is on fire and
could use the hose.
The metaphor works only if there’s a house on fire.
In this case the fire is purported to be “systemic racism.” Not just an
occasional isolated incident among 325 million people, but a problem so
pervasive that the house is burning down.
What is wrong with the metaphor? The house isn’t really on
fire. There’s as much “fire” as you might have from lighting the occasional
birthday candle in the house; you can easily blow it out and get along with
living in the house in complete safety and comfort.
The counter to the metaphor is two people in front of two
houses. One is screaming that his house is on fire, and the other one, who has
looked, examined, checked inside, and verified that the house is not actually
on fire, tries to calm the neighbor. Yes, all of our houses matter; we would
not want a fire in anyone’s house.
To which the first screams again, in agony and frustration, “You
don’t understand. My house is on fire!”
But it isn’t.
The narrative—the house-on-fire story—is that blacks,
particularly black men, are in danger of being killed by racist police every
time they leave their homes. Their mothers worry for them. Some people even
call it a genocide happening right before our eyes.
If this were happening, we would all be alarmed—the way we
would be if our neighbor’s house actually were burning. We’d call for the fire
department and use our water hoses to help in the meantime.
But where do you spray if there’s no fire?
Yesterday, Tucker Carlson on Fox News, went
through the entire list of deaths of unarmed blacks in the US in 2019—data maintained
since 2015 by The Washington Post. In 2019 there were ten: nine men and
one woman. By Carlson’s count, in five of those cases, the suspect attacked an
officer just before the shooting. In one, the discharge of the black police
officer’s weapon was accidental during grappling with the suspect, and the
officer was not charged.
That leaves four. In two of these cases, officers were not charged,
because circumstances showed they had reason to believe they were being threatened.
In two cases the officers were charged. One was of the female black woman. One
was a case in which the officer claimed he had seen a gun pointed at him during
a car chase; a gun was later found in the car. The officer was nevertheless
charged.
By my count, that is one killing of an “unarmed” black man—who
had a gun—and the police officer was charged. The case of the woman was a clear
fatal error by the police officer, who was charged.
The black population in the US is 13%, roughly 42,250,000.
Of these, 6% are male: 2,535,000. Even if you counted all nine of the unarmed black
males killed in 2019, that’s 0.000355%. Not a genocide by any definition of
that word. It is certainly not evidence that police are “hunting” black men, as
Joy Reid recently claimed on MSNBC.
In fact, police officers of any race are less likely to
shoot a black suspect than a white suspect, even though blacks are more likely
to be committing crimes. Why? Most likely because of fear of being called
racist. That fear is great enough to discourage officers from being willing to
patrol predominantly black neighborhoods.
Killings by police continue on a downward trend for all
races.
As for police officers, Carlson said,
At the same time, this country remains a dangerous place for
police officers; 48 of them were murdered in 2019, according to FBI data.
That’s more than the number of unarmed suspects killed of all races.
When the house-is-on-fire crowd are asked to give evidence,
it’s usually anecdotal. Typically they refer to a traffic stop in which the
person claims they were targeted because of their race—even though traffic
stops mostly happen before the police officer knows the race of the driver. In
other words, in our analogy, the smoke detector was set too sensitive and went
off when the toast got slightly brown. We do not help by buying in to something that simply isn't true; we do better service by helping the panicked person see that there's no fire.
However, in 2018, the last year of complete data, killings
of blacks by someone else happened about 7400 times more often than killing of
blacks by a police officer. Most often this is black-on-black crime. If this
were the house-on-fire, maybe we could talk. Maybe it’s a foundation problem—maybe
it’s fatherless homes.
Riots Are Not a Reaction to Racism
Shop owners have been hurt and confused as they put up signs
that say, “Black Store Owner,” or “We’re on your side,” to try to persuade the destroying
rioters to pass them by. The rioters go right ahead and attack. It might even
be that most of the looted businesses have had minority owners. These are
people who were struggling to stay afloat during the coronavirus shutdown, and
then this happens. Five minutes of rioting may have destroyed their entire life’s work and investment. Why would protesters do that?
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| Trevon Ellis, barbershop owner in Minneapolis, lost all when rioters burned down his shop. Image by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for NPR, found here. |
Because they’re not protesters getting carried away in the
anger over the unjust killing of George Floyd. They are domestic terrorists using that moment as an opportunity for their own purposes. Those purposes are to destroy civil
society. That is not an exaggeration; that is essentially what they say is
their mission. They want to create so much chaos that business can’t be
conducted—because they want to stop business exchanges of any sort.
You store owners—you are their enemy. They don’t care what
color you are; they hate that you are making money in a free-market economy.
A Washington Examiner editorial put it this way:
The senseless and callous police killing of George Floyd
inspired peaceful protests at first, but now, it has become an excuse for a
troupe of professional revolutionaries and marauders. They use these incidents
in order to flex their muscle and test how far their impressionable recruits
are willing to go in breaking the law.
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| An Antifa rally in Manhattan last year. Image by J.C. Rice, found here |
I doubt you could say these revolting terrorists are deep
thinkers. Have they thought through to the logical end how tearing down civil
society will mess up their lives as well as ours?
It might be that they have in mind some imaginary fantasy
utopia that they can create from scratch—once everyone is reduced to eking out
their survival in some post-apocalyptic wasteland. Picture New York City as
imagined in the movie Escape from New York. Or maybe like in Mad Max.
Or possibly a more widespread 9/11. It doesn’t look like people comfortably
housed and fed and enjoying the internet and their cell phones.
How do societies really look after their demise? Do they
rise, Phoenix-like from the burning cinders? No. Archaeologists look for them
where they rotted and got overgrown by trees, if they were in that kind of
climate. Or beneath blowing dust or sand, if they were in that kind of climate.
The closest you might see, historically, is Europe following
the Black Plague. Such a large percentage of the population was wiped out that
many areas were faced with starting over—without the brainpower or resources
that they’d recently had. It took centuries to build back up to the Renaissance.
But even they didn’t have to start completely from scratch. There were still governments
and property ownership, and people buying and selling their goods.
The bad guys always assume all will go better with them in
charge? Why? Because they’re prideful enough to believe they’re so much more
brilliant and advanced than any others who have tried it. And what is the
evidence of this brilliance and goodness?
They’re delusional, and they’re power hungry. They’re not
attempting to wipe out civilization so that a brilliant Thomas Jefferson can
combine with a golden-hearted George Washington. They’re not even going to be
looking for such minds and hearts. Nor would they submit to them if they arose.
These are power mongers.
Someone is organizing them. I think we’ll be learning more about that in coming days—if there are any news
media that do their job, but I wouldn’t expect to learn anything from the New
York Times (a former newpaper[i]),
CNN, or MSNBC, none of which have been seen seeking truth for a very long time.
There are likely to be multiple shadowy figures, George Soros
types (possibly including him personally). It looks like a James Bond story.
There’s a big bad guy, who plans to destroy the world for reasons that have
meaning only to himself, but will, he thinks, result in his ultimate control of
everyone and everything. And he’s surrounded by minions. So many minions that
it keeps all the Hollywood wannabes employed for the filming of the climactic
scene.
Did you ever think, “Why would somebody choose that life?
Out on some obscure island, away from family and comforts of home, to work for
this madman, who has no regard for them? They get paid, we assume. But enough
for that? Do they all buy into the madman’s mission, thinking, “Once he’s in
charge, he’ll put people like me in an important position”?
Those real life minions are out on the streets throwing
bricks at Mom and Pop stores, and anything else with a window—playing their
role in some evil villain’s master plan that includes destroying everything you
value: your beliefs, life, liberty, property, family, and truth.
In the movies, James Bond or some other hero comes to the
rescue and foils the plans. But, without a scriptwriter, we need that hero to
be the rest of us: police officers, national guard troops, civic leaders, and ordinary
everyday truth-telling citizens.
Chaos, Like Other Forms of Tyranny, Brings Oppression,
Poverty, and Savagery
If you’ve got a civic leader saying, “We need to give them
our sympathy, because their anger is justified,” that’s not a leader willing to
use government for its proper role: protecting life, liberty, and property. They're telling you they don’t want you to enjoy freedom, prosperity, and civilization.
They're telling you they think violent damage to people and
property is OK, if the perpetrator just claims to be angry about the accepted
narrative. And that accepted narrative is that America is racist—and always has
been; America is irredeemable.
Ben Shapiro asked (and answered) the question on his show yesterday: What is the logical next step of someone with the belief that America is
irredeemably racist and evil? That America must be torn down, totally destroyed.
You can’t have something that you claim is rotten to the core and always has
been, and then say, “But it will all be better if we just elect a Democrat as
president again.” You can’t claim that systemic evil will be cured by a bit of
tweaking.
You either have to be in favor of conserving, preserving,
restoring our Constitution and the civilization it has nurtured; or you are in
favor of overthrowing America and oppressing its people with some form of
tyranny, with its attendant poverty and savagery.
What did Barack Obama mean by “fundamentally changing
America”? He meant that the constitutional republic should be destroyed—and something
else, something Marxist, should be put in its place.
What did Maxine Waters mean recently when she said, “I don’t
want to see these establishments opened back up”? Why not?
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| The Political Sphere of the Spherical Model |
We know what it takes to move up north, on the Spherical Model, to Freedom, Prosperity, and Civilization.
Killing, looting, pillaging,
destroying, hating, taking, controlling—those are all behaviors of tyrants,
who bring oppression, poverty, and savagery, located far down south on the
sphere.
These people are telling you what they intend. They want to
take away your freedom, your earnings, and your civilization, and replace these
with oppressive tyranny, enslavement and poverty, and the savagery left to humans without
civilization.
Maybe it’s time to stop believing the false house-is-burning narrative
and start believing those who say they are determined to burn down all our
houses.
[i]
Andrew Klavan has made it his personal policy, every time he refers to the New
York Times, to add “a former newspaper.” I agree with him that that is
appropriate.
