The Dancing Cop controversy ought to lead reasonable people to consider whether activists are deliberately striving to break down the walls that allow us to remain together as a reasonable community.
Arthur Christopher Schaper says the targeting of Dancing Cop Tony Lepore is about much more than local controversy.
Judges and a ruling class who discard the Constitution in order to impose their decrees force the people to consider whether the peaceable civic process ought to be discarded, too.
What are the odds that the same Midwestern university that ousted its president over trumped-up accusations of apathy over racism and saw professors employing Alinskyite tactics against the freedom of the press would see another professor arrested for dragging his early-teen “relative” out of school by the hair because she wasn’t wearing a hijab?
An assistant professor at an American university has been arrested for allegedly grabbing a 14-year-old female relative by the hair and dragging her into a car after he noticed she wasn’t wearing a hijab.
Youssif Z. Omar, 53, was reportedly at Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri, on Tuesday when he spotted that the girl did not have the traditional Muslim headscarf.
No, really, what are the odds? What could possibly link cry-bully totalitarian impulses on a campus with the hiring of Islamic fundamentalists? It’s almost like universities are at the forefront of creating cultural banlieues.
Two concepts from an unsigned editorial in today’s Providence Journal beg for juxtaposition. It’s about a proposed Care New England and Southcoast Health System merger. First:
To be sure, regulators should carefully weigh what the new organization’s market share is apt to be in any number of areas, from primary and obstetrical care to cardiac facilities. How would the proposed merger affect Lifespan, currently Rhode Island’s largest hospital system, and presumably its chief competitor? How would it affect smaller entities such as the still independent South County Hospital?
Next:
The changes under way in health care are complex, and at times seemingly beyond the grasp of even health-care experts.
The whole editorial treats the merger as if it’s a question of public policy about government agencies, rather than the operation of private organizations. I find myself wondering, once again, what long-running government program instills the Providence Journal editorial board with such confidence in regulators’ ability to behave as an executive board for an industry that seems “beyond the grasp of even health-care experts.”
That shouldn’t be a new question. It’s a basic, long-standing part of the intellectual economic discussion whether human beings can possibly collect and process enough information to make economic decisions on anything but the most narrow, direct, and personal questions. Another basic consideration in the economic discussion is that the more decision-makers are insulated from consequences, the less care they’ll take and the less competence they’ll display. Giving “regulators” and the general public (as represented, here, by a newspaper editorial board) power to make economic decisions for both the providers and consumers of health care is many steps too far.
With Rhode Island as an excellent case study, the United States of America needs to get out of the weeds of private industry and turn its attention to the harder questions of social belief and policy. It’s a lot easier superficially to decree that everybody should have access to “quality, affordable health care” and then push the blame for failure around to interested parties and supposed experts than it is to answer the deep questions — especially when the solution for that failure is always to give the interested parties and supposed experts more power.
The deep questions to which I refer are those such as: What level of health care is “a right”? How does that right interact with individuals’ personal responsibility? Who pays for that level of health care? Who gets to balance that cost against other possible uses of scarce resources?
Simplistic declarations about rights, with the responsibilities handed off to unaccountable bureaucrats, absolve individuals and communities of responsibility. This lesson has become too obvious to miss in a country whose elite president indulges in endless rounds of golf and multi-million-dollar family vacations while education insiders prattle about needing more money for their own special interests and editorial boards blithely hand our freedoms over to Ubermensch regulators.
I’ve been meaning to note something important in this Mark Patinkin column from last Sunday, but it may be too subtle a point than I’ll have time to explore to satisfaction. So, herewith a few hundred words to mark the idea either for future reference or to work the nag out of my system.
On the whole, Patinkin’s got the right idea, but he misses subtleties that may be central to disagreements about the ways in which our country should address cultural and ideological differences. Take this sentence, for example:
Instead they were treated unequally, mostly segregated in tenement-filled ghettos, called banlieues, built for them outside the cities.
That phrase, “built for them,” isn’t quite correct. The banlieues are an old sort of inner suburb, not unlike the “municipal zones” that Walter Russell Mead describes in the article about Brussels to which I linked, this morning. Patinkin goes to far in emphasizing that the French failed to allow immigrants to assimilate. An important part of the equation is that they gave them room to choose not to assimilate. This process will ebb and flow, but it’s more of a battle than a one-sided acquiescence.
The French didn’t win the struggle against the reactionary forces within the immigrant communities that sought to build their own fiefdoms. In some contexts, assimilation isn’t a warm and fuzzy mater of tolerance, but a deliberate choice of force, as would have been required in order to prevent the development of “no-go zones.”
This is precisely the point at which standard liberal thinking flips around on itself — where Patinkin writes, “the original deterrent to homegrown terror [is] avoiding alienation.” To the mainstream liberal, this invocation means letting those from other cultures maintain much of their heritage and adjusting the American norm to accommodate it. Meanwhile, liberals and progressives have little concern with forcing their views on an ever-more-centralized scale, like the Supreme Court mandating the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples across the entire country (with a crackdown on private business owners who disagree) or the Obama administration using executive orders to tweak a partisan nationalization of healthcare and then a bureaucratic crackdown to hobble the opposition that arose against him.
They believe their worldview, from race to sexual matters to the environment, is simply factually correct, and nobody (at least nobody who shares their heritage) should be permitted to differ, much less to implement public policy according to differing beliefs. That’s a recipe for alienation if ever there was one.
We’re getting the worst of both sides of that intellectual contradiction. With identity-politics running rampant on campuses and in the pop culture, we’re allowing groups to create their own, privileged banlieues in which they don’t have to acknowledge disagreement, and with centralized establishment of the progressive faith overruling federalism and democracy, we’re alienating the majority.
It’s an alignment between identity groups and the cultural elite, meant to hamstring those in the middle and block those who would traverse across the middle from the bottom.
Here’s a telling revelation from a Providence Journal article by Lynn Arditi highlighting the fact that most Rhode Island colleges and universities have police forces that don’t match the racial composition of the student bodies. It comes almost at the end of the article, and I’ve italicized the key point:
At URI, where minorities make up nearly 20 percent of the student body but only about 7 percent of campus police, the university has found it challenging to recruit and retain minority police officers, who can have more opportunities for higher pay and advancement at municipal departments, URI Director of Public Safety Stephen Baker said in an email.
Note that the statement is not that campus departments are having trouble maintaining their forces, but that minority officers are disproportionately harder to keep because they’re in greater demand at higher-paying departments. If you don’t think folks — in police departments and elsewhere — notice such things, you’re ignoring an important piece of evidence in escalating racial tensions.
Be the sociology what it may, however, and turning to the specific article in question, there’s something unseemly, unfair, and deliberately divisive in using the front page of the state’s major daily newspaper to attack police departments at the bottom of the industry ladder because they can’t compete with the bigger players when it comes to answering progressive racial obsessions. Obviously, the article could have delved into the actual dynamic that Baker described, but then its insinuations might not have served the desired narrative.
The firing of Providence’s dancing traffic cop is just the latest in a series of incidents that prove that Mayor Jorge Elorza does not understand the concept of civil rights, and Rhode Islanders should be very concerned.
Although terrorism, collegiate fascism, and the presidential race have been dominating the headlines, center-right groups have been looking at civil asset forfeiture, recently. That’s when law enforcement agencies take people’s money and goods away from them out of suspicion that they were gained from illegal activity. Typically, even if the person is absolved of wrongdoing, he or she must then take the further step of proving that he or she gained the property through lawful means.
FreedomWorks gives Rhode Island an F for its civil forfeiture laws because the government only has to show probable cause in order to take property (that is, it only has to be reasonable for law enforcement personnel to believe the property was gained illegally). The burden then falls on the property owner to prove that the assumption is not reasonable, and if he or she fails, the agency keeps 90% of the money, sending 10% to fund a state-level drug abuse treatment program.
The Institute for Justice (IJ) gives Rhode Island a D-. (It’s not immediately clear why the minor difference, but it looks like IJ does a more-in-depth analysis of how the law applies to different crimes and different types of property and might give more weight to the fact that the confiscating agency doesn’t get to keep all of the money.) However, IJ also looks at state collections from federal asset forfeiture, on which Rhode Island is dead last. According to IJ, federal “equitable sharing” returns up to 80% of cash and property value taken under suspicion of federal violations to state agencies.
Looking at national numbers, Bonnie Kristian notes that the federal government confiscated $4.5 billion from Americans in 2014, which was more money than burglars managed to steal ($3.9 billion). Not all of the numbers are available specifically for Rhode Island, but it looks like government might be especially good at taking peoples money and things away, around here:
Of course, civil asset forfeiture is just one of the ways in which government takes money from people. When taxes, fines, and fees are added into the mix, it’s a safe bet that government manages to take more wealth from Rhode Islanders than just about any category of crime or business.
Answers took some days to receive and to clarify, but I’ve been meaning to follow up on this Richard Salit article in the Providence Journal:
Rhode Island is now among a handful of states that has expanded its Medicaid benefits to include medical care for transgender people, including mental health treatment, hormone therapy and sexual reassignment surgery.
The policy change, announced a week ago, is being hailed by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy groups, who say the benefits should now be offered by private insurers as well.
I asked spokespeople for the state how much the change is projected to cost, and the answer, in a word, was nothing. More specifically:
In its proposed rules for Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities, the US Department of Health and Human Services states that it expects [these expanded benefits to] impact a very small segment of the population, and will have minimal impact on the overall cost of care and on health insurance premiums.
This determination is based on a study in California that found that covering transgender individuals under California’s private and public health insurance plans would have an insignificant and immaterial economic impact on costs (based on evidence of low use and the relatively small transgender population).
We do not have cost estimates specific to Rhode Island’s Medicaid’s program.
Overall, it looks like the goal is more to pressure insurers to make the same change as part of a political effort to define transgender operations as a human right, meaning that a failure to pass along the cost for these rare treatments to everybody else through the cost of regular medical care would be discrimination.
Writing about one of the latest allegedly racist incidents on an American college campus, John Hinderaker may very well put his finger on the entire operating dilemma of the Left:
The Dean of the law school, Martha Minow, said that racism is a “serious problem” there. Really? Minow has been the Dean since 2009. Why has she allowed racism to flourish? Where has this “serious problem” been manifested, and what has she done about it? Who, exactly, are the “racists” who have created this serious problem? Frankly, I don’t believe a word she says.
Hinderaker, who attended Harvard Law, thinks such lies are just the sorts of things that administrators of higher education say to maintain a sort of peace with some groups, while expecting that nobody responsible will really believe them. But isn’t that a summary of the Left? They overtook the culture and most of its institutions by proclaiming a problem that only they would solve. Obviously, for example, racists wouldn’t solve the problem of “institutional racism,” but neither would those who are skeptical about the problem or those who, believing in it, think the best resolution is gradual and cultural.
The Leftists, in other words, are The People Who Care — The People Who Will Bring Change. Well, they’ve been running things for quite a while, now, in large areas of society, both institutionally (e.g., universities and the news and entertainment media) and geographically (e.g., urban areas), and what do we have? Suddenly, at the tail end of the second term of America’s first black president, we suddenly have a resurgence of racism in the cities and on college campuses? Come on, now.
If that’s true, why have the liberals/progressives allowed it to fester for so long? It’s possible, of course, that there really is some degree of racism extant on the campus of Harvard, but more important to the Leftist narrative and sales pitch is that there be a belief in the existence full colonnade of boogeyman -isms. Otherwise, our society might distribute power on the basis of (oh, I don’t know) experience, competence, and a willingness to leave people alone wherever possible.
If you want to know why so few Americans who aren’t partisan Democrats trust the Obama Administration — a dynamic that is currently have a real effect on the issue of accepting refugees from the Middle East — Joel Gehrke provides one of the most recent indications as to the reason:
Justice Department officials used “prosecutorial discretion” to shelter former IRS official Lois Lerner from a grand jury after she was held in contempt of Congress.
“I believe that in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, the matter was handled and was resolved,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch told the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday morning.
Translation: The Obama Administration simply decided not to prosecute somebody who very much appears to have broken the law in order to use a government agency to help his reelection chances. As Congressman Trey Gowdy argues, there was more than ample evidence to justify a grand jury.
The damage that Obama’s presidency has done to the United States is incalculable in all areas, but the damage to our civic society is right up there at the top.
PARCC results released today prove that education has become a moral issue of civil rights, that money isn’t the solution, and that dramatic reform is necessary.
The heated debate over accepting refugees from the Middle East in greater numbers than usual cannot skip the most-important consideration: Whether the American people can trust their government.
The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s Competitiveness Report Card for Rhode Island is less of an indication of how Rhode Islanders are doing than what insiders are doing to us.
Some of the difficulty that leads the West into what I termed, earlier, as an autoimmune disorder may derive from a sense that acknowledging that somebody is fighting a holy war against us means that our response amounts to a holy war against them. That sense arises because we misunderstand one of the central dynamics that has made our culture unique.
I’m reading an excellent book by my friend and fellow Catholic Andrew McNabb, and among his insights is that, even as we can become entangled in the natural things of this world (our biology, our human nature, and our social tendencies), identifying and understanding how those things work doesn’t negate God, nor does it make them antithetical to Him. This part of the book is in poetic form:
We are, ourselves, truly, when we are among others, living in, society. …
… Society, because when in this world, it is through our social constructs that we live, daily, and it is through our social constructs, so often imperfect, that we can become ensnared.
The imagery of being “ensnared” is apt, because the way not to become ensnared is to understand and straighten the snares. In that way, we can see when social constructs are leading us toward destructive ends and fulfill our responsibility to develop social constructs that point toward right, moral ends. In the case of multiple threads of current events, we have a responsibility to ensure a society of free inquiry in which (in religious terms) all people are free to pursue God and meaning as their spirits move them.
A Christian — in his capacity as such — should not judge others and should not engage in anything resembling a “holy war,” but we’re also members of a society with responsibilities quite apart from religion. Those responsibilities entail ensuring safety and fostering an environment of freedom. Failing to protect our neighbors from a clear threat is tantamount to hurting them because, being human, we have the capacity to assess threats one step removed.
The Catholic Catechism, for one, explicitly recognizes this framework, which is intrinsic to thoughts about just war and just punishment. It acknowledges a legitimate civic authority that has roles apart from the Church and religion. Indeed, progressives pick up this sort of thinking when they want to argue for a governmental role in asserting morality through welfare and social justice and even environmentalism.
Not as Christian believers, but as citizens, we have a responsibility to protect and preserve the civilization that we’ve set up. Our beliefs inform our actions and provided some underlying principles for our civilization, but protecting our society is not the same as protecting a given belief system. When Islamic radicals come at us with their holy war, we don’t respond with holy war, but neither do we use our theological pacifism to undermine a just response as citizens.
Nicki makes an important point at The Liberty Zone (via Sarah Hoyt in Instapundit), related to the Paris attack:
So yes. They need to shut their borders down. It might be callous, but it’s the only way to protect the citizens of those nations, and after all, isn’t that the basic role of government?
Americans and other Westerners need to spend some time with that question and discuss each other’s responses. It should be a basic question during debates and interviews with politicians: What is the basic role of government?
Whatever they might say, it’s obvious that progressives, including the current President of the United States, believe the basic role of government is to organize and run society. One consequence of that view (which, I’d argue, is really one of its primary motivations) is that a basic role of government is the dispensation of benefits.
When it comes down to it, that’s a central principle behind the governments in Europe and the United States that are throwing open doors for masses of low-skilled immigrants. They’re offering the benefit of safety, first, but then the security of government welfare and the promise of complete education, healthcare, and nutrition for the immigrants’s children. Most of the supporters of such activity would probably acknowledge that there is another side — namely, the question of how much our society can bear. But their thinking generally seems to be no deeper than that of the college student who doesn’t quite know how much “the 1%” can or should hand over, but is certain that it’s more than is currently confiscated and is confident that they’ll always be there to take the hit.
That is, the basic role of government is to dispense the benefits, with the protection of current citizens as a secondary consideration. If they start to hurt, maybe we’ll adjust things. (Or better yet, we’ll offer government benefits to those among them whom we deem worthy, whether the ultra-rich investors or the lower classes.)
As a civic matter, this is backwards. We institute governments to secure our rights and, yes, to preserve our culture. That view of government can go too far, of course, and become a dangerously aggressive nationalism, but that’s the basic principle with which we should start. No doubt, it’s easier to run away from that particular duty as the inverse of nationalism, because the consequences are less direct, but the boot comes down on the throat regardless.
On Thursday, Paul Caron (of TaxProf Blog) pointed to another article that would prove to represent a convergence of issues within a couple of days. Among the student cry-bully uprisings across America is one at Vanderbilt, where the radical whiners have been attempting to unseat black female professor Carol Swain:
In the January column, Swain asked, “What would it take to make us admit we were wrong about Islam? What horrendous attack would finally convince us that Islam is not like other religions in the United States, that it poses an absolute danger to us and our children unless it is monitored better than it has been under the Obama administration?”
Even those who take the view that Swain is wrong to suggest that the government should undertake targeted monitoring of people on the basis of their religion should be able to see the value of American freedoms in such situations and understand how the campus fascists may bring about precisely the outcomes they seek to prevent. Imagine a non-tenured member of a university’s staff or faculty writing such things. Even more: imagine somebody just starting out, as early as applying to attend as a graduate student. He or she would have to hide any such feelings until securely tenured, some years and years down the road, perhaps in a world in which his or her warnings come too late.
If we don’t want to get to a place in which government is monitoring targeted populations (although I suspect the brainwashed students would think it only natural for the government to monitor Christians and conservatives), and if we don’t want to get to a place of such division that we’re behaving as if one religion “poses an absolute danger to us and our children,” then we need more open dialogue, not less. People must be truly free to articulate what it is that makes their beliefs better than others and to highlight what in other beliefs seems dangerous. And that freedom must extend not only to people who can only be fired in extreme circumstances, but also to those who still need to find doors in their careers.
That’s the only way we can, as a society, work our way down to defining the good and the bad and determining who is in the thrall of each and why. As it is, anything that resonates with the tones of traditional American beliefs is treated as suspect, and the only way that attitude won’t have bad results is if there is nothing amazing about our country and nothing in our tradition that enabled it.
Early yesterday, I bookmarked a few things to consider posting, and last night’s atrocity in Paris only made the connections more relevant. Start with Mark Steyn’s take on the latest GOP presidential debate:
Ted Cruz had a strong night without any breakout moments, unless you count his venture into the immigration debate. It is striking that no moderators want to bring it up. For many Trump supporters, it’s the issue – because, if you don’t have borders, it doesn’t matter having a president or a tax code or a school system or a health-care plan, because they’ll all be overwhelmed. It’s a timelier subject than ever, given the Great Migrations across the Atlantic. Since Chancellor Merkel announced she was abolishing Germany’s borders and embracing all these “Syrian” “refugees”, for example, the country has run out of …diapers? blankets? No, pepper spray. Hmm. …
It is striking that, even in a conservative debate, mass, remorseless, illegal immigration is discussed almost entirely from the illegals’ point of view: as Kasich advises, think of the families, think of the children. Their families, their children. The families of those they’ve supplanted are of less consequence. The argument made by Bush and Kasich against enforcing the immigration laws is an appeal to moral preening: this is “not who we are”. But using mass immigration to destroy the lives of your own citizens? That’s exactly who we are.
This is part of a thread that I’ve been following more closely, lately, with evidence that Rhode Island policies are literally switching out native Rhode Islanders with immigrants, perhaps as part of a push to bring in more clients for the inside interests that make Rhode Island a “company state.” But to put a sharp point on it, turn to a chilling viral video, running about twenty minutes, that pieces together clips of the massive migration (some say, “invasion”) persisting throughout Europe.
To be sure, 20 minutes of footage from months of activity allows for a slanted view, but the points can’t be ignored. Toward the beginning of the video, for example, a European woman exclaims, “We are the victims, here, not them. We have to live like we did before. We have to live our lives; they took it from us.” The commentary running throughout the video addresses increasing incidents of rape and violence (including among school children) as well as the cultural displacement of Europeans from their ancestral home: “The Great Replacement.”
We’ve been trained to avoid any hint of xenophobia or racism, and that inclination is right and just, but we — all of us, Americans of every race and ethnicity — have a right to our homes and our heritage. When those marching across Europe are quite explicit in their aims, when our political leaders speak of changing demographics as marking an unavoidable, often a preferable, future, we have a duty to consider the ramifications. We have a right to worry about our families, our children.
If you haven’t seen this footage of students, apparently corralled by at least one professor, acting to eject and exclude anybody fulfilling the role of a journalist at a protest event at the University of Missouri, set aside the 12:41 for some preparatory research:
To me the most telling moment comes at the beginning, when a bespectacled guy who looks a little older than the average student tells photographer Tim Tai, from within the arm-linked circle of “protestors,” that the photographer “cannot push [the protestors] to move closer.” It’s a reasonable sounding rule of engagement from somebody presenting himself as some sort of an authority figure.
A moment later, the students start pushing Tai away from the center of the circle, and he turns to the same guy with a complaint that they’re breaking the rules that he had just laid out. The reply: “Don’t talk to me; that’s not my problem.” Tai then spends several minutes arguing with the students while being physically pushed back. The argument is fruitless, because the mob is clearly not interested in reaching fair conclusions. They are righteous, and any infiltrating journalists are not. It’s not about coming to a rational conclusion. The only rule is domination.
The second half of the clip is videographer Mark Schierbecker’s already-infamous conflict with Professor Melissa Click and the aftermath after she gets her requested “muscle” to eject him.
The bespectacled guy’s role is classic Saul Alinsky: force the enemy to live by his own rules… and then deny them as your own. In a chaotic interaction, people want some sort of authority figure who can negotiate between the sides. Pretending to be that figure deflates some of the leverage of the target while not limiting the pretender’s own options.
If one refuses to capitulate — to subordinate one’s own rights to those who do not acknowledge them — the only two approaches are to (1) abandon your own rules or (2) bring those among the fascists who are unaware that they are behaving as such face to face with their decision. In the first approach, Tai and Schierbecker would physically push back; find a weak link in the human chain, perhaps, and push through it. Of course, then the fascists would call in the actual authorities (perhaps armed) who would proceed to enforce the rules (which the fascists were ignoring in the first place) in a one-sided way.
In this case, the second approach would have been better and would probably have been even more clarifying for those now discomfited by Schierbecker’s footage. Standing on two legs leaves us susceptible to being pushed back by even jostling, as we strive to keep our balance. Sitting down would have required the fascists to escalate or to give up. Forcing somebody who’s sitting to move requires much more than simply leaning against him. Brainwashed students might convince themselves — in the thrill of the mob action — that stepping forward is not really “pushing” or “assault,” but somebody who’s sitting would have to be unambiguously pushed or dragged.
If you’re feeling particularly interested in preserving your liberties, could reverse the leverage. As the fascists strive to keep their balance around you, they’ll naturally shift their weight away a bit, at least periodically, leaving room to advance against them.
In this case, the likelihood of things escalating out of control looked pretty minimal, and too many of the students had looks on their faces like they thought they were only mildly misbehaving for fun. Contrast Schierbecker’s video with the scene when union thugs assaulted Steven Crowder in Michigan.
A little bit more fortitude while the fascism is still budding may prevent the need for actual risk of life for the next person down the line who attempts to resist.
UPDATE (7:51 a.m. 11/11/15):
Erik Wemple (via Instapundit) identifies the bespectacled guy as “Richard J. ‘Chip’ Callahan, professor and chair of religious studies at the university.” From his bio page:
I am particularly interested in the ways that people creatively and constantly negotiate identity, significance, and power through religious idioms in the dense contexts of their everyday lives.
So, Professor Chip clearly understood the moral dimensions of his statement to Tai that other students pushing him, in violation of the rules that the professor had just articulated, “Don’t talk to me; that’s not my problem.”
Saul Alinsky did dedicate his Rules for Radicals to Lucifer, after all.
Want another indication that government in the United States has become a massive exercise in fraud against the American people?
The U.S. national debt jumped $339 billion on Monday, the same day President Obama signed into law legislation suspending the debt ceiling.
That legislation allowed the government to borrow as much as it wants above the $18.1 trillion debt ceiling that had been in place.
The website that reports the exact tally of the debt said the U.S. government owed $18.153 trillion last Friday, and said that number surged to $18.492 on Monday.
No doubt, the folks with access to the numbers behind the scenes will offer complicated answers about how the debt didn’t actually continue to go up after it had hit the ceiling. The term of art is that “extraordinary measures” were taken. But the upshot is that the spending and the debt don’t stop.
Decision makers in government know the game is rigged — that there is no way the American people can leverage their representatives actually to stop the spending and borrowing — so they carry on until the politicians are able to figure out how to perpetrate the fraud.
It’s hard not to agree with Rhode Island Director of Health Nicole Alexander-Scott when she phrases her point of view like this:
“Like the governor, I also fully support diversity across the board in leadership levels … I love to say diversity brings strength. You have a variety of backgrounds, a variety of ideas, experiences that add new ways of accomplishing things. We’re in an age where we have to be creative, we have to be innovative, and the more diverse perspectives we have, the better we are at being able to achieve that effectively …”
Unfortunately, the context suggests that, like most liberals and progressives, she takes an extremely superficial, arguably racist view of diversity. Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza lays it out with stunning clarity in his contribution to the Providence Journal’s “Race in RI” series. With the paradoxical imperatives that we have to “focus on what brings us together” and declaring that people who disagree with him about the existence of “white privilege” should be written off, Elorza says he chooses to “focus on like-minded people.”
Apparently, having his biases confirmed is more important to the mayor than “a variety of backgrounds… ideas… and experiences” that brings “diverse perspectives” to the necessity of solving problems creatively. The way to achieve diversity is apparently to make people who are substantively different disappear.
That point of clarity dovetails nicely with another, hidden within Alexander-Scott’s interview:
Using $2.7 million from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, Rhode Island has created 11 “health equity zones” to target the root causes of poor health, including poverty, inadequate housing and lack of nutritious food and safe recreational opportunities.
Thus money confiscated from taxpayers for the purpose of disease control somehow becomes diverted to “safe recreational opportunities,” and this is just the edge of the crowbar under the bedrock of our freedoms. “Diversity” and “equity” are wonderful principles in the abstract and defined honestly. In the current practice, they’re manipulative buzzwords for “like-minded people” to confiscate money and consolidate power in order to buy votes and make people dependent on government.
Far from wanting healing, the people promoting these ideas need divisions and disparities to remain.
U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, from Rhode Island, isn’t backing off his suggestion that government should investigate his political opposition.
The word “diversity” as meant by the governor and the Providence Journal is used as cover and misdirection to advance their own agendas.
As Halloween approaches, fear not the masks and movies; fear the quiet promises whispered in press releases and incanted with mystical words like “equity,” “sustainability,” and “diversity.” The Cult of Big Government is working night in and night out to raise from the dark abyss of dangerous philosophies a demon to possess all of society and sap the human will. Look south of Salem, to Rhode Island, where the scheme is well advanced.
In a society so comfortable that it has become discomfited by the wisdom of its ancestors, our popular myths mislead us now. The demon will not arrive with a flash of lightning and the smell of sulfur. It has changed the masks of racial bigotry and overt greed in which it has been spotted in the past. Its minions have no need of the ritualistic dances of the legislature. No virgin need be sacrificed (though virginity itself may be). Surviving until dawn will not save the victims.
Rather, the secular clerics of the soulless cult have chosen three points in the lives of unsuspecting national villagers on which to build their citadels, disguised as places of public service, and when the triangle is fully drawn between them, all hope will be lost.
The loophole allowing the state to enter into perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in debt without voter approval relies on a scheme of creating “quasi-public” agencies but should be unconstitutional.
We’ve all heard that Rhode Island is a “sanctuary state,” meaning that people who’ve entered the United States illegally will find the law easier to skirt, here. A recent story out of Providence makes me wonder whether the city is keen to suspend the First Amendment, too — specifically freedom of speech.
Steve Ahlquist reports that somebody distributed 15 fliers promoting a branch of the KKK on the door steps of wealthy residents in one of the more progressive districts in the state. The fliers were printed directly from the site being promoted, and they were inserted into sandwich bags weighted down with rice. Below a nearly parodic sketch of a pointing Klansman is the message that “It’s time for YOU to fight back White Man.”
Now, I don’t ever want to overestimate the intelligence of the sorts of people who would sincerely recruit for the KKK — especially those who would do so in a wealthy, liberal neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island — but this looks like a hoax, to me. Why would a sincere racist bother with just a handful of fliers, printed poorly from a Web site, take the time to put them in bags with rice, and then toss them on doorsteps? That’s pretty furtive for somebody trying to recruit, who is presumably proud of his or her rebellious views.
It seems more like something a hoaxer would do to avoid detection.
Much more important, though, is the reaction of Mayor Jorge Elorza and the city’s safety commissioner, Stephen Pare, who asserted that such activity would not be tolerated and would be prosecuted as a “hate crime.” It’s disturbing that none of the journalists asking them questions thought to inquire: What’s the crime, here?
It might surprise some folks to learn, but hatred is not a crime. Even racism isn’t a crime. So, what’s the underlying criminal action, here, that is exacerbated by “hate”? Littering?
We’re on extremely dangerous ground if government officials are going to decide what sorts of messages are protected by the First Amendment and, especially, if journalists aren’t going to challenge them on it when they do so. Of course, the predictability of the response is more reason to think it’s a hoax, perhaps to justify another Black Lives Matter march or demand public money for some organization.
P.S. — Lest we ignore the obvious, by the way, it’s worth noting the likelihood that the very same people who’ll call this a “hate crime,” specifically citing Jewish residents and a nearby synagogue, likely harbor a visceral hatred of Israel, with a tendency to draw equivalence between Palestinian attackers and the Jews who defend themselves. And the same people who instantly believe distribution of a picture of a Klansman is a “hate crime” likely support public funding for “artists” who are overtly offensive and hostile, particularly against Christians.
“Health equity zones” are the latest euphemism hiding an ultimate end of our liberties and control over our own lives.
Some folks to the left of the center line in Rhode Island politics would probably like me a whole lot more if I didn’t get so heated on the subject of campaign finance reform. For much of the last two decades, that subject has been an area of rare agreement between left and right, but the more I’ve thought about it, and the more I’ve observed, the more convinced I’ve become that campaign finance reform actually does a great deal of harm to our country and that its supporters on the right have been suckered.
Among the many benefits of Scott Walker’s push against public-sector labor unions in Wisconsin may be its effect in prodding the left to start leveraging the campaign finance advantage before it was politically wise to do so on the national stage. I’m referring to the infamous “John Doe” investigations, which I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere in Rhode Island news media, other than on Anchor Rising-Ocean State Current:
In April, National Review told — for the first time — the stories of the targets of Wisconsin’s “John Doe” investigations. The accounts were harrowing. Anonymous sources told of pre-dawn raids, with police swarming into their homes, walking into sleeping children’s rooms, denying the targets immediate access to lawyers, and then imposing gag orders that prevented them from telling friends, family, and supporters about their ordeal.
These raids were not launched against hardened criminals but against conservative activists, and the “crimes” they were accused of turned out not to be crimes at all. Rather, a hyper-partisan district attorney, John Chisholm, and his special prosecutor, Francis Schmitz, launched a multi-county criminal investigation of First Amendment–protected speech. They wanted to know the extent to which conservative individuals and groups had coordinated with Scott Walker’s campaign — and the campaigns of various state senators — to advocate conservative issues.
On the surface, it sounds like a great idea to increase transparency in politics, down to the donations and spending by every candidate for every office. The problem is that insiders have all of the advantages, on that count, and ruthless people can make better use of the information than moral grassroots volunteers and candidates, whether the ruthlessness manifests as a literal government conspiracy, as in Wisconsin, or merely run-of-the-mill intimidation of donors who back the non-ruthless.
Although it’s slid into the political background, RhodeMap RI is still very much an issue in Rhode Island, and interested residents can learn more in Bristol, this Saturday.