[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]
America's most enduring problem, the problem of the blacks, has been dominating the news this week.
The attitude I bring to these news stories is one of weary despair. They are reported and discussed publicly in language that bears very little relation to reality, so that most of what is said and written is worthless. To speak honestly about race is in fact taboo, and genuinely shocking, for most Americans.
Here's an example. Back in 2016 a black man in Charlotte, North Carolina was shot dead by a cop, also black. There were protests, riots, vandalism, and looting. A Republican local congressman, Robert Pittenger, said the following thing:
The grievance in their minds—the animus, the anger—they hate white people, because white people are successful and they're not.
Congressman: Charlotte protesters ‘hate white people because white people are successful’, by Peter Holley, Washington Post, September 23, 2016
Nailed it, Congressman. But of course, Pittenger was denounced by all the Great and the Good, and to save his career, issued a groveling retraction.
I've been living in America since the second Nixon administration, with some intermissions. For many years I assumed that this clinging to unreality could not be stable; that truth and honesty would eventually prevail; that we'd learn to speak to each other openly and frankly, citizen to citizen.
To my dismay and despair, the opposite has happened. As the years pass, we drift further and further from reality and truth, deeper and deeper into fantasy and denial. It's very depressing; like being in a plane that's lost all power and is just going down, down, down.
I love this country; I have two kids who will live out their lives here. Yet it's hard to see any hope for America when the landscape of social commentary is smothered in shallow lies and infantile delusions.
A young professional white woman took her dog to New York's Central Park. In a secluded area called the Ramble, much favored by birdwatchers, she let her dog off the leash, which she shouldn't have—there are posted signs against it.
A large black man, a birdwatcher, took objection to her breaking the rules. She took objection to his having taken objection. He responded with the words: "Look, if you're going to do what you want, I'm going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it."
Scared, she called the police on her cellphone, telling them a black man was threatening her…except that she didn't say "black," she used the cant descriptor "African American." She seems to be a standard-issue New York City Goodwhite [Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper: A Confrontation in the Park, New York Times, May 28, 2020].
The black man had departed without further incident by the time the cops arrived, and they took no action. He had filmed the encounter, though, and the video was posted on social media. The white woman was fired from her job and the dog was confiscated. She is now probably unemployable.
You get the impression from the video that the woman is somewhat highly strung, the man somewhat obnoxious. Neither thing is a firing offense, though.
To the main point, she was quite right to be scared. A small white woman, alone in a secluded place with a large black male stranger using threatening words: Of course she was scared.
Black men commit sexual assault and rape against white women with such frequency that the federal government ceased publishing the numbers some years ago, when the slide into denial accelerated under the Obama administration.
I am told that the Bureau of Justice Statistics still collects those numbers, but dare not publish them. Still, even with the Main Stream Media trying their best to hide the facts, it's hard not to be aware of them—especially in a big city with lots of blacks and single young white women.
So this young professional woman was justifiably scared. But because it was a black man that caused her to be scared—deliberately, you can't help thinking, based on those words he spoke—the young woman's life has been wrecked.
Like Congressman Pittenger, she has done a full grovel, whining that she is not a racist. Of course it hasn't helped her. Her fellow Goodwhites have expelled her from the charmed circle of right-thinking citizens. She dwells in outer darkness, and will forever.
This is how white Americans live now: in fear. Land of the Free!
And then there were—and as of Friday night, still are—the black riots over a suspect fatally manhandled by cops in Minneapolis.
On a first glance at what's happening in Minneapolis itself, it looks like a regular black riot, a replay of what we've been seeing over and over since Detroit 53 years ago.
So again comes the despair. It seems like nothing ever changes.
Fifty-three years!—five and some decades of pontificating, agonizing, prescribing, legislating, twisting the Constitution into pretzels in efforts to quell the rage that Congressman Pittenger identified so accurately. Fifty-three years, untold billions of dollars, endless repetitive cant prescriptions ("Let's fix the schools!" "Save the black family!" "End institutional racism!") that are tried, and tried, and tried, and tried yet again, but get us nowhere at all.
1967, Detroit; 2020, Minneapolis. Fifty-three years from now, in 2073, will some other American city be going up in flames so blacks can vent their rage at being a failed race? Will nothing ever change?
On closer inspection, though, there are some key differences between then and now.
The one I've mostly been noticing is that a high proportion of the protesters, many of the rioters, and even a few of the opportunistic looters, are white. This is almost as much an Antifa riot as a black riot.
Where the protesting has metastasized to other cities—we had a modest riot in New York Thursday evening [ At least 70 arrested at NYC protest over death of George Floyd, NY Post, May 28, 2020]—the activists seem to be majority white, with white females strongly represented.
Can't load tweet https://twitter.com/SSMoghadam/status/1266519350787227648: Sorry, that page does not exist
I naturally want to ask these fired-up white anarchists where they were in July 2017 when Justine Damond, a white woman, was shot by a black cop for no reason at all. The cop is currently serving a 12-year sentence for 3rd-degree murder.
Yes, I know: There was a vigil in Ms. Damond's honor, and a public memorial service. I don't recall any rocks getting thrown, though, or any precinct houses being burned down.
A few weeks ago in this podcast I was cheering on the armed white citizens at the Michigan state Capitol, protesting that state's crazy lockdown rules. Those citizens were, I said, a hopeful sign that we have not yet altogether lost our turbulence.
Well, there's been turbulence aplenty in Minneapolis this week. Most of it was just blacks doing their black thing, which I suppose they always will. A lot, though, was white radicals venting their anger at the Man.
This seems nuts to me. As Ramzpaul famously told a bunch of these anarchists back in 2017, "You are the Man."
If "the Man" means all the power centers of American society—Harvard University, the New York Times, the social-media billionaires, the law schools, every corporation's Human Resources Department—then the Man believes everything the white anarchists believe: Institutional Racism, Toxic Masculinity, White Privilege, the whole package.
So…what are the anarchists protesting about?
I think the impulse is Totalitarian. They know there are still some pockets of resistance to their ideology, and the knowledge enrages them. Enemies of the people, and that certainly includes white cops who manhandle black perps—not to mention white women who call the cops on threatening black men—must be hunted down and destroyed, to the last one.
Why are white women so prominent in these riots, though? What's with all this white hatred of one's own race, one's own ancestors, one's own culture?
There is some discussion on the blogs about how these disturbances will affect November's Presidential election.
Big civil disorders like this, with underclass blacks running wild, looting and burning, seem historically to have favored strong law'n'order candidates. I mentioned the 1967 Detroit riots back there. They happened a few days after a major black riot in Newark, New Jersey [Five Days of Unrest That Shaped, and Haunted, Newark, by Rick Rojas and Khorri Atkinson, NYT, July 11, 2017] and were followed by the archetypal Long Hot Summer.
Then the following Spring saw the nationwide riots in reaction to the killing of Martin Luther King. And then, that November…Richard Nixon got elected.
On that model, it's been argued that the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri and the 2015 riots in Baltimore may have helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016.
So, will what we are seeing now—especially if this is just the prelude to another Long Hot Summer—will these events help Trump in November?
Well, we can hope. I don't know, though. Ferguson…Baltimore…2016… sure; but we are four years more Woke now that we were in 2016, with a big new cohort of voters who get their notions of reality from social media.
Just look at those fired-up young white rioters. Try talking to pretty much any white American under thirty. Nixon's "Silent Majority" they ain't.
Meanwhile, the oldest voter demographic, more disposed to favor social order over so-called "social justice," has been dropping off the other end of the demographic chart, with an assist from the geezer-hostile coronavirus.
And then there are the blacks. Their lack of enthusiasm for Mrs. Clinton in 2016 is generally given as one of the main reasons Trump won. They already like Joe Biden for his eight years' service with Barack Obama. If he names a black as his Vice-Presidential choice, blacks will be all in for Joe.
I've been arguing for Joe to pick Amy Klobuchar as his Veep. She is smart, capable, politically astute, and she has two X-chromosomes. Stodgy, dull capability; that's the way to go. That's the way to win back some working-class white Trump voters. So I have been arguing.
But the Minneapolis riots throw a spanner in the works. Not only do they strengthen the case for a black Veep choice, they cast a shadow on Senator Klobuchar.
See, before she was a US Senator, the lady was a county attorney, in charge of prosecutions for the city of…wait for it…Minneapolis.
Uh-oh.
Worse yet, quoting from an article in The Week,
While in that position, Klobuchar declined to prosecute multiple police officers cited for excessive force.
Amy Klobuchar didn't prosecute officer at center of George Floyd's death, left case to successor, May 28, 2020
And it gets worse. Among those police officers the lady declined to prosecute was Derek Chauvin, the very officer seen in this week's video clip kneeling on George Floyd's neck.
Officer Chauvin had at least ten conduct complaints against him before he was fired this week after nineteen years on the force. Some of those complaints, including one where he shot a perp, were prior to January 2007, when Mrs. Klobuchar became a Senator. And she didn't prosecute!
Now of course there are all sorts of reasons a complaint against a cop might not lead to the cop being prosecuted. I imagine very few do, although I can't find numbers for the Minneapolis force.
For purposes of GOP election propaganda, though, and black disillusionment with Joe Biden, Senator Klobuchar is looking like a liability.
I say she is toast, V.P.-wise.
That could mean disaster for America. As Progressive as she may be, Senator Klobuchar is at least halfway sane, and seems not to hate white people. You can't say either thing about Kamala Harris, or Stacey Abrams, or Michelle Obama, or any of the other nonwhite females on Joe's Veep list.
Given that Biden still has a healthy lead over Trump in national polls [Poll: Biden leads Trump by 11 points nationally, by Jonathan Easley, The Hill, May 27, 2020], and given further that six'll get ya eight Biden won't complete his first term, we may very well have a crazy black female in the White House four years from now.
Heaven help us!
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
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