The Politically Incorrect Truth About Race and Policing

From Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal

The Full Truth About Race and Policing

Chicago has long been one of the nation’s most dangerous big cities, and it seems determined to keep that distinction.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that 18 people were killed on one Sunday, May 31, “making it the single most violent day in Chicago in six decades.” Over the full weekend, “25 people were killed in the city, with another 85 wounded by gunfire.” None of these deaths or shootings involved police, so there will be no massive protests over them, no tearful commentary on cable news and social media, no white politicians wrapped in Kente cloth taking a knee for photographers.

Sadly, the only thing remarkable about the episode is that it occurred in the middle of a national discussion about policing. The political left, with a great deal of assistance from the mainstream media, has convinced many Americans that George Floyd’s death in police custody is an everyday occurrence for black people in this country, and that racism permeates law enforcement. The reality is that the carnage we witness in Chicago is what’s typical, law enforcement has next to nothing to do with black homicides, and the number of interactions between police and low-income blacks is driven by crime rates, not bias. According to the Sun-Times, there were 492 homicides in Chicago last year, and only three of them involved police.

So long as blacks are committing more than half of all murders and robberies while making up only 13% of the population, and so long as almost all of their victims are their neighbors, these communities will draw the lion’s share of police attention. Defunding the police, or making it easier to prosecute officers, will only result in more lives lost in those neighborhoods that most need protecting.

There’s nothing wrong with having a debate about better policing strategies, how to root out bad cops, the role of police unions and so forth. But that conversation needs perspective and context, and the press rarely provides it. People are protesting because the public has been led to believe that racist cops are gunning for blacks, yet the available evidence shows that police use of deadly force has plunged in recent decades, including in big cities with large populations of low-income minorities. In the early 1970s, New York City police officers shot more than 300 people a year. By 2019 that number had fallen to 34.

Part of the confusion stems from attempts to equate any racial disparities with racism, which is as mistaken as equating age and gender disparities with systemic discrimination. Young people are incarcerated at higher rates than older people, and men draw more police attention than women. Is something fishy going on here, or do such outcomes simply reflect the fact that young men are behind most violent crimes? When journalists break down police behavior by race but don’t do the same for criminal behavior, you’re not getting the whole story.

A recent New York Times report, for example, tells us that the racial makeup of Minneapolis is 20% black and 60% white, and that police there “used force against black people at a rate at least seven times that of white people during the past five years.” Left out of the story are the rates at which blacks and whites in Minneapolis commit crime in general and violent crime in particular. Nor are we told whether there is any evidence that white and black suspects of similar offenses are treated differently. Minneapolis may in fact have issues with police bias, but drawing conclusions about the extent of the problem or even whether one exists would be premature based on the information provided.

Reports about race and policing that omit relevant facts to push a predetermined narrative are not only misleading but harmful, especially to blacks. We know from decades of experience that when police pull back, criminals gain the advantage and black communities suffer, both physically and economically. A common assumption among liberals is that the movement of inner-city jobs to the suburbs in the late 1960s is what led to the higher rates of crime, violence and other social pathologies associated with ghetto life. But this gets the order wrong. The business flight took place after the rioting, not before. Will history repeat itself?

The Walmart and Target stores in Chicago that were looted last week are two of the city’s largest retailers. They employ a disproportionate number of low-skilled workers, and they haven’t decided whether to reopen. If they don’t, it could mean fewer jobs and higher prices for underserved minorities. Before we divert resources away from policing, maybe we should consider the effect it would have on the willingness and ability of businesses to operate in places where they’re most needed.

All of this is just more evidence that people on the left fundamentally don’t care about the welfare of black people. They simply view them as a client group that serves their political purposes.

Oh, they have convinced themselves they care. But when push comes to shove, they side with (mostly white) teacher’s unions rather than black families that would benefit from school choice. When riots are tearing up neighborhoods, they side with the rioters, seeming not to have noticed that it’s mostly black neighborhoods being torn up.

On issues of policing, they see cops in black neighborhoods as an “occupying army” and call for “defunding the police,” implicitly, but clearly, siding with black criminals rather than law-abiding black citizens.

Tucker Carlson: Lock Down for Thee, but Not For Me

Women’s March Lauds Terrorist / And So Did Marquette

Yes, these were the women with their badly knitted “pussy hats” who came out the day after the inauguration to protest Donald Trump. The organization is still in business, and tweeting. They recently tweeted this out:

Happy birthday to the revolutionary #AssataShakur! Today's #SignOfResistance, in Assata's honor, is by @Meloniousfunk. pic.twitter.com/V66au1dRnl

— Women's March (@womensmarch) July 16, 2017

Who is she? The FBI tells the story using Shakur’s real name (Chesimard):

On May 2, 1973, Chesimard, who was part of a revolutionary extremist organization known as the Black Liberation Army, and two accomplices were stopped for a motor vehicle violation on the New Jersey Turnpike by two troopers with the New Jersey State Police. At the time, Chesimard was wanted for her involvement in several felonies, including bank robbery. Chesimard and her accomplices opened fire on the troopers. One trooper was wounded and the other was shot and killed execution-style at point-blank range. Chesimard fled the scene, but was subsequently apprehended. One of her accomplices was killed in the shoot-out and the other was also apprehended and remains in jail.

Of course, Marquette honored Shakur with a mural in the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center.

And when we publicized the mural, and the Marquette administration ordered it painting over, over 60 faculty members signed a petition protesting the action, and supporting the mural.

Lauding terrorists and cop killers is becoming mainstream on the left, and among Marquette faculty (at least in a few departments).

Update

The “Women’s March” was not the only source of support for this terrorist on her birthday. Black Lives Matter in New York lauded her:

HAPPY 70TH BIRTHDAY, ASSATA! We are turning up in Brooklyn for you. We celebrate the revolutionary spirit you are. You inspired a movement. pic.twitter.com/MZRwawnmfH

— BlackLivesMatterNYC (@BLMNYC) July 16, 2017

So did CNN’s Mark Lamont Hill:

Happy 70th Birthday to Assata Shakur!!!! #HandsOffAssata #palenquequeen #bolekaja

— Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) July 17, 2017

Effluent

Trying to Put Out the Light

Can Snobbery Save the Liberals?

From Daniel Greenfield in Frontpage Mag:

The Atlantic’s May cover features Alec Baldwin covered in orange makeup holding up a Trump wig. The cover asks, “Can Satire Save the Republic?”

What is satire saving the Republic from? Republicans. While making America safe for Socialism.

After Bush won, Democrats fought back by doubling down on the ridicule. Before long they were getting their news from Jon Stewart’s smirk. Stewart spawned a whole range of imitators. Today you can find numberless clones of the Daily Show across cable and even on CBS and, soon, on NBC.

The left is devoutly convinced that this snickering can save America. That it’s better than the news.

The Peabody awards celebrated the Daily Show as “a trusted source of news for citizens united in their disappointment and disgust with politics and cable news.” But the media was the first in line to anoint the politics of contempt, ridicule and disgust as the future of journalism. Now the future is here.

The Washington Post, once a paper of record, swarms with snarky Stewartesque headlines like, “Jeff Sessions doesn’t think a judge in Hawaii — a.k.a. ‘an island in the Pacific’ — should overrule Trump.” Journalism is dead. And replacing it with snarky lefty spin hasn’t saved the Republic. Or anything else.

But the left’s faith in the power of its contempt has nothing to do with its tactical effectiveness.

The left remains convinced that Jon Stewart brought down Bush and Tina Fey brought down Palin because ridiculing the right isn’t just an ugly tactic. Instead it carries an almost religious meaning. Mocking Republicans can save us. Every ideology expresses its superiority through its own triumphalism. Sneering is the left’s own invocation of its own superiority. These are the grown up politics of kids who were convinced that they were better than everyone else because they looked down on them.

Much as Allahu Akbar denotes the superiority of the Muslim and the inferiority of the non-Muslim, the knowing smirk, the lifted eyebrow and the braying laugh of the audience when the unironic applause sign flashes is the prayer of the progressive to the cruel little god of his own ego.

The ritual is tribal. A lefty dons the mock wig of the hated enemy and is ritually humiliated for the entertainment of the tribes of Manhattan, Berkeley and Marin County. The foe is destroyed in effigy. The video of his destruction is virally spread with titles such as, “Saturday Night Live Destroys Trump.”

And yet Trump, like all the other viral subjects of destruction, is never destroyed. The tribal ritual lets lefties vent their anger on a totem that, unlike Trump, can actually be destroyed by liberal laughter.

Satire isn’t trying to save the Republic. It isn’t stopping Trump. It’s saving the left.

Trump has proven even more indestructible than Bush. It’s hard to think of any insult that the left hasn’t hurled his way. A dictionary of them could run all the way from Abuser to Xenophobe. To no avail. Instead he has proven exceptionally adept at treating the left with as much contempt as it treats him. When lefties bemoans his cruelty and vulgarity, what they really mean is that he is beating them at their own game without wasting time on their pretenses to saving the Republic on Saturday Night Live.

Saturday Night Live is still the only place that progressives have been able to beat Trump.

Mocking Bush didn’t save the Republic from him. If anything, liberal disdain helped make him a two-term president the way that it helped put Trump in office. Obama won by taking the opposite road. He kept his contempt and arrogance just enough in check to appear aspirational during his original race.

Elitist contempt isn’t an effective tactic. American politics is anti-establishment. Stewart, Colbert, Oliver and Bee are only revolutionary to likeminded lefties in lavish condos. To the Tennessee coal miner, the New Mexico checkout girl and the Pennsylvania steelworker they convey the smugness of an establishment in all its insufferable disdain for flyover country, for the working class and for everyone outside that golden circle of the tall towers and hot clubs in the big cities that really, truly matter.

Liberals need to believe that even their pettiest acts are ennobling. Their Whole Foods organic avocadoes are saving the planet. Their fair trade yoga pants are saving indigenous tribes. Even their ridicule of the “Other” on TV is the redemptive and salvific process by which they save America.

This isn’t idealism. It’s elitism. They’re not spitefully lashing out because they lost an election. Instead they’re saving the country by watching a lefty hack who had become more famous for his credit card commercials, and racist and homophobic slurs do a tepid slurred imitation of Trump.

What a piece of work is a progressive. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

Beneath the Midtown Manhattan sound stages and green rooms, the million dollar contracts of the performers, the Ivy League degrees of the writers and the suave sophisticated five-star restaurants where they rendezvous is the dark and primitive world of the firelit circle in which enemies are bound and destroyed by a magic fed on the anger and hatred of the watchers.

The tribal signifiers of power have changed. The totems are class, cool and hip. And much of the country does not recognize their claim to lead the tribe. Each time America dissents, the left wears out its lip sneering at them. Contempt is the final refuge of failed tyrants. If you can’t rule, you can always sneer.

The left’s faith in contempt tells us far more about them than it does about the objects of their contempt. Art is a reflection of the artist. Some artists strive to create while others only destroy. The left remains convinced that it can create through destruction, that it can build a fair society through theft, an ethical society by destroying its values and a high-minded society through contempt.

It must believe in the redemptive power of its thievery, amorality and hatred. Or face a moral reckoning.

When they go low, we go higher, they chant, before laughing as Alec Baldwin snorts through his nose. It’s not funny or meaningful. It’s wish fulfillment. The left gets a Trump they can destroy in a world where they are bound to win because they are naturally superior.

For a movement obsessed with the redemptive power of its own power and convinced of the utter truth of its own imaginary visions, what could be more sacred than acting out the destruction of its enemies?

Is it any wonder that getting high on snarky delusions of potency and superiority appears so uplifting? Can satire save the Republic? Its fumes are almost as good as actually winning an election. But a better question would be can the Republic save satire?

Saturday Night Live’s war on Trump is also a war on comedy as mediocre casts turn to outside performers to portray recognizable political figures, based not on talent, but sheer recognizability.

Tina Fey had a passing resemblance to Sarah Palin while Larry David shared an accent with Bernie Sanders and was forty years older than the average SNL cast member. Alec Baldwin is a real life version of what progs think Trump is; angry, dumb and bigoted. A bad man with no self-control. And that is appropriate. The left’s effigy of Trump is a self-portrait. Their hatred of Trump is pure projection.

Baldwin’s bad acting won’t save the Republic. He isn’t funny, but he doesn’t need to be. Funny is surplus to requirements. The point isn’t laughter, it’s barely sublimated hatred. Baldwin understands hatred far better than comedy. He knows that what his prog audience wants is not a good imitation but a contemptible one. One they can despise and feel superior to. And that is what he gives them.

Saturday Night Live could not satirize Obama to save its life. It can’t satirize Trump either for the same reason. The façade of humor is falling away from the left’s worship of its ideological idols and fanatical hatred of its enemies. And hatred isn’t funny. It’s clumsy. It’s stupid. And it’s ugly.

Comedy is creative. Contempt isn’t comedy. Ultimately it’s just contemptible.

Liberals like to claim that the Trump election has loosed the forces of hatred and bigotry in America. And it has. From the left. We’ve long claimed that, relative to conservatives, liberals have a superior ability to segregate and isolate themselves from other points of view. Their college professors were virtually all liberals. Their neighborhoods are enclaves of liberalism, like the East Side in Milwaukee. They are in professions where virtually everybody is a liberal: academia, journalism, social services.

This has rendered them unable to understand or even take seriously conservative arguments. It has rendered them unable to have any empathy with working class people (the core Trump constituency) or with middle class conservatives.

They paid the piper in November 2016. And there is no reason to believe more than a tiny minority of them will learn any lessons from that. It’s just too comfortable being smug.

Step by Step: Liberals and the Trump Election

Supposedly Pro-Trump Hoax Hate Crimes

Liberals’ Utopia

Democrats Don’t Especially Like America

From the Gallup Organization, the results of a question that asked “How proud are you to be an America — extremely proud, very proud, moderately proud, or not proud at all?” Gallup then tabulated the percentages in each group who said “extremely proud.” The results are presented below:

Democrats are 21% less likely to feel “extremely proud” than are Republicans. Gallup did not provide tabulations for liberals and conservatives, but had they done so, the cleavage would doubtless have been wider.

So why are Democrats less patriotic? They would insist they are most sensitive to the social injustice that they consider an endemic part of American life. This is just a rationalization. What liberal Democrats don’t like about America is that they have less power than they think they should. Being elitists, they are resentful that ordinary Americans — people who oppose abortion, gay marriage, gun control and so on — contest with them for power, and on a much more equal basis than they would like.

The classic statement of this elitism came from Barack Obama, who said:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. . . . And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Yes, these bitter clingers have too much power.

Bye, Bye First Amendment

Shakur Mural Gets Support from Communist Paper

From Workers World, whose motto is “Workers & Oppressed Peoples of the World Unite!,” an article attacking Marquette for painting over the mural of cop killer Assata Shakur.

The article has the sort of rhetoric one would expect from a far left paper, including things like this:

At a time when every progressive law, every policy, every organization and every resource is under attack by the right wing in Wisconsin, the destruction of the mural must be seen as part of the overall effort by Wall Street and their servants to attempt to smash what’s left of the labor-community movement and to make the state a Jim Crow, low-wage, nonunion, deregulated playground.

Particularly interesting is the following:

The Coalition of and for Students of Color at Marquette University issued a statement May 18 after the mural was removed:

“Marquette University does not waste a moment. They painted over a mural with inspirational quotes from activist Assata Shakur without asking anyone (the students) if it was ok the same day of graduation. This is an attempt to erase our voice and silence the people, but we refuse to be silenced MU! Remember you are only functioning because we pay tuition and the Coalition doesn’t believe the mural should have been painted over. This is disrespectful and unacceptable!”

So who is this Coalition of and for Students? As per their Facebook page, they are another project of the grievance industry at Marquette, whining about being minorities on a majority white campus.

Workers World is a Communist newspaper.

Message From the Liberals: Shut Up

Church Activists Oppose Free Trade: Compassion or Ideology?

From The Institute on Religion and Democracy:

An initiative of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Hunger Program is organizing U.S. and overseas activists to oppose free trade agreements and resist corporate investments in developing countries. This “Joining Hands” initiative was featured in a workshop at an April 5 PCUSA-sponsored conference on “food justice.”

Joining Hands describes itself as “an initiative of the Presbyterian Hunger Program that fights the root causes of hunger by sparking the formation of networks in developing countries. These networks lead the struggle against hunger at a local level while working with PC(USA) presbyteries and congregations to address global hunger issues.” Hunger Program associate Valery Nodem hailed Joining Hands as “the new approach in the church to do mission.” With the rest of the Hunger Program, it is funded through the One Great Hour of Sharing offering.

The Rev. Alexa Smith, PCUSA staff associate for Joining Hands, characterized the initiative as an effort to shine light into the dark places of international commerce. Developing country decisions to enter free trade agreements and allow foreign investment are often made without consulting the people most directly affected, according to Smith. “Most of the decisions that were causing people problems were not public decisions,” she said. “They were decisions that were made in the shadows.” Smith asked her audience to imagine a poor farmer caught by surprise when “a bulldozer was moving toward your house to displace you because the government had leased the land you were living on to a corporation very cheaply to grow a monocrop for export.”

The Joining Hands associate saw such incidents as symptomatic of a global problem: “There are 1.5 billion people in more than 50 resource-rich countries who remain mired in poverty.” Although the resources are abundant, many of those countries have “very authoritarian governments” that appropriate the proceeds from foreign investment for themselves and their loyalists. “Most of the money is siphoned off at the upper level and never filters down for basic needs like infrastructure, health care, education, and housing,” Smith charged.

Here is the dirty little secret of the activists: they don’t really care that much for poor people in poor countries.

They doubtless think they do, but they in fact are motivated by something else: an hostility to capitalism and free markets.

There is no other sufficient way to explain their embrace of crackpot pseudoscience on certain issues:

Nodem was encouraged that people, such as the networks supported through Joining Hands, “are becoming more aware and they are starting to fight back” against the corporations. He counted rising numbers of “divestments or abandoned or postponed projects” as victories for the poor.

Nodem was particularly suspicious of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) developed by multinational corporations. He rejoiced to recount how Haitian farmers had rejected a gift of seeds from Monsanto. Nodem was also pleased to report that “more and more countries around the world have banned or put in place GMO restrictions.” In the United States, he hailed “the whole organic thing” that disdains fertilizers and pesticides.

These folks, like Marquette students who want the university to boycott Palermo’s Pizza, care more about feeling self-righteous than about actually helping those in need.

As Alan F.H. Wisdom points out:

There is no reason to doubt the stories of abuse communicated through the Joining Hands program. In a fallen world, where authoritarian governments and other unjust structures leave many people powerless and vulnerable, it is not surprising that sinful individuals and institutions take advantage. Lack of transparency can make the problems worse.

Free trade may in some sense globalize the opportunities for exploitation. Yet at the same time free trade limits exploitation by undercutting the old local monopolies that used to hold all power. More open economies allow the poor and others to take the initiative in providing for their families. Some of them create their own jobs as entrepreneurs; others find employment with the very corporations that the PCUSA program habitually denounces. All of them benefit from the unprecedented abundance of food produced with the assistance of despised technologies such as fertilizers, pesticides, and genetic modification.

Indeed, this opening of new markets and new opportunities is the means by which hundreds of millions worldwide have emerged from poverty in recent decades. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization reports that over the last 20 years the proportion of undernourished persons in the world has dropped from 19 percent to 12 percent. This is the story that the PCUSA’s Joining Hands initiative is not telling. Perhaps corporations are not always the bad guys.

These clerical leftists are not well-meaning people who are just mistaken. They are rigid ideologues who are putting their anti-capitalist ideology ahead of the interests of poor people in the Third World.

Academic Yahoos: A Roundup

From Walter Williams in The Examiner:

Brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who are accused of setting the bombs that exploded at the Boston Marathon, attended the University of Massachusetts. Maybe they hated our nation before college, but if you want lessons on hating America, college attendance might be a good start. Let’s look at it.

“We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it.” That’s taught to University of Hawaii students by Professor Haunani-Kay Trask. Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Palestine monitor, explained the Boston bombings by saying, “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” Professor Falk has also stated that President George W. Bush ordered the destruction of the twin towers.

University of Southern California professor Darry Sragow preaches hate to his students in his regulation of elections and political finance class, recently telling them that Republicans are stupid, racist losers and that they are angry old white people. A few years ago, Rod Swanson, a UCLA economics professor, told his class, “The United States of America, backed by facts, is the greediest and most selfish country in the world.” Penn State University professor Matt Jordan compared supporters of the voter ID laws to the Ku Klux Klan. Professor Sharon Sweet, an algebra teacher at Brevard Community College, told her students to sign a pledge that read, “I pledge to vote for President Obama and Democrats up and down the ticket.” Fortunately, the college’s trustees fired her.

University of Rhode Island history professor Erik Loomis tweeted, “I want (National Rifle Association executive vice president) Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick.” He asked, “Can (we) define NRA membership as dues contributing to a terrorist organization?” Here’s a sample of how Professor Loomis frequently expresses himself: “Motherf---ing f---heads f---ing f---.” Then there’s Georgetown law professor Louis Michael Seidman, who explained our national problems by saying, “But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.” Professor Seidman worked for The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. When he was sworn in as an officer of the court, I wonder what constitution he swore to uphold and defend.

Parents don’t have to wait for college admission for their youngsters to receive America-hating lessons. Scott Compton, an English teacher at Chapin High School in Chapin, S.C., was put on administrative leave after he allegedly threw an American flag on the floor and stomped on it in front of his students. He has chosen to resign.

An Advanced Placement world geography teacher at Lumberton High School in Texas encouraged students to dress in Islamic clothing and instructed them to refer to the 9/11 hijackers not as terrorists but as “freedom fighters.” They were also told to stop referring to the Holocaust as genocide. John Valastro, the superintendent of the Lumberton Independent School District, told Fox News that the teacher did absolutely nothing wrong.

In McAllen, Texas, teachers tried to force a teenager to sing the Mexican national anthem and recite Mexico’s pledge of allegiance. The teen refused, saying it was against her beliefs as an American. She was thrown out of the class and given a failing grade for that day’s assignment. Her father has filed a lawsuit on behalf of his daughter against the McAllen Independent School District.

Investor’s Business Daily ran a story that shows student indoctrination is official union policy: “A New Low From The California Federation Of Teachers: Urine Indoctrination” (12/5/12). The union’s website has a cartoon narrated by leftist Hollywood actor Ed Asner. In tones used when reading to children, Asner says: “(Rich people) love their money more than anything in the whole world. ... Over time, rich people decided they weren’t rich enough, so they came up with ways to get richer.” The cartoon finishes its class warfare message by graphically depicting “the rich” urinating on the poor.

These people running our education system are destroying the minds and values of our young people, and we allow them to do it.

Of course, one could argue that these examples of outrageous indoctrination are atypical, and to an extent they are. But we have blogged about several examples nearly this bad at Marquette. Even an occasional example is an outcropping of a narrow, insular and intolerant culture among academics. When an entire subculture leans left, leftist extremism doesn’t seem that abnormal.

One could also argue that college professors (but not high school teachers) have academic freedom, and can say outrageous things. This, of course, is quite correct. But anybody has an equal right to hold such academics in contempt. Taxpayers have a right to vote against politicians who keep funding public universities at a high level, and parents have a right to look for a college for their kids from among the minority of institutions that actually have a diversity of opinion.

A good place to start is among Christian colleges, and not “Christian” colleges that, like Marquette, are only nominally Christian. There are a few that really are Christian. Those, ironically, would be more congenial to non-believers who are conservative or libertarian than the secular, politically correct places.

Palermo’s Confronts Student Activists in Campus Forum

Something unusual happened on campus last night. Leftist student activists got to confront representatives of a business they have been demonizing, and the business got to respond.

It happens very infrequently on this campus that people on two sides of any debate face off before an audience that gets to hear both sides.

The carnage, in fact, was considerable.

The representatives from Palermo’s Pizza were Chris Dresselhuys, Vice President of Marketing and Tom Branigan, who teaches part time in the College of Communication. They faced a student audience, a substantial portion of which consisted of activists from Youth Empowered in the Struggle, a branch of the leftist, pro-illegal immigration group Voces de la Frontera, which has been trying to force Palermo’s employees into a union.

Also present were two members of the Marquette administration, Vice President for Administration Arthur Scheuber and Vice President for Student Affairs L. Christopher Miller.

Given that the discussion was dominated by questions from student activists, the intellectual level was . . . well, not the most erudite.

Student activists asked the same questions over and over, appearing not to have noticed that they had been answered two or three or four times already. They often rambled incoherently during their stint at the microphone. And they made some absurdly bogus arguments.

One young woman, for example, stated that, since the Palermo’s representative was constantly denying wrongdoing, that indicated that Palermo’s was indeed guilty of wrongdoing!

Franz Kafka, call Palermo’s and place your take-out order.

Scheuber and Miller explained that they had examined all the charges against Palermo’s and found them to be without foundation. Palermo’s had been forced to fire workers who were in the country illegally (or at least, could not prove their right to be in the country to the satisfaction of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which had audited Palermo’s).

Voces de la Frontera lied to the fired workers, claiming that if they joined a union, their immigration problems would go away.

Chris Piszczek, a member of Voces de la Frontera who approached the microphone in attire reminiscent of Berkeley, Class of 1968, insisted that the mere fact that allegations were made should cause Marquette to want to distance itself from the company.

Piszczek claimed to have been thoroughly immersed  in Catholic Social Thought, with its concern for the poor and the marginalized.  After the event, we asked him whether he thought abortion ought to be illegal, and he responded that “that’s not part of Catholic social thought.”

Miller and Scheuber gave coherent answers to student questions – and indeed repeated them multiple times as questions were repeated multiple times. Miller, unfortunately, pandered a bit to the activist students. Actually, he pretty much kissed ass. He commended the students for their “passion,” when they should have been scolded for their callow, uninformed moral preening.

It’s not clear any minds were changed. The Youth Empowered in the Struggle contingent, easily identified by the applause they gave the standard activist talking points, numbered perhaps 15 students. The rest of the audience was hard to read, but at least one member said it was embarrassing how poorly the student activists fared.

According to the Marquette Tribune:

Marisa Galvez, a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences and one of those who called for the panel, said the administration still needs to take more notice to the issues students have with Palermo’s as a company.

That’s the standard activist way of thinking: “our position is so obviously right, and our arguments so obviously good, that if somebody doesn’t agree with us, it must be because they are not listening.”

Typically, people are listening, and think you are wrong.

The activists claimed to represent “the students,” but there is no evidence that any majority of Marquette students even know or care about the issue. And if they did, it’s not at all clear they would agree with the activists.

Marquette in 2013

Marquette in 2013 is not Berkeley in 1968, but there are ghettos of leftist activism on campus, particularly around the Center for Peacemaking, the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, the Women’s and Gender Studies program, Residence Life, the humanities departments, as well as Sociology and Psychology.

Within these cocoons, critical thinking is not encouraged, and students can luxuriate in a smug sense of righteousness, without worrying too much about complex issues in the real world. Do unions really help workers? Is racism the main problem blacks face? Is anybody who doesn’t think that abortion should be legal sexist? Is anybody who opposes gay marriage a homophobe?

Asking these questions is not encouraged, and indeed not even really allowed. The answers are assumed to be obvious.

Moral Seriousness

By coincidence, yesterday afternoon just a couple of hours before the forum, we talked to a student who is going to serve with Teach for America this summer, working in a poor school in the Mississippi Delta. He won’t bring World Peace, but he is devoting a few months of his life to something that may make things just a bit better for some children.

That’s a morally serious choice. Whining about the evils of Palermo’s Pizza isn’t a morally serious choice. It’s a cheap way to feel self-righteous.

Liberals Have Been Suckers For Leftist Tyrants

From Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:

On the 60th anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s death last week, the Associated Press reported that admirers of the Soviet dictator, one of history’s bloodiest tyrants, were flocking to the Kremlin to venerate him as a great leader despite his ghastly record of repression. With polls showing a rise in Russians’ admiration and nostalgia for Stalin, observed the Associated Press, “experts and politicians puzzled and despaired over his enduring popularity.”

That some Russians express approval for a despot who has been dead since 1953 is distressing, though perhaps not surprising given the ongoing campaign to burnish Stalin’s image by Russia’s autocratic president, Vladimir Putin. But even more of a reason for puzzlement and despair is the enthusiastic applause for Stalin by influential American liberals when he was at the height of his bloody reign — and the willingness of similar propagandists, naifs, and true believers today to sing the praises of other thugs and dictators.

In the 1930s, as millions were being murdered in Stalin’s terror-famine and Great Purge, Walter Duranty was assuring readers of The New York Times that the Soviet ruler was “giving the Russian people . . . what they really want, namely joint effort, communal effort.” The renowned literary critic Edmund Wilson extolled Stalinist Russia as the “moral light at the top of the world.” Upton Sinclair, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, vigorously defended the integrity of the “confessions” extracted by the secret police from many of Stalin’s victims: It “seems obvious,” Sinclair wrote, that they would not have “confessed to actions which they had not committed.”

The adulation of left-wing dictators and strongmen by Western intellectuals, journalists, and celebrities didn’t begin with Stalin (in 1921 Duranty had hailed Lenin for his “cool, far-sighted, reasoned sense of realities”), and it certainly didn’t end with him. Mona Charen chronicled the phenomenon in her superb 2003 book “Useful Idiots,” which recalls example after jaw-dropping example of American liberals defending, flattering, and excusing the crimes of one Communist ruler and regime after another. Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, the Khmer Rouge, Leonid Brezhnev, Kim Il Sung, the Sandinistas: Over and over the pattern was repeated, from the dawn of the Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Iron Curtain — and beyond.

And the useful idiocy lives on.

When Venezuela’s America-hating caudillo Hugo Chavez died last week, Human Rights Watch summarized his legacy starkly: “a dramatic concentration of power and open disregard for basic human-rights guarantees.” Over his 14-year rule, Chavez succeeded in rewriting the constitution to abolish the Venezuelan Senate and repeal the one-term limit for presidents. He stifled judicial independence, cracked down on freedom of speech, and used his power to “intimidate, censor, and prosecute Venezuelans” who opposed his political agenda. Chavez cemented Venezuela’s alliance with Cuba — “the only country in Latin America that systematically represses virtually all forms of political dissent,” Human Rights Watch noted — and vocally backed dictators elsewhere, including Syria’s Bashar Assad and Libya’s Moammar Khadafy.

None of that troubled the ideologues who raced to praise the dead bully. Chavez “understood democracy and basic human desires for a dignified life,” gushed US Representative José Serrano of New York. Former President Jimmy Carter saluted his “commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.” And former Massachusetts Congressman Joseph Kennedy II, a longtime Chavez booster, eulogized Chavez as a humanitarian who cared about the poor.

All this was preceded by Dennis Rodman’s return to the headlines, as the former basketball star traveled to North Korea, where the planet’s most ghastly regime presides over a Stalinist hellhole in which hundreds of thousands of people are imprisoned in slave-labor camps. But Rodman, whose trip was financed by Vice Media, an American documentary production company, wasn’t there to see a human-rights nightmare. He came to watch some basketball, to hang out with the country’s new dictator, Kim Jong Un, and — in a country where starvation is a leading cause of death — to eat a 10-course meal that participants described as “an epic feast.”

All in all, the trip’s organizer said, “they had a grand old time.” So much so, apparently, that before a crowd of thousands, Rodman assured Kim: “You have a friend for life.”

Indeed. It’s a shameful thing, but dictators like Kim always do.

The Attack on Palermo’s: More

From Ethan Hollenberger on the website of the Young America’s Foundation:

A discussion of the student leftist’s demonstration against Palermo’s Pizza at the Bradley Center on Saturday. The demonstration was mounted by Youth Empowered in Struggle, a recognized Marquette student group.

The basic agenda is to bully the pizza company into recognizing a union. The claimed grievance: the company fired 75 workers when they could not prove they were in the country legally. And Palermo’s didn’t do this just to spite the workers. They doubtless would have preferred not to hassle them. But they were under an immigration audit by federal authorities.

It is, in this country, illegal to hire illegals. The law isn’t well enforced, but when it finally is enforced, a company better comply.

As Hollenberger notes:

The liberal students are looking to destroy a business that has spent supporting the local community, not to mention the students at Marquette University. Palermo’s was vindicated by the NLRB in November, and as of now, Marquette is sticking with Palermo’s.

It’s terribly revealing that the pro-union forces have to resort to trying to blackmail Palermo’s by staging a boycott, and trying to pressure politically correct institutions (as universities usually are) to enlist in the jihad.

If a majority of employees actually wanted to join a union, the union could win a representation election held with a secret ballot among workers. But they apparently can’t do that. So the real issue is not support for the workers, it’s support for union bosses, who want to coerce people into joining — and paying dues.

Marquette Center for Peacemaking: Demonstrate at NATO Meeting

Marquette’s Center for Peacemaking has never pretended to be any sort of academic enterprise. Rather, it has simply been a center for left-wing activism.

Nothing illustrates this better than an e-mail from the Center, received today.

Peace Action Organizing Bus to Chicago

The NATO Summit is just days away! Fifty heads of state will be meeting in Chicago to potentially pledge billions in funding to the ongoing war in Afghanistan as well as to make important decisions that will affect the peace and stability of our entire planet. In response to the NATO Summit, Peace Action-WI is organizing a bus from Milwaukee to the Counter Summit in Chicago.

Bus pick-up is Sunday, May 20, 8:00 a.m, outside Peace Action (1001 E. Keefe Ave.) Tickets are $20 roundtrip.

Call Peace Action 414-964-5158 or stop in their office to purchase your tickets and more information.

Among those scheduled to appear at the rally...

Reiner Braun - ICC No to War - No to NATO, Germany
Malik Mujahid - Muslim Peace Council
Kathy Kelly - Voices for Creative Nonviolence
Vijay Prashad - author of Arab Spring, Libyan Winter
Leah Bolger - President, Veterans For Peace
Carlos Montes - Committee Stop FBI Repression
Kari Fulton - Environmental Justice Network
Larry Holmes - International Action Center


Center for Peacemaking

The Marquette University Center for Peacemaking strives to empower the University and the wider community to explore together the necessary skills to become informed, spiritually-centered, nonviolent peacemakers. Rooted in the Ignatian charism, the Center works with a spirit of confidence and joy to achieve an awakening to the complementary relationship of scholarship, spirituality, non-violent living, and the active struggle for peace and justice.

Of course, there is plenty of room to debate the war in Afghanistan. But the Center for Peacemaking isn’t interested in debate. Their assumption is that any U.S. military action is evil and imperialistic, and that demonstrating against it is the obvious response.

The Center is, in other words, anti-intellectual. They don’t believe there are any intellectually challenging policy questions to be addressed, rather there is only the “struggle for peace and justice” with it always being obvious that peace and justice are on the left side of any issue.

Lefties: Then and Now

From Tom McMahon’s Four Block World.