Black Lives Apparently Don't Matter to Democrats Who Use Them As Cannon Fodder in Pursuit of Power

America is being destroyed from within.  The Republic is being demolished by the Swamp, the borg of pernicious politicians, entrenched, politicized bureaucrats, media elites and academics who wield environmentalism and equity as truncheons to obliterate individual freedom, economic opportunity and the rule of law.  The recent episode of hypocrisy onMartha’s Vineyard demonstrates with crystal clarity the universe the elites of the Swamp create as they make laws that apply to peasants but no to the aristocracy.

Columns documenting the machinations of the Swamp are legion, but this is not one of them.  No, this piece is specifically about the destruction of the rule of law that the those elites have unleashed on said peasants, specifically as it relates to violent crime.

This past week New Orleans reclaimed the title of America’s deadliest city after seeing murders jump 141% over the last couple of years.  In New Orleans the murder rate is a staggering 52 per 100,000 people.  That compares to the national average of 6.9, the highest it’s been in a quarter century and the 50 per 100,000 of Venezuela, the most dangerous country in the world.

If New Orleans were an outlier it would be a shame, the fact that it’s not is a tragedy:  New York, Chicago, Portland, LA, San Francisco, Philadelphia and more. Big cities and small, crime is up across the country over the last two years, in most cases, dramatically.

We’ve always had crime in America.  Such is the price of freedom.  But what we are experiencing today is something altogether different.  It’s not just crime.  America can sometimes be a dangerous place.  Everyone knows working the midnight shift at a convenience store carries more risk than working the 9 AM shift at your local library, just as common sense tells you the odds of getting into a fight in a bar on a Saturday night are far higher than they are at church on Sunday morning.   

And just to be clear, this is not Antifa thugs and BLM cultists burning down cities.  Protest, even violent protest has been part of American history since its founding and largely is event driven like Shay’s Rebellion, the Vietnam War protests, or the riots after the killing of MLK or the acquittal of the police in the Rodney King video.

No, this is something different.  It’s one thing to rage against the machine, it’s another to commit violence against citizens, particularly when they are unsuspecting innocents or compliant victims.  And this is the issue today and we see it taking place across the county, from urban jungles like New York City to Midwestern communities like Salt Lake City.

What America’s experiencing today is exponentially worse than the typical crime that America is used to, and the truth is, most of it – but far from all of it – is being perpetuated by young black men, although increasingly, by young black women as well. 

Violence is being taken not only to a new level in terms of its frequency, but in the application as well. It’s not taking place in dark corners or deserted parking lots, but rather right in the middle of regular hustle and bustle of American’s daily lives.  It’s taking place in broad daylight, in full view of video cameras – often with others videoing the carnage to share on social media.  Violent, brutal crime is taking place on main street USA, in schools, drugstores, fast food restaurants, subway platforms, high end retail stores, and of course homes. 

We see large groups of young people blitzing stores and grabbing merchandise off shelves and running out with smiles on their faces.  We see “shoplifters” methodically clear store shelves of merchandise and simply stroll out the door, unconcerned about getting stopped or arrested and often assaulting employees along the way. 

What’s more, there’s an element of violence that seems unprecedented in its scale.  Almost daily we see random innocent people on subways or on stairs or in restaurants getting shoved or kicked or punched. We see fast food workers attacked as customers come over or around counters and spark mayhem.  We see bus drivers attacked and shop owners beaten and cops spit on. Indeed we see countless instances where robbers beat or shoot victims even after they have taken whatever they were after.  We also read daily of innocents of all ages killed in the crossfire while sleeping in their beds, standing in a bar or sitting in their cars. 

There also seems to be a racial element to this new crime wave with black perpetrators targeting a disproportionate number of white or Asian victims… but make no mistake, the single largest group of victims of this crime wave are black citizens. 

The question is, why is all of this this happening?  What is it that has caused an increasing number of black Americans to believe that they can rob and beat and even kill their fellow citizens with impunity? There are no doubt countless contributing factors, from missing fathers to failing schools to social media, but those problems (at least the first two) have existed for quite some time. No, the reason for the sharp jump in violent crime and unhinged behavior on the part of large numbers of primarily young black Americans is the Democrat proposition that everything bad that happens to blacks is a consequence of racism and as such, they’re not responsible for their choices and therefore they should not be held accountable for their actions.

Ronald Reagan once said, “If you want more of something, subsidize it…” and that is exactly what the Democrats have been doing with violent crime.  While they are not yet directly paying criminals to attack their fellow citizens and rob local businesses, they are subsidizing crime nonetheless.   

On the one hand George Soros backed Democrat prosecutors from coast to coast are demonstrating their pro criminal empowerment bonafides by refusing to seek bail for most arrestees, refusing to prosecute countless misdemeanors and simultaneously undercharging countless violent crimes as said misdemeanors. While on the other hand you have Democrats effectively decriminalizing an entire swath of crimes or eliminating bail for almost every offense.  Indeed, the lunatics running Illinois have just passed a law that eliminates bail for virtually every offense below 1^st degree murder and prohibits police from arresting or removing trespassers caught in the act of burglarizing a home or business.  That means that if someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night and you call the police, if you’re lucky enough given the Democrat “Defund the police movement” that they respond while the trespasser is still there, they are literally not allowed to remove them from your home…

All of this is happening exactly when America’s cultural and political elites are telling young black Americans that the system is rigged against them, that they’re incapable of succeeding when playing by the rules, that most white people hate them and if they break the law there are no consequences to be had.  That is literally a recipe for the collapse of society. 

Today in Democrat run America, it’s only the rights of criminals that matter, never the victims… and the fact is that most of the victims of this American renaissance of violence are, in fact, black Americans, the very people Democrats pretend to care about.  Democrats have leveraged the fictions of “systemic racism” and millions of “white supremacists” running around to accumulate power, and Americans of all races are paying the price.  But this is exactly what happens when politicians pursue policies of balkanization and victimization, setting groups of Americans against one another for the purposes of gaining power.  The Democrats thrive, their grifter partners thrive and America’s citizens suffer. 

America was founded on the principle that all men were created equal in the eyes of God and in the laws of man. While the execution of those truths have been imperfect from the beginning, it has consistently improved for over 200 years, bringing Americans freedom and prosperity unmatched in human history, and that includes black Americans, who make up fully 8% of American millionaires.  Democrats, in half a generation have undone 200 years of progress and created a violent cage match between demographics in the public square, and the result has been a body blow to civil society, mayhem in cities, and blood on the streets, and most of it black.  But somehow black America continues to vote Democrat in Stalin like numbers. Perhaps they should reconsider…

Arguing with Leftists is an Exercise in Futility...

Last week Dan Bongino talked about the pointlessness of arguing with the left. He said something like “We think the left are simply people with bad ideas while the left thinks we are simply bad people…” He went on to say that while pointless in terms of trying to convince the person with whom you’re “arguing”, it’s worthwhile because others, who may be open minded and paying attention, might be persuaded.

This was driven home to me via a Facebook discussion that started out with a friend’s cartoon suggesting CRT is an innocuous addition to the teaching of American history that shows some of the darker chapters.

My response was: “No one opposes teaching history, warts and all. I studied slavery, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, Chinese workers basically in servitude to build the RR and more. You keep mischaracterizing CRT as just teaching the negative side of American history. It’s not. The heart of CRT is that the US is systematically racist and minorities can’t succeed. That’s fiction and you know it.”

Which started a firestorm from a friend of my friend, from which I’ve excerpted:

It’s apparent that you gained little insight from your studies. If they didn’t touch on the racist systems that led to those events occurring, you obviously got the sanitized, white washed version where the savagery and downright inhumanity to any non-white man BY white men was totally excluded. Just like your fellow GOP white Supremacists, there is NO reality that y’all can’t bend to save your false sense of identity that you’re superior to all non- whites and European genius and goodness is the only reality there is.

American Slavery was different and worse than any other slavery in the History of the World. It’s the only slavery where the slaves were dehumanized. No other slavery treated the slaves like a horse or a chicken.

To which I responded:

It’s true slaves were treated as property, but in fact, slaves in the American south were largely treated better than slaves in South America and the Caribbean. One major reason for that was the Constitution’s ban on the importation of slaves after 1808. Slaves therefore became far more valuable than they were in the rest of the Americas and it was to nobody’s benefit to work them to death. That is, very unlike Brazil, the Caribbean and elsewhere where slaves were cheaply imported and therefore expendable. The truth of this can be seen in the fact that 94% of the slaves brought to the New World went somewhere other than the United States, but by 1860 2/3 of the slaves in the New World were in the American south.

He continued: The effects are still being felt today when George Floyd’s murderer gets 22.5 years for killing a black human being but a black man killing a Police DOG recently was sentenced to 45 years. That just shows that the dehumanization of black folks specifically males is baked in to American society. The ONLY ones who are treated like human beings are the exceptional negroes who make it through systemic racism baked into every institution in America or those who entertain white folks in music, TV or sports. And even they can’t say anything bad about America or their lives could get turned upside down.

Wouldn’t it be nice if American Europeans tried to dismantle this system and rectify the damage? The boost to our economy through reparations alone and the good will gained worldwide as America denounces its past and pledges to make amends would truly place this nation at the top as it stones for its sins. But, white America collectively isn’t interested in any of that. It’s only interested in the maintenance of white supremacy for various reasons, not the least of which is white genetic survival, power and greed.

After more futile back and forth, I decided to take a different tact:

Let’s try a thought experiment... Imagine everything you said is true about programs being stacked against minorities. What do you do to fix them? Reverse discrimination? How about reparations? Who pays? Who gets what? Who decides? Does Obama pay or does he get money? Do recent African or Caribbean immigrants get money too or only people who can trace their lineage back to slavery or even Jim Crow? What about black families who owned slaves? Do the million or so black millionaires get money too? When are things as they should be? What's the measure? Will every company or classroom or board have to reflect the pigment hue of the country as a whole? Will it apply to everything from police to janitors to ditch diggers to the NBA and the NFL? Will all of this change the unwed birth rate in black America? Is murder still to be considered a crime as half of the offenders in the US are black males despite the fact that they make up only 6% of the population? Since reparations will make everything even do we do away with welfare programs that disproportionately benefit minorities?

Or, maybe all of us could be grateful for the fact that today virtually every one of us is extraordinarily lucky to live in a country that allows so much freedom and opportunity that millions of people literally risk their lives to come here every year and probably half or more of the rest of the world would happily change places with almost any American.

He responded: In other words, you’re just another psychotic white Supremacist and it makes NO sense trying to REASON with a psychotic.

To seek to evade all responsibility or accountability for the greatest crimes against Black humanity in history is the mindset of a Savage…PRETENDING to be civilized. Someone who cares nothing about Honor, truth, civility, fair-play OR in obeying their OWN laws, let alone those of God.

White Supremacy has made most white folks, LIKE YOU, spiritual MONSTERS to be able to say stuff like that with a straight face and sleep like a baby at night. There lies the entire problem of Racism in America which is a power dynamic that only WHITE AMERICANS have. Blacks can’t be racist towards you because we haven’t set up systems of power that can destroy the lives of you or your family. White folks do that to blacks ALL the time.

It was clear he was not really interested in ideas focused on making life better for black Americans,  but rather extracting revenge in the form of reparations from the whites who by definition are racists and guilty.

This is why Biden is in the White House, other than the fraud, obviously. Democrats have become the party of grievance, the party of victimization. If they can convince a group they’re victims, they never have to actually accomplish anything. The focus is always on past failures or some other strawman that rational policies simply cannot be allowed to address. It’s the ultimate in maintaining a grip on power. Why ever address policy failures or “unintended” consequences, when it’s so much easier to simply craft a grievance that can simply never be addressed. For Democrats that’s a recipe for success. For America it’s a recipe for disaster.

The Real Tragedy of the George Floyd and Daunte Wright Stories

America is on the verge of anarchy. Every time a black man is killed by police the community finds itself on the edge and the nation wonders if an inferno is about to erupt. This reality dovetailed with a meme I saw a few days ago: “The Biggest Change Since Rodney King is the Video Quality”. While video quality has improved, one thing that hasn’t changed is negative outcomes from resisting arrest. Some of the names Americans know that demonstrate that include: George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Rayshard Brooks and Michael Brown. If the media were being honest they would characterize these encounters as what they were, black men killed while resisting arrest.

In every one of these cases and many others, the men who ended up dead resisted arrest, sometimes violently. According to policeviolencereport.org there were 268 black males killed by police in the United States in 2019 (the last normal year prior to Covid). Of that number, 212 or 79% were armed (allegedly) while 182 or 68% were attacking the police (allegedly). Of the 32% who were not actively attacking the police, most were carrying on other actions such as resisting arrest, holding weapons they wouldn’t drop or attacking other people. For comparison, during that same year the numbers for white males was 415 killed with 298 or 68% armed and 281 or 68% attacking the police. An interesting note about that comparison is the percentage of black males killed who were “unarmed”, 21%, is actually significantly lower than that for white males, 32%.

It’s difficult to get a complete picture of what’s going on in America by simply looking at numbers. Luckily we also have videos, including many of the death of George Floyd. While there is much going on in those videos, one thing that is clear from them is that Floyd was resisting arrest. One can make the argument that the police were too physical for too long, but the fact is, he was on the ground as a direct result of his actions. Similarly, Dauante Wright lunged back into his car.  

Many people say that Floyd was subdued or that Wright wasn’t a threat, but the fact is no one knows. As the case of Rayshard Brooks demonstrates, things can go from calm, even collegial to confrontational in a split second. Just last week in New Mexico a suspect was conversing with a cop one moment and killing him the next.

The circumstance that America finds itself in today is the result of a purposeful manipulation of American citizens. The facts are that while black men are killed by police at a higher rate than their proportion of the population, they are killed by police at a lower rate than their proportion of perpetrators of violent crime.

The truth is, 700,000 police officers interact with Americans approximately 75 million times a year. Of those 75 million interactions, typically about 1,000 citizens are killed by police. That is a death rate below 0.002% per encounter, which means that 99.998% of police encounters pass without a death. Put another way, out of 1,000,000 Americans, 3 will die each year at the hands of the police. Compare that to 18 from texting while driving, 121 from suicide, 757 medical mistakes, and 2,000 from heart disease. At the hands of police: 3, and most of those were armed and attacking the police!

One of the things that gets lost in all of this propaganda is the job that the police do. They interact with citizens 75 million times a year. Someone stealing from a store, passing counterfeit bills or assaulting someone. There are domestic disturbances, auto accidents, speed stops, bar fights etc. In all of those circumstances and myriad others, police willingly walk into a situation with the goal of everyone exiting the encounter alive. They put their lives at risk every day for people who in most cases they don’t even know. Of course that’s the job they signed up for so it’s not a surprise, but that doesn’t make it any less courageous.

They of course don’t always get everything right. Police are human and make mistakes and there are bad cops and racists too. We've probably seen videos of cops behaving badly, but the fact is, overall, cops do an outstanding job. If they didn’t, 99.998% of encounters wouldn’t end with everyone emerging alive. There’s almost nothing in human existence that’s that successful, and that number is made that much more extraordinary because a significant number of those encounters include citizens who are armed, violent, callous and perhaps on drugs.

In the face of this widespread assault on them, the police are still expected to do their jobs, and do them perfectly. In going into situations where tensions are already elevated, where bystanders may be distracting or even interfering and where everyone seems to be filming, police are expected to comport themselves flawlessly despite elevated adrenaline and likely experiencing some combination of anger, confusion, fear, disorientation, exhaustion and more. All of this while a subject may be striking them, pointing a weapon at them, reaching into car or simply resisting arrest. Yet they are still supposed to respond perfectly every time. They don’t of course, but overall they do a pretty good job. How many of us when faced with citizens calling us “Pigs” spitting on us or striking us, or even shooting at us would be able to rein in all those emotions and perform perfectly in every instance? My guess is that most of us would fall far short of the performance most police demonstrate.

And the rarely mentioned secret (but easily observed common sense fact) is that the very communities where leftists are calling for the defunding, reimagining or disbanding the police are the very communities who benefit most from their presence. The police pullback has a cost. Murders are up in Portland 255% over the last year in Portland. Chicago 65%, New York 58%, Louisville 87%, Minneapolis 64% and LA 51%. And who exactly have been the victims of that increased murder rate? Black Americans, the very people BLM, Antifa, Democrats and the media ostensibly are seeking to protect.

The truth of the matter is that Floyd, Wright, and Brown would likely be alive today had they not resisted arrest. But that’s not the story that Democrats want to tell. Because telling young black men, or anyone, that respecting the police and not resisting arrest doesn’t make news headlines, doesn’t galvanize citizens and most importantly, doesn’t drive voters to pull the levers for Democrats.

And that’s the key. The reality is, Democrats don’t care about black Americans. They seek power and are willing to sacrifice black Americans to get it. By creating the fiction that black Americans are in the crosshairs of the police they have done an extraordinary disservice to America. The real lesson to be learned by the Floyd and Brown incidents is not that police are shooting black men with abandon but rather resisting arrest or engaging in a violent confrontation with police leads to bad outcomes. The challenges of urban America are legion, from terrible schools, limited job opportunities, and violent crime, and the fiction proffered by the left addresses none of those. What’s worse, it takes any energy that might be available to address those real problems and focuses it on addressing a fictional issue. And that’s the real tragedy here.

Why America is on the Brink of Civil War...

If you’d have asked me even six months ago what the chances of the United States being on the verge of a civil war I would have said probably under 1%. Today I think that number is much closer to 25% and maybe even higher.

Why is that? Simple. Democrats, media and academia…

I grew up on the Navy base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was a small base but there were a million things to do. Horseback riding, year round sports, a bowling alley, four pools that I can remember, game rooms, gyms, motocross, hiking, scuba diving, surfing, half a dozen outdoor movie theaters – it almost never rained! - karate tournaments and spectacular parades and midways for 4th of July. Cable TV hadn’t reached us and of course the Internet hadn’t been invented so we spent our time actually doing things… I loved virtually every minute of it, but despite being in something close to nirvana, there were people who hated it and were miserable.  We find what we're looking for.   

We often get out of life what we are expecting... are you a glass half full or a glass half empty person?  This question explains why America is at the brink of civil war.

We look around and see people burning down our cities, destroying public and private property, disrupting life for millions of Americans who are simply trying to go to work, eat their lunch or shop at a mall. We see people chanting “F the Police”, “No justice, No Peace” holding up “Black Lives Mater” signs and calling everyone and anyone who doesn’t agree with them racists. We see in New York, LA and countless other cities thugs shooting cops, beating civilians and feeling entitled to do so the whole time.

How did we get here? Very simple. We’ve had decades of the Democrat / Media / Academia Industrial Complex telling Americans that the country is racist. That Republicans don’t care about the poor. That Christians are homophobic. That whites have privilege. That America is rife with systematic racism. That cops hunt down and kill unarmed innocent black males with impunity. And of course that if you are a person of color you have no control over your life and the system will not allow you to succeed, regardless of the hard work you put in, the education you achieve or the virtuous life you lead.  In essence they have been proffering the notion that not only is the glass half empty... but that the other guy took your glass and poured half your water into his glass and then poisoned what's left in yours.  

It is upon this decade’s long backdrop of despicable lies that the same group, along with the Obama holdovers in DOJ, has spent the last four years telling us that Donald Trump is a racist bigot. That Donald Trump was bought and paid for by Russia. That Donald Trump is guilty of abuse of power with respect to Ukraine. That Donald Trump is a power hungry fascist who seeks to make himself king by stealing the election and disenfranchising minority voters.

Of course, none of those things are true. None of them. But that has not stopped the media, academia and the Democrats from shilling each of them, repeatedly. And the result is, you have young people – mostly young, but not all by any stretch – who today see exactly what they have been told to see, exactly what they expect to see. If you are told that you can’t succeed regardless of the life you lead, regardless of the hard work you do, then it’s not unexpected that you would want to tear down the system that has boxed you in.

The fact that all of the bile that the Democrats have been spewing for decades is not true is of no consequence. The fact that the media blatantly paints a picture that is demonstrably false 24 hours a day, seven days a week is of no consequence. The fact that leftist hack academics have rewritten American history through the perspective of their 21st century woke lenses, is of no consequence. The only thing that is of consequence is power… Democrat power. Nothing else matters. As such, if burning down cities is the cost of power, so be it. If putting targets on the backs of police is the cost of power, so be it. If undermining the basic elements of common courtesy, politeness and civic order are the cost of power, so be it. If destroying the life's work of shopkeepers and the jobs of workers trying to provide for their families are the cost of power, so be it.

What you are seeing in the streets is not protest, peaceful or otherwise. What America is experiencing is the beginning of a civil war, only one side has not yet awoken to the fact that it is involved in one. Civil wars don’t have to last long nor be bloody, but they can be, and this one might be. But it doesn’t have to be. Stopping it will take no only a firm response by police and the government, but more importantly in the long run, it means expunging from academia the anti-American fascists who have been rewriting American history as a march through hate and oppression and racism. It means discrediting and marginalizing the manipulative media cabal that proffers the “blame America first” or “America is racist” fictions as they seek to drive up temperatures. Finally it will take a party, whether it’s the GOP or some new entity, that finally stands up for the United States and embraces its history, both good and bad. They must be willing to recognize that America is indeed an imperfect place, as it has been since its founding, but that it gets better decade after decade and has done more to advance the condition of mankind than any nation in human history. They must know and be willing to say that the United States is the greatest nation in the history of human civilization and that there is more freedom here, more opportunities here and more prosperity here than anywhere on the planet. That with hard work one can make a better life for himself, for his family and his community.

Imagine what a country could do if those were the ideas that young people were being exposed to every day. Imagine if they expected to succeed… if they expected to be treated fairly… if they had gratitude for our freedoms and what others sacrificed to give it to them. Imagine they understood they are living in a time and place most people in history would have traded their souls for and millions of people risk their lives for every year.

Tell young people their lives aren't theirs, they can't succeed and racism is everywhere and they will believe it find it around every corner.  Tell them racism and other evils exist, but they live in the land of opportunity and their success is in their hands and they will succeed despite the roadblocks.   Couple that glass half full on steroids mindset with America’s bounty and the opportunities are infinite.

The Driving While Black Meme And Other Fictions Fueling The Burning of Cities

Ever since the protests of the killing of George Floyd began, the phrases “America is a racist nation”, “Institutional Racism” and “White Privilege” seem to have become ubiquitous. The sad thing – among so many others about all of this – is that these seem to be considered the end all and be all for some who are engaged in the debate. The reality that cops are 18 times more likely to be killed by a black man than they are to kill an unarmed black man… Doesn’t matter. Institutional racism! The fact that the poorest 20% of Americans are more prosperous than the average European… So what! America is a racist nation. That blacks make 8% of America's millionaires… Obviously white privilege.

We’ve been hearing for at least the last 30 years that America needs to have a conversation about race. But how are we supposed to have such a conversation when one side is not interested in facts? How are we supposed to address real problems if rather than focus on facts and data one side only wants to focus on anecdotal evidence? For example, cops and race. one can certainly appreciate that different people have different experiences with cops. Race is no doubt one of many factors that impact how those experiences play out. But everything else does too. Everything from height to girth to behavior to dress to politeness to language and countless other variables, verbal and non verbal all play a role. Race may even be one of the major factors, but it is far from the only one or even likely the primary one. Most – though not all – of the videos we see where someone is hurt or even killed by cops, whether the person is black or white, involves some level of conflict such as resisting arrest, ignoring warnings or things of that nature. Cops can and do make mistakes, but most interactions not only don’t end up with someone dead on the sidewalk, they don’t even end up with an arrest.

Not sure about that? Here’s the data. According to the FBI, in 2015 of 250 million Americans, 53 million of them had contact with police, one half of those initiated by police the other half by citizens. Of police initiated contacts 11.2% of whites had some interaction with police, while 11.3% of blacks did. The numbers remain consistent whether the person earned $24,000 or less a year or $75,000 or more a year.

We’ve often heard about the phenomena of the extraordinary perils of “Driving while Black”. The data don’t support that charge either. The percentage of white drivers who experienced a traffic stop: 8.6%. The percentage of black drivers: 9.8%. The percentage of stopped white drivers to receive a ticket: 46.4%; black drivers: 49.9%. The percentage of white drivers who were arrested as the result of a traffic stop: .3%. The percentage of black drivers who were arrested as the result of traffic stops: .5%. What these numbers mean is that out of 1,000 white drivers, 86 could be expected to be stopped by police and 3 could expect to be arrested. Of a similar number of black drivers, 98 could expect to be stopped by police and 5 could expect to be arrested. Further, of those traffic stops, 96.1% of whites believed that police had a legitimate reason for stopping them while 94.5% of blacks did. Finally, FBI data from 2008 show that of those who had contact with police, the average number of times a white person interacted with police was 1.7 times while for blacks it was 1.6 times.

These numbers tell a vastly different story than the one being told on the streets and in the media. These numbers indicate that most Americans, regardless of color have no contact with police during any given year, and even if they did, they face a tiny chance of being arrested. The differences in being stopped by police while driving, getting a ticket or getting arrested as a result of said stops varies only slightly between races. The number of multiple contacts between police and citizens is almost identical between races and is slightly lower for blacks.

Of course any conversation on race police would include other data like the fact that black males make up 6% of the population but represent 53% of known homicide offenders and commit about 60% of robberies.  And a wider conversation would include factors such as income and wealth gaps would be part of any such discussion as well as the impact education and unwed motherhood have on poverty rates. But it's the relationship between race and police that are animating the events of today.

As such, the overarching question is, do these numbers tell a story of a nation policed by an army of inherently racist storm troopers where blacks are oppressed by virtue of the color of their skin? No they don’t. Differences in the data do exist, but they are staggeringly small… but differences exist everywhere between people of different sexes, heights, weights, skin tone, amount of acne, hair and simple beauty. Not to mention religion, education, income as well as less distinct things like assertiveness, shyness, personality and level of politeness… The cornucopia of characteristics that impact our daily lives is almost infinite and race is but one of them, and a small one at that.

At the end of the day the data indicate that there is no significant bias on the part of police contacts with citizens based on race. Certainly nothing sufficient to warrant the burning of cities and neighborhoods across the country. Given that, one has to ask, what else might be going on here?  That something else is the media’s hatred for Donald Trump and BLM and the rest of the victim industrial complex’s desire for power. For them, burning the country to the ground is just another means to their ends of extinguishing individual liberty, crushing capitalism and most of all, getting rid of Donald Trump.  That's the real story that the data tell.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Part I

We are watching the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse attempt to destroy the United States and everything it stands for. Never in American history has such a cabal of cultural and political players banded together with the specific purpose of undermining not only the serving president of the United States but the very fabric of the country itself.

The idea of American Exceptionalism has been with this country since its founding. The American Constitution was the first constitution in history where the government was granted limited power and was explicitly barred from infringing on specific rights of citizens and the governed. From the beginning the premise and reality of limited government and individual rights such as free speech, exercise of religion and private property created a virtual – albeit imperfect – Eden of creativity and experimentation that changed the face of the world.

Whether it was Cyrus McCormick inventing the mechanical reaper, JD Rockefeller driving the petroleum industry, Bill Gates putting a computer on every desk or Steve Jobs essentially creating the mobile revolution, the United States has done more to bring prosperity to the world than any nation in human history. And it’s not even close. Add such government led endeavors such as winning World Wars I & II and the Cold War, putting a man on the moon, inventing the Internet and mapping the human genome and it’s clear that the United States is the most consequential nation that has ever existed on the planet Earth.

None of this suggests the United States is or has been perfect. It’s not today and it never was… but as Winston Churchill once noted “…it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” We’re of course not a democracy, but in this case his words apply to our republic.

Any objective analysis of human history will clearly demonstrate that, while no doubt standing on the shoulders of giants, the United States has led a march that has done more good for more people than any nation in history.  From more prosperity, more freedom and more opportunity to less poverty, less war and and more democracy, life on earth today is spectacularly better for a higher percentage of the world's population than has ever been, and much - but not all - of that was driven by the United States, both as a nation as as a result of the efforts of individual Americans or those working together in one corporate form or another. 

Image:  www.deviantart.com/packwood

But in 2018 none of that is relevant. What is relevant is that America (i.e. conservatives or Republicans) is racist. America is sexist. America is homophobic. America hates Muslims.

Of course none of those things are true of the United States. While a small minority of individual Americans may carry one or more of those characteristics, America as a nation does not.  (Even the very left leaning Southern Poverty Law Center says there are only between 5,000 and 8,000 KKK members in the United States today.  That's out of a population of 320 million, or .000003%.  Compare that to the 3-6 million KKK members the United States had in the 1920s.  That was out of a population of 115 million, or fully 5%.  An equivalent number today would be 16 million klan members... vs. the reality of 5-8,000.) 

America as a nation is none of those things.  On the contrary. Minorities of every sort have more opportunity to succeed in the United States than in any nation on earth. As an example, the average income for black American households in 2016 was approximately $38,500 in 2106. That is over 7 times the $5,300 of Botswana, the highest average HH income on the continent of Africa. At the same time it’s almost 60% higher than the Bahamas’$24,603 the highest HH income of any majority black country in the world. Similarly, gays in the United States are largely able to live their lives as they choose without fear of being jailed, thrown off buildings or executed as they might be in many countries.  Women attend college at higher rates than men and half of the Fortune 500 was founded by immigrants or their children.

None of this means that there is no hate in the United States or that minorities do not encounter challenges. There is hate, but there is hate everywhere on every continent and in every nation where humans live. There always has been and always will be, at least until we’re replaced by machines without hearts and brains. But that fact does nothing to alter the reality that the United States offers more people more freedom and more opportunity for success than any place on the planet ever has. And that is fundamentally because of our Constitution based limited government, our free markets and, frankly, the American spirit that drove the country to simultaneously take on and defeat the Nazis and the Japanese at a time in history where it looked as if they would take over the world.

All of that is imperiled today by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who are together seeking to destroy everything that made America great in the first place. These Horsemen are: 1) Hollywood and the Mainstream Media 2) Social Media 3) Unions and the Education Industrial Complex 4) The very real Deep State.

Identity Politics - Barack Obama Fails Black America With Liberalism

In 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president, much of America – including millions of white people – thought the election of a black man to the presidency would prove that America had finally overcome its racist past and truly become a colorblind nation. Alas, that was not to be.

Not surprisingly, after almost eight years of America’s first black president, America is still a racist place… maybe even more of one. At least in the eyes of the Black Lives Matter movement, Colin Kaepernick and thousands of “protesters” around the country and their millions of fans.

The reality is, the United States is fundamentally not a racist place. It does have some elements of a racist past, (as do most countries) and there indeed may be vestiges of racism that remain, but they are largely gone from the public square. Much of what passes for racism today is nothing of the sort. Constantly we hear community activists – including the one in the White House – tell us that high unemployment in the black community is indicative of racism, that higher incarceration rates among black men is indicative of racism, that poor inner city schools are indicative of racism.

None of those things are true. All of those things are problems, but they are not signs of racism. They are mostly signs of bad decisions by the people living in black communities… mostly in the form of voting for Democrats and liberals, who've long run most of the nation’s largest cities where a majority of black Americans live.

While slavery and Jim Crow most certainly are stains on American history, the problems bedeviling black America today are not the vestiges of some racist system stacked against it. No, a significant number of the problems disproportionately impacting black Americans are the result of liberalism. Union and Democrat control keep urban students stuck in expensive, failing schools. Increases in minimum wage rates keep unskilled and poorly educated black youth unemployed and without work experience. Welfare programs encouraging single motherhood have pushed the rate at which black babies are born to unwed mothers from 20% in 1960 to almost 75% today. The brilliant Thomas Sowell states: The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life. And with the breakdown of the family came an increase in crime and social unrest. Combined with the destruction of education and a regulatory leviathan that suffocates entrepreneurship, blacks in America face daunting challenges. But it is big government liberalism that keeps the deck stacked against them, not racism.

And Barack Obama has been nothing if not a paragon of liberalism. Not only has he dramatically increased both government spending and costly regulation, but he has also been a champion of identity politics. And divisive identity politics has not worked out well for black Americans under Barack Obama. By many objective measures black Americans are worse off today than they were before Barack Obama became president: Black incomes are down since 2008 and poverty rates are up. Black homeownership is down and while unemployment rates are ostensibly lower, factoring in the lower Labor Force Participation Rates makes it a wash. And most tragically of all, murders are up since Barack Obama became president, with 6,782 black Americans murdered in 2008 vs. 7,039 in 2015.

All of this on the backdrop of a presidency that has at its core race. By putting race and “racism” front and center of his presidency, Barack Obama failed the country, and most of all black Americans who looked for him to bring about positive change. His big government policies have dramatically slowed economic recovery and hindered growth, the two keys to prosperity for all Americans, black and white. His constant focus on race has divided the nation more than at any point since the 1960’s. His promises that to improve the lot of black Americans while simultaneously implementing programs that make their success that much more difficult has created a level of frustration not seen in decades. His constant embrace of the social justice perspective against that of law and order has brought back the riots on a scale not seen since the 1960s and a dramatic increase in lawlessness that disproportionately impacts communities of color around the country.

At the end of the day, Barack Obama’s presidency has been an abject failure, for the country in general and for black Americans in particular. Identity politics may play well in the media and in the streets, and sometimes at the ballot box. But alas, where it counts most, economic freedom and prosperity, it never works. Barack Obama was once heralded as the poster child for opportunity in a post racial nation. Now he is a poster child for the failure of identity politics. Economic freedom, opportunity and prosperity don’t care about your race, your sex your religion or your sexuality… they seek limited government and laws that apply to everyone equally. None of which applies to liberalism and identity politics. Let’s hope that history records the failed presidency of Barack Obama is the high point of those cancerous ideologies…

Do Black Lives Matter? No, Apparently, Not Unless They're Good For The Race Pimp Business.

For the last two years the phrase “Black Lives Matter” has been a rallying cry for those who suggest black lives don’t in fact matter to whites or to the police. In seeking to make sure that no one misses the point, across the nation citizens just trying to go through their everyday lives have been subjected to restaurant sit ins, manufactured traffic jams and various other protests. As annoying as those activities are, the movement has become entwined with a more sinister trend, delegitimization of police.

From Barack Obama’s “The police acted stupidly” to Bill de Blasio’s suggestion that the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” program was racist to Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby’s invoking the thug mantra “No Justice, No Peace” as she indicted six police officers for the death of Freddy Gray, black Americans have been endlessly warned that the police are the enemy. They have been told that the police are racist and that the criminal justice system will provide them with no justice at all.

The consequences of this indictment of the police and the criminal justice system are exactly what you would expect. Police have been targeted, literally and lethally, across the country. From getting shot while sitting in their patrol cars, to getting attacked with axes as they stand on the street, to being swarmed as they try and make arrests, police today have targets on their backs like never before. Such is the obvious outcome from government officials and race pimps telling blacks that the police are the enemy.

That, however, is not the only outcome that was predictable as the false narrative behind the Black Lives Matter movement took hold. There is another, even more sinister tragedy that gives lie to the words themselves: skyrocketing crime and the flowing of black blood in the streets in places like Ferguson, New York and Baltimore. And, most of that blood is shed neither at the hands of whites or the police, but usually at the hands of other blacks.

As police have their authority and legitimacy challenged, the citizens of the neighborhoods they police have become targets and victims. Murder rates have jumped in NYC under de Blasio as police feel neutered. In Baltimore, as police have become fearful of doing their jobs, black citizens are paying the price as shootings and murders skyrocket and anarchy reigns.

Conservatives don’t typically suggest that every cop is a Boy Scout. The killings of Walter Scott and Akai Gurley are certainly troubling and rightly raise flags. And there are still many questions that remain about the circumstances of Freddie Gray’s death. But, thankfully, those deaths are news because they are so rare. Of the tens of millions interactions police have with black Americans each year, only a tiny fraction of them result in wrongful bloodshed or inappropriate behavior. Indeed, most of those interactions are with blacks who have been victims of crime or who are citizens seeking help from police.

But when police become the enemy, they cease to be able to provide the basic service they are intended for… fighting crime and preserving the peace. As crime victims are disproportionately black, when police become less effective, blacks disproportionately pay the price. To put that in perspective, following the April riots in Baltimore, where Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told police to stand down so that rioters could have space to “destroy”, May saw an unprecedented jump in violent crime, with shootings up 72% from the previous year and murders reaching 43, more than any month since August, 1972. And most of those victims were black... and the hands of other blacks… but those lives don’t seem to matter to the liberals and the race pimps who are using the extraordinarily rare deaths of black men at the hands of police to decimate the entire criminal justice system.

While we’re told that “Black Lives Matter” what apparently is really the case is that only some black lives matter… those who give liberals and race pimps a platform upon which to enrich themselves or increase their power. The black lives of men, women and children who die at the hands of black criminals emboldened by the neutering of the police… not so much. And unfortunately, the latter outnumber the former exponentially.

"Mr. Smith, do you still beat your wife?" and other lies the GOP must contend with in order to win in 2016

The lies of the left drive American politics. For years we heard the “Bush Lied” mantra chanted endlessly. It didn’t matter that the claim was wrong. A lie is a very specific thing… Saying a falsehood when you know it to be wrong. Bush never did that. While in retrospect the question of Saddam’s WMDs is unclear, at the time George Bush, Bill Clinton and the intelligence agencies of most of the world believed he did. There is a difference between being wrong and lying… but the left doesn’t care about truth when a lie better serves their purposes, whether it’s WMDs, the “rape culture”, the “war on women” or blaming Benghazi on a video.

Two illustrative examples can be found in Ferguson, MO and Indiana. One was the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” meme that played itself out everywhere from the House chamber to the NFL and countless places and broadcasts across the country. Of course the basic premise was a complete lie, and an easily known one at that, but that didn’t matter. There was little hard reporting by the mainstream press to illuminate that fact because it supported their political agenda.

Similarly a similar scenario played itself out on the national stage recently when Indiana passed its Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Across the mainstream media and the left (sorry for being redundant) cries of discrimination could be heard. The suggestion was that the RFRA would allow any business to choose not to serve gay customers simply because they were gay. That was a lie. The legislation did nothing of the kind. It simply protected from suit or prosecution those whose believed their religion was against gay marriage and therefore declined to participate in the wedding or its various supporting activities. The difference may be subtle, but it’s distinct. Not that that matters to the left because fealty to the truth are foreign concepts to them.

Why does any of this matter? Because government responds to the voices of the people, eventually. We got the disaster of Obamacare because the left convinced enough people that the failures of the healthcare marketplace were due to insufficient regulation, despite the fact that the opposite was true. We got Dodd-Frank because the left convinced enough people that the financial collapse of 2007 / 2008 was due to a lack of regulation when in reality the opposite was true. Even now Barack Obama is ramping up his push of the fictional “global warming” agenda because he buys into the hoax that’s been foisted on the nation over the last two decades despite overwhelming evidence that no such warming exists.

In modern day America reality is no longer the driving force for policy, instead it’s whatever the left says it is, factual or otherwise. Even when it comes to the GOP, they play according to the rules established by the left rather than dealing the reality most Americans actually live with. And that’s a problem… for the GOP and the country. If the GOP agrees to play by the ground rules set by the left, they will have handed victory to Hillary or Pocahontas or whoever emerges from the cesspool of the Democrat party.

2016 promises to be the single most defining election in a century and a half. The choice will be between continuing down our current path that inevitably leads to a fascist state where economics and culture are dictated by whatever the left deems is acceptable, or returning to a path ordered by limited government and individual rights. But that choice only exists if the GOP is willing to stand up and make the argument for freedom.

In both 2008 and 2012 the GOP candidates allowed the left to set the agenda and played a defensive game throughout. Defense may be the winning strategy in the NFL, but it’s not in national politics. It is preordained that the GOP is going to be labeled racist, sexist and homophobic. The left and the media (again… apologies for the redundancy) will no doubt seek to portray the GOP as the party of the rich that cares not for the pain and suffering of the poor. Like the innocent man who spends his time answering “no” to the question “Mr. Smith, do you still beat your wife?” rather than disputing the premise of the question in the first place, if the GOP allows the left to define the parameters of the campaign they’ve lost before the nominee is even selected.

During the run up to the convention and through to the general election, the GOP candidates have to be willing to take the slings and arrows that come with saying that Michael Brown was not the “Gentle Giant” the left has made him out to be and that his death was directly related to his actions, not his skin color. They must be willing to withstand the vitriol directed at them as they articulate the difference between discrimination against gays and the religious freedom that protects Christians from being forced to participate in gay “marriage” activities. They must be willing to endure the accusations of racism that would follow any suggestion that the need for strengthening the southern border is a matter of national security.

Whoever the eventual GOP nominee is, he or she will have the most fertile soil to till since Ronald Reagan in 1980. Eight years of Barack Obama will have set the lines stark, between economic fascism and free markets, between cultural coercion and individual rights, between international retreat and international leadership. The challenge for the GOP will be to articulate conservative positions that offer the greatest prospect for prosperity but rarely fit easily on a bumper sticker like “Coexist” or “Hope”. Not only will they have to figure out how to make the arguments in a way that a majority of Americans can understand and embrace, they’ll have to do so while facing a media that is lined up against them from the start and who is actively carrying water for the other side. The first step to doing so would be learning that the right answer to the question “Mr. Smith, do you still beat your wife?” is not no, but “I reject the basic premise of your question and here’s why…”.

Barack Obama will go down in history as the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln...

The eight year reign of Barack Obama will go down as the most important in American history since Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln led the United States at the single most important decision point in its history. At stake was no less than the question of whether the country would continue as a single nation or would it split in two as Manifest Destiny was fulfilled. Would there be a largely agrarian, slaveholding Confederate States of America bordering on a largely industrial and free United States of America or would a single, free and economically mixed United States emerge? At no point in the subsequent century and a half did the United States ever face a more foundational question.

Six years into Barack Obama’s presidency - and looking with much trepidation at the “last” two - one can’t help but wonder what kind of a nation will emerge on the other side. “History” said Winston Churchill, “is written by the victors” and like it or not, Barack Obama is the victor. Not sure about that? Take a look at the latest capitulation by his supposed opposition, Boehner and McConnell, the GOP leaders of the House and the Senate, respectively. In what is only the most recent example of obsequiousness they have vociferously attacked their own base in order to allow Obama to continue with his patently unconstitutional amnesty.

And what is it that Barack Obama has done to merit such distinction? He has opened the Pandora’s Box of unprecedented, omnipresent, government intervention. And like the evils escaping from Pandora’s Box, once government intervention is put in place you can’t get rid of it. With Obamacare he decreed that the government can tell Americans what they must buy, for their own good. With his NLRB appointees and the nationalization of General Motors he has eviscerated private property rights. With his using the IRS to muzzle opposition and his FCC taking over the Internet, he has taken a sledgehammer to concept of free speech and free markets.

In addition, his regulatory bonanza and welfare policies have cut the legs out from the basic premise of hard work being the key to success in America. By making entrepreneurship and job creation more difficult and by providing a seemingly endless array of benefits, he has driven the labor participation rate down to levels not seen in four decades.

And of course it’s not just the laws. He has set black against white as he constantly invokes racism in places where it simply doesn’t apply. What’s more, he has essentially told black Americans, those who are at most risk of being victims of crime, that the police are their enemies. He has set the poor and middle class against the rich as he assails the successful as robber barons who earned their success on the backs of others.

The country was far from perfect when Barack Obama took office and you can make the argument that it was already heading in a troubling direction when he came along. But the difference is, unlike Abraham Lincoln, who sought to save the Union, Barack Obama set out to fundamentally transform it. And that he has… from a place where individual initiative was the key to overcoming challenges, achieving success and finding happiness to a place where the first instinct of many is to look for someone to blame for their lack of success or happiness, or to try and figure out which arm of government to look to provide them.

Combine that entitlement / victim mentality with a legion of regulatory diktats and unconstitutional decrees – that no one in power seems willing to fight – and you have a recipe for a banana republic where power is held by whoever bribes the largest number of people and creates scapegoats to fuel populist furor. And so it goes as a nation of giants transforms into a nation of beggars and a government limited by the Constitution becomes a one limited only by a president’s appetite.

No president in 150 years has changed America more. Not Roosevelt, not Kennedy, not FDR not Reagan. Such is the transformation Barack Obama promised and delivered. Most Americans won’t view it as success, but the left does. Therefore, if history is indeed written by the victor – or in this case by his lefty sycophants in the media – Barack Obama will go down as the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln. And at this point it might be useful to think of something Churchill’s enemy, Adolph Hitler, said: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”

The tragic irony of turning Michael Brown and Eric Garner into martyrs

It seems like it’s almost impossible to get through a day without reading or hearing something having to do with the killing of black men by cops. Whether it’s endless Facebook posts or NFL players running out on the field with their “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gestures or protests blocking rush hour traffic, it seems to be everywhere. From what you see one would think that black men in America are being killed like dogs in the street across the country. While they might be, it’s not by racist white cops, but rather, by other black men.

One example was a video a friend posted on Facebook of a man named McKenzie Cochran, a black man who died at the hands of three white mall security personnel in Detroit last January. Like the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, a grand jury decided not to indict the security officers.

According to the Huffington Post, Cochran had returned to the mall after being requested to leave, threatened to kill someone, refused when asked by security to leave once again and then continued to struggle with officers after being pepper sprayed.

Brown, Garner and Cochran were indeed black, and all three ended up dead at the hands of white police officers or security personnel. But this is far from a war on black men that Al Sharpton, Mayor De Blasio and Eric Holder seem to suggest exists.

The reality is, there were numerous opportunities for Brown, Garner and Cochran to change the outcomes of their interactions with police. Does anyone imagine that had Brown simply moved out of the street when told that he would have been shot? Does anyone imagine that had Garner simply allowed the police to arrest him that he would have suffocated? Does anyone who reads the story about Cochran imagine that he would have ended up dead at the hands of security officers had he simply left the mall when asked?

As painful as these situations are for the families, one wonders what might have happened had the police been more differential? Might Michael Brown have robbed another store – and maybe this time pushed someone so that they fell and struck their head on the floor – or might McKenzie Cochran have actually carried out his threat to kill innocents? Eric Garner is slightly different in that his crime was selling untaxed “loosies” or loose cigarettes, a viable pursuit because of New York’s $6.00 a pack taxes. Doing so is illegal. You can complain about the law being stupid, but it was the law and Garner was breaking it. The cops could have let him go, but just days before Garner died the city’s highest-ranking uniformed cop, Philip Banks, issued an order to crack down on loosie sales.

The point is, none of these cases, nor most of the cases the left throws up to demonstrate the institutional racism rampant in America, hold up to scrutiny. They simply demonstrate a confluence of events where people who chose to act badly had outcomes that resulted in their deaths. But such are the odds when someone chooses to act badly, regardless of the activity. Most drunk drivers don’t die behind the wheel, but some do. Most recreational drug use doesn’t result in an overdose, but some does. And the truth is, while police encounters sometimes turn out bad for black men – just as they sometimes do for whites, Hispanics, Jews, etc. – they also sometimes turn out badly for cops. This can be seen by the fact that fifty officers were shot and killed in the line of duty in 2014, a jump of 56% from 2013. The difference is, unlike Brown or Garner or Cochran, these officers were killed while seeking to serve and protect their communities rather than resisting arrest or threatening innocent civilians.

The tragic irony about the rioting and demonstrations and accusations seeking to turn Michael Brown et. al into martyrs for a false cause is the fact that it diverts attention from where it should be. There are no doubt bad cops out there. In any group numbering in the hundreds of thousands you will find some number who have betrayed their oaths. But when the left characterizes all cops as racist killers it makes it impossible to find and focus on the real bad actors. That’s the irony of the whole thing… by wrongly accusing the entire police establishment of being bad, protesters actually empower the cops who are to continue doing business as usual because their actions are lost in a sea of fictional claims of racism and oppression. It’s called hiding in plain sight… by ignoring the difference between bad actors and bad outcomes – admittedly, sometimes tragic outcomes – activists make it that much more difficult to truly weed out the bad cops that really exist. By making everyone a racist, then no one is a racist and real racism has no fear of detection. The result is that activists actually increase the odds of the exact outcomes they are seeking to eliminate by giving them camouflage with a sea of false accusations. But then this is liberalism… where rhetoric is more important than results.

The boy who cried wolf... or the demagogues who cry “Racism"

We’ve all heard the story “The boy who cried wolf” about the boy who falsely cried out so often that when the wolf finally appeared none of the townsfolk came to his assistance because they assumed he was once again lying. The same thing has been happening in the United States with the charge of racism. The problem is, when the word racism is used so often by so many people in such patently absurd contexts the charge and the word cease to have any value.

Of course, what many people often refer to as racism is in reality racial discrimination, and in most cases the activity charged as racism is neither.

Racism is a belief in an inherent difference in the cognitive and physical abilities of members of different groups based on race, which manifest themselves in social and economic achievement. Such differences are usually organized in hierarchical manner putting the proponent of the theory’s race in the superior position.

Racial discrimination is the treatment or making a distinction, gift or punishment for or against, a person or group based on the race to which that person or persons belong rather than on individual / group merit.

The dilution of the charge of racism has been going on in the United States for decades. The housing crisis that brought about the economic meltdown in which we find ourselves today was the direct result of federal regulations intended to counteract false claims of racist / discriminatory practices on the part of mortgage lenders.

More recently the cries of racism have been thrown around like rice at a wedding since Barack Obama became a candidate for President. From individuals to Tea Party activists to radio talk show hosts, every disagreement with the policies of Barack Obama is at some point reduced to the simple charge of racism. It does not even appear as if race itself is a defense against such claims as can be seen by the denunciations of Herman Cain.

Is it possible that by 2012 the overuse of the charge of racism has finally contributed to its own demise? Perhaps two absurd events from last week will be a sign of the false charge's swan song.

The first comes from Dallas and has to do with Microsoft’s purported “Avoid the Ghetto” app for smartphones – a name suggested by critics rather than the company. The app, which is said to use crime statistic data, is supposed to offer drivers and pedestrians the opportunity to set routes to their destination that avoid high crime areas.

Dallas NAACP President Juanita Wallace seems to be unhappy about the as of yet unavailable product: "It’s almost like gerrymandering,” she said. “It’s stereotyping for sure and without a doubt; I can’t emphasize enough, it’s discriminatory.” However, the app will not label communities based on race. It is not going to tell users to avoid minorities or minority communities. It is is rather simply going to inform users about neighborhoods where a high number of crimes have been reported and offer them alternative routes to getting to their destinations. Certainly James Cooper and James Kouzaris could have used it.

Whatever the demographics of the neighborhoods drivers or pedestrians avoid as a result of Microsoft’s app, claims of racism or racial discrimination are absurd. Crime is crime, regardless of who perpetrates it. Indeed, it is President Wallace who has suggested the connection between crime and minority communities, not Microsoft.

The second story comes from Burlington, Vermont. At a time when consumers are put off by many bank’s limited hours and increasingly automated services, TD Bank sees an opportunity to distinguish itself from its competitors by opening for business every day other than Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter Sunday and New Years Day. In the highly competitive marketplace the bank is seeking to succeed by providing more services to attract more customers. The result? The branch in Burlington, Vermont was picketed for being open and serving its customers on the MLK holiday. Protesters printed flyers suggesting the bank was racist: “Dear TD Bank, you are defying the King holiday. Shame, Shame, Shame. This is a racist act. Shame, Shame, Shame.”

In what universe is a company seeking to provide its clients – all clients, regardless of race – with better service acting in a racist, or more accurately, a racially discriminatory manner? Only in a leftist, victim mentality universe fueled by the Democratic Party.

As we approach the battle for the White House those of us who disagree with the policies of President Obama should be prepared to be labeled racists for virtually every utterance. Of course it is possible that the false charge of racism has jumped the shark and will finally be disregarded by citizens as just another Democratic tool of intimidation and slander. Possible, but unfortunately... unlikely.

I’m afraid it’s more likely to be another Hollywood creation, Freddy from the Friday the 13th franchise that more accurately characterizes the future of the false charge of racism. Even when it is so widely seen as debased and hollow, when it should be dead after so many false utterances, the charge of racism is likely to once again be an instrument of the left with which it seeks to intimidate conservatives and distract voters from the abject failure of decades of Democratic policies – whose victims are both black and white. That's unfortunate because real examples of racism and racial discrimination do indeed exist, but because the left has purloined the charge for its insidious ends those real examples are far less likely to be taken seriously. And for that we are less well off.