Food Deserts are the Fruit of Democrat Policies

After the Rodney King riots in LA in the early 1990s news organizations told us endlessly that citizens were angry about the food deserts in minority communities. I remember thinking there might be another reason why there were no stores in the neighborhoods besides the implied racism.  Maybe the burned husks of buildings might have something to do with it…

At the time I was living in Washington, DC and understood all too well what I was seeing.  DC had endured extraordinary riots in 1968 and wide swaths of it still resembled a war zone. Riots have a way of destroying more than just the buildings that go up in flames. They rip the hearts out of a community, something that often takes years or decades to repair.

Riots, however, are just one way a community can be destroyed.  Another, far more insidious, is common crime. While with riots everyone can point to the damage and clamor for rebuilding, with common crime, once the window is replaced or the body chalk is washed away the neighborhood looks exactly the same as it did before.

But of course, it’s not the same. From citizens being scared to walk down the street to kids having to dodge junkies as they walk to school to upstanding members of the community not visiting certain neighborhoods – and not spending money there – the fear of violence has devastating consequences on any community.   

Food deserts are one of those consequences.  Retailers are typically not charities.  They exist to make money. When violence, security costs and shoplifting make it so they can’t make money they usually close.  Hence, when all the food stores close you have said “food deserts”. 

The funny thing is, however, that the people who create the conditions that lead to food deserts never take responsibility for them. Democrats have unleashed an unprecedented amount of street violence and crime on Americans, from coast to coast.  In California, which made shoplifting under $950 a misdemeanor a decade ago, shoplifting is de facto legal. That basically means that you can steal $949 worth of merchandise every single day and likely never go to jail. So, if you steal that $949 worth of goods every day, sell them for 25 cents on the dollar, you can generate an income $86,000 a year tax free!  Not bad.

Both Illinois and New York enacted bail reform that makes it far more likely that offenders will end up back on the streets and we’ve seen exactly that whether it be for shoplifting or assaulting cops or citizens.

Why all of this matters is because the chickens are coming home to roost.  Across the country, from San Francisco to Seattle to New York to Boston stores are closing because of crime.  Some, in an effort to reduce shoplifting put literally every single item behind lock and key in an effort to remain open. (Surprise, it didn’t work.) But, rather than recognize that stores are closing because they can’t make a profit due to the extraordinary amounts of crime, Democrats are blaming… you guessed it:  Racism.  Communist, racist, Democrat (pardon the redundancy) Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley assails the fact that CVS is closing another store in a minority community, not because of shoplifting or security or losing money, but “racial and economic discrimination”.

But of course she’s not alone in her unhinged take on stores closing. In the hellhole that has become San Francisco city supervisors have proposed a bill that would allow citizens to sue retailers if they close without giving the city six months’ notice.  That means, basically, that after struggling to make a profit, when a store finally decides to bite the bullet and close its doors, according to Democrats running the city, they must remain open for another six months, regardless of how much money they lose. And, as if that was not enough, “Supermarket operators would also have to make "good faith" efforts to ensure the continued availability of groceries at their shuttered location, either through finding a successor store, helping residents form a grocery co-op, or any other plan they might work out by meeting with city and neighborhood residents.” So the store that once operated at a profit providing desired services to a community, when it can no longer do so must become the caretaker of the community because regardless of what they might do the Communists in charge of the city will claim they didn’t act in “good faith” and invite citizens to sue them.

But of course there’s more.  In St. Louis the Democrat mayor wants to hold stores and gas stations liable for the violence happening close to their stores.  Last month at a mayor’s conference she said: “We have a lot of violence around convenience stores and gas stations… So how can we hold those business owners accountable and also bring down crime?” So businesses not only have to face the myriad challenges that go along with running a profitable store in the best of circumstances and endure staggering levels of crime and shoplifting, but now they’re somehow looking at being held responsible for the crime near their establishments that is driven by Democrat’s defunding of the police and soft on crime policies…

And if all of that wasn’t enough, now, Democrats are claiming that companies who seek to protect themselves and customers by not hiring criminals are racist because more black and minority applicants are passed over than white applicants. So, companies that seek to protect themselves, their employees, and customers by declining to hire criminals are now going to be sued by the government.  But if they do hire a criminal and said criminal harms or kills a customer or employee the company can surely argue the government forced their hand, right?  Don’t count on it. 

If there was ever a moment of clarity about what America faces in 2024, it’s this.  Democrats pass laws that make it almost impossible for the system to hold criminals accountable for their crimes and unsurprisingly, crime soars.  When citizens resist such crime, Democrats arrest and charge them. Then Democrats try to make businesses responsible for the crimes that occur in the very neighborhoods where said Democrat policies spiked crime. Finally, if a business has had enough, can’t afford to continue to lose money and decides to close, Democrats tell them they either continue losing money for a further six months or they’ll have to open up their checkbooks in court as slimy lawyers are invited to sue them.

Soon it won’t be just food deserts that are ailing American cities. It will be deserts of every kind from medicines to clothing to gasoline to hardware, and everything in between.  While it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that the combination of unleashing violence and penalizing businesses for simply operating is a recipe that won’t produce prosperity, it does take a semblance of common sense, a basic understanding of human nature and at least an idea of how businesses operate. Democrats lack all three.  So too do their similarly obtuse and gullible voters.  It’s no wonder they live in deserts.

America's Coming Race War, Courtesy of the Democrat Party...

Sometimes it’s hard to know what exactly to write.  I don’t mean in general staring off into space or watching the clouds in your coffee kind of stuff, I mean when you see something so extraordinarily evil that you’re left speechless.

That happened to me a few weeks ago when I saw the video of a white female student being brutally beaten by a black female student in Missouri.  As you’ve no doubt seen, the black girl beats the white girl into unconsciousness and repeatedly slams her head into the concrete.  The victim went into convulsions and as of this writing is in critical condition in the hospital.

There are two primary questions I had after watching this video.  The first was why does no one try and stop the attacker when there are a dozen people around the fight, including at least one person recording a video?  The second was what kind of an upbringing would someone have to have to make them act this way? These two unanswerable questions melded into a third, which was, why do we see so many videos of blacks acting violently?  Beating white people.  Beating other black people. Attacking restaurant employees.  Attacking cops. Pushing people in front of subway trains. And the list goes on. And on. And on.

On the day I saw this video I happened to be reading a book called Empire by Niall Ferguson.  I was at the point where he is comparing the actions of the British – which is the empire to which the title refers – and the Japanese in their early 20^th century empire. In particular he discusses the Rape of Nanking, one of the most brutal and disgusting displays of savagery ever chronicled. He doesn’t pretend the British were never brutal. In fact they were and he discusses it. But he makes the distinction between the British killing opponents during battles – sometimes including unarmed women and children while peacefully protesting – or the deaths of prisoners from incompetent logistics management and the brutal, intentional infliction of pain and torture on civilians and POWs alike.  There were literally contests to see who could kill more people or do so more quickly or brutally. 

Such abuse was never limited to the Japanese of course.  The Germans were equally as evil during WWII.  Like the Japanese, their killing beyond the battlefield, more often than not was a mix of cruelty, sadism, depravity, and systemized murder.  Such evil has been endemic through much of human history.  One of the reasons the Spanish were able to so easily subdue the great Aztec empire was because so many of its neighbors were enthusiastic about ridding themselves of the cruel, murderous empire where captured enemies would frequently die horrifying, brutal deaths. More recently the Rwandan genocide, the brutality by ISIS, the execution thousands of Nigerian Christians my Muslims and the October 7^th attacks by Hamas demonstrate that man can be a savage instrument of evil.

Since the moment Cain slew Able history is full of violence. But this seems to be different.  Not different in that it’s unique in history, but that it’s unique in American history.  What I mean by that is that it’s a perfect storm of Democrat malevolence.

That storm has three components.  The first is what seems to have become the primary plank of the Democrat party. White racism. Prior to Barack Obama America’s race relations had been largely improving for 40 years. With his the “police acted stupidly” comment things got off on the wrong foot, and after the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown things went south quickly.  Then the 2020 death of George Floyd sent race relations into a tailspin. With the riots and the shilling for BLM by everyone from the NFL to Microsoft to Congressional Democrats, things took a decidedly bad turn. Suddenly we were told systemic racism was to be found everywhere from law enforcement to math to punctuality to proper English. At the same time we had the Pentagon, the White House and practically every news organization in the country telling us that white nationalism is the single biggest threat to the country and that blacks were in constant danger. The left has done to whites what the Nazis did to the Jews, what the Japanese did to the Chinese and what the Hutu did to the Tutsi… dehumanize them, make them into the Other, the ones towards whom no humanity need be shown. Once that mindset is absorbed, there are no limitations on what can be done to members of the target group. 

The second is that black Americans have been told by Democrats that they cannot succeed.  That regardless of what they do they are incapable of success in America because of white oppression. As such, the rules need to be changed for them, most critically, the elimination of consequences for crimes. Essentially the argument is, given that blacks cannot find success when they behave properly, society can’t punish them for behaving improperly.    

The third is the collapse of the black family.  Today more than 70% of black babies are born to unwed mothers.  That leaves a single mother, often on welfare, to raise the children. And children in fatherless homes are far more likely to be criminals. 

The outcome of this perfect storm is significant proportion of the black population hate white people, have little belief they have a vested interest in civilized society and there’s no one at home to teach them right from wrong. With little reason to have self-respect and with even less reason to respect others, too many black Americans are simply acting out as a child would, with no filters, no self-control, no empathy and no real remorse.  That’s a recipe for disaster for society.

If America is coming apart at the seams, it’s not because of any “systemic racism”, but rather because Democrats have seen fit to weaponize blacks. And not just against whites, but against the very fabric of America. This plays itself out in major cities across the country where most black Americans live and dominate the politics. Indeed, black mayors (most of whom are Democrats) run almost every one of America’s largest and most important cities:  Washington, Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and New Orleans among others. Virtually every one of them is like living in a relative war zone compared to much of the rest of the country. The ironic thing about all of this is that the biggest victims of this black despondency and disconnect with civilized society are fellow blacks, because the animating factors of alienation and desolation know no bounds, color or otherwise. 

This is not a sustainable model. A nation divided by race cannot survive. Americans fought a war then passed civil rights laws a century later to stop that. But here we are with significant portion of America’s population looking into life’s kaleidoscope and seeing nothing but a fatalistic cacophony where they have no agency, nothing matters and thus nothing has any value, including their lives and those of others.

What we saw on that video is the epitome of the race war Charles Manson tried to launch but failed.  Sadly for Americans of all hues, a half a century later the Democrats are making his dream a reality.

Divide and Conquer: Democrats Turn Americans Against One Another in Naked Pursuit of Power

Evidence of civil war has been playing out in the streets of America for the last year; the reality is it’s been percolating for decades. From the 1999 WTO protests to the hordes calling George Bush a Nazi to Occupy Wall Street, the hyperbole and violence have been ratcheting up for years.

The catalyst that put us on the path to today was the nomination of Barack Obama. Not because of Obama himself, but rather because of the cudgel Democrats crafted from his race. Anyone who opposed Obama’s policies was racist. Suddenly, conservatives who reiterated policies they’d supported for decades were racists as was anyone who opposed Democrat policies.

But race was only the beginning. If you opposed gay marriage: Homophobic. Opposed women in combat:  Sexist. Supported the police:  Fascist.

Such was the beginning of the journey that brings us to America circa 2021.  Today you’re either on the side of angels or the side of Hitler. There’s no middle ground. George Washington was a slave-owning racist and nothing else matters. Michael Brown and George Floyd were innocent victims of racist cops. Period. All women should be believed… unless they accuse Democrats. There are an infinite number of genders. Clearly.  America is systemically racist and any evidence to the contrary is fiction. "Border wall" is a dog whistle for white nationalists.

The reality is, there are racists among us.  So too sexists, homophobes and fascists. There are also bad cops, sexual predators, and evil people. But here’s the thing: Most Americans are none of those. It wouldn’t be possible to build the free, thriving, diverse and prosperous nation America so recently was if they were. If America were systemically racist, we’d never have had a black president: many of the most popular and highest earning entertainers wouldn’t be black; Asian Americans wouldn’t make up 40% or more of the student body at some of America’s best colleges; and minorities wouldn’t own 30% of businesses.

But of course, none of that matters to Democrats. The only thing that matters is setting Americans against one another via victimization and leveraging that conflict for power.

But here’s the other thing about all of this: There’s not an American alive today who can’t claim victim status for one thing or another. If you’re black, you’ll undoubtedly encounter racists. If you’re short you’ve likely been the butt of short jokes, while if you’re 7’ tall “How’s the weather up there?” is a ritual greeting.  Beautiful women are taken for dumb while rich men are in the IRS crosshairs. Fat people or ugly people often find themselves ostracized or worse. An Asian might be expected to be good in math while gays no doubt have heard countless whispers that communicate disapproval or disdain.

The point is, if someone wants to see themselves as a victim, they can… every time. But that’s not traditionally what Americans do. In early 20th century America, when Jim Crow reigned in the south and redlines crisscrossed the country, black Americans moved to places like Harlem and Chicago’s south side and built thriving communities. In the latter half of the 19th century, two million Irish came to America and, despite facing extraordinary hatred, built successful communities. Millions of Jews came at the turn of the century and despite virulent anti-Semitism built a pantheon of successful businesses. Chinese, Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants had similar experiences. And up until the 1970s there were places where women weren’t allowed to get credit cards or open bank accounts without their husbands’ signatures!

Virtually every American alive today can point to some injustice in their lives or those of their ancestors that they could use to paint themselves as victims. But again, historically Americans have not done that. In fact, American history is a story of a people, a diverse mix of people really, overcoming extraordinary adversity and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to build a nation out of a sparsely populated continent and, in the process, changing the world for the better in virtually every area of culture, charity, science, commerce and, of course, freedom.

That is the story of America. Americans, largely (but not exclusively) white males, built a nation unlike anything the world has ever seen. Americans, again, largely white men, but not exclusively so, united to save the world from self-destruction in two hot wars and one cold. Americans, largely white men, but not exclusively, put men on the moon. Along the way, they invented television, air conditioning, movies, mobile phones, safety elevators, the Internet, the iPhone, the Pet Rock and, sadly, Facebook.

A nation made up of imperfect men and women, in the short expanse of two centuries, has created prosperity unlike anything the world has ever seen. It’s not perfect -- at times it’s even been ugly -- but for the most part, it’s been spectacular. Not for everyone, and not all the time, but for most people of every race, creed, and color, America has been a Godsend.

Not sure about that?  Would black Americans be better off moving back to Africa? Would Italian Americans be better off moving back to Italy? Chinese to China? Mexicans to Mexico? Iranian Americans back to Iran? The answer is likely no in almost every instance.

But again, none of that matters to Democrats. America’s greatness doesn’t matter.  America’s freedom and prosperity don’t matter to Democrats. What matters to Democrats is raw power. The proof is easy to see and can be found in the fealty black Americans pay to the Democrat party. Democrats don’t care about black Americans, but use their votes to get and maintain power. For 50 years Democrats have had a stranglehold on the black vote, and what they’ve done with that power shows exactly how much they value the lives of black Americans. Not much…

And that’s the template for the Democrats’ endgame: Divide and conquer. By seeking to turn every American into a victim, by seeking to demonize the group that played the single biggest role in building the nation that we inhabit today (white males – because of numbers, not because of DNA or some special gift from God), Democrats are seeking to build a coalition of us vs. them, where the “us” is characterized by victimhood and the “them” are evil incarnate in the form of white males.

The beauty of that plan is that, when literally every single person can point to something today or two decades ago or two centuries ago that constitutes a slight or injustice to be rectified, the pool of potential soldiers is bottomless and all that’s necessary is a promise of salvation. Army not big enough? Craft a few more victim narrative promises of salvation and presto, more soldiers.

But the consequence of those votes will be anything but salvation. Once they set the entire population at war against itself, Democrats will step in to pick up the pieces and their literal death grip on power will bring the end of individual liberty, limited government and in time, the Republic itself. And with it will go the prosperity that gave so many Democrats the luxury of focusing on our differences and fabricating victimhood in the first place. Caveat emptor.

Vietnam War Playbook Repeats Itself In American Cities...

Sometimes it’s difficult to recognize that history is being written while you are in the middle of it actually taking place. Such is I think the situation we are in the middle of today with the riots associated with the murder of George Floyd.

Probably no sentient person in the country would have condoned what we saw on that video as the breath was literally pressed out of Mr. Floyd. On the contrary, almost every single person who responded, black, white, police, civilian, politician or guy on the street expressed revulsion for the officer’s conduct. Thankfully, from the moment that video was shared, the wheels of justice were indeed turning, with all four officers being fired immediately and culminating in the primary officer being arrested within days.

Despite this, protests began, followed by looting and then riots. None of those things are surprising given the media’s glee at any opportunity to use anecdotal evidence to try and convince blacks that they are victims and that the police are out to get them.  It's all in furtherance of media / Democrat’s default narrative that America is a racist nation. Mix Black Lives Matter with the Bernie Bros of Antifa and you have a rather predictable combustible setting. Anytime you have large groups of young people who feel the government is their enemy, it's difficult to keep the Molotov Cocktails in their bottles.

None of that is new… but what is new is police chiefs and officers and mayors kneeling with and embracing protesters, as if the idea of “If we just understand their pain” will turn everything down to simmer and will bring about peaceful coexistence. I doubt it. This is a moment in time not unlike the watershed event of the capitulation of the administration of Columbia Univ. in 1968 which ushered in students taking over universities and turning American colleges into progressive propaganda factories.

If the chiefs et al think that embracing the protesters is going to bring about harmony, they will soon be disabused of such notions. While the media continues to proffer the fiction that the protests have been mostly peaceful, the reality is obviously different. For an entire week Americans have been watching blue cities across the country go up in flames, seen bottles and bricks thrown, police cars set ablaze and businesses big and small get looted and destroyed. Just last night, exactly one week since Mr. Floyd’s death, a police officer is shot in the head in Las Vegas, four officers were shot in St Louis, a car rammed into officers in Buffalo in the Bronx a cop was beaten while onlookers videotaped and egged the assailants on.

The people causing this mayhem have no interest in being heard or understood. Their goal is not a better neighborhood, city or America. They want to loot, they want to destroy, they want to cause chaos, and fundamentally, they want to start a revolution because they have no vested interest in things like private property, rule of law, capitalism and freedom.

Given the decades long endless undermining of such ideas from the media, from Democrats, and the education machinery at all levels, it’s no surprise that millions of young Americans, both black and white are happy to not only stand by and watch as their cities and the country burn, but more, they want to participate in it. This all reminds me of something I read 25 years ago in a biography by Peter G. MacDonald of North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. In reference to the Vietnam War in general and the Tet Offensive in particular Giap said something to the effect that “We didn’t have to win the war on the ground, we only had to win over the American media and they would do the rest.” Probably not an exact quote - it's been a quarter century after all! - but the truth of his sentiments can be seen in the widespread notion at the time that the United States was defeated in the Tet Offensive. Completely wrong. After the initial surprise the North Vietnamese were not only repelled, but their army was so badly destroyed that Giap considered surrendering. But he didn’t because he didn’t have to... The American media did their job and the tide eventually turned against the war.

Today on a much different playing field the leftist media and their Democrat partners are playing the same role and but it’s not on some far off field where Americans are dying, it’s here in the United States and the enemy of freedom the media and Democrats are supporting is not some foreign army, but rather the looters and anarchists who seek to burn the place to the ground and start a real revolution. By lying about the peaceful nature of the protests, by lying about the prevalence of police brutality, by lying about America being a racist and fundamentally unjust society, they are tearing at the frayed threads that already keep young people connected to the nation and its values.  In doing so they are encouraging the destruction you see across the country today.

As Rudy Giuliani demonstrated when he saved literally thousands of black lives by simply enforcing the law, the only way to stop this chaos is to actually enforce the law and arrest or shoot if necessary the rioters who are destroying American cities and threatening the lives of police and civilians alike. Unless governors and mayors step up and decide to win this war for America's soul rather than hold hands with and tolerate the terrorists, 2020 looks like it might just be another long hot summer.

San Bernardino - As Usual the Left Gets it Wrong on Guns and Christians

As usual, with the terrorist attack in San Bernardino the left gets it wrong on pretty much everything. Of course their first response was to call for gun regulation because… that’s what they do. Then when it became clear that it wasn’t a couple of white Christian Tea Party types who were responsible, they doubled down on gun regulation to try and distract from the fact that it was Islamic terror.

Whether it’s the focus on guns or the meme that it’s racist white Tea Party Christians who perpetrate most of these crimes, they are simply wrong.

Let’s take the latter first. Of the 21 mass shootings since 1990 that have taken the lives of 8 or more people, white men have been the killers in 10 of them, while minorities and or immigrants have committed the other 11. Of those 10, exactly one had anything to do with Christianity, politics or race, and that was in last year’s Charleston church murders. (See list here)

So in the worst of the worst shootings over the last quarter century, despite the left’s focus on white, conservative, Christian perpetrators, the killers actually fit the bill less than 5% of the time. But that doesn’t stop Democrats and their lefty media from seeking to further their agenda by pushing the white racist Tea Party Christian meme every time one of these events occurs.

Which brings us back to guns and the left’s goal on eviscerating the 2nd Amendment. As we’ve seen, they are not above seeking to exploit any tragedy to further their agenda, regardless of how wrong their narrative is. Despite the fact that California already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, they claim that we need more gun legislation. Their narrative is that if we could just get Americans to give up their guns – or take them if necessary – then the US would suddenly become a peaceful place.

They are simply wrong, America is already a pretty peaceful place – or at least most of it is. There are over 300 million guns in the United States. Each year 299 million of them are not involved with murders or crimes of any sort. The problem isn’t gun ownership… the problem is criminals on the street. According to a study by the Milwaukee Sherriff’s Dept., 97% of the suspects – and 85% of the victims – in non fatal shootings had criminal records. In homicides the numbers weren’t much different: For all homicides in 2011 -- those involving guns and those that didn’t -- 57 percent of the 72 suspects and 62 percent of the 66 homicide victims had at least six prior arrests. Six arrests! Baltimore has similar numbers and one would expect that they would be reflected in the rest of the country as well. So the problem is not guns, but rather criminals. And to put a fine point on the fallacy of the gun control reduces violence narrative, in Chicago, crime increased after guns were regulated… and dropped when the city was forced to begin issuing concealed carry permits.  Keep the criminals in jail and the crime rate would drop... but that would deprive Democrats of voters.

Something Democrats never mention is that in many countries with more restrictive gun laws than we have, crime rates are in fact actually much higher. Nor are they spared mass killings either. There was of course the attack in Paris last month, and the Smithsonian Magazine writes in a piece titled Outside the Americas, Knives Are Often the Weapon of Choice in Homicides:

In Japan, in 2001 a janitor wielding a kitchen knife killed eight children at an Osaka school where he worked, while a man in Tokyo went on a random stabbing spree with a dagger in 2008, killing four people. In South Korea, a disgruntled man killed eight people in a stabbing spree at his apartment complex in 2008. In Germany, a drunk 16-year-old stabbed 41 people at the opening ceremony of a Berlin train station. And last year, anti-knife campaigns ramped up in the U.K after a 13-year-old girl was stabbed to death.

In addition, in Israel today Jews are being stabbed and run over by cars on a regular basis… and there they have lots of guns. The problem isn’t guns, it’s people with bad intentions.  Get rid of the guns and they will still find knives, cars, bombs, poison or countless other ways to kill people.

Despite the facts, the left continues peddle gun laws as the solution to the problem of crime and a culture of violence they have fostered. Similarly contrary to facts, they continue to blame white conservative Christians for the massacres we see all too often see on our TVs and in our communities. We shouldn’t be surprised however as the Democrats and their media lackeys have a long tradition of manipulating and obscuring facts in order to hide from the failures of their progressive agenda. No doubt when the doors are closed lefties can be heard saying "Hmmm... If there was only a way to take the guns out of the hands of citizens the the government could simply start it implementing the social programs that would eliminate all this crime and racism and inequality and hurt feelings and..."

The founding fathers may not have been able to conceive of the notions of television or the Internet, but they sure understand human nature and the dark side of government.  Thank God - and James Madison & friends - for the 2nd Amendment.