Riot-Plagued Baltimore Is a Catastrophe Entirely of the Democratic Party’s Own Making

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

A few weeks ago, there was an election in Ferguson, Mo., the result of which was to treble the number of African Americans on that unhappy suburb’s city council. This was greeted in some corners with optimism — now, at last, the city’s black residents would have a chance to see to securing their own interests. This optimism flies in the face of evidence near — St. Louis — and far — Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco . . .

St. Louis has not had a Republican mayor since the 1940s, and in its most recent elections for the board of aldermen there was no Republican in the majority of the contests; the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Baltimore has seen two Republicans sit in the mayor’s office since the 1920s — and none since the 1960s. Like St. Louis, it is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Philadelphia has not elected a Republican mayor since 1948. The last Republican to be elected mayor of Detroit was congratulated on his victory by President Eisenhower. Atlanta, a city so corrupt that its public schools are organized as a criminal conspiracy against its children, last had a Republican mayor in the 19th century. Its municipal elections are officially nonpartisan, but the last Republican to run in Atlanta’s 13th congressional district did not manage to secure even 30 percent of the vote; Atlanta is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. 

American cities are by and large Democratic-party monopolies, monopolies generally dominated by the so-called progressive wing of the party. The results have been catastrophic, and not only in poor black cities such as Baltimore and Detroit. Money can paper over some of the defects of progressivism in rich, white cities such as Portland and San Francisco, but those are pretty awful places to be non-white and non-rich, too: Blacks make up barely 9 percent of the population in San Francisco, but they represent 40 percent of those arrested for murder, and they are arrested for drug offenses at ten times their share of the population. Criminals make their own choices, sure, but you want to take a look at the racial disparity in educational outcomes and tell me that those low-income nine-year-olds in Wisconsin just need to buck up and bootstrap it?

Black urban communities face institutional failure across the board every day. There are people who should be made to answer for that: What has Martin O’Malley to say for himself? What can Ed Rendell say for himself other than that he secured a great deal of investment for the richest square mile in Philadelphia? What has Nancy Pelosi done about the radical racial divide in San Francisco?

Mychal Denzel Smith, toy radical at The Nation, offered the usual illiterate slogan “f**k the police” and declared of the rioters: “I also hope they break s**t.” Writers at Salon also endorsed violence for its own sake. “I do not advocate non-violence,” Benji Hart affirmed. Most of this can be credited to juvenile posturing, and it should be noted that the rioters in Baltimore mostly are not burning down tax offices or police stations but are in the main looting businesses and carrying out acts of wanton opportunistic vandalism — that’s not a revolt, but a crime spree. Meretricious “black rage” rhetoric notwithstanding, what we have seen in places such as Ferguson and Baltimore is much more ordinarily criminal than political.

But there is a legitimate concern here — from which no one seems to be willing to draw the obvious conclusion: There is someone to blame for what’s wrong in Baltimore.

Would any sentient adult American be shocked to learn that Baltimore has a corrupt and feckless police department enabled by a corrupt and feckless city government? I myself would not, and the local authorities’ dishonesty and stonewalling in the death of Freddie Gray is reminiscent of what we have seen in other cities. There’s a heap of evidence that the Baltimore police department is pretty bad.

This did not come out of nowhere. While the progressives have been running the show in Baltimore, police commissioner Ed Norris was sent to prison on corruption charges (2004), two detectives were sentenced to 454 years in prison for dealing drugs (2005), an officer was dismissed after being videotaped verbally abusing a 14-year-old and then failing to file a report on his use of force against the same teenager (2011), an officer was been fired for sexually abusing a minor (2014), and the city paid a quarter-million-dollar settlement to a man police illegally arrested for the non-crime of recording them at work with his mobile phone. There’s a good deal more. Does that sound like a disciplined police organization to you?

Yes, Baltimore seems to have some police problems. But let us be clear about whose fecklessness and dishonesty we are talking about here: No Republican, and certainly no conservative, has left so much as a thumbprint on the public institutions of Baltimore in a generation. Baltimore’s police department is, like Detroit’s economy and Atlanta’s schools, the product of the progressive wing of the Democratic party enabled in no small part by black identity politics. This is entirely a left-wing project, and a Democratic-party project.

When will the Left be held to account for the brutality in Baltimore — brutality for which it bears a measure of responsibility on both sides? There aren’t any Republicans out there cheering on the looters, and there aren’t any Republicans exercising real political power over the police or other municipal institutions in Baltimore. Community-organizer — a wretched term — Adam Jackson declared that in Baltimore “the Democrats and the Republicans have both failed.” Really? Which Republicans? Ulysses S. Grant? Unless I’m reading the charts wrong, the Baltimore city council is 100 percent Democratic.

The other Democratic monopolies aren’t looking too hot, either. We’re sending Atlanta educators to prison for running a criminal conspiracy to hide the fact that they failed, and failed woefully, to educate the children of that city. Isolated incident? Nope: Atlanta has another cheating scandal across town at the police academy. Who is being poorly served by the fact that Atlanta’s school system has been converted into crime syndicate? Mostly poor, mostly black families. Who is likely to suffer from any incompetents advanced through the Atlanta police department by its corrupt academy? Mostly poor, mostly black people. Who suffers most from the incompetence of Baltimore’s Democratic mayor? Mostly poor, mostly black families — should they feel better that she’s black? Who suffers most from the incompetence and corruption of Baltimore’s police department? Mostly poor, mostly black families.

And it’s the same people who will suffer the most from the vandalism and pillaging going on in Baltimore, too.

The evidence suggests very strongly that the left-wing, Democratic claques that run a great many American cities — particularly the poor and black cities — are not capable of running a school system or a police department. They are incompetent, they are corrupt, and they are breathtakingly arrogant. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore — this is what Democrats do.

And the kids in the street screaming about “inequality”? Somebody should tell them that the locale in these United States with the least economic inequality is Utah, i.e. the state farthest away from the reach of the people who run Baltimore.

Keep voting for the same thing, keep getting the same thing.

The Paradox of Dogma: How the Left Is Crippling Itself

By Robert Tracinski

Tuesday, April 29, 2015

If you try to shut down public debate, is this a way of ensuring that you win—or an admission that you have already lost?

The question seems relevant today, because the most remarkable characteristic of our current national debate is that one side wants desperately to stamp it out whenever it occurs.

Recently, for example, a gay New York businessman had the temerity to sponsor a “fireside chat” with Republican presidential candidate and arch-conservative Ted Cruz. He was, of course, required to repent the error, calling it “a terrible mistake” to actually talk to a politician who disagrees with him about gay marriage. We can assume that no gay businessman or activist will repeat that error any time soon, which is the whole point.

More recently, the actress Alice Eve got into trouble for stating the obvious fact that Bruce Jenner is not a woman. She, too, was forced to recant, concluding: “I felt confused and now I feel enlightened and like I know what education I need to move forward.”

What gives this a creepy totalitarian feel is the way she found it necessary, not only to change her views, but to express gratitude for her re-education.

College campuses have long been on the forefront of this kind of “speech code,” and Judith Shulevitz recently wrote an eye-opening description of the latest innovation: the campus “safe space.” In this case, the safe space was created in response to that most troubling of events: a debate (in this case, between a feminist and a libertarian).

    The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall—it was packed—but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.

God forbid anyone should have to encounter viewpoints that go against their beliefs. And on a college campus, of all places!

Even some lefty college professors are starting to become uncomfortable—and afraid that the new revolutionary tribunals will devour them, too. Posting anonymously, here is how one academic describes it.

    Saying anything that goes against liberal orthodoxy is now grounds for a firin’. Even if you make a reasonable and respectful case, if you so much as cause your liberal students a second of complication or doubt you face the risk of demonstrations, public call-outs, and severe professional consequences….

    Personally, liberal students scare the sh– out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a Facebook page calling me a communist or else seek to formally protest my liberal lies, the university would have my back.

    The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip—not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery—and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.

The Onion, as usual, manages to encapsulate the whole thing in a headline: “College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea: Students, Faculty Invited to Freely Express Single Viewpoint.”

The cultural and political left is cocooning itself in a bubble of ideological uniformity. This is intended to totally suppress dissent on key issues by making it impossible for anyone to even express a divergent opinion. The result is to entrench leftist dogma, in the hope that a whole generation will graduate from college unable to engage in thoughtcrime.

That’s the dilemma for anyone trying to overturn any aspect of this dogma. How can you debate an issue and change anyone’s mind, when the discussion has been rigged so that your viewpoint is dismissed as illegitimate before anyone has even heard it? So the new orthodoxy seems impenetrable and its hold on the young unbreakable.

Yet the safe space described by Shulevitz, with its Play-Doh and frolicking puppies, captures the infantilizing nature of the ideological bubble. As Shulevitz puts it:

    People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it. They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled. What will they do when they hear opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how will they learn to persuade people to join them?

If I were to come up with one idea for how the left could cripple itself over the long term, it would be: teach your young adherents that ideological debate is an abnormal trauma and that it is a terrible imposition to ever expect them to engage in it. It is a great way of raising a generation of mental cripples. And that is exactly what they have set out to do.

If you want a small taste of what it looks like when a leftist emerges from the ideological hothouse of academia and is forced to encounter opposing ideas he has never seriously grappled with, well, we’ve been living through it for the past six years. When President Obama drops the “post-racial politics” facade and embraces the idea that everyone who opposes him is just a racist “cracker” (which is the point of the Key & Peele routine he borrowed at the White House Correspondents’ dinner), then he will never understand the real issues, he’ll never be able to engage his opponents, and he won’t be able to convince anyone. Which pretty much explains the results of his presidency. Yet Obama came of age in an era where he had to encounter a lot more ideological opposition than most of today’s college students.

When the left attempts to envelop itself in a bubble where all decent people believe the same things, they are only fooling themselves. They are creating the illusion that all the intellectual battles have been won and they no longer need to debate or justify their positions.

At the same time, out in the real world, Democratic politicians are scrambling to move to the right just to survive.

At the beginning of the year, I speculated that we may have reached “Peak Leftism,” the point at which the left has achieved such uniform control of the commanding heights of the culture that they have no place to go but down. Their mania for soft ideological conformity suggests a mechanism for this decline. They are growing so accustomed to living in an ideological “safe space” that they will no longer understand what it means to debate their positions, much less how to win the debate.

The most powerful historical precedent for this is the totalitarian creed of the Soviet Union—a dogma imposed, not just by campus censors or a Twitter mob, but by gulags and secret police. Yet one of the lessons of the Soviet collapse is that the ideological uniformity of a dictatorship seems totally solid and impenetrable—right up to the moment it cracks apart. The imposition of dogma succeeds in getting everyone to mouth the right slogans, even as fewer and fewer of them understand or believe the ideology behind it.

This is the Paradox of Dogma. To return to the question we started with: if you try to shut down public debate, is this a way of ensuring that you win—or an admission that you have already lost? The answer is: both. It might ensure that you win in the short term. But over the long term, it abandons the field to those who do believe in ideological debate.

Outlawing ‘Islamophobia’ Would Be Folly, Mr. Miliband

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

A few years back, when the American response to the horrors of September 11 reached its muscular zenith, dissenters from the cause liked to issue a pithy cri de coeur. “You can fight a nation or a person,” they would say with palpable indignation, “but you can’t declare war on an abstract noun.” The “War on Terror,” they would conclude, is little more than a marketing exercise for a preexisting disposition.

At the root of this objection was the fear that governments that cannot easily define what they are fighting will eventually come to be at war with everyone and everything. What, after all, constitutes “terror” — an inherently subjective term? How, pray, can we know when it has been truly vanquished? And which borders — physical, philosophical, and political — must we respect in the course of combat? These, I’d venture, were fair questions. “The essence of tyranny is not iron law,” Christopher Hitchens observed. “It is capricious law.” Now, as in the time of King John, free people should demand some ground rules.

This debate came rushing back to mind this week after it was revealed that a would-be prime minister of Great Britain, the Labour party’s Edward Miliband, had promised London’s Muslim Times that he would seek to outlaw and to punish “Islamophobia” if he were elected to high office. “Although Islamophobia already falls under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006#….#” The Independent recorded on Saturday, “Mr Miliband’s proposal would allow authorities to hand down tougher sentences for similar crimes.” Evidently, those sentences would be harsh. At present, Britons who violate the Racial and Religious Hatred Act are at risk of “up to seven years imprisonment” — not, you will note, because they have actually hurt anybody, but rather because they have uttered strings of opinion-laden words that the incumbent government happens to disfavor. This, alas, is apparently not good enough for the Labour party. Under a Miliband administration, The Independent confirmed, Britons who caustically knocked Islam would be guilty of an “aggravated crime.” “We are going to make sure it is marked on people’s records with the police,” Miliband submitted, “to make sure they root out Islamophobia as a hate crime.”

The presumption that the state has a role to play in the policing of the human soul is an utterly terrifying one, running contrary as it does to all the beautiful suppositions that served as scaffolding to the Enlightenment. If Ed Miliband believes that his fellow countrymen are intolerant rubes, he of course has every right to lobby them to change direction. That he has promised to marshal the police in disapprobation is something altogether different.

Why? Well, because underpinning the notion of free and untrammeled debate is the humble acknowledgement that the state cannot — and should not — decide what is true and what is false. Naturally, governments may have strong opinions on a corporate level. Individually their members may, too. But, whatever they might come to believe, those governments may not contrive to ossify or establish as legally impregnable a sole definition of reality. This, I’m afraid, is what Miliband is effectively proposing. Seemingly, he has contrived a two-step process for censorship: First, submit that criticism of Islam is beyond the pale (that’s the “phobia” stuff, for phobias are irrational, remember); second, because that criticism therefore has no value, move to prohibit it.

In attempting to discern a limiting principle, critics will likely pretend that this approach constitutes a radical departure from British norms and should therefore be resisted on principle. Much as I might like to pretend that this were the case, it represents no such thing. Despite its proud history as a cradle of individual liberty, Britain today boasts some of the most capricious, the most vague, and the most far-reaching censorship laws in the developed world. As of 2015, the execrable Public Order Act of 1986 had been used to harass two-bit singers, radical members of the media, drunken students, preaching pastors, proselytizing Muslims, leafleting atheists, ignorant soccer fans, and pretty much anybody else who stepped out line. During this year’s election, moreover, aspiring members of parliament used it to shut down criticism from their potential constituents. Can we really be so surprised that the appalling Ed Miliband has jumped on the appalling British Milibandwagon?

Pushing back against Milband’s proposal, a few critics have noted acidly that the elite class’s obsessive focus on “Islamophobia” is peculiar given that the most frequent victims of racially motivated crimes in the United Kingdom are in fact Jewish. Well intentioned as that critique is, however, I’d venture that it represents entirely the wrong way of looking at the question. No matter what the numbers say, nobody who lives in a free country should be immune from harsh and even hateful oppobrium — not Christians, not Muslims, not atheists, not blacks, not whites, not anybody. Frankly, it is not the role of the British authorities to police the verbal output of the people they serve, until and unless that output is explicitly and deliberately brigaded to an illegal action. If they are to be at liberty, men may freely exhibit irrationality, fear, animadversion, disdain, acrimony, bitterness, revulsion, and pique — and they may do so without their emotions or their expressions being compared by the law to battery. If Ed Miliband hopes to make physical assaults even more illegal, he has my blessing. Until then, he must stay the hell away, lest he spur a recrudescence of precisely the sort of illiberalism he purportedly intends to banish.

Writing yesterday in The Spectator, Douglas Murray struck a great blow for common sense when he noted that if Miliband were to get his unlovely way, almost everybody could find himself in the crosshairs:

    If Ed Miliband were to become Prime Minister and were to decide to make what people call “Islamophobia” illegal then I’m very happy to test the law straight away. Indeed I will immediately put on a gathering of academics, writers, Quranic-scholars and philosophers — Muslim and non-Muslim — to discuss Islam. It is possible that some of those gathered may disagree with the foundational claims of Islam. I, for instance, may repeat my belief — not being a Muslim — that it is highly unlikely that the Quran was “dictated” by God. This is not only my belief. It is also the belief of Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, Christians (some Anglican priests excepted), atheists and ex-Muslims, to name only a few minority groups.

Murray’s point strikes at the beating heart of the matter. In Britain, in Australia, in France, and beyond, limitations on free expression are typically justified with mawkish appeals to “multiculturalism,” to “diversity,” and to the maintenance of the allegedly exquisite feelings of the supposedly out-of-touch. And yet, as Murray subtly implies, this is rather to put arse over elbow, for rather than creating an intractable problem, freedom of speech actually is at its most useful when the culture it serves is lacking in homogeneity. Were all Britons to adopt an ovine pose and to agree that the Church of England is the correct religion and that its central claims are unquestionably true, there would be little need at all for the protections of free expression. While reasonable in and of itself, “Oh, I like the Queen, too!” is clearly not the sort of opinion that requires the passage of strictures guarding against the intrusion of the state. When a country hosts a broad array of opinions, however — and when it is home to people whose deep-seated beliefs directly contradict the deep-seated beliefs of others — a legal framework that can accommodate sharp and pronounced dissension is absolutely vital.

In Britain at present, almost all speech that is critical of Islam is reflexively deemed to be “Islamophobic” — this, regardless of intent, regardless of context, regardless of caveat or commonition. In consequence, if the British government were indeed to crack down more robustly in this area, it would not really be defending the “rights” of a minority group against the pitchfork-wielding mob, but effectively privileging one clique over another. How, one wonders, would it decide what was beyond the pale and what was legitimate? How would it conclude whether the Islamic religion or Mr. Douglas Murray were the victim? How would it distinguish between the imprecations of the imam and the critiques of the atheist? Might it not be possible, perhaps, that this is little more than a recipe for the sort of whimsy of which there is too much in British life; and, further, that this is the sort of thinking that has led to situation in which, a few days before a close general election, one of the men who would instruct the bayonets has ended up tendering special legal protections to a crucial, and increasingly cunning, electoral bloc . . . ?

Do the Clintons Even Care about How Their Myriad Scandals Affect Their Public Image?

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

I once had a boss who gave me some great advice, not just for managing people but for judging politicians: You forgive mistakes; you punish patterns. Everybody screws up. But if someone won’t learn from his mistakes and try to correct his behavior, then he either doesn’t think it was a mistake, he just doesn’t care, or he thinks you’re a fool. The one indisputable takeaway from Peter Schweizer’s new book, Clinton Cash, is that Bill and Hillary Clinton fit one or all of those descriptions.

Let us recall Marc Rich, a shady billionaire indicted for tax evasion and defying trade sanctions with Iran during the U.S. hostage crisis. Rich fled to Switzerland to escape prosecution.

He hired Jack Quinn, a former Clinton White House counsel, to lobby the administration for a pardon. Quinn sought help from then–deputy attorney general Eric Holder, who advised Quinn to petition the White House directly — advice Holder later regretted. On the last day of his presidency, Bill Clinton pardoned Rich.

The ensuing scandal was enormous — and bipartisan. It was widely believed that Rich had bought his pardon. Denise Rich, his ex-wife, had made huge donations to the Democratic party, including $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and $450,000 to the foundation building Bill Clinton’s presidential library.

Liberals were infuriated. “You let me down,” wrote the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen. “It’s a pie in the face of anyone who ever defended you. You may look bad, Bill, but we look just plain stupid.”

“It was a real betrayal by Bill Clinton of all who had been strongly supportive of him to do something this unjustified,” exclaimed then-Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.). “It was contemptuous.” Senator Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) chastised, “It was inexcusable.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd suggested Clinton had “traded a constitutional power for personal benefit.” Jimmy Carter all but called it bribery and said it was “disgraceful.”

You can understand the bitterness. Democrats had defended the Clintons through Whitewater, Travel-gate, and Hillary Clinton’s billing-records shenanigans. They even defended Bill Clinton when he raised millions in re-election donations from Chinese donors and rented out the Lincoln bedroom. But this was just too much. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us half a dozen times . . .

The Clintons said it was all a misunderstanding, which is what they always say. Quinn offered a familiar defense: “The process I followed was one of transparency.” Bill Clinton: “As far as I knew, Marc Rich and his wife were Republicans.” Hillary Clinton kept quiet.

Personally, I think Jimmy Carter was right, which is not something I say often.

But let’s assume it really was just a misunderstanding. Wouldn’t a normal person — never mind a family with historic ambitions — go to great lengths to avoid even the appearance of a repeat performance? When Senator John McCain was unfairly lumped in with the “Keating Five” influence-peddling scandal, he said the dishonor was more painful than his five years in a Vietnamese prison. He dedicated himself to demonstrating the sincerity of his shame, including his decades-long — though intellectually misguided — quest to reform campaign-finance laws.

There are no allegations of pardons for sale in Schweizer’s book. After all, Bill Clinton had none to sell anymore. But the Rich scandal was equally about the wealthy buying access and influence. And though there is no clear proof that Bill Clinton illegally sold access to shady gold-mining interests in Haiti or uranium moguls in Canada, no one this side of longtime Clinton defender Lanny Davis can dispute that the Clintons have acted as if they really just didn’t care how it all looked.

As New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait notes, the “best-case scenario” is that the Clintons have been “disorganized and greedy.”

The Clinton spin on the book is that there’s not a “shred of evidence” of criminal wrongdoing, or as ABC’s George Stephanopoulos helpfully repeated over the weekend, “There’s no smoking gun.” He’s right, but not being a criminal is a remarkably low bar for a politician, even a Clinton.

The standard is that public servants should avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Not only is there three decades of evidence that the Clintons don’t think that standard applies to them, but there’s growing evidence that his biggest supporters are happy to play the fool — again.