Chris Wray Is Right: Antifa Is an Ideological Threat to the United States

 Chris Wray Is Right: Antifa Is an Ideological Threat to the United States

Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review

His assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on the very real and present threat of ideologically driven violence.

On Thursday, Jim Geraghty had a characteristically insightful Corner post discussing FBI director Christopher Wray’s recent characterization of Antifa on Capitol Hill. Jim observes that the director’s testimony will be (indeed, is being) distorted in the debate halls, congressional chambers, and media commentary because, well, that’s what we do.

The rap on Wray is that he resists framing Antifa as an “organization,” thinking it more accurate to depict it as a “movement” or an “ideology.” The problem is not just that he is being maligned for what was a more nuanced and accurate description than the commentary indicates. Beyond that, the commentary is missing entirely that his assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on ideologically driven violence, which has been the most immediate threat faced by the United States for a generation. If the government is applying to international terrorism — i.e., jihadist terrorism — the same thinking that Wray described as the bureau’s approach to Antifa’s domestic terrorism, that is a significant security enhancement.

Wray is not denying that Antifa is infecting and driving violent anti-American anarchists. Those anarchists, he indicated, include collections that range from ad hoc groups of individuals who self-identify as Antifa to more regimented “nodes” that are “coalescing regionally.”

 FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on “Threats to the Homeland” on Capitol Hill, September 24, 2020. (Joshua Roberts/Pool/Reuters)

His assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on the very real and present threat of ideologically driven violence.

On Thursday, Jim Geraghty had a characteristically insightful Corner post discussing FBI director Christopher Wray’s recent characterization of Antifa on Capitol Hill. Jim observes that the director’s testimony will be (indeed, is being) distorted in the debate halls, congressional chambers, and media commentary because, well, that’s what we do.

The rap on Wray is that he resists framing Antifa as an “organization,” thinking it more accurate to depict it as a “movement” or an “ideology.” The problem is not just that he is being maligned for what was a more nuanced and accurate description than the commentary indicates. Beyond that, the commentary is missing entirely that his assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on ideologically driven violence, which has been the most immediate threat faced by the United States for a generation. If the government is applying to international terrorism — i.e., jihadist terrorism — the same thinking that Wray described as the bureau’s approach to Antifa’s domestic terrorism, that is a significant security enhancement.

Wray is not denying that Antifa is infecting and driving violent anti-American anarchists. Those anarchists, he indicated, include collections that range from ad hoc groups of individuals who self-identify as Antifa to more regimented “nodes” that are “coalescing regionally.”

Does that sound familiar? It should. On a global stage, it mirrors in many ways the Muslim Brotherhood. Not a precise reflection, but it is similar (and bear in mind that these movements are in very different stages of their historical development).

I wrote a book about Brotherhood ideology, called The Grand Jihad, in 2010, and another one a couple of years later, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, about the turbulent influence of that ideology during the short-lived uprisings known as “the Arab Spring.” Over the years, I’ve consulted with sundry lawmakers on legislative initiatives to designate the Brotherhood formally as a foreign terrorist organization.

Those efforts were mostly inchoate, and they have petered out in recent years. The failure owes not to the fact that anyone doubts the Brotherhood is real, nor to skepticism that it is a malign force. The problem is nailing down exactly what it is. It manifests itself in many different ways.

The Brotherhood was established in Egypt nearly a century ago as an Islamic competitor to the Muslim world’s various post–World War II lurches toward secularization, Western democracy, and Soviet communism. In Egypt, the Brotherhood was an organization that, by turns, was overt in the manner of a political party, and covert in the manner of a subversive conspiracy.

Over time, it spread regionally and transcontinentally, metastasizing into the most consequential Muslim ideological enterprise in modern history. It adheres to a distinct sharia-supremacist Salafism rooted in centuries of scholarship. I’m not invoking “Salafist” here as an epithet, the way it is commonly used in media — the same way “Wahhabist” was used as an epithet meaning “radical” in the years after 9/11, usually by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. The Brotherhood is also supple, particularly in the West: media savvy, versed in civil-rights law, schooled in identity politics and community-organizing tactics, and strategically aligned with leftist grievance groups. That’s a level of sophistication that Antifa lacks in these early years of its existence. (Black Lives Matter, with its roots in 1960s “small-c communism,” is further along.)

Here is the point: The Brotherhood appears as different things in different places. It has countless tentacles, but most of them are not called “the Muslim Brotherhood.” Some are terrorist organizations, like Hamas (which would tell you it is not a terrorist organization but a political entity with a social-justice agenda and a forcible resistance wing). Some are think tanks, like the International Institute of Islamic Thought. Some are self-styled civil-rights groups, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Some are umbrella groups for all manner of sharia-supremacist activism, like the Islamic Society of North America. Some form up in campus chapters, as parts of the Muslim Students Association. Some, like the Muslim American Society, purport to be the quasi-official presence of the Brotherhood’s Egyptian mother ship. But what the Brotherhood is, for the most part, is a movement that propagates a particular ideology, and that inspires to action everyone from terrorists (such as the Blind Sheikh, Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda’s current leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, all of whom had Brotherhood alliances) to celebrity academics (such as Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna) to internationally renowned sharia authorities (such as Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi).

To label the Muslim Brotherhood a mere “organization,” as if it would be possible to target one iteration of it and put the whole thing out of business, would be to underestimate it at our peril. Indeed, the problem with the American government’s approach to Brotherhood-inspired entities in our own country has been the failure to come to grips with the ideology they represent and facilitate. Our officials tend to take them on their own masquerading terms, as if, say, CAIR really were just a civil-rights organization. Thus, the government rationalizes working with these groups as organizations rather than rejecting them because of the movement they represent.

Regarding Antifa, what Wray appears to be saying is that, if the FBI is going to counter Antifa effectively, it has to recognize, first and foremost, the ideological thread that knits all the militants together. You can’t kill it by arresting ten guys in balaclavas mixing Molotov cocktails in Portland.

If that is the FBI’s logic, it’s not only right; it is progress.

In the Obama years, the government’s willful blindness to the ideological driver of jihadist terrorism was taken to new and absurd extremes. Our officials were cautioned that to take note of sharia supremacism was unconstitutional folly, potentially chilling religious liberty and the rights to assemble and engage in political dissent. It was as if CAIR were writing policy when, as I’ve pointed out a few times, the actual constitutional violation was the administration-backed U.N. Human Rights Resolution 16/18, which attempted to outlaw speech that, even if true and backed by mounds of evidence, could “incite hostility” to Islam.

That, however, was not nearly the worst of it. Obama wanted to project success in quelling the threat of terrorism, even as al-Qaeda thrived and its breakaway faction, ISIS, went on a rampage that gained it control of a swath of Iraqi-Syrian territory larger than Britain. The administration did this by miniaturizing the threat: pretending the animating sharia-supremacist ideology did not exist, and treating the nodes of the terror networks as discrete organizations that were really concerned with regional and local disputes — not anything so bold as global anti-American, anti-Western jihad to establish and expand the dominance of sharia laws and customs.

Like jihad, mujahideen, and other Islamic terms whose utterance in connection with terrorism was verboten, discussion of sharia in connection with Muslim militancy was discouraged. It became vogue to speak of “al-Qaeda ideology.” That is, if a person who was clearly inspired by sharia supremacism committed a mass-murder attack, the Obama administration — very much including the FBI — ludicrously refused to concede that the act was terrorism unless there was some solid evidence “operationally” tying the person to an al-Qaeda entity that had been formally designated as a terrorist organization.

The knock-on effects of consciously avoiding ideology include limiting what the government can legitimately investigate. That approach is an invitation to be attacked: The terrorist is never a terrorist until the government has gotten around to designating him as such, and the threat of violence is never certain until after the violence happens.

Let’s not do that again. In fact, let’s bear in mind that, if Joe Biden is elected, we will be doing it again — instead of confronting enemy ideology, we’ll be back to “countering violent extremism.”

Chris Wray is right. He is not saying that the FBI is making no cases on violent insurrectionists who are driven by Antifa’s anti-American ideology. He is saying that if we’re confronted by a movement, and we want to protect the country, we can’t afford to delude ourselves into thinking we can beat it by taking out any particular organization. It’s bigger and more insidious than that.

Let’s remember one more thing, a lesson we never learned with sharia supremacism. The FBI is a law enforcement agency. It does not, and must not, get involved with ideological threats in the United States until they’ve ripened into crimes — or, at least, into concrete preparation for crimes and conspiracies. That is the end stage. A confident, free society best takes on ideological threats at the early stage: talking about them, examining their ideas, doing real investigative journalism about how they operate, and calling them out and discrediting them. If we’re waiting for the FBI to confront the challenge of anti-American anarchism, then we’re waiting way too long.

 

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy

The Devil and Joe Biden

 

The Devil and Joe Biden

Bill O'Reilly, billoreilly.com

A front page article in the Wall Street Journal reminded me that a Roman Catholic priest in South Carolina denied Joe Biden communion just about one year ago.  Reverend Robert Morey blessed Mr. Biden but refused him the host, later saying the former Vice-President’s liberal position on abortion defies church teaching.

As with many Catholic politicians, Mr. Biden fell back on the rationalization that he could not impose his “private” beliefs on other Americans.  But in Biden’s case, that rings very hollow.

For decades then Senator Joe Biden supported the Hyde Amendment, which disallows federal money for the abortion procedure because that violates the religious rights of Catholics and other religious people.  There are exceptions for rape, incest, and serious medical danger to the mother.

The Hyde Amendment was fair because pro-choice Americans can easily donate money to fund Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers thereby assuring legal abortions can be made available to all.

There is no need for the federal government to force religious Americans to fund a life-ending procedure they reject on moral grounds.

But the new, progressive Joe Biden now repudiates the Hyde Amendment in a stunning reversal of conscience.  He also selected Kamala Harris, an aggressive pro-choice advocate, as his running mate.  Some describe the Biden-Harris ticket as the most pro-abortion political duo in history.

The Democratic platform is very clear: there should be no restrictions on abortion whatsoever.  A number of states have rebelled against that using “science” to justify regulations.  It is a medical fact that a baby is viable in the womb long before birth. Many legislators believe destroying a fetus after viability is a violation of human rights.

Joe Biden has not responded to that point-of-view and that’s his problem with the Catholic Church.  His political posture enables abortion at any time, for any reason. Just this week, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Vigano, warned Catholic voters that killing babies is “demonic.”

With almost 70 million Catholics registered to vote, Biden’s flip-flop on the Hyde Amendment and his political embrace of Senator Harris, could be a problem for him on Election Day.

However, the former Vice President is counting on the Catholic clergy remaining largely silent.  The church is frightened, intimidated, and under financial siege due to the clerical abuse of children.  Few American priests will speak out on anything.

After Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the nation’s most powerful Catholic voice, said the opening prayer at the Republican National Convention, he was brutally attacked on social and traditional media.  Some wealthy Catholic donors even resigned from church boards.  The message was heard loud and clear by Catholic clergy in America.

So Mr. Biden may well believe he has little to fear from the Church.

As for Joe’s faithfulness to the faith, who really knows?  In 1936, Stephen Vincent Benet wrote a short story entitled “The Devil and Daniel Webster.”  In it, a good man sells his soul for prosperity.  In real life, it would be unfair to suggest that any politician would ever do that.

Wouldn’t it?

The Problem with Cuties

 

This may be okay in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Paris, Sundance and Netflix, but child pornography is unacceptable. Netflix has taken odd positions before and I would encourage everyone to drop Netflix and state and national law enforcement take action. BH

The Problem with Cuties

Madeleine Kearns, National Review 

In critiquing the sexualization of children, the filmmakers sexualized children.

French director and writer Maïmouna Doucouré was rather taken aback to find that her film Cuties (Mignonnes) — an award winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — was so violently unpopular with the American public after it appeared here on Netflix. In response to promotional materials and clips from the movie (which showed eleven-year-old girls dressed and dancing like strippers), politicians, journalists, and celebrities complained that the streaming service was “basically distributing child pornography.” A petition calling for Netflix viewers to cancel their subscription gained 600,000 signatories. Yet the moviemakers were baffled, maintaining that “Cuties is a social commentary against the sexualization of young children.”

If this were a novel — or if the lead actresses weren’t minors — I might be inclined to side with the defenders. But Cuties isn’t a novel; rather it’s a visual medium, one in which actual eleven-year-old girls have been presented to millions of viewers in ways that, in any other context, would be considered reprehensible, if not criminal.

Since I suspect that many won’t watch the movie out of principle, I’ll try summarizing it.

Cuties explores the various ways that vulnerable young girls act out sexually. Set in modern-day France, it tells the story of Amy (Fathia Youssouf), who moves with her family (her mother and two younger brothers) into a government-housing scheme. Amy, whose family are part of a strict Muslim community, soon discovers that her father intends to take a second wife, who will occupy the empty room next to hers. Owing to the conventions of her religion, her mother has no say in the matter and must even feign enthusiasm. Understandably feeling angry and confused, Amy internalizes her mother’s misery and seeks escape.

Before long, the “cuties,” a group of highly troublesome popular girls at school, attract Amy’s attention. The cuties lie, steal, fight, and (with unfettered access to hypersexualized pop culture through their phones) exhibit precocious sexual curiosity, particularly in relation to dancing. Having earned their acceptance, Amy is soon pressured into taking a video of a boy’s penis as he urinates in a school toilet. Soon, engrossed in her new double life, Amy slips beneath her hijab at a prayer meeting to watch adult women perform a raunchy stripper-esque dance routine. The cuties giggle at pornography in the school toilets; they strut, pout, and make crude sexual comments in order to attract the attention of older boys; they dress in skimpy and provocative clothing (Amy borrows her toddler brother’s T-shirt to use as a crop-top). And yet, all the while, the filmmakers remind us that they do not really understand what they are doing — that they are children. In one scene, one of the girls mistakes a used condom for a balloon, causing a chorus of prepubescent shrieking.

Angelica, the group’s ringleader, complains that she is neglected by her parents, but adds that at least “people like me.” Amy realizes during the most controversial scene in the movie — the cuties’ dance routine — that this isn’t who she is or wants to be and runs off the stage to find her mother. Thereafter, she changes into an age-appropriate outfit and plays outdoors with a skipping rope, a reminder of what girlhood ought to look like. But while the girls’ inappropriate behavior is not framed as liberation as much as a cry for help, and though depiction doesn’t equal endorsement, the nature of the depiction is harder to justify. During the dance sequence, the scantily clad girls grind, hump, and contort their bodies on stage in a way that would be gratuitously sexual for adults, never mind children. Even the (watered-down) IMDb “Parents’ Guide” fails to reassure:

A pair of tight leather pants on an 11-year-old girl are forcefully pulled down in the midst of a scuffle with another girl. . . .

11-year-old girls dance suggestively in front of a live adult audience.

Thus, whatever their artistic intentions, in making a social commentary about the sexualization of children, the filmmakers undeniably sexualized children.

Imagine if a movie, a social critique about cruelty to animals, depicted the literal burning and beatings of dogs and cats. Would it be morally convincing for filmmakers merely to replace the usual disclaimer “no animals were harmed in the making of this film” with a post-production protestation, “Oh but our whole point was to show that it’s wrong”? Obviously not. Besides, in the case of Cuties, there was an easy way around the artistic challenge that the script presented. Why didn’t they cast young adults who could be made to resemble minors?

Defenses of the film tend to start with the complaint that critics haven’t watched the film, but my complaint with those defending it is that they have watched it and yet still pretend there isn’t a major ethical problem. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes that “‘Cuties’ is a film of the center, and it’s aesthetically of the center — it depicts the unconsidered without advancing to the realm of the subjective, and it doesn’t allow its young protagonists much discourse, outer or inner.” Only a true intellectual could — when faced with the writhing, leather-clad bottoms and spreading legs of little girls — utter such besides-the-point nonsense.

I hate to say it but it’s not in the least bit surprising that this is a French film. In the 1970s, key thinkers of the French intelligentsia — Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Satre among them — published an open letter in Le Monde, a leading French newspaper, defending three men who had been charged with having sex with children under 15. For centuries, the French legal system didn’t classify sexual activity with children to be a criminal offense and, apparently, in some instances, it still doesn’t. In 2017, the French writer Valentine Faure summarized a recent case in a piece entitled “Can an Eleven-Year-Old Girl Consent to Sex?” (Ms. Faure thinks Not) for the New York Times:

The events, first reported by the website Mediapart, took place on April 24 in the Paris suburb of Montmagny. That afternoon, the child followed a man, who had already approached her twice in the previous days, telling her he “could teach her how to kiss and more.” They went to his building, where she performed oral sex in the hallway. Then she followed him to his apartment, where they had sexual intercourse. Afterward, he told her not to talk to anybody about it, kissed her on the forehead and asked to see her again.

On her way back home, the girl called her mother in a state of panic, realizing what had just happened. “Papa is going to think I’m a slut,” she said. The mother immediately called the police and pressed charges for rape. But citing Article 227-25 of the French criminal code, the public prosecutor stated that “there had been no violence, no coercion, no threat, no surprise,” and therefore, the man would be charged only with “sexual infraction.” That offense is punishable by five years in prison, while rape entails 20 years of imprisonment when the victim is under 15.

By comparison, the moral outrage of Americans at the first whiff of pedophilia is deeply reassuring. Yes, the filmmakers were on to something important: There is much at stake here, and in order to better protect children, we do have to explore unpleasant realities such as those discussed in the movie. Still, a clear line was crossed. The makers of Cuties didn’t merely simulate the cultural degradation and abuse of children, they became part of the problem they purport to protest.

American Idealism at its Birth

American Idealism at its Birth

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

Some American colleges and universities have received heat for posing in some form the question below:

Yes or no, the United States Constitution was designed to advance slavery? 

The question is great. The national disgrace is that so few students can muster a coherent argument for the obvious answer: No. Why? Because of the lousy history education too many received on the two subjects at hand: The Constitution and slavery.

At that great historic moment in the late 18^thcentury, a great many in the United States did not want the newly created nation to be just another country in the world and the issue of slavery struck at the heart of that dream. 

So what if the known world in the 1770s-1780s embraced the enslavement of people and in the case of many countries had done so for centuries upon centuries?

These American visionaries did not want to be just like everyone else. They wanted a country that continuously strove for a more perfect union of states. They wanted a nation that sought to be better in the future than they were today. 

For them it did not matter that slavery was the norm in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, West Africa, East Africa, South Africa, Southwest Asia, the Indian Sub-Continent, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, North America, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. It did not mater to them that the planet, almost as a complete whole, embraced slavery.[1]

Unlike the rest of the world at that time, there was a deep and strongly rooted sense of American independence and exceptionalism. A great many that embraced American independence and exceptionalism stood against slavery from day one. The newly formed United States could not rid the world of slavery but brave Americans believed they could begin to end it. 

It was a hard fight to end slavery and proved far harder than many ever imagined. Undeterred, it began in the United States even before the War for Independence was won or the Constitution written.

Vermont put limits on slavery in 1777 and later banned it. Pennsylvania moved to abolish slavery over time in 1780. In Pennsylvania, after 1780 no new slaves could be added to the population and all children of slaves were born free. Massachusetts went even farther in 1783, ending slavery immediately and freed all slaves. New Hampshire also acted in 1783 to gradually eliminate slavery like Pennsylvania. New York did the same in 1788. 

By international standards, these truly were revolutionary polcies.

It was a divisive struggle to end slavery, nonetheless, and the fight was carried to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Amongst the delegates there, ending slavery was not universally accepted. 

There were many in America that accepted slavery – most obviously the overwhelming majority of slaveholders. What they advocated certainly was within mainstream international norms. Legal slavery was the politically correct worldview and the conventional wisdom of the day held that slavery was a fact of life.

Given all that, it is a wonder that so many Americans opposed slavery in the 18^thcentury. Slavery had been legal under British rule and if the rest of the world tolerated slavery then why did the United States have to be so exceptional? 

Why didn’t the Americans just obey the rules? After all, every country of importance permitted slavery and shouldn’t the new United States follow suit?  

The antislavery Americans fought back and ensured that no mention of slavery entered the Constitution. The war could not be won in 1788 but everyone on both sides knew that the fight against had just begun: The Constitution empowered each state to end slavery, and its amendment process opened the way to nationwide abolition.

Unique in the world, when the Constitution was ratified in 1788, the United States of America, almost alone in a giant slave-holding world, began the battle to end that great scourge on humanity. It met with success. 

As many new states entered the union, they eschewed slavery. Ohio became a state in 1802 and its state constitution explicitly banned slavery in all its forms. Many others followed suit. There even was some success at the national level when Congress banned the importation of slaves in 1808. By 1860 most states (19 of 34) along with the backing of the large majority of America’s citizens had acted to end slavery.

When Abraham Lincoln of the abolitionist Republican Party was elected president in 1860, 11 of the 15 slave holding states went into open rebellion to protect slavery. 

That ushered in the great and bloody Civil War (1861-1865) and during that conflict, on 1 January 1863, Abraham Lincoln’s issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery finally was abolished across the United States.

Yes, the United States of America was not the first country in the world to end slavery. Japan ended the practice in by 1615. Mexico ended slavery in 1829, England (to include Canada) in 1834, Denmark in 1848 and the Netherlands in 1861. 

 

But it is equally true that other countries lagged behind the United States. Portugal did not end slavery until 1878; Spanish Cuba did not act to end slavery until 1886 and Brazil, the country with the most slaves on the planet, held out until 1888. The Ottoman Empire officially ended slavery in 1890 but it took another decade to complete suppress its “legal” slavery and small-scale illegal slavery continued.

 

Thailand ended slavery in 1904, China only in 1910. It officially ended in Tanganyika and Namibia in 1919. And it is equally and importantly true that slavery still exists in both its ancient and modern forms in parts of the world today. It is a depressing and endlessly tragic history.

 

But in 1788 the United States of America, by adopting the Constitution, pushed against what the rest of world accepted as normal and fought the good fight – to form a more perfect union – from its inception. It continues to do so to this very day.

 

To use today’s international organizations as guideposts, you will find virtually every member state had institutionalized slavery in the late 17^thcentury: The UN, the OAS, the EU, OPEC, the G4/G7/G what have you. The same for military alliances like NATO and its opposition counterpart, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Go back a couple of centuries and you will find a vast mosaic of slave nations everywhere.

There is no international ranking of nations who did the most to end slavery but the United States of America, by relentlessly pursuing the end of slavery starting in the late 1700s, certainly ranks at or near the very top – and the instrument that made it possible was the Constitution.

It’s a Straight Line from Biden to BLM

 It’s a Straight Line from Biden to BLM

Andrew McCarthy, National Review. 

"The devil made me do it!” That was how funnyman Flip Wilson explained away his rogue moves in 1970s comedy bits. In 2020, it is Joe Biden’s rationalization of the Black Lives Matter revolution, with Baal taking on a decidedly orange cast.

An unmistakable correlation between the radical Left’s extortionate violence and the sudden tightening of polls has stirred the Democrats’ senescent standard-bearer to bolt the basement. He’d hoped to wait another week or so before emerging to read short speeches about President Trump’s erratic handling of COVID-19 (the government’s missteps during the Obama-era swine flu pandemic having apparently slipped Biden’s mind). But he’s got a tiger by the tail in the radical Left, which is turning electoral battlegrounds into smoldering battlefields. So now he’s hustling into the hustings with a narrative about what’s motivating his fellow travelers — who have just added murder to the mayhem they’ve wrought on America’s streets for the past three months.

Here’s the punchline: Trump made them do it!

That was the upshot of the former vice president’s speech in Pittsburgh on Monday. “Are you safe in Trump’s America?” His argument lays at the incumbent president’s feet the upheaval instigated by Democratic supporters in Democrat-run cities. In a weekend warm-up as the flames continued to rise in Portland, Minneapolis, and Kenosha, Biden claimed it is Trump who is “fanning the flames of hate.” By Monday, Biden was roaring about how, on Trump’s watch, the murder rate is up 26 percent in the nation’s cities this year (a shift from Democratic messaging of five minutes ago, which said surging crime was nothing to be concerned about because crime is still historically low — thanks to policing policies Democrats oppose, because, you know, racism).

As Rich Lowry relates, this is the Left’s blame-shifting response to violence from within its own ranks, which it lacks the will to counter. It is Trump supporters, we are told, who are “recklessly encouraging violence.” You could set your watch by it (if we still set watches): The Democratic nominee offered up the cartoon version of Trump backers, calling out “right-wing militias, white supremacists and vigilantes” as the worrisome “extremists.” And you could set your watch by this, too: no mention by Biden of the Marxist iconoclasts, the menacing Black Lives Matter activists, and the insurrectionist Antifa arsonists who are actually and quite deliberately tearing the country apart

Exactly how are the Trump deplorables to blame? How are they instigating the violence that Biden now “unequivocally” condemns (after remaining largely mum, while his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, was promoting a fund to bail out rioters)?

Why, by saying things that offend the Left’s hair-trigger sensibilities, that’s how.

If you are a conservative, a Republican, and/or a Trump supporter, you offend by backing candidates and policies the Left opposes. And don’t even think about doing it quietly because, it turns out, “silence is violence,” too — your very existence equates to offensive speech. There is only one way out for you: submission. You need to get with the program that capitalism is white supremacy, private property is colonialist exploitation, noticing the criminal records of criminals is racism, and supporting the arrest of those criminals when they forcibly resist is police brutality.

Wait a second, you’re thinking. Biden’s not with that program. He even says he’s no “radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters.” He’s a moderate, right?

Well, truth be told, he’s a hack. For half a century, he’s blown with the progressive gales, trying to stay on whatever seemed to be the popular side on a given day. In favor of using force in Iraq but against the Iraq war. For the “Russia Reset” after Moscow annexed parts of Georgia, but wannabe scourge of Russia after Moscow annexed parts of Ukraine. Back in 1994, he labored to brand tough Clinton crime legislation as the “Biden Bill”; now, with the Left decrying that law as the foundation of America’s racist “carceral state,” he’d prefer to forget the whole thing, and hopes you will, too.

We could go on . . . and on. But why bother? After all these decades, Biden, most of all, is the former vice president of the Obama administration. President Obama is the only reason he’s gotten this far. Pre-Obama, Biden’s presidential runs were a joke (written by somebody else); post-Obama, his patent weaknesses made even Obama-world lukewarm to his current bid to lead “Obama’s third term.”

The problem, of course, is that Obama got those two terms because of his charisma. His personal attractiveness was always leaps and bounds more popular than his progressive “Hope and Change!” agenda. His historical significance as the nation’s first black president tapped into the longing of Americans to transcend our racial divide — even as his manner of governance exacerbated tensions.

With Biden, you’d get none of that mystique. You’d get an Obama administration without Obama. You’d get the policy without the pizzazz.

And getting the policy means getting the Left’s radical revision of the First Amendment, codified in the Obama-Biden administration-backed U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. In a nutshell, it is the “heckler’s veto” — though would that the Left’s shock troops contented themselves with heckling.

I tried to warn about this eight years ago (and I’m grateful to my friend Dave Reaboi for noticing this week on Twitter). Resolution 16/18 is a blatantly unconstitutional provision the Obama-Biden government pushed to support Islamist regimes. Ostensibly, it is about religious liberty. In reality, it is the Left’s template for speech suppression.

The trick is to turn the once simple concept of incitement on its head.

The resolution purports to render unlawful any speech about religion that “constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence.” Its transparent purpose is to insulate Islamic doctrine from critical examination, notwithstanding that fundamentalists unabashedly exploit scripture to justify and promote terrorism.

In the Soviet style, the Left sustains its program with a combination of fantasy, indoctrination, and suppression. American history, for example, becomes the 1619 Project — the republic as an enterprise to perpetuate slavery. The Big Lie is cemented by Pulitzer prizes, K–12 curricula, and reparations bills; it is protected by attaching the smear of racism to naysayers who dare show that the project is farcical.

In the same vein, progressives have created their own fantasy version of Islam. Its defining tenet — indeed, its only known tenet — is anti-violence. You are to see terrorism as innately un-Islamic activity. Any claim that scripture justifies violence — i.e., any reading of what belligerent scriptures unambiguously say — is angrily rebuked as a distortion of the “true” Islam. Jihad itself is transmogrified into an internal struggle to become a better person, not a doctrinal command to wage war for the purpose of establishing the dominion of sharia (Islam’s law and cultural norms).

This is fraud. Obviously, it is not necessary for Muslims to construe their scriptures as a command to holy war in modern times, and most do not. Literally, though, the doctrine says what it says. To a greater or lesser extent, then, a not insignificant percentage of Muslims accepts this sharia-supremacist interpretation of Islam, which is backed by centuries of fundamentalist scholarship. Common sense says this is why there is so much jihadist terrorism. It is why many Islamic societies still hew to a literalist interpretation of sharia standards, endorsing discrimination, repression, and cruel corporate punishments that seem barbaric by today’s sensibilities.

That is reality. To acknowledge it as such is not to call for violence against Muslims. It is to resist violence by understanding both why some Muslims are committing it and why reformist Muslims need our support in their courageous work. Dealing with reality head-on is what adults do. It is critical thinking. The objective is to solve difficult problems, not tell stories about them.

The Obama-Biden administration rejected this approach. Their substitute is a fantasy, peddled tirelessly and protected by shutting down all debate — indeed, by making their opposition’s position unutterable, not just by intimidation but by the force of law.

Our free-expression right should make this impossible. At issue here is political speech, the exchange of ideas in examining a threat, in order to develop sensible security policy. That’s the First Amendment’s core. There have always been exceptions to free speech, however, and they include incitement: speech intended to spur people to violence and other lawlessness.

For years, the Left has been trying to reinterpret incitement (and if you can reinterpret jihad and reproductive health, how hard can incitement be?). How? By erasing the intent part. On this construction, monstrous in a free society that depends on accurate information to govern itself, I incite you not just by exhorting you to carry out violence and crimes, but by saying things that offend you.

In fact, things are now sufficiently daft that real incitement is no longer incitement if it’s done for The Cause. Joe Biden did not mention BLM in his speech because, for all his chest-beating about not being soft on violent radicals, he must give BLM immunity because, the dogma holds, BLM is fighting against racial injustice, America’s original — and apparently indelible — sin. By contrast, if you’re a conservative, or even a traditional, patriotic American liberal, you commit incitement not just when you actively offend the Woke Left by speaking up, but when you passively decline to affirm its delusions.

This contortion of incitement is the foundation of the Obama-Biden advocacy of Resolution 16/18.

Consider the following observation: There is a causative nexus between the commands to violence in Islamic scripture, the mediating influence of sharia-supremacist scholars, and the bombings of Western targets carried out by young Muslim men. When I made that observation in a courtroom in the mid Nineties, I was enforcing the law by marshaling evidence. If I made the same observation today, though, then according to Resolution 16/18, I would be violating the law by inciting hostility. The facts I’d be uttering would be as true as ever, but now, rather than informing you, I’d be framed as engaging in hate speech.

That’s the Left’s theory: It’s my fault if you can’t cope with news you don’t like. It’s not on you to control yourself; it’s on me to factor in your instability before opening my mouth. That I’m playing with fire is the offense; that you are the fire is to be overlooked, because you’re on fire over all the right things.

Back when Biden was in power, a few brave souls called the administration on the notion that our Constitution would ever tolerate a government-certified version of “truth,” insulated from dissent. It was left to Ol’ Reliable, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (the Democrats’ last presidential nominee), to defend Resolution 16/18. Unable to vouch for its constitutionality, she vowed that, if the coercive use of law were not an option, the government would “use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”

That’s where Biden and the Democrats are coming from. Are you surprised, then, to find BLM provocateurs screaming in the faces of pedestrians that they must accept the slander that the nation’s police forces are hunting down black men? To find BLM rabble-rousers menacing diners until they feebly raise a clenched fist in condemnation of our white supremacist society? To find BLM mobs shutting down roads, telling the frustrated motorists they mock that their best hope is to submit? How surprising is it to find BLM portraying police and Trump supporters as deserving of forcible attack? To find them simultaneously airbrushing the criminal histories of, and forcible resistance by, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Jacob Blake, as if police had no cause to arrest them — as if the effort to arrest them was motivated solely by their skin color?

The Obama-Biden approach to political opposition was: Try to make it illegal, use bureaucratic intimidation against it when no one’s looking, and if all else fails, resort to good old-fashioned peer pressure and shaming . . . whatever form that may take.

Black Lives Matter is not a reaction to Donald Trump. It is a subversive movement of loosely knit but lavishly funded chapters that exploded on the scene in the Obama years, amid the rioting over the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Demagogues turned those horrific incidents into racial controversies, despite the lack of evidence that racial animus led to the fatal confrontations, and despite the abundant evidence that the decedents were culpable. The Obama-Biden strategy was to embrace BLM as an ally, exploiting BLM’s agitation in order to suppress opposition to shared political goals.

It still is.

 

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy

Police Killings: In Perspective

 

Police Killings: In Perspective

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (ret)

All,

We are seeing rioting, burning, assaults, beatings, and murders associated with the killing of unarmed Black people in America.

I understand lawful protest but the rest is unconscionable, indefensible and just plain wrong. Here is why:

The FBI compiled and released the crime statistics for 2019. Given the United States has over 300 million people, it is not surprising that the police carried out millions arrests in 2019.

Very few arrests ended with the police killing the suspect: 1,004 out of the millions - a very small fraction of 1%.

Of the 1,004 fatalities, 963 (95.9%) of the suspects were armed.

That left 41 unarmed suspect fatalities:

19 were White 

13 were Hispanic/Asian/Pacific Islander

9 were Black 

That is why I hold lawful protests over the police killing of unarmed Black people as legitimate but the rest is unconscionable, indefensible and just plain wrong.

All Americans need to keep things in perspective and act responsibly!

See the FBI website for details: Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program | Federal Bureau of Investigation

Joe Biden's Awful Vice Presidential Pick

 

Joe Biden's Awful Vice Presidential Pick

Ben Shapiro, Jewish World Review 

For well over a year, former Vice President Joe Biden has carried forth a simple strategy: Be nonthreatening. Facing a volatile, mistake-prone incumbent, Biden merely had to mimic vital signs, stay out of the spotlight and avoid looking off-putting or radical. And he accomplished those objectives, to great effect.

He barely stumbled his way through the Democratic primaries, representing the nonradical voting repository for those alienated by the extremism of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren; he refused to kowtow to the Twitter blue checkmarks calling for him to endorse rioting and looting; he shied away from insane slogans about defunding the police. He stayed in the basement, playing prevent defense against President Donald Trump.

All he had before him was one final hurdle: picking a vice president.

Usually, the vice presidential pick means little or nothing. The vice presidency is a uniquely powerless office, and presidents rarely hand over power to their vice presidents. But Joe Biden will be 78 in November and appears to be slipping significantly mentally — despite CNN's protestations that he can still ride a bicycle. There is a reason nearly 6 in 10 Americans, according to a new Rasmussen poll, think Biden's vice president will finish his first term.

So Biden had one task: to pick a vice president who would appear nonthreatening, mainstream and generally normal. The onus would then lie with President Trump to shift the spotlight from his own campaign.

Biden couldn't do it.

He made an early error on that score when he declared publicly that he would pick a woman. This made it obvious that Biden was seeking a token — some sop for the woke progressives in his base. And that sop opened the door to further demands: the demand, for example, that he pick not merely a woman (or, as the woke left might have it, an individual with a cervix) but a black woman. And so Biden was trapped into a limited selection of politicians, ranging from the unknown (Rep. Val Demings of Florida) to the communist (Rep. Karen Bass of California), from the quietly sinister (former President Obama's national security advisor Susan Rice) to the loudly ridiculous (Georgia non-governor Stacey Abrams).

None of these picks would be great; some would be far worse than others. But there was one pick who would prove far worse than all the others: Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. Harris is deeply radical. She endorsed "Medicare for All" while announcing that she would move Americans away from their private health care plans; she announced in open debate that she would use executive orders to ban "assault weapons"; she said she would ban fracking; she attacked Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a purported rapist and Judge Brian Buescher for his Catholicism.

Harris is unpopular with many black Americans: As a prosecutor, she was fond of pursuing heavy sentences for light charges, as well as civil asset forfeiture — and then she bragged about smoking marijuana during her campaign. Harris has similarly alienated moderates, attacking Biden himself as a vicious racist for his unwillingness to support forced school busing in the 1970s, and suggesting that she believed Biden's sexual harassment accusers. There is a reason Harris utterly flamed out in the primaries, aside from her bizarre habit of breaking into a Joker-esque whoop when asked difficult questions.

Nothing about Harris screams nonthreatening. In fact, in her Machiavellian campaign manipulations, she appeared deeply threatening — threatening enough that Biden campaign adviser Chris Dodd reportedly wondered why Harris "had no remorse" for her opportunistic and dishonest attacks on Biden. At the very least, Biden should hire a food taster.

In selecting Harris, Biden has opened the door to the Trump campaign. And Trump should take full advantage. Biden's alleged moderation means nothing if he is willing to place Kamala Harris one heartbeat from the presidency. Biden's entire campaign strategy has now been undercut — all in a vain attempt to please the Twitterati, who will remain pleased for precisely seven seconds.

Trump should be ecstatic. The race is on. And that's all on Biden.

Trump’s Reactive Engagement

Trump’s Reactive Engagement
Victor Davis Hanson, National Review 

Examining the president’s foreign policy

The United States and indeed the Western world face four quite different challenges on the horizon: China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea. All these threats were analyzed at length in the 68-page U.S. National Security Strategy assessment of December 2017, written by then–national-security adviser H. R. McMaster and his staff.

The encompassing theme of that blueprint was dubbed “strategic realism.” In popular parlance it may have been better known as a new “Jacksonianism” — defined loosely as something like the self-composed epitaph of the Roman strongman Sulla found in Plutarch’s life of the general (“No friend had ever surpassed him in doing kindness, and no enemy in doing harm” [οὔτε τῶν φίλων τις αὐτὸν εὖ ποιῶν οὔτε τῶν ἐχθρῶν κακῶς ὑπερεβάλετο]), or perhaps the reactive principle enshrined in the motto of the Stuart dynasty of Scotland, Nemo me impune lacessit — “No one provokes me with impunity.”

One overarching goal of the NSS white paper was to synthesize U.S. and allied interests while isolating enemies and winning over neutrals — and all in the context of a new domestic paradigm of enhancing the economy of the American interior while securing the nation’s borders. That assessment of continued, though recalibrated, engagement abroad explains the considerable increases in U.S. defense spending, the preservation of some 800 military bases and installations, the steady deployment of 170,000 active military personnel overseas, and the assignment of 30,000 State Department officials outside the U.S. Isolationist powers simply do not commit such massive resources outside their borders; declining nations “in retreat” do not allot such forces to protect the interests of so many allies. The aims of restoring economic vitality in the U.S. interior, pressuring China for reciprocal trade, and establishing a secure southern border and energy independence are not just campaign props, but foreign-policy assets that allow America to extend its strategic reach, if need be, well beyond its borders and on its own terms.

There is nothing radical in the American idea that NATO allies must meet their promises of military investment if the alliance is to survive in the 21st century. Who would disagree that our military, after 19 years in a stalemated Afghanistan, should rethink its strategic agenda and indeed the utility of its presence? What is controversial in concluding that policies that led to interventions in Libya did not enhance U.S. interests or regional stability? The Iraq War is now mostly seen, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, fairly or not, as not having been worth the price in blood and treasure. And if isolationism is defined by taking out General Qasem Soleimani, or bombing ISIS into retreat, or taking unprecedented action in moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, or reestablishing good relations with Egypt and the Gulf monarchies, then such isolationism is a strange sort of blinkered standoffishness.

In truth, the U.S. is in a far better position to deal with its strategic challenges than it was in 2016. The old Western consensus concerning Chinese globalized mercantilism and imperial aspirations could be summed up only as an uncertainty about when — not whether — China would assume world dominance. For all the upheavals of the coronavirus pandemic, the prior trade standoff with China had prepped the world for the unacceptable Chinese reaction to the Wuhan outbreak.

After America’s pushback to Beijing in 2017 — leveling tariffs on key Chinese industries and warning China to cease copyright and patent infringement — exposed Chinese mercantilism to the world, few were surprised in 2020 by China’s chronic lying, subversion of transnational organizations, and laxity in allowing its Wuhan virus to infect the world. Certainly, once China calibrates the full damage done to the U.S. economy by the coronavirus and the baleful effects of the subsequent lockdown on American social equilibrium, we should prepare for the chance of episodic appearances of more SARS-CoV-2-like viral “accidents.” Beijing may soon not so subtly warn the U.S. that in a matter of weeks it could suffer more economic and social devastation from an “inadvertent” release of a “new” virus from a Wuhan wet market, lab, or wayward pig or bat.

When the contagion reached the U.S. in early 2020, Americans were already aware that China was on notice that it could not continue routinely violating almost all post-war commercial protocols. Its disdain for global commercial norms was quite stunning. It offered no apologies when it stole technologies, violated copyrights and patents, dumped subsidized goods on the export market, manipulated its currency, ran up artificially huge trade surpluses, and sought to siphon off key domestic industries.

No one knows what the balance of power will look like after the end of the COVID-19 epidemic. Yet at least now the world recognizes that Beijing’s systematic deceit and corruption of transnational organizations were exactly what the U.S., alone since 2017, had been warning about. The lessons of 2020 were not that America had unduly taken on China, but that America had ripped off the veneer of Chinese intentions, which now were revealed as unapologetically imperialist and bellicose, without the prior dissimulating claims of furthering world harmony.

One reason that the Middle East has ceased being the world’s hotspot is current U.S. foreign policy. The decision to accelerate fracking and horizontal drilling has crashed oil prices, robbing the Middle East of billions of dollars in U.S. importation revenue and making its oil optional, not essential, in American strategic thinking.

The Obama policy of championing Iran over both Israel and moderate Arab states — and by extension Iranian terrorist surrogates, such as Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government, Hezbollah, and Hamas — is deservedly in shambles. It was destroyed by the Trump administration’s departure from the flawed Iran deal, its leveling of tough “snapback” trade sanctions on Tehran, and the forging of a new de facto tripartite alliance of America, Israel, and moderate Arab states against Iran. The effort to bleed Iran economically through sanctions and boycotts, and the retaliatory strikes on its military aggression abroad — most notably the killing of Soleimani, the arch-terrorist-architect — put Iran in an especially vulnerable position. Its position became even worse when oil prices crashed in February 2020 and Tehran clumsily tried to hide the fact that its Chinese patron’s imported coronavirus had reached epidemic proportions throughout Iranian territory.

Obama’s failed multiyear effort at a reset with Russia (2009–2014) only whetted the appetite of Vladimir Putin to absorb eastern Ukraine and Crimea and to carve out an imperial zone of operations in Syria — given that the Putin regime has often seen American outreach not as magnanimity to be repaid in kind but as timidity to be leveraged. John Kerry, the Obama administration’s secretary of state, invited the Russians back into the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus, ostensibly to become a stabilizing influence in controlling Syrian weapons of mass destruction. They have never left, although the cost of their presence suggests it may ultimately prove as unwise as other such Mideast interventions have been for a long array of Western nations.

For all the false talk of its “collusion” with Russia, the Trump administration has repeatedly opposed the surreal German–Russian natural-gas deal. It upped sanctions on Russian oligarchs, jawboned NATO to beef up its expenditures and defenses, especially in the context of Russian bullying of Eastern Europe, and sold lethal weapons to Ukraine after the Obama administration had refused to do so. The U.S. pulled out of an asymmetrical 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that was continually violated by Moscow, and it increased defense spending — also the exact opposite of Obama-era appeasement of Russia.

Yet one casualty of the Russian-“collusion” myth was the end of traditional Kissingerian realist triangulation, or the old American policy that neither a nuclear China nor a nuclear Russia should become a better friend to the other than each was to the U.S. One of the reasons China has so brazenly moved on its Indian border, threatened Taiwan, cracked down on Hong Kong, and carved out bases in the South China Sea is that the U.S. has not worked with Russia in areas of mutual advantage to curb Chinese aggression.

The Trump administration inherited a North Korean menace that boasted it had the ballistic-missile capability and the unhinged will to hit the cities of the U.S. West Coast. Past administrations had tried all sorts of multilateral agendas to denuclearize North Korea. All had not merely failed, but in their appeasement had further encouraged Pyongyang to accelerate its nuclear proliferation and become more bellicose.

Ultimately there are only four ways of dealing with North Korea’s nuclear capability. One is to increase missile-defense efforts to neutralize any sudden attack, allowing the U.S. to remain safe while providing good cause for a devastating response on North Korea’s entire missile-launching infrastructure.

A second, of course, is to pressure China to rein in its useful client. In the past, appeasing Chinese trade violations conveyed the same sort of weakness to Beijing as the Agreed Framework (1994), the Six-Party Talks (2003), and other assorted U.S. outreach had shown to Pyongyang. Beijing wondered why it should corral North Korea when the latter’s studied recklessness and feigned rogue independence from China had proved so valuable in consuming U.S. attention and resources.

Third, South Korea and North Korea could denuclearize the peninsula, each pledging to dismantle existing weapons or disband nuclear-weapons programs. This is unlikely because an impoverished failure such as North Korea feels it now enjoys diplomatic parity with a rich, democratic, and successful Seoul — but only because it boasts as a failed state that it has the spoiler power to destroy its rival.

Fourth, America can easily impose sanctions, and not relax them on reports of near starvation in North Korea, but rather tighten them on the rationale that, in such lose–lose arithmetic, short-term callousness is preferable to a nuclear exchange.

Yet efforts to denuclearize North Korea in these ways always seemed to fail, for obvious reasons. North Koreans understand that denuclearization, either voluntary or coerced, is tantamount to regime change or emasculation of the kind that occurred in Iraq, Libya, and Syria — as John Bolton at one point seemed to hint.

Beijing finds a nuclear North Korea a useful pit bull to let off its leash occasionally as a way to remind China’s neighbors of its own clout and warn the United States that it is not responsible for a rogue missile launcher. And South Korea’s sometimes left-wing governments naïvely cling to the idea that spillover prosperity might liberalize the North, or that advantageous unification could follow from mutual nonproliferation agreements, or that warming up to China might entice Beijing to pressure the North to work with the South.

The Trump administration has mostly rejected these nostrums. In reductionist fashion, it assumed that the only method the U.S. possessed to deter North Korea, aside from imposing far tougher sanctions or encouraging Seoul to become a nuclear power, was a frightening message of Armageddon to Kim Jong-un that any use of North Korean nuclear assets against the U.S. or its Asian allies would be synonymous with the nation’s utter destruction.

Why, then, is all of the above written off as rank isolationism?

Donald Trump was the first president without either elective office or military service in his past. He was elected to the chagrin of the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment and most of the permanent administrative class of the State Department and the Pentagon. Trump also was the first president to question the 75-year-old post–World War II status quo, by asking whether there was a shelf life on America’s role in subsidizing the defense of affluent Europeans and Asian allies, many of whom ran up huge trade surpluses with America and were not always so friendly to the U.S.

Trump was the first president to reject the standard view that granting trade concessions to dictatorial nations such as China is a necessary cost to ensure their good behavior — on the dubious theory that globalized wealth inevitably leads to political liberalization and consensual government. He was instead elected on the argument that a hollowed-out American interior, an open border, millions of foreign nationals living illegally in the U.S., a stagnant economy and middle-class wages, and an inability to win often-optional wars in the Middle East were all unsustainable and weakened the economy — and eventually would erode U.S. stature abroad. And he doubted the notion that military forces could achieve strategic results in the Middle East by fighting on behalf of dubious allies or coerced democratization, and in ways that limited or neutered conventional American military strength and advantage.

Effective criticism of the Trump foreign policy not only would entail rejecting all these premises, but also would address why almost half the country believed in 2016 that many of their domestic problems arose from a foreign policy that had not yet adjusted to a world far different from what their grandparents had created in 1945.

This article appears as “Reactive Engagement” in the August 10, 2020, print edition of National Review.

The fallacy of white privilege — and how it’s corroding society

Author Rav Arora (right) was teased as a child for looking different (left) 

but leveraged his economic privilege to succeed.

The fallacy of white privilege — and how it’s corroding society
Rav Arora, New York Post 

Last month, I retweeted a comment by a contrarian writer who questioned whether racism was to blame for the spread of the coronavirus, and a close (white) friend responded to me with a well-meaning text:

“I feel it is my calling to help end the oppression people of color like you face in our society,” he wrote. “I understand I have white privilege. And that has consequences.”

His message left me feeling bewildered. What “oppression” had I actually faced? And what “privilege” had society conferred upon my friend because of his white skin?

Growing up as a Sikh, turbaned boy in the majority-white environment of British Columbia, Canada, I was a constant target of bullying throughout my elementary school years. On bus rides home, I remember having to sit in the back where the older, “cool” kids hung out, and they used to jump up and slap the top part of my turban. I was consistently harassed with comments like “Go back to where you came from” and “You don’t belong here.”

Upon immigrating from India when I was 4, my family suffered tremendous economic hardships and cultural challenges. My father drove a taxi at night and my mom worked many menial jobs as a cook, housecleaner, barista and motel cleaner. It’s fair to say my family never had success handed to them on a silver platter. But more than a decade post-immigration, we have found our footing in Western society, with my dad making nearly six figures operating his own software company.

Rising from poverty to economic prosperity is a common narrative for immigrants from all backgrounds in the West. For example, after the communist takeover of Cuba in 1959, many refugees fled to America, leaving most of their wealth behind and having to start from the bottom. But by 1990, second-generation Cuban Americans were twice as likely to earn an annual salary of $50,000 than non-Hispanic whites in the United States.

The notion of white privilege stems from the idea that white people have benefited in American history relative to “people of color.” And it’s true that the institution of slavery and the following decades of anti-black dehumanization has a continuing impact today. A major 2013 study from Brandeis University found that 32 percent of the wealth gap between whites and blacks can be attributed to inherited wealth and length of homeownership, two factors linked to institutionalized racism. Meanwhile, Harvard economist Roland Fryer’s much-publicized study on racial bias in policing found that cops are 53 percent more likely to use physical force on black civilians compared to whites (his study, however, found no anti-black bias in fatal police shootings).

Because of facts like these, an emerging definition of white privilege is now being widely circulated on social media: “White privilege doesn’t mean your life hasn’t been hard. It just means your race isn’t one of the things that make it harder.”

And yet, this definition suffers from several shortcomings. For one, it ignores anti-Semitism — the second leading cause of hate crimes in America, according to the FBI. In addition, the growing demonization of whiteness now means that white people are no longer immune to racism. I can think of several instances where friends and colleagues have been racially targeted for being white and holding contrarian but intellectually defensible positions such as “we need to have generous, but reasonable limits on our immigration system” or even “I don’t think racial minorities are systematically oppressed in Western society today.”

And the concept of white privilege can’t explain why several historically marginalized groups out-perform whites today. Take Japanese Americans, for example: For nearly four decades in the 20th century (1913 – 1952), this group was legally prevented from owning land and property in over a dozen American states. Moreover, 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. But by 1959, the income disparity between Japanese Americans and white Americans nearly vanished. Today, Japanese Americans outperform whites by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes, test scores and incarceration rates.

One could argue the successful stories of my family, Cuban Americans and Japanese Americans are cherry-picked cases. But whites are far from being the most dominantly successful group in Western society. A wealth of data collected in a longform Quillette analysis, shows overwhelming white underachievement relative to several minority groups among health outcomes, educational achievement, incarceration rates and economic success.

According to median household income statistics from the US Census Bureau, several minority groups substantially out-earn whites. These groups include Pakistani Americans, Lebanese Americans, South African Americans, Filipino Americans, Sri Lankan Americans and Iranian Americans (in addition to several others). Indians, the group I belong to, are the highest-earning ethnic group the census keeps track of, with almost double the household median income of whites. In Canada, several minority groups also significantly out-earn whites, including South Asian Canadians, Arab Canadians and Japanese Canadians.

Interestingly, several black immigrant groups such as Nigerians, Barbadians, Ghanaians and Trinidadians & Tobagonians have a median household income well above the American average. Ghanian Americans, to take one example, earn more than several specific white groups such as Dutch Americans, French Americans, Polish Americans, British Americans and Russian Americans. Do Ghanaians have some kind of sub-Saharan African privilege?

Nigerian Americans, meanwhile, are one of the most educated groups in America, as one Rice University survey indicates. Though they make up less than 1 percent of the black population in America, nearly 25 percent of the black student body at Harvard Business School in 2013 consisted of Nigerians. In post-bachelor education, 61 percent of Nigerian Americans over the age of 25 hold a graduate degree compared to only 32 percent for the US-born population.

These facts challenge the prevailing progressive notion that America’s institutions are built to universally favor whites and “oppress” minorities or blacks. On the whole, whatever “systemic racism” exists appears to be incredibly ineffectual, or even nonexistent, given the multitude of groups who consistently eclipse whites.

In fact, because whites are the majority in Canada and America, more white people live in poverty or are incarcerated than any other racial group in those countries. If you were to randomly pick an impoverished individual in America, you are exponentially more likely to pick a white person than a “person of color,” because of population differences. Today, 15.7 million white Americans (almost twice as many as black Americans) live in poverty. Given such facts, why would we deem all white people as privileged, even if whites have lower poverty rates compared to African Americans and Hispanics?

It should also be noted that suicide rates are disproportionately high among the white population. In 2018, whites had the highest suicide rate of 16.03 per 100,000. The New York Times has reported that whites are dying faster than they are being born in a majority of US states — in large part due to high rates of substance abuse and suicide. In comparison, black Americans had a suicide rate less than half of whites (6.96) and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders had the lowest rate of 6.88 per 100,000. In this context, do blacks and Asians have some kind of unmerited “privilege” they must atone for?

If we look at health outcomes reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we find that African Americans are less likely than whites to die of several health conditions such as bladder cancer, leukemia, esophageal cancer, lung cancer, bladder cancer, brain cancer and skin cancer, to take a few arbitrary examples. But no one in their right mind would protest any “health privilege” enjoyed by African Americans in these instances. And while blacks have the highest COVID-19 death rate, more than double that of whites, the group with the lowest death rate from the coronavirus is actually Asian Americans. Given the crisis of the pandemic, perhaps it would be laudable for Asians like me to confess their “Asian privilege” on social media because otherwise, as the Twitter hashtag goes, #SilenceisViolence.

Overall, I can think of several privileges I have benefited from that are arguably more significant than “white privilege.” Roughly speaking my family has more wealth than many in my social circle, including my friend who texted me to atone for his white privilege. This would be a form of class privilege.

I was also afforded the privilege of taking a full one-year break from education to pursue my passion for creative writing and social commentary. Had I been in a different economic circumstance, I would’ve been forced to immediately attend college or spend a substantial portion of my time working in my gap year. Comparatively, my friend who texted me went to university right away and tenaciously worked part-time on the weekends to afford his tuition. Perhaps it would be more appropriate for me to confess economic privilege to him. I was also afforded the privilege of my parents strongly encouraging me to read books and learn new vocabulary words at a very young age, which has undoubtedly aided me in my freelance journalism career. This kind of “literacy privilege” has, in part, given me the tremendous opportunity to write essays for top publications like The Globe and Mail and The Grammy Awards, despite being just 19 years of age.

Writing this essay, I also have the immense privilege of being a person of color. I receive plentiful backlash for defending the positions I hold, but had I been a white person, I would have easily been demonized as “alt-right” or even a “white supremacist,” despite having average libertarian or classical liberal views on politics.

Fundamentally, privileges of all kinds exist: able-bodiedness, wealth, education, moral values, facial symmetry, tallness (or in other contexts, shortness), health, stamina, safety, economic mobility, and importantly, living in a free, diverse society. Rather than “whiteness,” an exponentially more predictive privilege in life is growing up with two parents.

This is why 41 percent of children born to single mothers grow up in poverty whereas only 8 percent of children living in married-couple families are impoverished. In a racial context, the poverty rate among two-parent black families is only 7.5 percent, compared to 11 percent among whites as a whole and 22 percent among whites in single-parent homes. In fact, since 1994 the poverty rate among married black Americans has been consistently lower than the white poverty rate. Furthermore, an illustrative study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that when controlling for family structure, the black-white poverty gap is reduced by over 70 percent.

When surveying the tremendous complexity of racial disparities, it’s simply wrong to presuppose all whites are “privileged,” let alone racist. Using the despicable actions of a few to judge an entire group of people is never sound reasoning. Just because some white people (who were kids) weaponized their whiteness and harassed me for the color of my skin, doesn’t mean I view all white people as racist or privileged.

None of the statistics in this piece discount racial prejudice, unequal opportunities or the privilege of not experiencing racism. They simply point to the glaring fallacies of the all-consuming white-privilege narrative which has degraded our national discourse into identity politics and racial tribalism. White people are now one-dimensionally seen as an undifferentiated mass of privilege and wealth whereas minorities are seen as powerless victims oppressed by a society ingrained with white supremacy and racial bigotry.

Ultimately, I don’t want to be treated as “Rav, the brown-skinned boy” or “Rav, the underprivileged minority.” I want to be treated as an individual with a unique set of circumstances and characteristics. To cohere as a multiethnic, pluralistic society this standard must be applied to all colors and ethnicities. But until we collectively repudiate race-based stereotyping and fallacious, inflammatory generalizations, we shift the focus away from real inequity and discrimination — and never truly make progress.

Rav Arora is a 19-year-old writer based in Vancouver, Canada, who specializes in topics of race, music, literature and culture. His writing has also been featured in The Globe and Mail and City Journal.

Cancel Culture: The New McCarthyism

Cancel Culture: The New McCarthyism

Col Mike Walker, USMC ret

All,

Was reading a WSJ book review by Harvard Professor Duncan White on Larry Tye's new biography of Senator Joe McCarthy titled Demagogue.

Now compare White's comment on McCarthy to the Cancel Culture:

"He was a creature of reckless momentum consuming everything in his path, heedless of consequence."

"McCarthyism was not an intellectual project. The Senator had no program ideas, no set of policies he wanted to enact. It was always clear what he was against but never what he was for, other than Joseph R. McCarthy."

Update and substitute the references to McCarthy and replace them with Cancel Culture and Professor White has neatly captured today's reality:

"The Cancel Culture is a creature of reckless momentum consuming everything in its path, heedless of consequence."

"The Cancel Culture is not an intellectual project. It has no program ideas, no set of policies its followers want to enact. It is always clear what the Cancel Culture is against but never what it is for, other than the Cancel Culture."

Amen.