Seattle police call it quits. What's next? Vigilantism

Something will fill the vacuum left by police, and it seems doubtful the left will like the results.

Seattle Chief of Police Carmen Best

 Seattle police cannot use any crowd-control devices and must, effectively, let the violent, lawless rioters run free. 

Seattle’s police chief alerted residents that they are on their own now.

Here is Chief Best's letter to the city council:

University of Tennessee law Prof. Glenn Reynolds wrote in June about the absence of police:

We’ll see a lot of vigilante justice. And what are people gonna do about it? Call the cops? Remember, in the end the police aren’t there to protect the public from criminals, they’re there to protect criminals from the public. Communities dealt with crime long before police were invented, usually in rather harsh and low-due-process ways. The bargain was, let the police handle it instead. No police, no bargain.

Get ready, folks. Major parts of the country are about to descend to the level of the Wild Wild West.

Update: A federal judge has ruled to overturn the Seattle city council's prohibition of non-lethal riot-control measures.

A good friend of mine for 25 years lives in Seattle; he texted me yesterday,

Last night got tense with somebody trying to burn down the court house but Feds kept their distance. They torched the new juvenile detention center that's being built also this weekend.

And the link to this: At Least 45 Arrested After Seattle Police Declare Riot

Here a link, there a link, everywhere a link link!

A Taxonomy of Fear

There is a pattern in the way speech is silenced. Understanding it can help us stand up to the illiberalism of this moment.

Once you get through the pro-forma but irrelevant up-front Trump dumping, the article seems right on target. And obviously related:

Survey: Majority of Americans Afraid of Expressing Political Beliefs

Too Many Jobs Feel Meaningless Because They Are

If work that is of no real value has proliferated, no wonder productivity is stagnant.

Overall, many good points, but I wish it had explained the influence of government in rendering so many American jobs meaningless. And speaking of jobs, look at what Seattle;s leftist leaders have done - on purpose - to job creation there:

Seattle’s Tarnished Dream
A generous safety net doesn’t mean much if you can’t find jobs or afford housing.

What went wrong?

Lots. Social benefits for the poor aren’t worth much if the poor can’t afford housing in the city that offers them. A family looking to find a place to live in Seattle must navigate a market where the median two-bedroom apartment lists for more than $2,600 per month. Lower-income families have been priced out into the suburbs. Drive south from Seattle into neighboring Tukwila, and you’ll see the child-poverty rate nearly triple, from 10 percent to almost 30 percent.

Remember - this was done to Seattle on purpose.

If Joe Biden is elected, the effort to remove him by those now supporting him will begin the day after the election and it will not be as crude as rounding up a Yale psychiatrist to testify to his dementia in Congress or shaming the White House physician to give him the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test in the manner that the Left went after Donald Trump. It will be far more insidious and successful: leaked stories to the New York Times and Washington Post from empathetic White House insiders will speak of how  “heroically” Biden is fighting his inevitable decline –and how gamely he tries to marshal his progressive forces even as his faculties desert him. We would read about why Biden is a national treasure by sacrificing his health to get elected and then nobly bowing out as he realized the cost of his sacrifice on his person and family.

Democratic National Committee platform mentions ‘whites’ 15 times, all damning

They hate half the country. 

Now let's look at the American media:

The Media and the Virus
American press coverage of Covid-19 was first dismissive, then alarmist—but always condescending.

As it unfolded in the media, the story of the pandemic was initially that of a nonevent. On January 31, Vox ran a supposedly comprehensive “explainer” about the coronavirus. There was no need for Americans to wear protective face masks, Vox said, and “really no reason to worry.” On Twitter, Vox was still more blunt: “Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.” The hectoring tone and sham certitude are Vox specialties. But Vox wasn’t alone in dismissing the virus. USA Today, the Washington Post, Canada’s National Post, and many other outlets treated the Wuhan virus (as it was then known) less as a matter of objective concern than an instance of mass hysteria.

Their cardinal error, in almost every case, was to rely on the WHO, an organization at best egregiously mistaken and at worst politically compromised, carrying water for the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping.

If a video is viral, who cares if it’s fake?

Welcome to the age of unreality

Remember, for the Left, which includes almost all the media, truth means the Leninist concept of Revolutionary Truth, and that is how they speak and act and write and broadcast. All the time. 

Like this:

New FBI Notes Re-Debunk Major NYT Story, Highlight Media Collusion To Produce Russia Hoax

The New York Times in 2017 falsely reported that the Trump campaign had 'repeated' contacts with Russian intelligence officials during the 2016 campaign, and instead of being held accountable for publishing lies, the story's authors received Pulitzer prizes.

Deepfake Journalist Is a Terrifying Sign of Things to Come

We have entered a time when there is not merely fake news, but fake journalists. That is, byines and images of a writer who does not exist in the real world. We are entering the time of Matrix reality, where material and virtual reality are merging.

Nets’ Portland Coverage Evaporates After Antifa Attempted to MURDER Agents

Wednesday night saw a major escalation in the conflict at the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon as Antifa terrorists and rioters barricaded federal agents inside the building and tried to set the building ablaze. It was a provocation that could have killed the untold number of agents in the building. Luckily, Antifa failed. But during the Thursday evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC, the Portland coverage largely evaporated, with only NBC Nightly News daring to downplay the attempted murder.

Fox Sports to add virtual crowds to MLB ballparks

Fox Sports announced Thursday it will include computer-generated fans in otherwise empty stadiums for its telecasts this season, starting on Saturday.

“We believe that what we’re doing is creating a natural viewing experience,” said Fox Sports Vice President Brad Zager. “Sports is supposed to be an escape and when people have that escape we want it to feel as normal as possible when there’s very little normalcy, like a crowd at a baseball game on a Saturday."

"We’re not looking to fool everyone. We know it is a virtual crowd. But we also know how jarring watching a game in an empty stadium is on TV," Zager added. 

And that's a wrap.

What Defund the Police hath wrought

This is the link to article.

The federal secret police

In progressivism, only some black lives matter

All the links herein are corrected and will work. No thanks to Blogger.

If you call Planned Parenthood and offer to make a donation to fund abortions specifically for aborting black unborn children, they will accept it. If you tell them the reason you will donate is because there are too many black people in the country today, they will still accept it without protest. 
https://www.facebook.com/liveaction/videos/3140269152701373/

But of course, because Planned Parenthood was formed for that very reason, to kill black people. Just google Margaret Sanger, its founder. Or you can just read why Margaret Sanger's Fans Work to Clean Up Her Racist Past.  
https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2020/may/they-have-to-reinvent-her-margaret-sangers-fans-work-to-clean-up-her-racist-past

Then there are these mostly white BLM activists who consent to the claim made to them that some black lives matter and the rest do not. Namely, black people murdered by other black people do not matter. And like Planned parenthood, black persons killed in the womb do not matter.
https://twitter.com/OntWtf/status/1273760666365710338
  

And there is Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, who says that Black Lives Matter  doesn't have a 'd*** thing to do' with saving black lives.  
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/niger-innis-black-lives-matter-agenda-doesnt-have-a-damn-thing-to-do-with-saving-black-lives

More and more black Americans are no longer afraid to speak out publicly against the  real oppressors of black people in America today.  

"These Democrats, and I'm sorry to say this, they hate black people," she continued. "These are the same people who fought to keep slavery in. These are the same people who built the KKK. The Republican Party is the party of the blacks."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/they-hate-black-people-street-preachers-decry-democrats-outside-seattles-chaz 

Once again:

Who is behind the system of systemic racism?

Update: Apparently some people think I am endorsing the concept of "systemic racism." In fact, this essay is throwing the accusation back at those who make it. If systemic racism is real, then there are no places where it is more blatant and entrenched than in the cities named by George Korda, just below, and others under Democrat dominance for many years, even decades. 

If racism is systemic in America, then it is a human-made system, not a creation of nature. So who are the humans responsible for its longevity and power? Why, the very same people who want to accuse everyone else of it.

George Korda: Are we being honest about who is to blame for systemic racism?

Minneapolis, Minn. has been under Democratic control since 1978. Chicago has been under Democratic control for 89 years; its present mayor is a black woman. Philadelphia has had Democratic mayors for 68 years; three of its last five mayors have been black men. Six of the last seven Atlanta, Ga., mayoral administrations were led by black Democratic mayors, and the present mayor is a black woman.

A city runs its police department and other services; therefore, if there is so much ‘systemic racism’ in these organizations, why hasn’t it been corrected over so many years under Democratic leaders?

Why aren’t these cities garden spots of racial tolerance, understanding, and virtue?

Because tolerance, understanding, and virtue don’t promote Democratic power. ...
Unfortunately, in too many cases when people say they want an open and honest discussion about race in America, what they mean is they want an open and honest discussion only about what they say is wrong with people who aren’t them. When people talk about the need to deal with systemic racism, if they’re not willing to talk about the systems run – often for generations by the political party or politicians they support – they aren’t interested in an open and honest conversation; instead, they want only to use the issue as a club against people who aren’t them. (HT: Glenn Reynolds)

I am a retired Army officer. Not long after the Vietnam War, a group of colonels got together to assess the state of the Army postwar. I entered active duty in 1977 and there were a lot of Vietnam vets still serving, and I talked in person with two of the colonels who did the assessment.

What they learned was that the Army's ethic of "Duty-Honor-Country" had been transformed by the Vietnam War to, "Me, My Ass, and My Career." Sorry, that was the way they put it.

Why did that happen? The answer would not have surprised Napoleon. The colonels found that there were still some units that embodied the virtues of the service. What made them stand apart was the moral character of the senior leadership, starting with the brigade commanders. As Napoleon put it, "There are no bad brigades, there are only bad brigadiers."

What went wrong in Minneapolis? It didn't start the day George Floyd was murdered, but many, many years before. The murder of George Floyd was decades in the making, as George Korda explains.

The four former Minneapolis police officers charged in the murder of George Floyd.

Ask yourself this question: Why did Chauvin and the other three officers get fired in Minneapolis, and later charged with murder?

One reason only: A passer-by video'd them. Chauvin and the other three cops did what they did because they thought what they had been taught to think by decades of one-party rule in the city, that the fix was already in: if the pols keep their hands off the cops, the police union will deliver the votes.

That has been going on for decades and not merely in Minneapolis.

What needs to be done now? Very simply:

1. Dis-establish public employee unions, starting with unions that represent people who carry guns and the authority to use them.

2. Revoke qualified immunity for police.

3. Stop electing Democrats. Put Republicans in office, and then after 10 years or so, fire them, too,

The NY Daily News - hardly an example of the vast rightwing conspiracy - said about three years ago that cops should be required to pay for liability insurance, at least in part. I am not sold on that right now, but it is worth considering, especially if qualified immunity is revoked.

Update: Law Prof. Ilya Somin posted this piece.

Update: KT Cat at The Scratching Post points out that my list is incomplete. Maybe he is onto something.

Update: Kevin Williamson also: Comforting Abstractions - We have real people to hold accountable, and we know their names.

Who is responsible for the mess in Minneapolis? The answer to that question is not unknowable — but it is, in many political quarters, unspeakable.

Minneapolis’s municipal government, its institutions, and its police department are what they are not because of the abstract Hegelian forces of capital-H History, but because of decisions that have been made by people. Who these people are is a matter of public record. We know their names: Jacob Frey, Betsy Hodges, R. T. Rybak, Sharon Sayles Belton, Medaria Arradondo, Janeé Harteau, Tim Walz, Mark Dayton . . . the rogues’ gallery is practically inexhaustible.

But, oh, the transmuting magic of partisanship! Minneapolis is a Democratic city, with a Democratic mayor and a Democratic city council (0.0 Republicans on that body), in a state with a Democratic governor and a Democratic state house; these are the people who hire police chiefs and organize police departments, who specify their procedures and priorities, who write the laws that the police are tasked with enforcing — Democrats and progressives practically to a man. (Not every member of the Minneapolis city council is a Democrat — there’s a Green, too.) That’s a lot of lefty power, hardly anything except lefty power — but, somehow, the bad guy in this story must be Donald Trump. ...

...  one of the problems here is the power of police unions, which resist efforts to increase accountability and oversight of their members. There is a political party in this country that is very much committed to increasing the power of public-sector unions, that has worked hard with some success to do that, and that is enormously dependent upon the financial and political support of those unions for its campaign efforts — and it is not called the Republican Party. It’s the other one.

Update:

 

Update:

What Democrats have done and why

Liberal Cities, Radical Mayhem

Democratic mayors and governors seem unable to stop the destruction of their own cities.

This isn’t merely about damage to property. It’s about destroying the order required for city life. Non-criminals are afraid to go into these cities to make a living. The police pull back from active policing, which creates more opportunity for criminals, especially in poor and minority neighborhoods. Businesses that are finally starting to emerge from government lockdowns have new costs to absorb and more reasons for customers not to return.

What all these cities have in common is that they are led by Democrats who seem to have bought into the belief that the police are a bigger problem than rampant disorder. They are either cowed by their party’s left, or they agree that America is systemically racist and rioting is a justified expression of anger against it. They offer pro forma disapproval of law breakers but refuse to act to stop them.

The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

The left-wing mantra of “America is racist” has little to do with caring for blacks; rather, it is indispensable to bringing America down.

Second, without a lopsided black vote for the left-wing party, the Democrats, no Democrat could get elected to national office. It is therefore imperative to repeat as often and as vociferously as possible how anti-black America is. The angrier a black person is at America, the more likely he or she is to vote Democrat. Some years ago, after talking to listeners of every race on my radio show for decades, I came up with this riddle:

“What do you call a happy black person?”

Answer: “A Republican.”

To the left, blacks are not real people as much as they are an electoral bloc. How else to explain Joe Biden’s recent comment, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” The contempt for blacks — from the sentiment that one is “not black” unless one is a Democrat to his use of the word “ain’t” — is obvious to any nonleftist.

Here's the Real Story on George Floyd, Police Abuse, and Racism, and What You Should Do About It

While police abuse is not necessarily a racial problem, it is nonetheless a big problem. Derek Chauvin, the man who killed George Floyd, had a long record of complaints. Gregory McMichael was not immediately arrested. The men who killed Breonna Taylor entered her house in plainclothes without announcing their presence. These facts should make Americans’ blood boil, and they should lead Americans to demand concrete action.

I don’t always agree with former President Barack Obama (okay, I almost never agree with that scandal-plagued president), but I agree with his basic advice on police reform. Obama encouraged activists to develop concrete demands and to focus on achieving change at the local level.

Police unions often protect bad cops who pose a danger to the community. In some cases, police have effective “get out of jail free” cards that they hand out to their family and friends. This institutionalizes an “old boys club” culture.

I did not kill George Floyd
The attempt to hold all whites responsible for the death of Floyd shows what a dead-end woke politics is.

There’s a new sin. Forget gluttony. Forget sloth. The great moral error today is whiteness. To be white is to be fallen. Whiteness has become a kind of original sin, an inherited moral defect one must atone for throughout one’s life. In the wake of the brutal execution of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, this almost religious treatment of whiteness as an existential flaw has gone uber-mainstream.

We Don't Have a Racism Problem, We Have a Deep State Problem: The Hideous Police Killing of Duncan Lemp

That tiered justice system that black activists talk about is real. The people pulling the strings who revel in all this chaos never pay for their massive crimes. They get away with treason, presidential coup attempts, mishandling of classified documents, child trafficking, insider trading, and even murder (Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself) while the cattle are thrown into prison for twenty years for petty drug offenses or shot dead in their beds with no explanation. We are not who we should be mad at. We are in the same herd of oppressed and abused livestock. Some of us get abused more regularly than others but we’re still locked up in the same rancid farm. It’s time to act in unison and break out of the prison they’ve built around us.

Read all of each one.

Update: Professor Alex Tabarrok on Police Union Privileges Revisited, read all of it, too. It's not long.

White supremacist rioters? Nope, not there

Who says that? Well, the Southern Poverty Law Center does, that well-known core member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that Hillary Clinton told us about in 2008. So here ya go:

Signs of any organized effort or even participation in the violence were relatively rare. “I have not seen any clear evidence that white supremacists or militiamen are masking up and going out to burn and loot,” said Howard Graves, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center who tracks white supremacist and other anti-government extremist groups.

And I have to admit that I did not know this:

There are [white supremacist] factions that express solidarity with some in the African-American community in their animosity toward the police, a position dating to violent showdowns in the 1990s between white supremacists and law enforcement in places like Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

As the old saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Related: White privilege rioters

The laws that antifa learn to despise in their four-year colleges guarantee their racial privilege. If you’re black and angry enough to burn down banks and stores in your black neighborhood, tomorrow you’ll have to live in the ruins. If you’re white and you burn down banks and stores in someone else’s neighborhood, tomorrow you’ll be back in white world: fixing bikes or brewing espresso, waiting for The Man to cancel your student loans, living in a historic urban neighborhood whose historic black population you and your white friends have gentrified out of sight.

Once again:

The fiction of the riots

The Sole Justification Offered for the Riots Is a Fiction

Rioters and their enablers claim that the present disorder is justified by an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed black men. But no such epidemic exists.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer conducted a now-famous systematic review of police violence, and found that cops were more likely to use low-level force against black suspects than against white suspects, but no more likely to use lethal force. The racial disparities in the use of low-level force shrank when Fryer accounted for differences in group behavior, but a gap remained between white and nonwhite suspects even after such controls. And the fact that the police are more likely to place their hands on a black suspect, push them into a wall, or shove them to the ground no doubt contributes to the sense of hostility between law enforcement and African Americans.

But the central claim advanced by those defending the riots is not that police are disproportionately likely to use low-level force against black suspects. The central claim advanced by those defending the riots is that “they are killing us,” that blacks are “hunted” by racist police departments and are in danger every time they leave their homes. The evidence simply doesn’t back that up. And as stores are burned and livelihoods destroyed, churches desecrated and precincts set ablaze, evidence is something we must insist on.

As I said earlier, Rioters don't care about George Floyd.

One result: Another black man murdered.

Will there be vigils held for him? Protest marches at the injustice of his death? Enormous media coverage of the particulars? Leaders of the Congress demanding a full-scale investigation?

Will a massive national public outcry demand his murderer be arrested and brought to justice?

To ask the questions is to answer them.