New York City seems like a gag that’s gone too far. “First, we’ll release all the criminals because too many black bodies are in prison! Then we’ll denounce the police as Nazis and refuse to prosecute any suspects they arrest. The city will be overrun with violent criminals — raping robbing, assaulting and killing at will… But if anyone steps up to protect the citizenry from the mayhem that’s been intentionally inflicted on them, well, gentleman, then we’ll prosecute the hell out of that douchebag.”
This exactly how things are playing out right now with twenty-four-year-old Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who subdued a deranged lunatic on the F train at the Broadway-Lafayette Street station in Manhattan on May 1.
According to witnesses, Jordan Neely, a thirty-year-old homeless man was pacing madly, and throwing trash at passengers trapped in a hermetically-sealed subway car with him. He said he did not mind “going to jail or getting life in prison” and was “ready to die.” (Enjoying your commute, New Yorkers?)
The ex-Marine quietly stepped behind the kook and put him in a chokehold to hold him for the police and protect everyone on that subway car. Neely struggled so much that two other men had to help secure him. Alas, Neely died in the skirmish.
In response to his death, a lot of ugly people held protests, demanding “justice” for the darling psychotic. We’re supposed to be impressed that Neely hadn’t punched anyone on the subway car yet. He was merely throwing garbage and threatening to hurt them.
If you’re wondering why would anyone imagine things might have escalated, it’s because things always escalate with crazies.
One Saturday morning in August 2020, around 11 a.m., also on the F train, a thirty-one-year-old man, Jose Reyes, was “making weird noises and laughing to himself,” according to a witness. He wasn’t assaulting anyone. Big deal, you scaredy cats. The next thing you know, he’d grabbed a twenty-five-year-old woman, punched her, pushed her to the ground and started raping her in front of horrified bystanders. Too bad Penny wasn’t there.
In the afternoon of March 18, 2021, a disturbed man on the on the 1 train in Manhattan, Marc Mathieu, thirty-six, yelled “you motherfucking Asian!” at Narayange Bodhi, a sixty-eight-year-old Sri Lankan on his way his job as a security guard, and knocked him unconscious. Mathieu had nine prior arrests. Too bad Penny wasn’t there.
One Saturday morning in January 2022, an emotionally disturbed man was taunting passengers on the platform at the Times Square Station. Oh it’s just verbal harassment — nothing physical! Suddenly the nut ran full force at a woman, Michelle Go, forty, shoving her in front of an oncoming train, where she was pulverized beneath the wheels. Naturally, the man, Martial Simon, sixty-one, was a homeless ex-con, out on the streets where he could continue terrorizing the public.
The station was full of transit officers, but what could they do? Until Simon ran at Ms. Go, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Harassing strangers is a basic constitutional right in New York! Unless Penny had been there.
In February, 2022, a woman was waiting alone at the Wakefield-East 241 Street station when a man approached her saying, “Mami, how come you don’t want to talk to me?” Just words. No need for concern. The man, Frank Abrokwa, thirty-seven, soon returned and jammed a bag full of his own feces into her face, ears, eyes, nose and hair, saying, “Like this, bitch?” Too bad Penny wasn’t — well, you know.
In the previous six weeks, Abrokwa had punched a thirty-year-old man on a subway platform and a fifty-three-year-old man at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. So naturally, he was still at large. In fact, the feces attack was his fortieth arrest — whereupon, he was released again without bail. He committed another violent crime the very next day. And again he was released without bail.
Weird that New Yorkers would feel like city officials are releasing insane people onto the streets and refusing to remove them, even when they commit violent crime, after violent crime.
One lovely Sunday morning in May 2022, Andrew Abdullah was pacing and muttering to himself on the Q train as it crossed from Brooklyn into Manhattan. Then he pulled out a gun and blew away a Goldman Sachs employee, Daniel Enriquez, forty-eight. In a surprise development, Abdullah was facing a slew of criminal charges — for stealing property, domestic abuse, endangering the welfare of a child and gun possession. Free as a bird!
The stories go on and on and on. But all these were other demented homeless people, not the beloved, and much-missed Mr. Neely.
Actually, Neely is no different from the rest. Among his forty-plus arrests, Neely punched a man on a subway platform in May 2019, breaking his nose. This was New York City, so a month later, he was still roaming the streets, and cold-cocked a sixty-seven-year-old man. Then in 2021, Neely decked a sixty-seven-year-old woman, hitting her so hard he broke her nose and fractured her orbital bone.
Neely’s admirers say that he’s mentally ill, but I notice that he was sane enough to keeping choosing elderly people to attack.
And now our brave Marine has been indicted by Alvin Bragg for finally putting an end to Neely’s one-man crime wave — something Bragg’s office steadfastly refused to do. Penny protected every person in that subway car. So now he’s got to pay.
Edward Smith outside his home. (Jason Franson for The Free Press)
Edward Smith didn’t think the color of his skin had anything to do with it.
He was 23, and he’d come to Canada in 2005 from West Africa. Now, he lived with his mother and sister in Edmonton, the capital of the western province of Alberta.
Racism—overt or systemic—didn’t make him take part in an armed robbery of an Airbnb in July 2019, he said. He’d decided on his own to help his cousin, who had told Smith that the people staying at the Airbnb had robbed him and that he was trying to get his money back. Smith agreed to help, but he didn’t want any guns involved. So they compromised: they’d bring a gun, but it would be unloaded.
Things didn’t go as planned, and Smith was arrested. At his trial, Smith pleaded guilty to the two charges—theft and robbery with a firearm—filed against him.
Since Smith is black, he also submitted an Impact of Race and Culture Assessment, or IRCA—a presentencing report in which “Black and racialized Canadians” can demonstrate how systemic racism led them to commit their crime.
The logic behind Smith’s IRCA was clear: as a black man, it was assumed that he had been subjected to a great deal of hate, and that that hate had limited his job opportunities, housing opportunities, opportunities to build a meaningful and law-abiding life.
Dunia Nur, the activist who wrote Smith’s IRCA, told me the report was meant to help the judge appreciate the convict’s “background” and “history.”
I obtained Smith’s IRCA from Smith himself. Oddly, the four-page report cites no concrete instances of racism—no violence, no untoward remarks, no employers or schools that turned Smith down because of his skin color. Not even any microaggressions.
It also fails to mention that, in a separate incident in January 2018, Smith was arrested and charged with theft, robbery, and kidnapping.
What it does say is that Smith had a rough childhood and adolescence—the refugee camp in Ghana, his father’s absence, immigrating to Canada, his early run-ins with the law. It further notes that “Edward identifies as an African Canadian” who is of “Liberian heritage,” and that he has “a feeling of disconnection with his culture.”
The judge apparently sympathized with Smith. In February 2020, after six months in prison, he was allowed to go free with court-appointed supervision. If he’d been white, he would have been looking at eight years behind bars.
“I didn’t face racism,” Smith admitted to me in a recent phone call. He’s now a sales representative at a debt-collection company. Referring to the IRCA, Smith said, “It was my only way out of this situation. I took full advantage.”
Canada’s first official IRCA was submitted in the now-famous case of R v “X” in 2014—a case in which a 16-year-old black boy in Nova Scotia was charged with attempted murder after shooting his 15-year-old cousin in the abdomen with a rifle. This was not long after Black Lives Matter was formed, in 2013, to protest the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida.
At the time, it was mostly confined to progressive circles in Nova Scotia, which has a higher concentration of African Canadians than any other province. Now, it’s taken for granted among Canadian criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, and law professors that the assessments are a necessary tool for curbing the “overrepresentation” of black and indigenous prisoners.
Danardo Jones, a University of Windsor law professor who has written extensively on criminal justice reform, said that when it comes to IRCAs, there is “institutional buy-in.” For now, there are no statistics on the number of IRCAs being filed nationwide or on a province by province basis. Criminal defense attorneys in Ontario estimated that IRCAs run up to $4,500 and that there’s a nine-month waiting list to obtain one.
Canada is at the forefront of a broader movement that seeks to reimagine police, prisons, and the nature of justice—a movement that gained much greater momentum and cohesiveness in the wake of George Floyd’s May 2020 killing in Minneapolis.
“The protests of 2020 marked the new way in which many people thought about criminal justice,” Daniel Fryer, a University of Michigan criminal justice law professor, said. “The thing about the protests of 2020 is that they reached a global audience. Although the problem was at least ostensibly domestic, everyone in the world was watching.”
In the United States, the new thinking was reflected in the push for “decarceration” and the rise of progressive district attorneys—Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, George Gascón in Los Angeles, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, Kim Foxx in Chicago, and others. Central to the progressive prosecutor movement, Fryer said, was a rejection of “the gladiator, adversarial model.” Instead, he said, “the prosecutor’s role should be to seek justice in society.”
On top of that, a handful of states sought to impose justice from the top down: Virginia and Washington barred police from using choke holds and no-knock warrants. Minnesota adopted a law meant to make police more accountable. California, the country’s progressive laboratory, enacted the Racial Justice Act, which enables anyone convicted of a crime to challenge that conviction on the grounds of racial bias.
But Canada has gone further, insisting that judges explicitly consider race when meting out justice.
As far as Nadia Robinson was concerned, there is nothing fair or just about that. The father of her two boys was killed eight years ago by a driver in Ottawa, and he had gotten off with a lighter sentence because he was black.
“I’m not trying to be a ‘Karen’ in any way, shape, or form,” Robinson, who is white, told me. “I believe that when you do something wrong, you stand up and say you did something wrong.”
I suggested IRCAs were an effort to undo decades, even centuries, of racism that had been baked into the criminal justice system. “You can’t rewrite the past,” Robinson said. Then, she added: “We’re all equal.”
Nadia Robinson. (Dan Aponte for The Free Press) Race-based sentencing in Canada did not emerge in a vacuum.
It started in 1996, when Canadian lawmakers, upset that so many indigenous people were in prison, amended the Criminal Code, hoping to prod judges into considering indigenous people’s history of colonization—and dispensing less punitive sentences. In 1993, aboriginal peoples accounted for 17 percent of prisoners even though they were less than 4 percent of the total population.
In 1999, in R v Gladue—the first case to make its way to the Supreme Court following the amendments to the Criminal Code—what started as a suggestion became the law of the land. The Criminal Code, the Court ruled, “mandatorily requires sentencing judges to consider all available sanctions other than imprisonment and to pay particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders.”
In the wake of that case, courts started to require so-called Gladue reports when sentencing indigenous defendants. Gradually, the idea of building on Gladue reports to acknowledge African Canadians’ history started to gain traction.
Fast-forward to the mid-2010s and the rise of the IRCA. The whole point of the IRCA, Robert Wright, a social worker and early pioneer of IRCAs, told me, was to level the proverbial playing field.
“Some people think we’re trying to get a race-based discount for people,” said Wright, who wrote the first official IRCA, in R v. “X.” IRCAs, he said, are “real tools” that enable judges to “be more thoughtful” and “sentence black people more appropriately.”
Ryan Handlarski, a criminal defense attorney in Toronto, added: “How can we pass judgment on a person without at least trying to understand what led them to that place?”
Judge Anne Derrick, who presided over R v “X,” was apparently persuaded by this logic.
“I find that when ‘X’ shot ‘Y’ he was an immature, dependent 16 year old caught up in the dysfunctional dynamics of his community,” Derrick wrote. She sentenced “X” as a minor, giving him two years in prison and another year of supervision at home. Had he been sentenced as an adult—as the prosecutor requested—he would have received a life sentence.
While R v “X” influenced thinking among judges, attorneys, and prosecutors, its impact was limited because it took place on the local, trial court level.
But in 2017, Derrick was promoted to Nova Scotia’s Court of Appeal—where her future rulings would have an automatically binding effect on lower courts across the province.
And then, in 2021, she got her chance—with the case of R v Anderson—to make race-based sentencing the standard across the province.
During a traffic stop in Halifax three years earlier, Rakeem Rayshon Anderson was found carrying a .22-caliber handgun. He was charged and convicted of five offenses related to possession and transportation of a loaded weapon.
Prosecutors asked for Anderson to be given a prison sentence of two to three years. Being African Canadian, Anderson filed an IRCA—co-authored by Robert Wright, who had written the IRCA for R v “X.” The trial judge who heard Anderson’s case gave him a lesser sentence—house arrest and probation—based, in no small part, on the IRCA. (Judge Pamela Williams said as much, adding that the dearth of “Afrocentric services” contributed to her ruling.)
Prosecutors appealed to the Court of Appeal—where now-Justice Anne Derrick was presiding.
Derrick was unsympathetic to prosecutors.
“Even where the offense is very serious, consideration must be given to the impact of systemic racism and its effects on the offender,” Derrick wrote in August 2021, upholding the lower court’s decision.
Brandon Rolle, senior legal counsel at African Nova Scotian Justice Institute and one of Anderson’s attorneys, called the decision “historic,” adding that “this decision will directly impact every African Nova Scotian being sentenced from this point forward.”
I asked Mark Scott, the lead prosecutor in Anderson, what he made of Derrick’s ruling. “People’s culture and background are something that is essential to recognize when you’re looking at a just result,” Scott told me, sounding like a defense attorney. “If you’re going to say that justice has to be colorblind, I think there are people who would disagree with that.”
Chris Rudnicki, a criminal defense attorney in Toronto, told me: “If Justice Derrick’s decision in ‘X’ can be seen as opening the door to systemic considerations in Canadian sentencing, then her majority opinion in Anderson—now sitting as a judge at the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal—can be seen as leading us all through it.”
Since Anderson, federal authorities have tried to nudge the rest of Canada to follow Nova Scotia’s lead. In April 2021, the Department of Justice announced $6.6 million to subsidize IRCAs. Since then, the sense of urgency has grown, with everyone from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger saying more must be done to combat the “overrepresentation” of minority inmates.
This urgency is fueled, in part, by an awareness that over the course of the first two decades of this century—from the first Gladue reports in 1999 to 2020—the percentage of indigenous prisoners has jumped, from 17 percent to more than 30 percent.
To Nadia Robinson, the idea that the man who had killed her partner should be given a lesser sentence because of his race felt “surreal,” she said, as if the people in charge were speaking one language, and she were speaking another.
Robinson’s partner, Andy Nevin, had been riding his bike on the morning of June 28, 2015, when he was killed in a hit and run.
In court, the driver, Deinsburg St.-Hilaire, testified that he’d been out all night at a wedding. It was almost six a.m., and he was speeding home—going almost 20 miles over the limit—when he nodded off. He came to when he heard a thud. He didn’t see anything in his rearview mirror. He said he thought he’d hit a mailbox.
Except that when he got home, St.-Hilaire covered his Ford F-250 pickup truck in a tarp, and, within a few days, he had the hood and side panel changed.
It seemed as though he knew what had happened.
This was what Nadia Robinson couldn’t accept. “If I knew it was my son who did something like that, I’d be like, ‘You need to come forward, you need to tell this family—you don’t hide,’ ” she told me.
After repairing his truck, St.-Hilaire decamped to an airport hotel, hoping to evade the cops. Nine days after the accident, he was arrested.
Later, when he tried to explain why he hadn’t turned himself in, St.-Hilaire noted that he had emigrated at age 7 from Dominica, in the Caribbean. “Being the only black child in his class, and not speaking English proficiently, resulted in Mr. St Hilaire being bullied at school,” according to a court document.
At the trial, Judge Catherine Aitken said she believed the defendant “wanted to do the right thing but did not have the confidence to do so out of fear.” She added: “I also accept that this fear was likely heightened as a result of Mr. St. Hilaire’s experience with racism as a black person growing up in this community.”
Ultimately, Aitken found St.-Hilaire guilty of obstructing the police investigation into the collision but, parroting the defendant, added that his “experiences earlier in life when he was subjected to racism and bullying in the school context” as well as “experiences more recently when he did not feel fairly treated by police officers during traffic stops” were mitigating factors.
It seemed not to matter to the judge that St.-Hilaire, 39, didn’t provide any details about the racism he had suffered: names, dates, comments that were made, pain that was inflicted. Nor did he say how it had affected him over the years.
St.-Hilaire could have wound up spending two years behind bars. Instead, he was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and left the courtroom, in November 2018, a free man.
St.-Hilaire hadn’t even filed an IRCA. All that was required to get a lighter sentence was to bring the defendant’s race to the judge’s attention—to obtain “judicial notice,” Danardo Jones, the University of Windsor law professor, told me. “Failure to consider race and anti-Blackness,” Jones said in an email, could lead to a sentence being overturned on appeal.
The Ottawa police chief, Charles Bordeleau, was furious about the sentence and issued a terse statement voicing frustration—something he almost never did. “It’s unfortunate that these comments were made putting into question the professionalism of our members during this difficult investigation,” he said.
Nadia Robinson told me the court’s judgment made her feel like Andy Nevin’s life didn’t matter. Did anyone care that on the morning of his death, he was biking to the new apartment they planned to live in? They were moving out of the dump they’d been in, starting a new chapter. The boys were so excited, she said.
“Are you kidding me?” Robinson said. She was crying. She felt as if she were living a parallel life, a life that wasn’t supposed to happen. Her sons, now 26 and 24, she said, have had a lot of trouble since their father’s death: alcohol, drugs, a seemingly bottomless grief. “My kids are devastated,” she said.
Among prosecutors and even some criminal defense attorneys, it felt as though the country were crossing the Rubicon.
“The judge basically calls the system out for being systemically racist even though the system bends over backwards to be reverse racist,” a prominent defense attorney in Toronto told me.
The attorney, who asked me not to publish his name out of fear of backlash, found it galling that the judge had portrayed St.-Hilaire’s actions during the course of those nine days between the hit and run and his arrest as a “momentary lapse of judgment.”
“The idea that somehow this cover-up had anything to do with racism or this never-demonstrated canard of systemic racism is patently false,” the attorney said. “To use language we’d normally associate with murder, this was not a momentary lapse in judgment but planned and deliberate. That’s what makes the judge’s ruling so egregious, and the idea that the defendant gets some kind of break because of something that happened years ago, something completely unprovable and possibly untrue that has nothing to do with Andy Nevin’s death—that’s absurd. Actually, it’s offensive.”
He added: “This is the scam of scams.” He said that lots of people knew it, and no one would say it openly. Including him. “Criticizing IRCAs would mean career suicide.”
I asked Chris Rudnicki, the criminal defense attorney, whether the subtext of the whole IRCA phenomenon was that black people from poor neighborhoods have less control over the decisions they make.
He emailed back: “In some cases, yes.” He added, “To the extent that systemic discrimination has a material impact on people’s lives—restricting access to housing, education, and employment, for example—it can render them more susceptible to criminal influences. You are more likely to steal a loaf of bread if you’re poor, for example. Or more likely to join a street gang if your school has expelled you. Etc. So a sentencing court will treat a person who has experienced the material impact of systemic discrimination differently than a person who has not suffered that impact.”
(Jason Franson for The Free Press) Edward Smith, who robbed the Airbnb, insisted the problem was never systemic discrimination. It was him. It was his family.
In high school, he’d started stealing candy and clothing from local stores. Partly, he said, this was because his mother, who packed chickens for minimum wage, couldn’t afford to buy him stuff. But mostly, he said, it was because he could. He was a latchkey kid surrounded by other latchkey kids. “It was just me and my friends,” Smith said. “If we were going to make bad decisions, we were going to do it together.”
It was in the summer of 2019 that his cousin asked him to help rob this Airbnb to get his money back. He didn’t ask questions.
So, the three of them—his cousin, some other guy, and Smith—showed up at the Airbnb, and the two other guys had guns, and they robbed the place and got out and drove away before Smith could catch up with them. He got arrested. It turned out his cousin had never been robbed. He just wanted to do some robbing. (He was later arrested, too.)
Smith was happy to have avoided a longer sentence but seemed almost embarrassed by it. “It didn’t have anything to do with race,” he told me for the third or fourth time. (But Temitope Oriola, a University of Alberta sociologist, said it wasn’t uncommon for black victims of racism to deny they had been victims of racism. “They refuse to acknowledge the existence of racism as a particular way of navigating the world and holding onto their sense of self,” he told me.)
Two months after being released from jail, Smith was arrested again, in April 2020, for possession of stolen goods. In September 2022, he was arrested once more and charged with two counts of assault and one count of damaging property, according to court records.
All these charges were subsequently dropped, but that wasn’t the point, the criminal defense attorney in Toronto said. “The police don’t arrest innocent people,” the attorney said. Referring to Smith, the attorney added: “Is he a ticking time bomb and going to keep reoffending? One million percent.”
It seems odd that liberals, who spent decades trying to deracialize society, are now re-racializing it.
Jonathan Simon, a University of California–Berkeley law professor, explained that, when it comes to criminal justice reform, it’s hard to sidestep race.
“The criminal-legal system is the equivalent of a toxic-waste disaster with over decades of institutional focus on communities of color,” Simon said. The public, Smith added, tends to view “crime” and “blackness” as one and the same. “There’s overwhelming evidence from psychologists that blackness and crime are fused in a cognitive way,” he said.
It was necessary to acknowledge that “the criminal-legal system has been jacked up on racism,” so society—in Canada or the United States—can start down the long path of decarceration, Simon said. That was the point of IRCAs, its defenders explained.
John Medeiros, the staff sergeant at the Ottawa Police Department who had overseen the St.-Hilaire case, said he understood why black defendants were skeptical that the system would treat them fairly. There was a long history. There had been discrimination. There had been a great deal of institutionalized oppression.
But he’d been dismayed by the judge’s ruling in the hit and run. According to Nevin’s postmortem examination, the 39-year-old cyclist had been struck from behind and flown into a ditch. He had a laceration on his head, and abrasions on his shoulders, waist, and legs; his spinal cord had been severed, and one of his lungs punctured. The only good news, perhaps, was that he had been killed instantly.
“I don’t think race ought to have been a factor here,” Medeiros told me.
Referring to St.-Hilaire, Medeiros added, “He left a human being on the side of the road, like he drove over a skunk.”
Rupa Subramanya is a reporter for The Free Press. Her last article, Trudeau’s Battle Against a Free Internet, examined Canada’s effort to curb free expression online.
“Of all the 69 reports we now have, this is the most disturbing,” expressed DailyClout CEO Dr. Naomi Wolf in a live stream on Sunday. “Because the bottom line is, according to a new tranche of Pfizer documents released just this month, this past month, April of 2023. And these are documents that go back to April of 2021 — exactly two years ago. Both Pfizer and the FDA knew that the mRNA COVID vaccine caused dire fetal and infant harms, including death.”
The batch of Pfizer clinical trial documents released in April 2023 by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under court order contains a shocking, eight-page document titled, “Pregnancy and Lactation Cumulative Review” …
This document is among the most horrifying yet to emerge into public view. It reveals that both Pfizer and the FDA knew by early 2021 that Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine, BNT162b2, resulted in horrible damage to fetuses and babies.
• Adverse events in over 54% of cases of “maternal exposure” to the vaccine (248 out of 458). The language “maternal exposure” implies that Pfizer acknowledged intercourse, inhalation, and skin contact as methods of exposure to its mRNA injection, as also evidenced by Protocol Amendment 14.
• Six premature labor and delivery cases resulting in two newborn deaths.
• 19% (41/215) of babies in Pfizer’s records exposed to the company’s COVID mRNA vaccine via their mothers’ breast milk were recorded as suffering from 48 different categories of adverse events.
The damage and suffering feel even more real when you narrow it down to individual stories.
• “A 15-month-old infant with medical history of vomiting experienced skin exfoliation and infant irritability while being breastfed (latency <7 days). The outcome of the event’ skin exfoliation’ was not recovered and outcome of event’ infant irritability’ was unknown.”
• “A 9-month-old infant with a medical history of meningococcal vaccine and no history of allergies, asthma, eczema or anaphylaxis experienced rash and urticaria a day after exposure via lactation.”
• “A day after the mother received vaccination, a baby developed a rash after breastfeeding. At the time of the report, the event was ‘not recovered.”
• “An 8-month-old infant experienced angioedema [an area of swelling of the lower layer of skin and tissue just under the skin or mucous membranes] one day after his mother received vaccination.”
• “There were 2 cases reporting ‘illness’ after exposure via breast milk’. In the first case, a 6-month-old infant developed an unspecified sickness 2 days post-mother’s vaccination. The outcome of the event sickness was recovered, and no causality assessment was provided. The second case, a 3-month-old infant developed an unspecified illness and required hospitalization for 6 days post-exposure via breast milk (>7 days latency).”
Pfizer employee, Robert T. Maroko, approved the Review with these horrific findings on April 20, 2021.
“This is a real person working at Pfizer, Mr. Robert T. Maroko, who looked at this damage to babies, these dead babies, these dead fetuses, these miserably-injured babies — approved it and sent it on to the FDA. The FDA approved it and gave it to Rochelle Walensky and the CDC,” shared Dr. Wolf.
And three days later, on April 23, 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky held a press conference, which kicked off an aggressive campaign to get pregnant women vaccinated.
“No safety concerns were observed for people vaccinated in the third trimester or safety concerns for their babies. As such, CDC recommends that pregnant people receive the COVID-19 vaccine.”
“The FDA signed off on this document showing dead babies, sick babies, dead from the injection, sick from nursing, the spontaneous abortions, or dead subsequent to the injection, the spontaneous abortions, the respiratory distress, babies hospitalized … These monsters looked at whether the babies would get sick and die or whether the fetuses would spontaneously abort, and they did. And they saw that they did, and they kept going.”
“This was just [four] months into the rollout,” Dr. Wolf mentioned. “And I want to remind you that breastfeeding has gone from 34% of moms and babies at the start of the pandemic to only 15% now, meaning that babies are having a terrible time with their mother’s breast milk. Pfizer knew they would!” she exclaimed. “Pfizer knew they would! The FDA knew they would, and they told pregnant women and lactating women to get vaccinated anyway.”
“At the end of this horrific, demonic analysis of all these sick and dying babies, all these aborted fetuses, all these babies getting sick from poisoned breast milk. Seriously sick. Damaged. They held a press conference. And Dr. Walensky, who has this report in hand, who has this report in hand,” Dr. Wolf said twice with emphasis, “told the women of America and anyone else who is listening in the world that these vaccines were safe and effective for pregnant women and for their babies. And that to protect their babies, they had to get vaccinated. They knew. They knew. Absolutely criminal.”
And there are 68 other damning reports — just like this one — using primary source Pfizer documents released under court order by the U.S. FDA.
These important summaries, which detail astonishing ranges of deaths, disabilities, and other systematic harms to subjects — damage that both Pfizer and the FDA sought to keep hidden from the public for 75 years — contain vastly important headlines: twenty forms of menstrual damage to women — how Pfizer covered up a flood of adverse events — PEG in breast milk — within a month of rollout, Pfizer knew the mRNA vaccines did not work.
Now, the information Pfizer and the FDA wanted to keep hidden for 75 years is available in paperback form. Funds and proceeds raised go to the research project, which helps makes more Pfizer Documents Analysis Reports possible. So, please, show your support and get your hands on this critical information in one place — by ordering your copy today.
Invest in More Cops
A lesson from Europe. City Journal Photo.
Devon Kurtz is the director of public safety policy at the Cicero Institute. He also mentors formerly incarcerated people and leads a Quaker ministry group at a prison in his home state of Vermont.
How’s this for per capita? Invest in More Cops A lesson from Europe.
After the election of Brandon Johnson as mayor of Chicago, many are bracing for more of the same kinds of negligent public-safety policies preferred by his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot. Johnson has made it clear that he will not invest in more police resources or officers, claiming that neither will make Chicagoans safer. He’s wrong, of course. Johnson and other progressive leaders might take a lesson on better public-safety policies from an unlikely source: Europe.
The U.S. and its peers in the European Union each spend roughly 1.2 percent of GDP on public safety, but the U.S. is much more violent. Americans are more than seven times as likely to be murdered than Europeans. More than 60 percent of American inmates committed violent offenses, compared with roughly 40 percent of European inmates. Nearly one-third of people released from American prisons go on to commit a violent offense within the first five years. Given these higher violence levels, America’s public-safety resources are spread far thinner than those of the European Union, undermining our ability to fight crime effectively.
So, what is Europe’s secret? One possible answer: police. Europe spends five times as much of its GDP on policing as on prisons. America, meantime, spends a mere 1.5 times as much on policing as on prisons. As a result, Europe has more than twice the total number of police officers as the U.S., despite only having 35 percent more residents.
Other metrics show in stark terms how under-policed America is compared with its European peers. America has roughly 198 officers per 100,000 residents—down 18 percent since the late 1990s—whereas Europe has 333 officers for every 100,000 residents. Comparing officer levels with violent-crime levels reveals an even more concerning statistic: Europe has 396 police officers per homicide; America has only 32.5.
These data show plainly that America has far fewer officers to handle far more violent crimes than other developed nations. Contrary to the popular progressive narrative, little evidence suggests that America is overpoliced. In fact, the United States is woefully under-policed, and we have the crime rates to show for it.
Of course, criminologists have long known that investments in police are an effective way to cut crime—and far more efficient than prisons, which are necessary but blunt (and costly) tools for fighting crime. University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt estimated that one dollar spent on police is 20 percent more effective at reducing crime than a dollar spent on prisons. In another study, he found that expanding police departments reduced violent crime by 12 percent and reduced property crime by 8 percent. Berkeley law professor Frank Zimring concluded that increasing the number of police officers per committed homicide contributed significantly to New York City’s 80 percent drop in crime over two decades. Notably, Zimring finds that much of New York’s police-driven reduction in crime came without substantial increases in prison populations.
Progressive politicians are choosing a dangerous course in refusing to invest in policing. At the heart of this ideological delusion is a gross miscalculation of the social costs of crime and policing. Advocates for shrinking police departments point to America’s outlier levels of officer-involved shootings compared to its peers. Unjustified police violence is contemptible and should be punished, but it is statistically quite rare. Its scale pales compared with the social costs of crime in the U.S.: 21 times as many people get killed in criminal homicides as are killed in officer-involved shootings. When including only unarmed individuals killed by cops, that figure grows to a multiple of 715. And the racial disparity among homicide victims is twice as severe as that among victims of police shootings. In 2021, roughly 27 percent of people killed by police were black; in 2019, 52 percent of homicide victims were black.
Despite worries about police violence, more than eight in ten black Americans want a strong police presence in their neighborhoods because crime is a pervasive and dangerous problem. Europe’s example suggests that having more cops may actually reduce the use of force, in addition to reducing crime. Progressives should extend their fondness for Europe to an embrace of its policing policy, which appears to get better results than America’s.
If blacks kill at nine times the rate of whites in Kansas City but die of homicide at only six times the rate of whites in Kansas City, what makes up the difference? Blacks killing people outside their own race. That disparity applies to non-lethal as well as to lethal violence. In 2021, 87 percent of all non-lethal interracial violent crimes committed between blacks and whites in the U.S. were black-on-white—480,030 incidents with a black offender and white victim, and 69,850 incidents with a white offender and black victim, or seven times as many black-on-white as white-on-black incidents of interracial non-lethal violence. In other words, whites have more to fear from blacks than blacks from whites, a fact contrary to the race-hustle narrative.
The distribution of interracial violence means that an “X-ing while white” meme is a more appropriate way of representing racial crime patterns. Recent instantiations of the “while white” meme would include: “accosting shoplifters while white” (California Home Depot employee fatally shot while trying to prevent a theft); “reporting on a crime while white” (Florida journalist fatally shot working the scene of a homicide investigation, cameraman critically injured in same shooting); “riding the subway while white” (two 19-year-old females punched and robbed on Times Square subway by larger group of females wearing dayglo green body suits); “bicycling while white” (California emergency room doctor run over and fatally stabbed by man who reportedly had complained about “white privilege”); “jogging while white” (young Memphis mother abducted, raped, and killed); “walking downtown while white” (Minneapolis man thrown to the ground, stomped on, stripped of pants, run over with a bicycle, hit with planters, and robbed by group of teens); “holding on to one’s wallet while white” (Minneapolis man beaten unconscious after refusing to give up his wallet in attempted robbery); “walking in school hallway while white” (New Jersey ninth-grader punched, kicked, and hit with water bottle in high school, later commits suicide); “existing in school while white” (Florida girl beaten in head by five females); “riding a city bus while white” (57-year-old female hit in the head with an unknown object on a Queens bus by two teenage girls and a third individual); “riding a school bus while white” (12-year-old boy in Virginia choked by female classmate).
If any of these incidents had had black victims and white perpetrators, there would have been a national, if not international, uproar. Every news outlet would be covering the emergency of white supremacy and Joe Biden would have given another of his speeches about the stain of white racism on America’s soul.
“While Asian” is another potentially fertile meme: “wearing jewelry while Asian” (California victims had jewelry forcibly torn from their necks); “possessing property while Asian” (California victims targeted in robberies; suspects tried to run over arresting officer with a loaded firearm and extended magazine in their car); “grocery-shopping while Asian” (two California women violently robbed at an Asian supermarket); “riding subway while Asian” (three Asian boys and a girl attacked by four girls on a Philadelphia subway train; Asian girl punched, stomped on, and shoved in the head against subway door).
(Other “while Asian” incidents are chronicled here, including a 75-year-old man fatally knocked to the ground and robbed while taking his morning walk in Oakland; an 84-year-old man fatally knocked to the ground in his driveway; a 67-year-old man kicked to the ground, dangled upside down, beaten, and robbed in a San Francisco laundromat; and an 88-year-old great-grandmother, beaten so brutally as to be unrecognizable and discarded next to a recycling bin.)
In virtually none of these “while Asian” incidents was the race of the suspects reported, because those suspects were black. The media not only omit a detail that would be automatic if the suspects were white but also compose a racial narrative about anti-Asian crimes and anti-Asian hate crimes that is wholly false: that it is whites who are the threat to frail, elderly Asians.
“While Hispanic” incidents would include: “defending one’s girlfriend while Hispanic” (Minneapolis man pistol-whipped and shot in chest for yelling at someone harassing his girlfriend); “working the cash register while Hispanic” (25-year-old female grocery store clerk beaten in Bronx by two females following argument over recyclables). “While trans” would include: “waiting for light rail while trans” (trans individual beaten by five individuals at Minneapolis light rail station; brain matter found on ground). But because the perpetrators in these attacks were black, the violence is taken as a matter of course.
The anarchy in American cities is carefully de-raced, whether the flash mobs that routinely maraud in shopping malls and down Chicago’s Magnificent Mile; the looters who plunder convenience stores and jewelry stores; or the Miami spring breakers who rape and kill. To name a suspect’s race when that suspect is black is virtually taboo, no matter the race of his victim. Let a white person assault or kill a black person, however, and the entire story will be about race.
This double standard and the fiction that blacks are under daily risk of their lives from whites do no one any good, least of all the victims of black crime. The Journal of the American Medical Associationrecently reported that in the first 18 months of the coronavirus epidemic (read: the post-George Floyd era) black juveniles 17 and younger died of gun homicide at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. If that death rate were due to whites shooting blacks, we would have heard about every one of those shootings. In fact, almost none were widely reported because they were overwhelmingly committed by other blacks. The race activists were silent; Biden was silent; the media were silent; the Black Studies professors were silent. Merely mentioning black-on-black crime guarantees the accusation of racism, as if facts are racist.
And so, with debate silenced about how to overcome the inner-city culture that spawns this dreary parade of drive-by shootings, those shootings continue unabated. This past weekend, six people got out of a car in the heart of Hollywood in Los Angeles and unleashed gunfire at a man and a woman standing in front of a convenience store. Less than a day earlier, shooting broke out at a Hollywood nightclub. Earlier in April, a 37-year-old was shot in the head on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On the other side of the country, in Baltimore this past weekend, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the groin, a 55-year-old was shot in the face while sitting in a vehicle, a 23-year-old man was shot in the back, a 25-year-old man was shot in the lower back and legs, a 19-year-old man was shot multiple times in the leg, and a 44-year-old was shot in the knee, all in separate incidents. On Monday, two men were shot. Ho-hum. Because Baltimore does not have the cachet of Chicago, this quotidian mayhem gets even less attention than Chicago’s.
Millions of blacks are walking around believing that whites hate and fear them so much that blacks are at daily risk of their lives from that hatred. This belief is the rankest fiction. Yet it is embraced and amplified by almost every mainstream American institution. We exist mentally in a counterfactual, alternative reality when it comes to race and crime. That alternative reality further poisons race relations, incentivizing more anti-white violence. It creates fertile support for the dismantling of law enforcement and of the meritocratic standards that are said to prop up white supremacy. It is time to unflinchingly pierce that fiction with the truth.
The estimated deaths from the COVID crisis are probably around ten million people or more
The World Health Organization estimates that (worldwide) there have been 763,740,140 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 6,908,554 deaths as of April 19, 2023. This does not include additional components of the excess mortality during the COVID crisis being documented by many in Western nations, for which scientists and the various governments seem to not know what the causative agent is, and no government seems to want to investigate… Although most will agree privately that these deaths are also related to COVID-19 “public health” policies in some way or another. These include deaths from lockdowns (famine, suicide, violence, alcohol, and drug abuse), long COVID, vaccine deaths, lack of medical care for cancer and other diseases, etc. All told the estimated deaths from the COVID crisis are probably around ten million people or more. Ten million people is a very big number. It is hard to even fathom.
For comparison, the largest natural disaster (excluding famine) of the 20th century was the Chinese Yangtze River Floods in 1931, which killed 3.7 million people both directly and indirectly, with many people dying from poor sanitation and diseases. In 1958, the Chinese Yellow River Flood killed around a million people, although estimates widely vary. Other floods, cyclones, earthquakes all killed countless people. But none did so with as much devastation to human life as was done by the SARS-CoV-2-WIV virus.
This disaster was man-made!
But we also know this was not a natural disaster; this disaster was man-made.
A list of genocides on Wikipedia shows that there have been no single human atrocities in the history of mankind that have come close to the deaths caused from the COVIDcrisis.
How do we “know this”? Because we have the receipts thanks to Judicial Watch, as well as the Congressional investigations – still ongoing.
This week, Judicial Watch received 552 pages from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). These documents include the initial grant application, biosketches, budgets and annual reports to the NIH from EcoHealth Alliance. They describe the specific aims of the project, which include creating mutant viruses SARS (and MERS viruses) “to better predict the capacity of our CoVs [coronaviruses] to infect people.”
I spent the afternoon reading these documents and the 552 pages are a gold mine of information. But the specific aim 3 of the contract is particularly important. It reads in full:
Specific Aim 3: Testing predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. We will test our models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments in cell culture and humanized mice. With bat-CoVs that we’ve isolated or sequenced, and using live virus or pseudovirus infection in cells of different origin or expressing different receptor molecules, we will assess potential for each isolated virus and those with receptor binding site sequence, to spill over. We will do this by sequencing the spike (or other receptor binding/fusion) protein genes from all our bat-CoVs, creating mutants to identify how significantly each would need to evolve to use ACE2, CD26/DPP4 (MERS-CoV receptor) or other potential CoV receptors. We will then use receptor-mutant pseudovirus binding assays, in vitro studies in bat, primate, human and other species’ cell lines, and with humanized mice where particularly interesting viruses are identified phylogenetically, or isolated. These tests will provide public health-relevant data, and also iteratively improve our predictive model to better target bat species and CoVs during our field studies to obtain bat-CoV strains of the greatest interest for understanding the mechanisms of cross-species transmission.
Later, they write (page 195):
we will assess potential for each isolated virus and those with receptor binding site sequence, to spill over. We will do this by sequencing the spike (or other receptor binding/fusion) protein genes from all our bat-CoVs, creating mutants to identify how significantly each would need to evolve to use ACE2, CD26/DPP4 (MERS-CoV receptor) or other potential CoV receptors.
It is important to understand that, although these quotes are technical and well beyond many to understand, the bottom line is that this project was and is gain of function research. In contrast to Dr. Fauci’s sworn testimony to Congress.
It is important to pull out these sections highlighting the gain of function research conducted that led to the deaths of millions of people. This is the only way I know of to make scientists, the courts and policy makers aware that this is not a conspiracy theory. This is real. That these deaths were caused by manslaughter.
The only question now is was this an accidental or intentional release of the man-made virus? Was it manslaughter or murder?
According the 552 pages released, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was so safe, there were assurances made to this effect and the facilities were never inspected by the US government. The risk of mutant viruses escaping the laboratory was never even discussed in the risks associated with conducting this research.
If it was so safe, doesn’t the intentional release of this mutant virus have to be considered?
This only gets worse. The year 2 report (2016) clearly states that AIM 3 for year 3 had been expanded to also include conducting gain-of-function research using the MERS virus!
Specific Aim 3: Testing predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. The following experiments will be undertaken in Year 2 (page 197)
-An infectious clone of full-length MERS-CoV will be constructed using reverse genetic method. Using the S sequence of different MERS-related viruses identified from Chinese bats, the chimeric viruses with S gene of bat MERS-related coronaviruses and backbone of the infectious clone of MERS-CoV will be constructed to study the receptor usage and infectivity of bat MERS-related coronavirus.
The MERS virus (MERS-CoV) is highly pathogenic. During the 2012 outbreaks, there were about 2,500 known cases and 800 deaths. If these numbers are correct, this would be a case fatality rate of 31%! MERS-CoV did not appear to be highly infectious, unlike SARS-CoV-2-WIV (the virus created by Ralph Baric/EcoHealth/WIV).
Note that the above passage includes references to creating new chimeric variants and linking them to the infectivity of MERS! Could you imagine if they also created a more highly infectious MERS virus, that they spread through out the world, like SARS-CoV-2-WIV? The devastation would be like nothing the world has ever seen.
Moving on to the 2017 report (page 253):
In Year 3, we successfully isolated Rs4874 from the single fecal sample. Using the reverse genetic system we previously developed, we constructed two chimeric viruses with the WIV1 backbone replaced with the S gene of Rs7327 and Rs4231, respectively. Vero E6 cells were respectively infected with Rs4874, WIV1-Rs4231S and WIV1- Rs7327S, and efficient virus replication was detected by immunofluorescence assay in all infections. To assess the usage of human ACE2 by the three novel SL-CoVs, we conducted virus infectivity studies using Hela cells with or without the expression of human ACE2. All viruses replicated efficiently in the human ACE2-expressing cells. The results were further confirmed by quantification of viral RNA using real-time RT-PCR (Fig.11).
The full-length infectious eDNA clone of MERS-CoV has been successfully constructed. The full-lengthS gene of 12 different novel bat MERS-related coronaviruses have been amplified and cloned into the T-vectors. In Y4, we aim to use the reverse genetic method, and construct chimeric viruses with the backbone of MERS-CoV and the S genes from diverse newly identified bat MERS-related coronaviruses, to examine the pathogenicity of bat MERS-related coronaviruses on cell and animal levels.
More gain of function research.
Moving on to Year 4 (page 275):
Specific Aim 3: Testing predictions of CoV inter-species transmission.
In Vivo Infection of Human ACE2 (hACE2) Expressing Mice with SARSr-CoV S Protein variants
Using the reverse genetic methods we previously developed, infectious clones with the WIV1 backbone and the spike protein of SHC014, W IV16 and Rs4231, respectively, were constructed and recombinant viruses were successfully rescued. In Year 4, we performed preliminary in vivo infection of SARSr-CoVs on transgenic mice that express hACE2. Mice were infected with 105 pfu of full-length recombinant virus of WIV1 (rWIV1)and the three chimeric viruses with different spikes. Pathogenesis of the 4 SARSr-CoVs was then determined in a 2-week course. Mice challenged with rWIV1-SHC014S have experienced about 20% body weight loss by the 6th day post infection, while WIV1 and rWIV-4231S produced less body weight loss. In th emice infected with rWIV1 -WIV16S, no body weight loss was observed (Fig. 35a). 2 and 4 days post infection, the viral load in lung tissues of mice challenged with rWIV1-SHC014S, rWIV1-WIV16S and rWIV1-Rs4231 S reached more than 106 genome copies/g and were significantly higher than that in rWIV1-infected mice (Fig. 35b). These results demonstrate varying pathogenicity of SARSr-CoVs with different spike proteins in humanized mice.
In the year 2020, it appears that the contract was revised and extended for an additional FIVE years!
For this period (2020-2025, it appears that AIM 3 on the cover page was re-written to remove any gain-of-function research from the proposal front page. It is as if they might think that they could be blamed for having conducted gain of function research that resulted in development of a virus that was released onto the global population! Seriously, the complete rewrite of AIM 3 on the new contract cover page to remove all allusions to the creation of mutant viruses has the appearances of a cover-up of one of the most highly lethal atrocities in the world.
Aim 3. In vitro and in vivo characterization of SARSr-CoV spillover risk, coupled with spatial and phylogenetic analyses to identify the regions and viruses of public health concern. We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential. We will combine these data with bat host distribution, viral diversity and phylogeny, human survey of risk behaviors and illness, and serology to identify SARSr-CoV spillover risk hotspots across southern China. Together these data and analyses will be critical for the future development of public health interventions and enhanced surveillance to prevent the re-emergence of SARS or the emergence of a novel SARSr-CoV.
It is interesting that deeper into the text, the proposal is a little more specific about AIM 3.
Aim 3: In vitro and in vivo characterization of SARSr-CoV spillover risk, coupled with spatial and phylogenetic analyses to identify the regions and viruses of public health concern. We will characterize the propensity of novel SARSr-CoVs to infect people in vitro using primary human airway epithelial cells and in vivo using the transgenic hACE2 mouse model. We will use mAb and vaccine treatments to test our hypothesis that SARSr-CoVs with 10-25% divergence inS protein sequences from SARS-CoV are likely able to infect human cells. and to evade mAb therapeutics and vaccines. We will then map the geographic distribution of their bat hosts and other ecological risk factors to identify the key ‘hotspots’ of risk for future spillover.
Note the use of the word “novel.” It is unclear if these novel mutants have already been “developed” (gain of function research) in prior years or whether they are to be developed.
Farther into the documents, they write (page 496):
3.3 Virus characterization: 3.3.a Construction of chimeric SARSr-CoV viruses: Infectious clones with the S gene of novel SARSr-CoVs and the SARSr-CoV WIV1 genome backbone using the reverse genetic system developed in our previous R01 (24). The correct infectious BAC clones will be screened by BAC DNA digestion with appropriate restriction enzyme or PCR amplification. The chimeric viruses will be rescued in Vero cells and then verified by sequence analyses.
The proposal goes on to describe how the chimeric viruses will infect primary epithelial cells and humanized mice (pages 496-497).
Yep! Nothing has changed. Deep in the text is the gain of function research that they still have left to do! It is just removed from the front page of the proposal.
The are no more annual reports – so whatever research has been conducted subsequently is not known past the 2019 annual report.
This research has to stop now. Congress must stop the funding immediately. There must be accountability. There must be justice for the injured and the dead.
There are ten million people dead from this research “project”. Do we need another man-made outbreak to fully grasp how dangerous this type of research is?
Just like Hunter Biden’s laptop was “misinformation” that turned out to be true. The “conspiracy theory” about the origin of Covid-19 has also proven true. –TPR
The Washington Post's editorial board has recently supported efforts to increase policing. (Oliver Contreras/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Winning. Washington Post calls for more police. Especially in cities like DC. All the MSM was calling for the defunding of police. Most called for a citizen type social worker group replacing them.
Now the Washington Post has finally admitted that it doesn’t work. More police is the answer.
WaPo editorial board shifts view on ‘Defund the Police’ since George Floyd riots: DC ‘needs more officers’
Recent editorials from the Washington Post changed the publication’s “Defund the Police” perspective with calls for increased police presence in the D.C. area.
On Friday, the paper’s Editorial Board published a piece arguing “Why police officers need to be in D.C. schools.”
“Many cities yanked officers out of schools while reassessing policing after George Floyd’s 2020 murder. However well-intentioned, the experiment has left kids more vulnerable and classrooms less safe amid surging youth violence. That’s why a notable number have already reversed course — including, in this region, Alexandria and Montgomery County. Other jurisdictions, from Boston to Phoenix, are actively debating whether to follow,” The Post wrote. “D.C. should join them.”
However, the Washington Post was one of many media outlets that entertained the idea of defunding the police after the death of George Floyd in 2020.
“Weeks of sustained anger and grief after the police killing of George Floyd have reignited a public debate over police brutality in the United States. Alongside demands for police reform, another demand has surfaced: Defund the police. This provocative slogan at its most constructive represents a welcome call to reimagine public safety in the United States,” a June 2020 editorial stated…
“Rethinking which institutions truly serve public safety and imagining new ones should be part of that conversation. This work is arduous and demanding — as many community organizers who have been doing it for decades can testify. But no one ever said reimagining public safety would be easy,” The Post wrote.
A police department in New Mexico released body camera footage that shows officers fatally shooting a homeowner after they responded to the wrong home.
“All of us – the men and women of the Farmington Police Department – recognize the severity of this incident,” Farmington Police Department Chief Steve Hebbe said in a statement posted to the department’s Facebook page.
“We will do everything we can to ensure a fuller understanding of what took place,” the statement added. “I believe that the footage will help to provide a greater understanding of what transpired.”
Officers with the department were called to the neighborhood on April 5 at about 11:30 p.m. over reports of domestic violence.
The bodycam footage of the incident, released Friday by the department, shows responding officers walking up to the front door of a home with the house number illuminated under a light. The video shows police knock three times and identify themselves as officers.
After there is no response at the door, one of the officers asks dispatch to confirm the address of the home and to tell the person who called 911 to come to the front door. Dispatch states the address of a house across the street from the one where officers responded.
Moments later, the homeowner, who was armed, opens the door and officers are seen shooting him. The homeowner is seen dropping to the ground.
The officers back away from the home, and a woman screams from inside the house, the video shows. Police said the homeowner’s wife was also armed and fired shots from the doorway, not knowing who was outside. Police returned fire, but the woman was not injured, officials said.
Dispatchers also received a frantic phone call from the daughter of the deceased homeowner.
“There were gunshots in the house and my dad is dead,” the daughter told 911, according to CBS News.
Sirens were heard soon after the gunfire ended, according to the video.
“Help! Somebody shot my husband. Please! Please! My kids are upstairs,” the wife of the homeowner is heard in the background pleading with officers.
The three unidentified officers involved in the matter were placed on administrative leave. The investigation into the shooting is ongoing.
“Once again, we wish to express our condolences to the Dotson family and as your chief of police, I wish to convey how very sorry I am that this tragedy occurred. We will continue to provide updates as we are able,” the police chief added in his comment.
Nowhere do I see any indication here that he actually fired at the police. The wife did shoot back after he was shot, but she couldn’t see who was shooting at them either. Since the pictures are so well-lit, those lights they were training on him must have been blinding.
Fire these jerks. Yes, police hate domestic calls for good reason, but they already knew that they had gone to the wrong house. (The fact that both husband and wife were armed suggests this was not the best of neighborhoods to be banging on someone’s door after people are in bed.)
What does President Trump, The Leaker, and Joe Biden have in common? All three had top secret documents. Only President Trump had top secret documents legally. Biden and the leaker had those top secrets illegally.
Also President Trump had the power to declassify the documents. Biden and the leaker did not. President Trump had the documents in a locked secured location where you had Secret Service Personnel on site.
President Trump did not release the documents to the public. The leaker did, and with Joe Biden, who knows. Biden wouldn’t remember if he did. And remember when sked about the documents, Biden at first denied it than said they were in his garage on the floor in boes secured.
Heather Mac Donald – On Uncomfortable Truths About Policing And Crime. After hearing about the work MacDonald has done and the books she’s written, I feel this interview from 2021 is still relevant today.
In the fifth episode of High Noon, Inez Stepman speaks with Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, who almost certainly has more police community meetings under her belt than any reporter at The New York Times, about rising crime in America’s cities.
Stepman and Mac Donald discuss the reality of who is most often victimized by high crime rates, lay out a defense of meritocracy, and address critiques of the Enlightenment from the left and right.
High Noon is an intellectual download featuring conversations that make possible a free society. Inviting interesting thinkers from all parts of the political spectrum to discuss the most controversial subjects of the day in a way that hopes to advance our common American future.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we discuss controversial subjects with interesting people. Today, our guest is Heather Mac Donald. Heather is a fellow with the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor to its magazine, City Journal, and a New York times best-selling author. Her most recent book is The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. And her previous book is The War on Cops, which we’ll also be discussing today.
Her columns have appeared everywhere, including The Wall Street Journal and New York Times and all the other usual suspects. Heather is no stranger to speaking bluntly and engendering controversy, including in this high new conversation. I think one of her most admirable qualities is her total fearlessness to discuss anything and everything as long as it’s backed by sound data.
In this episode, we discuss the reasons for disparate police interactions with Black Americans, including whether the narrative about racial discrimination or bias in policing is born out by the underlying facts. Heather predicts that unfortunately I suspect she’s right, a violent upcoming summer for us all, especially those of us who live in urban areas with rising crime rates in most of American cities.
She also talks about her experiences at many, many high crime neighborhood police meetings and how the complaints she hears at those meetings differ wildly from what we read in the newspapers. My favorite description of Heather, it I came from a recent Manhattan Institute event, I believe where she was dubbed the freest woman in America. Heather, welcome to High Noon.
Heather Mac Donald:
Thanks. Who said that? That’s new to me. I don’t know-
Inez Stepman:
It was reported back to me from somebody who attended, was one of the first live events, I guess and apparently somebody described you that way at that event. I was like, “That’s a really good description,” because you are just unafraid to say. If you see something in the data or you see something as true, you are totally unafraid to say it. But let’s get into it.
It’s taken as obviously true these days that Black Americans are justified in being afraid of police brutality. Do the data underlying justify the presumption that Black Americans are disproportionate danger from police violence when they walk out the door?
Heather Mac Donald:
No, it’s ridiculous. The whole key to the anti-cop rhetoric is they use the wrong benchmark that compare police activity to population data. That’s completely irrelevant; you have to look at crime data. When you take crime into account rents and violent crime Blacks are actually far less likely to be family shot by the police than whites. The raw numbers are these in as every year, the police shoot about 1,000 people. That’s been remarkably constant over the last five years when the Washington Post has been scouring media reports to try and come up with a complete number.
Whites make up about 50% of those 1,000 police fatal victims of police shootings each year. Blacks have averaged between 23 and 27% of fatal police shootings. Now, that is larger than the Black population, which is about 12%. Nevertheless, as I say, the population is always the wrong benchmark. Blacks, although they’re 12% of the population, 15% in the 75 largest counties commit about 60% nationwide of homicides, shootings and robberies.
And it is the chance which an officer is going to encounter an armed, violent resisting suspect that predicts his own use of fatal force. So when you take crime rates into account, Blacks are by no means at risk from the police. What they’re at risk for are these insane drive-by shootings, where you have kids rolling down the street, opening fire at houses, at parties, and people’s backyards.
Black children are getting mowed down by the dozens to not a peep of protest from the Black Lives Matter activists, or by the press, or by the democratic politicians. That is what is leading Blacks to have a 13 times higher death by homicide rate than whites when you look at the ages between 10 and 43. 13 times higher, they’re being killed by other Blacks at that 13 times higher rate.
Inez Stepman:
You’ve heard personally a lot of these stories because you’ve probably spent a lot more time at these community policing events than most of us have. What are you hearing in some of those meetings that you’re not seeing in the media, that you’re not seeing politicians talk about? How do actual communities, whether they’re Black communities or just other high crime neighborhoods, how are they relating to the police in these community meetings versus how those relationships are portrayed in the media?
Heather Mac Donald:
I’ve never been to a police community meeting in a high crime area where I do not hear the good law abiding residents who show up to these meetings, beg for more police protection, they want more police activity. They want the police to do precisely the things that the ACLU says is racist. They want the police to get the drug dealers off the corners. They want them to get the kids that are fighting by the hundreds on corners off the streets.
In South Bronx, somebody said, “They’re hanging there like birds, whatever happened to loitering laws, whatever happened to truancy laws.” I heard somebody complain about smelling weed in his hallway. So they want the cops to crack down on marijuana smoking, because those people that live in high crime neighborhoods understand that street disorder, public disorder is the seed bed for more serious forms of violence like knifings and shootings.
And they also understand that public is an end in itself. I’ve never heard people say, “We want less police.” I’ve always heard them say, “We want more police.”
Inez Stepman:
That lines up with surveys and national polling that there was reported, if very quietly, reported about some of these issues. But what are the effects of law and order breakdown? Unfortunately, going into this summer of 2021, we are looking at rising crime rates in a lot of American cities. It’s looking like always the summer is usually worse for crime generally and this summer is probably going to be a bad one.
Are we moving towards a sort of Latin American style society where the rich simply essentially hire themselves private protection and the rest of us have to fend for ourselves in a environment of rising crime? What do we expect as people, I guess… I’m now in New York city, what should urban Americans expect in the coming summer in terms of crime rates and in terms of response from the police?
Heather Mac Donald:
They should expect anarchy. It’s going to get very, very bad. There will inevitably be a police shooting because the cops are confronting increasingly emboldened suspects, guns are being carried around without any fear of getting stopped because the cops are not getting out of their car. So at some point, the cops are going to confront an armed, resisting suspect. You’re shooting at him, they’ll shoot back, they’ll kill somebody. There will be riots. And the situation is already out of control.
The rise in crime we’ve seen since the George Floyd death and the riots over the summer is astounding. Last year we saw the largest percentage increase in homicides in this nation’s history and it’s gotten worse in 2021. The lie that the media says is that it’s all because of the pandemic and all of these poor kids who are out there shooting each other in their drive-bys because of their can’t eat because of pandemic, famine or something.
This is ridiculous, it has nothing to do with the pandemic. It’s all about deep policing. There has not been a comparable rise in homicides and shootings in Canada or in Europe, which have had even stricter lockdowns than we have. This is all about what happens when you demonize the cops, when cops go fetal as Rahm Emanuel, once said in 2015 during the first iteration of what I called the Ferguson effect, when officers also were backing off of proactive policing after the Michael Brown riots. And now it’s gotten even worse.
The thing that I find amazing though is that by and large, this crime increase has not impinged upon the national consciousness. The Democrats are still talking about the police. It’s extraordinary. The number of people killed by the police this year is minute compared to the Black children that have been gunned down by Black gang bangers. But the public turns its eyes away for several reasons.
One, because we feel guilty, we feel embarrassed by elevated rates of Black crime. We don’t want to just consider what the causes may be. Is it cultural? Is it something else? This is not how a white supremacist country acts by the way. A white supremacist country would not feel ashamed of itself for Black crime. It would be talking about it all the time. But nothing is going to change because it turns out the media for all of its pretenses of being woke and left wing, which it is, it doesn’t give a damn about Black lives.
It is been silent about the two children in Minneapolis, nine and a 10-year-old who were shot in the head over the last two weeks who are now on life support and a six-year-old who was shot most recently, who died. They’ve said nothing about that. The only thing that is going to change the public attention is when white kids start getting shot, that’s when the media will pay attention, and that’s when the bulk of America will pay attention.
As long as the crime remains concentrated in Black neighborhoods for a variety of reasons, America does not really care that much.
Inez Stepman:
That’s definitely something that we… You’re right, the media doesn’t cover it. I would say, even on the right, there’s a certain reluctance to talk about that underlying reality and the fact that there are a lot of victims, Black victims of this crime that their voices are not represented largely in the media. I would condemn the right for this as well, in terms of cowardice, not wanting to talk about. Data isn’t racist, facts are not racist.
There could be any number of explanations for why we see those disparities in crime, and we can have the societal conversation about… I worked in education reform for many years, we are still assigning kids to schools based on their zip code. And a lot of schools in minority neighborhoods are appallingly bad. There’s all kinds of policy conversations we could have about this, but we can’t even start that conversation unless we acknowledge the underlying fact and reality, and then try to build from there.
But you wrote The War on Cops in 2016, and you mentioned the Ferguson effect and all of that. It seems like it’s gotten a lot worse since then, since last summer, since the riots that happened after George Floyd’s death. I read a piece the other day that said that 20% of the Seattle police force has actually quit. And the guy in the department that was giving the statement for the department said, “That’s definitely underestimating it, not overestimating it because there’s a lot of people using up their vacation time, using up their sick days before they leave the force.”
And just on a personal level, a friend told me a story about his friends, so I guess this is a friend of a friend’s story. But his friend is a police officer and recently turned in his badge. And he did it the day after he received a call to a neighborhood where there was a knife fight between two Black men. And fortunately, when he pulled up, everybody’s scattered and he realized very easily in that situation, I could have appropriately had to use my gun.
And then my name would be in the papers and my life would be essentially over, even if I was acquitted, even if I completely appropriately did my job. And the next day he walked in and decided, I’m doing something else in my life, this is not worth it. How are we even going to find capable police officers to take this job in the future? Isn’t this going to make police violence worse if we have to basically desperately recruit people who may or may not be qualified or may or may not have the kind of training that is necessary for these kinds of extremely tense and dangerous situations?
Heather Mac Donald:
Yes. Recruiting has been over for a long time, and you’re absolutely right, lowering standards is not the solution, but of course that’s been the official policy of the Obama administration and it is as well under the Biden administration with this idea that police forces should be “diverse,” defined by skin color. When that push was underway, most strongly under the Obama administration, what that meant was junking criminal background, the requirement have a clean criminal background because that had a disparate impact on Blacks.
Of course, that’s not a good thing to have people come in to the force that have been involved in crime, above all, in drugs. Long time ago, a police commander who’d worked in the Soundview section of the Bronx, which is where Amadou Diallo was so infamously shot in 1999 in New York said that in his experience, Black and Hispanic rookies don’t break ties with their neighborhood the way traditionally generations ago, white officers would understand that when you become a police officer, you have to start a new life.
Any connections you’ve had in the past that may compromise you, those have to end. And now things are much more informal and police officers, especially Black and Hispanics may continue and hanging out with the people they did before that makes life difficult. There’s also been a push in order to diversify police forces to lower cognitive requirements, because any kind of reading or math test inevitably has a disparate impact on Blacks and Hispanics, so we’ve been junking those requirements.
All of this is unbelievably short-sighted. There’s no evidence that Blacks have a lower rate of using lethal force. In fact, a study done under the Obama administration in Philadelphia found that Blacks and Hispanics have a higher rate of what’s called threat misperception, which means an officer mistake somebody’s cell phone for a gun and shoots. So the push to diversify forces at the expense of higher standards of recruiting is insane.
But now, you’re up against the rhetoric of the defunding movement and the voluntary attrition on the part of officers. Officers are saying, anybody they know, don’t even think about going into this profession because you’re a racist from the moment you step on the job, the amount of hostility that officers are getting on the streets now is overwhelming. Yeah, I don’t know how you get out of it, whether we need the army or something to come in. It may come to that and we’ve seen that.
You had the militarized zone during the Derek Chauvin trial, not a good sign for the rule of law when a jury operates under such a real and completely valid perception that if they don’t convict, there will be riots happening across the country.
Inez Stepman:
Since we’re talking about this and it’s hard to say, but I almost… When I was looking at the evidence for the Chauvin trial, I actually came to the conclusion that there was a pretty strong case for even second degree murder, I think you wrote somewhere, it was definitely not an open and shut case. There was definitely countervailing evidence in that case, but I was almost relieved to find that it wasn’t a crazy stretch of a verdict in my view, my review of the evidence.
It didn’t seem like it was a completely stretch of a verdict because I was worried exactly that it could be influenced in that way. And of course, we’ll never know if it were, but it’s like it’s never a good sign for the rule of law that I felt relieved reading the evidence that actually there might be a serious case for murder two here. That jurors probably felt the same way, that officers of the court probably felt the same way. That’s not good as you say, for, for the principles of due process and the rule of law.
Heather Mac Donald:
Right. Yeah. It’s going to be very hard going forward. The riot ideology, the threat of Black violence is always in the back of our minds at this point, and officers know that as well. That’s another disincentive from staying on the job or going onto the job in the first place.
Inez Stepman:
How do we get away from… Because it seems like the underlying assumption, whether it’s tests applied to recruits or whether we’re talking about the disparate crime statistics. How do we get away from this underlying assumption that if there’s a disparity, that it’s due to discrimination? Because it’s not just in matters of crime and race that we see those kinds of underlying assumptions going completely unquestioned. It definitely go on question with regards to sex as well.
I’m sure that in all the other identity categories that are endlessly being multiplied by one section let’s say, of the left, I’m sure that’s also true with regard to those categories. I’ll give you the most clear encapsulation of that side’s argument that I’ve ever heard. It was a policy colleague not at IWF, not working alongside me, but just in the same field. And she said that we would have equity, because I was trying to push her on, what is equity? What does it mean to have a fair world?
And she said that we will achieve equity when your background, your immutable characteristics or your family have. All of those things have zero predictive statistical power over your outcomes. That doesn’t just sound like impossible to me, that sounds tyrannical. How do we get away from this idea that if there are any differences in outcomes between massive categories, that it’s always discrimination that is to blame and not any variety of… The factors involved here are almost endless.
Heather Mac Donald:
Yeah. I guess I just think we have to be able to look at behavior and talk about behavior, and notice that there are huge behavioral differences say, between Black students and their families and their attitudes towards schooling, and Asian students and their families and their attitudes start schooling. So race is predictive of that, but is that because of racism or is it because there are cultural differences that predict the massive academic skills gap?
I just am not willing to turn away from behavior. I would say that’s the big dividing line between liberal or progressive or left-wing way of understanding the world in a more conservative one that the liberal or the left-winger is always going to see large structural forces at play, and the individual is basically helpless. Individual choices don’t matter, behavioral choices don’t matter.
Whereas the conservative is more likely to talk about personal responsibility, the famous success sequence for avoiding poverty, which is graduate from high school, work full time at any job, and don’t have children until you’re married. 75% of the people who follow that formula regardless of their family background will not end up poor. And so, I refuse to abide by the taboo that you cannot talk about the fact that inner city classrooms are chaos.
And yes, we can blame the teachers’ unions all we want, and I would say teachers’ unions have shown themselves to be positively evil during the coronavirus shutdowns and there for hysteria about their own vulnerability with children who are not susceptible to the virus. Nevertheless, for all, you can talk about the lousy schools and whatnot, the parents in those lousy classrooms are not insisting that their children learn.
They’re not insisting that they take their textbooks home, that they pay attention in class, that they respect their. The other end of the spectrum again is Asians where the parents are utterly fanatically involved in their children’s upbringing. They are making sure that they do their homework, that there’s quiet in the home for them to learn two instruments, the violin and the piano, and those behavioral differences matter.
I proposed as thought experiment in the Diversity Delusion, which is that if Blacks acted like Asians for 10 years in all things that bear on success, whether it’s school behavior, not getting involved in drugs, gangs, not having out of wedlock child-bearing and we still saw the socioeconomic disparities that we do, even though the behaviors were equal. At that point, I’m going to join you in talking about systemic racism.
But when the behavioral gaps are so yawning, it is way premature to talk about systemic racism as the only allowable explanation for disparate socioeconomic outcomes.
Inez Stepman:
We’d have a whole conversation about education, but it’s… I worked for the past 10 years alongside a lot of people who run or teach in high performing charter schools, in urban environment’s oftentimes teaching a population of students that’s not only majority Black and Hispanic, but also majority single parent homes, majority low socioeconomic status. And they say that the first few years of the child being in the school, they’re primarily dealing with exactly what you might call bourgeois values.
They’re primarily saying, “Okay, you need to learn how to show up on time. You need to learn how to be prepared to learn in the classroom,” and that’s before. They can then, after months or sometimes years of essentially instilling a very, very strict school culture, then we find that these students within that culture are finally able to academically succeed, so they have some… I’ll probably have one of them on at some point to talk about how difficult that process is, but it is possible.
But it requires an enormous investment in terms of exactly providing that bourgeois success sequence, kind of culture in an environment where it has largely dissipated and disappeared. But some people would tell us that we should not have this conversation. That you and I are two white ladies and we should not be talking about race, or culture, or critiquing in any way differences between cultures and in different groups of people.
We don’t have, I hate this phrase, the lived experience in order to have this conversation. What’s your response to that?
Heather Mac Donald:
I reject that idea completely. Race should have no bearing on the ideas that any individual is allowed to broach on the investigations into human reality. And the fact of the matter is, is that there’s absolutely no inhibition on calling whites white supremacists, the white privilege, white fragility, whites is the source of endless oppression and mental and emotional exhaustion for Blacks. And whites turn the other cheek and say how unifying this rhetoric is when it comes from President Biden, it’s quite remarkable.
In any case, I’m not going to suppress what I know to be the case. Far from being a white supremacist country, there isn’t a single mainstream institution in the land, whether it’s a corporation, a law firm, a big tech company, a government, a university that is not twisting itself into knots to hire and promote as many Black and Hispanic candidates or students as it can. Managers are being promoted, given bonuses based on their rate of promoting Blacks.
There’s not a single university that’s minimally selective in this country, where being Black does not confer enormous privilege. The idea of white privilege is ludicrous in the face of this. Blacks are admitted to selective colleges with test scores and GPAs that would be automatically disqualifying, if they were presented by a white or Asian student. So if a Black activist tells me that I cannot describe aspects of the world that contradict the narrative of white supremacy being the only allowable explanation for socioeconomic disparities, I’m just not going to accept that because there are too many empirical facts that are crying out to be noticed.
Inez Stepman:
There’s somebody on Twitter, Zayid Julani, I’m hoping I’m saying that right. He tweeted out this really fascinating study. Unfortunately, it was a very small study, but I hope that it’ll just replicate it at a larger scale because I think it’s really interesting with regard to what you’re saying here. He said that, “A sense of victimization and supremacy are linked. When you think of yourself as a victim, make that your entire identity, you can’t think about other people’s welfare, or their feelings, or your responsibility to others.”
There’s a huge psychological element and here, I think this conversation is way, way broader than race. For sure, there’s an aspect of this that touches on sex and sex differences, and virtually any aspect of our identity. There seems to be such a huge psychological pull in our discourse and in our society these days towards the kind of cache of victimization, that seeing oneself as a victim.
I was actually reading Frederick Douglass earlier today in preparation for something else and It contrasts so strongly somebody who actually undeniably was subjected to some of the worst forms of brutality that the human race has ever conceived. This is somebody who was born in slavery, had to teach himself how to read and write on the basis of… And was against the law when he did that. He could have been punished very harshly for that and was able to come out of that circumstance and still see the beauty of the American system.
Initially he did not. Initially, he agreed to with the Nikole Hannah-Jones of the world, which is to say that the institutions of the United States, the constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the ideas contained in it, he came from essentially the Nikole Hannah-Jones” position, which is, these things are themselves white supremacy and a cover for white power to believing that the constitution was the greatest anti-slavery document ever created and seeing the truth and universality of those ideas.
How is this psychological element of… I think it’s two aspects. One is there’s a clear ignorance aspect of how things were and still are throughout the world, sort of utopian baseline, like we’re working backwards from perfect equity versus, I don’t know. As a conservative, I look at it from the ground up and I’m like, “There’s been a lot of night. Life is nasty, brutish and short for most of human history.”
And we were able to build a multiethnic, a diverse free republic in the United States that undoubtedly has its Black marks, but those aren’t the remarkable bit to me. How do we talk people out of this psychological mindset, where they see themselves as Americans? I would say, we all have American privilege here and instead of looking at that through that lens at their lives in America, they’re looking through a lens of, I would say, almost invented victimization at this point.
And again, this is way broader than race, right? It’s almost like people are inventing categories to then place themselves into a victimhood position. What is so appealing about victimhood and how do we talk people or how do we convince people that coming out of that kind of mentality is both good for them and good for society at large?
Heather Mac Donald:
It’s power, and as long as a society confers power on victims, and this is sort of a chicken and egg question, it’s hard to know where you break the link. But you’re in a situation where both sides are enabling each other. Where the victim groups are asserting power against this phantom white supremacist majority, the white supremacist majority is chest beating and saying, “Oh, you’re absolutely right. You are sanctified by your victimhood, we are guilty,” and the cycle continues.
As long as the establishment kowtows to this and says, “Yes, we’re responsible for all the problems in this country or in the world,” then why would anybody give up that power of victimhood? It’s an amazing thing. You just get to, being female is an accomplishment, being female is your power, being Black is your power. There’s people in academia, they specialize in being Black. That is their accomplishments and they go around informing everybody else about how awful it is to be Black.
It’s the same with being female or being gay. These are not accomplishments. I do not view being female as an accomplishment. It is, as far as I’m concerned, probably the most trivial aspect of myself. What is important is what one knows, what one has learned, what one’s intellectual curiosity is. But you’re right, people are inventing phantom ways of being victims. I just finished a piece about the drama division in the Juilliard School in New York, which is most famous for its music conservatory, but it also has a drama section and a dance section. And the Black students there are on the warpath claiming they’re victims.
There was a Black professor, gave a workshop in the roots of the American spiritual and the influence of Black music on American culture, that had a auditory recreation of a slave auction in Africa. The Black students claim they have been tortured unto death by hearing this audio recreation and the school is kowtowing before them. This was preceded by a whole set of demands about how awful it is to be a Black student at Juilliard in the drama division, even though Juilliard’s student body for drama is 50% Black.
That is only accomplished due to massive racial preferences. Given the 12% Black population in the United States at large, these are not victimized people. These are extraordinarily privileged people and yet they have the administration on the run, kowtowing to them. As long as mainstream institutions continue to take this line, we’re not going to get out of it. People have to stop saying, “I apologize. You’re right, I’m a racist,” and defend the institutions of American civilization and Western civilization against the phony charges.
You’re absolutely right, Inez, the rest of the world would be in much worse shape, if not for European civilization. It would be still racked by slavery. There’s still slavery in many parts of the world. There would be no female rights anywhere, there would be no religious toleration. These are all products of the secular enlightenment tradition. And frankly, as grotesque betrayal of the nation’s founding ideals that slavery and decades of Jim Crow were unquestionably, unquestionably blind on American’s part, callous on American’s part, cruel, hypocritical on Americans’ part.
We were founded on ideals that were unique, and we have by now virtually lived up to them. We are the anti-racist country, we are so ready to be post-racial. At this point, for our current situation, we have nothing to apologize for.
Inez Stepman:
You mentioned the enlightenment. The enlightenment is coming under critique now from both ends, so both parts of the political spectrum. You have the left critique that you just laid out, let’s call it the critical race theory critique. The stamp from the beginning critique from Ibram Kendi that says, “Enlightenment ideas are mere,” not even mere covers, but they themselves are the genesis of racism.
And then you have on the right, a totally different critique of the enlightenment, which is to say that, the individualizing or atomizing forces within rationalism or an enlightenment thought about, let’s say liberalism, small L liberalism, liberal systems. That it has eroded some of these foundational structures within society like churches, like families. That that individualization has of turned into atomization and that’s where a lot of our modern problems originate.
What do you think about the critiques? There’s a person rejecting the critiques from the left with regard to the enlightenment, do you think there’s any validity to the critiques from the right about the enlightenment?
Heather Mac Donald:
I just still have to say about Kendi that this is just insane. Africa is tribal, there’s tribal genocide, there’s mutilation of females. There is absolute brutal warfare. The idea of a nation state or of a universal humanity is not tribal. That is again, those ideas of equal rights, the idea of rights itself is a uniquely Western concept of protecting the individual against either the tribe, which is a primitive form of social organization or against a central government.
So, the idea that somehow reason is responsible for tribal genocide or cultural genocide is completely absurd. As far as the right-wing critique, yes, it’s very much based on a revolt against secularism, against toleration. And I would just say that try going back into the 16th, and 15th, and 17th century with religious wars. We now live in a world formed by enlightenment ideas of toleration and secularism.
And so we think of religion as an unmitigated good. Because religion has been told to mind its manners and sit quietly in the corner and you do not have Catholics and Protestants clubbing each other. You do not have pogroms against Jews. And the extraordinary hatreds that were engendered in the pre-enlightenment world, where religion was viewed as a truth that nobody dared question.
So within its constraints of toleration for different faiths, yes, religion can be very positive. But again, toleration is not a religious value, it is an enlightenment secular value. Religion is necessarily triumphalist. It believes it has the single answer. It is truth. It is not relativistic and it does not necessarily, except now, maybe we’ve got lots of kissy wissy between Jews and Christians. That’s wonderful, thank God for it.
But that is not the history of the relationship between Jews and Christians until very recently. Now we talk about the Judeo-Christian tradition. That’s not the way they thought about it. Jews were viewed with hatred by Christians, all of the blood libel, extraordinary hatred. So I would not be willing to go back to a pre-enlightenment world, as far as whether the breakdown of the family is a result of the enlightenment possibly, possibly the celebration of the individual.
I would also say that capitalist affluence plays some role in the empowerment of teenagers, of adolescents. And the fact that we are so wealthy that we can afford to subsidize single mothers, rather than cast them out from the village because the village is a subsistence level and can’t afford to support a single mother and her child. So there’s a lot at play, but I would say we should hold on to the enlightenment values that we have and then try to support through empirical evidence, more traditional values like the two-parent family, which is again, not inherently at odds with enlightenment values.
Inez Stepman:
For this last question, obviously, the ideology that you’re describing in terms of being unwilling to look at data or disparities without assuming that it’s a result of discrimination, whatever… It’s funny, there’s so many words for these, but each time that we try to nail down a word for what is now, I guess known as the woke or as John McWhorter calls it, the elect.
Before that they were social justice warriors, which is something they came up with for themselves just like woke, but they became negative terms. And then they got stretched beyond their usefulness, I think. But let’s call them woke for the sake of the conversation. We’ve seen this push from the woke left move very aggressively into institutions. You mentioned that there isn’t a single tech company, there isn’t an agency, government agency, there’s not a school, there’s not a major media outlet. Those on the right are accepted, but it’s like, let’s say legacy traditional media like the New York Times or any of the major channels like CNN or MSBC.
It seems like this has happened quite quickly in terms of the takeover from what might be called maybe more traditional Democrats or the previous left to this kind of woke ideology. But in the last year, we’ve also seen the formation of a much more vigorous movement pushing back against that. Especially we see that with regard to critical race theory in schools. We’re seeing parents form organizations, come to PTA meetings, come talk to their school boards.
We’re seeing a huge push for school choice, I think related both to the pandemic and to the radical stuff that’s being pushed into schools. Given the balance of those two things, are you an optimist or are you a pessimist about the American future, given that we agree on the difficulty of the project?
Heather Mac Donald:
I’m torn between what the narrative or performative convention is here and my gut instinct. In such a setting, one is supposed to be optimistic. Viewers want to come away with hope, and for the sake of your podcast I should be such. And you’re absolutely right to point to these instances of people fighting back. There’s been times over the last couple of months when the white bashing has gotten so extreme and so constant, and so loud, that I’ve thought that maybe it will finally rouse people to say, “We’re not taking this anymore. We’re not accepting this narrative that whites are to blame for everything.”
And I’m sorry to use the white word. I know it’s a taboo word, but it’s one that’s wielded by the left, so I’m not going to banish it from my lips because that is their category, not mine. So I’m just going to use their category and say that at some point, the idea that whites are the root of all evil should provoke a backlash in some form or another. Maybe you’re right, this is going to happen.
It is a race against time though, because every year that colleges are still up and running and too bad the pandemic didn’t completely knock them back on the ropes as many of us were hoping at the start of this, would have been the only silver lining. It turns out that the elites are coming out stronger than ever with higher than ever numbers of people applying, which is just absolutely nauseating.
So the dynamos, the engines of this hatred for Western civilization continue pumping out every single year, new classes, new graduates that are bringing this ideology into corporations throughout mainstream and mainstream America. So it’s a race against time, and I’ve been observing this for four decades now and it has only gotten worse. It’s not the case that this is a recent phenomenon, it’s been going on for many years.
Nobody paid attention to it, they called it the snowflakes. These are silliness in college. People laughed it off, they thought it was cute. It was never cute. These people were pathetic, but they were being empowered by the adults around them and they were clearly going to bring that into the world at large. So I don’t know. The past four decades have given me no grounds for hope, but maybe there will be finally the long awaited uprising, where people take their history back and take their civilization back.
Whether the growing crime will cause that to change, I don’t know, but I can only hope. I admit that I am not hopeful, but that is part of my nature not to be helpful. So I’m not a completely neutral judge on this. But I hope you’re right, Inez that there’s a growing momentum that can withstand the silencing by big tech and by big media.
Inez Stepman:
This was a safe space. This podcast is a safe space for pessimism. Heather, thank you so much for-
Heather Mac Donald:
Thank you.
Inez Stepman:
… joining High Noon today. It’s been a pleasure to have you.
