Writing in the Financial Times on September 1, Robin Wrigglesworth reported that markets are signaling unease about what may lie ahead in the first week of November. It is not so much the election that’s causing agita as the fear that Election Night might not resolve the result. Investors do not appreciate uncertainty, and if everything is still unresolved by, say, late the next day, the only certainty will be uncertainty.
On Bloomberg, Ryan Teague Beckwith has invited readers to “choose your own election adventure”:
So . . . how badly could this election go? In our choose-your-own-election game, see if you can avoid landing in a Supreme Court showdown or constitutional crisis and keep democracy safe (for now).
To be blunt, given the way that both the Trump and Biden camps (and parts of the media) are already throwing shade on the election process (not to speak of the sour aftermath of the 2016 election, or, for those with longer memories, the Diebold paranoia of yesteryear, or, for that matter the halcyon days when an election hung on hanging chads), the nervousness, if anything, may be underdone, especially as there are some signs that the race may be tightening, thereby reducing still further the chances of a clear-cut outcome not too long after polls close.
The president’s dark ruminations about the election — many of them centered on the iniquities of mail-in voting — are too well known to need repetition, as is the use he makes of conspiracy theories. But comments from the Biden camp also seem aimed at preparing a claim that they were robbed.
To take one example, CNN recently quoted Hillary Clinton as saying this:
“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is. . . .”
Then there was Biden in June:
“My greatest concern, my single greatest concern [is that] this president is going to try to steal this election.”
And the Washington Post cannot be said to have been calming things down by printing a piece by Rosa Brooks describing how things might play out under various simulations prepared by the “Transition Integrity Project,” an exercise that might not have been entirely even-handed:
In each scenario, Team Trump — the players assigned to simulate the Trump campaign and its elected and appointed allies — was ruthless and unconstrained right out of the gate, and Team Biden struggled to get out of reaction mode. In one exercise, for instance, Team Trump’s repeated allegations of fraudulent mail-in ballots led National Guard troops to destroy thousands of ballots in Democratic-leaning ZIP codes, to applause on social media from Trump supporters. Over and over, Team Biden urged calm, national unity and a fair vote count, while Team Trump issued barely disguised calls for violence and intimidation against ballot-counting officials and Biden electors.
But don’t worry, counseled Brooks, steps (some of them certainly sensible) can be taken to defuse the atmosphere ahead of the vote. “The media also has an important role” to play.
Oh.
In a rather more measured article for the New York Times, Trip Daniel put, so to speak, flesh on the specters, focusing first on the likelihood that many more Biden than Trump voters will vote by mail:
An NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll last month found that nearly half — 47 percent — of supporters of Mr. Biden planned to mail in their votes, compared with two-thirds of Trump supporters — 66 percent — who planned to vote in person on Election Day.
In some states, the discrepancy is even more stark. A recent Marquette Law School poll of Wisconsin, another swing state, found that among voters planning to cast a mail ballot, Mr. Biden was favored by 67 percentage points. Among those who planned to vote on Election Day, Mr. Trump led by 41 points.
And so:
“We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump,” Josh Mendelsohn, the chief executive of the group, Hawkfish [a data-analysis company founded by Michael Bloomberg “to inform progressive initiatives”], told Axios on HBO. The company’s survey of registered voters concluded that twice as many planned to cast a ballot by mail as ever before, and that they were mostly Biden supporters.
A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, Thea McDonald, called Democrats’ concerns about the president prematurely declaring victory “an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory,” adding, “President Trump and his campaign are fighting for a free, fair, transparent election in which every valid ballot counts — once.”
“Once.”
Category: US politics
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My father was a Teamster for 15 years. I grew up in a working-class household.
And I don’t believe the propaganda for a second.
“The Weekend: Brought to You by Labor Unions,” reads the bumper sticker.
I see. So those Third World countries looking to escape poverty and enjoy additional leisure just need … some labor unions?
(What’s the point of foreign aid, then?)
Until society grows wealthy enough, all the labor unions in the world can’t make it possible to take two days a week off from work.
Can you imagine, in the primitive economies of 300 years ago, agitating for a shorter work week? People would have thought you insane.
With little capital, and with most goods produced by hand, it takes all the labor power all the hours it can spare just to make life barely livable.
That’s why people worked long hours in terrible conditions in the past (and why they do in the Third World today). Not because short men with white mustaches and a monocle took delight in oppressing them.
What emancipated people from these dehumanizing conditions was capital goods. With workers vastly more productive than before, thanks to the assistance of machines, physical output was multiplied in quantity and quality many, many times over. This greater abundance put downward pressure on prices relative to wage rates, and people’s standard of living rose.
At that time they opted for more leisure and more pleasant working conditions rather than more cash.
But if you ask people who work in sweatshops today if they’d prefer to have (1) more pleasant conditions (or fewer working hours) but (2) less take-home pay, they overwhelmingly say no.
Professor Ben Powell of Texas Tech University actually bothered to ask. And 90+% of them said that regardless of what Western do-gooders thought they should want, they wanted the money.
Meanwhile, American workers had the eight-hour-day well before their much more heavily unionized counterparts in Europe did, and they earned higher wages. Unionism never accounted for more than a third of the American labor force, and that was at its height.
So whatever your kids’ teachers are crediting unions for, just roll your eyes.Given that I have worked every day (not merely weekdays) since the pandemic began, and I have worked every Labor Day since my return to the weekly newspaper world, Labor Day is just another day of labor for me. I’d prefer Constitution Day, Sept. 17, to be a national holiday.
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Kyle Rittenhouse deserves the best defense money can buy. He shot three men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, not because he wanted to but because he had to. He is, for all intents and purposes, a standup citizen with aspirations of being a great public servant. I hope he still manages to become one after all of this.
That said, the Rittenhouse situation shouldn’t be a situation at all.
I’ve gone into detail about what Rittenhouse faced that night, so I’m going to skip the details and get down to the point.
(READ: Kyle Rittenhouse Was Right to Fire His Weapon)
The fact that Rittenhouse was there in the first place isn’t a good thing. Not necessarily on Rittenhouse’s part, though. He felt he needed to be there. Looking at the teenager’s history, he’s clearly a believer in public service and holds police and firefighters in high esteem. This isn’t a bad thing, but it answers the question on both sides about why Rittenhouse felt he should be in that Kenosha warzone.
Rittenhouse’s inner voice that tells him to act for the good of his fellow Americans was likely pretty loud in his ears and, combined with the impetuousness of youth, he set out to put himself into harm’s way for the people of Kenosha. Being the person he is, he even gave medical aid to the people who were there supporting the riots.
His ideological stances and opposition to the mob eventually lead to him killing two people and injuring a third. Despite the fact that this happened, it doesn’t make Rittenhouse the bad guy in the story. Yes, two people are dead, but that’s not Rittenhouse’s fault, it’s theirs.
Arguments against that very point have arisen. Some say that Rittenhouse shouldn’t have put himself in the position to have to kill someone in the first place. He showed up with a gun and began doing things that could only upset the rioters. In a way, Rittenhouse was inviting violent conflict even if he wasn’t actively seeking it out.
Tim Carney at the Washington Examiner put it like this:
This isn’t a new story. In my family, we have a word for it: a “Plaxident.” It’s in honor of former Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress, who in 2008 shot himself in the leg. Burress was walking up a narrow, dark stairwell with a drink in his hand when he tripped and fell. His gun came sliding out of his belt, and he tried to grab it. Then, bam.
Yes, anyone could slip on a stairwell. Trying to grab the falling gun might or might not have been rational. But showing up at a night club with a gun in your belt was the real error. So the accidental discharge wasn’t an accident: It was a Plaxident. If your kid breaks a window explaining that his grip slipped on the fastball he was throwing, the relevant question isn’t how his grip slipped but why he was throwing a baseball inside.
Rittenhouse’s error had far graver consequences.
Catholic teaching includes a concept called the “near occasion of sin.” Sometimes, the biggest mistake we make is putting ourselves in a terrible position. And in Catholic teaching, that prudential mistake is a moral error — a sin.
It’s a solid point to consider, but not one I entirely agree with. Rittenhouse definitely put himself into a position where he would have been forced to kill people. He brought a gun to a riot and began attempting to limit the damage the riot was trying to cause. That the teenager had a hand in developing what happened that night is a fact that cannot be denied.
Where I tend to diverge with arguments like the one above is a moral question. Is it wrong to go to a place where evil is flourishing and stand between it and innocent people? Is it wrong to show up to a lawless place and inject order?
There are different schools of thought on this with all sorts of variables and nuances to consider to be sure, but what I want to focus on is Rittenhouse’s situation in particular. If the kid had gone there with the intent to shoot someone and took an active part in arranging for things to happen that would facilitate homicide then yes, I believe that would have been wrong.
But that’s not what happened. Rittenhouse clearly reacted to the situation with self-defense after going there to assist people, not play the part of vigilante. Vigilante actions would mean actively seeking out “justice” against those committing injustices. All evidence so far points to Rittenhouse being there to help defend locations and assist where he can.
The rioters, who were clearly there to do wrong in the first place, could have left Rittenhouse alone. It would have been wise of them to do so given the fact that he was armed. Yet, they didn’t. They attacked Rittenhouse who was then forced to defend himself. They didn’t have to, but they did. The risk of death was their choice, not Rittenhouse’s. Rittenhouse attempted to prevent their deaths by retreating every single time. He was trying to show them mercy as he was in the position of a death dealer but the rioters rejected that and came after him.
The teen fired his weapon out of necessity, not vengeance. It was the rioter’s decisions that lead to their deaths.
The teenager is not to blame for the deaths despite the fact that he was there any more than officers who are forced to shoot attackers are to blame. Yes, it’s true that Rittenhouse could have stayed home and none of this wouldn’t have happened, but it’s also true that his being there wasn’t a moral wrong and the events that led to the shooting weren’t the kid’s fault.
Being there as a defensive measure will definitely invite retaliation from those on the offensive, but again, the option to attack is not on the defenders, it’s on the attackers.
Were the Koreans on the rooftops during the LA riots wrong to be there? We largely agree that they were perfectly in their right and their threatening posture paid off. The Korean businesses were spared the destruction the rest of the city suffered.
Rittenhouse’s situation differs slightly but not enough to be considered wrong. He was there doing what Americans do and was doing so legally.
If you ask me, the real blame for Rittenhouse’s fateful night doesn’t rest on the kid and while the protesters have the blame to take, I wouldn’t put the lion’s share of it on them.
The riot shouldn’t have been going in the first place, and it wouldn’t have happened if the leaders in control of these cities and states would do what they’re supposed to do and protect the citizenry. They aren’t. They’re allowing this burning, pillaging, and murdering to happen.
If there wasn’t a riot, there wouldn’t be a Rittenhouse, but if you allow your streets to be terrorized and destroyed, a Rittenhouse is bound to arrive.
As for the victims of what the black humor portions of social media call the “Kenosha hat trick,” Wisconsin Right Now has evidence that you would want none of the three as neighbors.
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Jason Whitlock wrote this after the Bucks fell behind 2–0 in their NBA conference semifinal series against Miami:
The refs bailed out Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks Wednesday night.
Yep. You read that right. The refs saved the Greek Freak with the bogus touch foul that sent Miami Heat star Jimmy Butler to the line for the game-winning free throws with no time on the clock.
The 5th-seeded Heat now own a 2-0 advantage in their best-of-seven playoff series against the NBA’s best regular-season squad.
Lucky for Giannis and the Bucks everyone will spend [Thursday] talking about the sloppy officiating that first allowed Milwaukee’s Khris Middleton to knot the score at 114 with three gift-wrapped free throws and then four seconds later handed the game back to Miami.
Milwaukee fans will likely focus their animus toward referee Marc Davis, who made both sketchy foul calls. That’s fine. But all of Milwaukee should be talking about Jacob Blake’s role in Milwaukee’s terrible start to the second round of the playoffs.
The Bucks dug this hole the moment they diverted their attention away from basketball to fight for the life of a criminal suspect who doesn’t care all that much about his own life.
The Bucks are suffering from Post Traumatic Black Lives Matter Disorder. It’s the mental lapse that happens when a professional athlete realizes he’s allowed Twitter race-hustlers to dupe him into caring more about the life of a criminal suspect than the criminal suspect cares about his own life.
Twenty seconds of an edited cell phone video provoked the Bucks to shut down the NBA Bubble and other parts of the sports world. The shutdown accomplished nothing. Skipping work rarely does.
It was a well-intentioned publicity stunt orchestrated by people who believe in the power of publicity to end racism, cure cancer, spark world peace and stop police from shooting resisting criminal suspects.
The Bucks are mentally lethargic because they’ve spent the past four or five days coming to grips with the immaturity, recklessness and futility of their response to events in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Giannis, George Hill, Kyle Korver and the rest of the Bucks are the official public relations team for Jacob Blake, a man accused of serial sexual assault against a black woman. The Bucks knew nothing about Blake when they decided to go on strike moments before taking the court against the Orlando Magic. All the Bucks knew at the time is what the Twitter race-hustlers told them.
A white cop shot Jacob Blake while Blake was innocently trying to break up a fight. That was the original fairytale floating across the Twittersphere.
Now we know the rest of the story. Blake allegedly had a history of sexually abusing the black woman who called the police. He allegedly stole from her. He wrestled with the police. He admitted having a knife. With his kids in the car, he ignored the commands of police at gunpoint.
Blake behaved in an incredibly irresponsible manner. He behaved like a man who didn’t care whether he lived or died. Think about it. You’re somewhere the courts have ruled you should not be — at the residence of the alleged victim of your sexual assault. Your kids are in the car. You fight with the police. The police draw their guns and you attempt to get inside the car where your three children are.
You’re endangering your own life and the life of your three completely innocent children.
The social media mob and Black Lives Matter dictate that we only evaluate the behavior of white police officer’s in these situations. It’s illegal, immoral and racist to second-guess Jacob Blake’s behavior.
BLM seemingly believes Blake has no responsibility to protect the safety of his three kids, to protect his ability to provide for them. According to Bigots Love Marxism, it is the sole responsibility of the government and white police officers to make sure nothing bad happens to Blake, a suspect they’re trying to arrest for visiting a woman he allegedly sexually assaulted.
Bigots Love Marxism thinks black men are incapable of consistently making decisions to protect themselves and the welfare of their children. Blake responded to police like a man with a death wish and no regard for his children.
Did he deserve seven shots in the back? No.
Am I going to skip work and mourn Blake’s tragedy as if the government sanctioned the KKK to physically harm Martin Luther King, Michael Jordan, Patrick Mahomes or a sophomore at Morehouse College? Absolutely not.
The Bucks made fools of themselves. They chose the wrong hill to plant a flag. It’s easy to lie to yourself via social media. The algorithms, Russian bots and blue-check, bubble-approved sports journalists protect the influencers promoting BLM Derangement. It’s unlikely anyone will ask the Bucks if their Blake stunt shook their focus.
And if the question is asked, they’ll be allowed to pretend it was all worth it.
“The Bucks started a conversation. They raised awareness. They showed empathy.”
Inside the social media matrix, it’s better to slap a slogan on the back of your jersey, kneel during the national anthem or perform some other symbolic gesture on behalf of a criminal suspect than it is to take action in support of a high school or college kid attempting to make a positive impact on society.
The Bucks are “ride or die” for Jacob Blake.
If they die in the second round of these playoffs and Giannis leaves for Golden State, Milwaukee made the ultimate sacrifice for someone unwilling to sacrifice his pride to protect his three sons.
Trust me, not everyone on the Bucks’ roster is foolish enough to believe justice for Jacob Blake is worth a 0-2 playoff deficit.
According to Wisconsin court records, Blake has been in court three times for not paying child support. The charges for which Kenosha County courts issued an arrest warrant include third-degree sexual assault — domestic abuse (maximum penalty 10 years in prison and a $25,000 fine), criminal trespass to dwelling — domestic abuse, and disorderly conduct — domestic abuse. That is who people are defending.
To no one’s surprise, what pro athletes — and, for that matter, Gov. Tony Evers and Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes — thought happened in Blake’s arrest is not what happened. But don’t believe me, read the state Department of Justice‘s investigation yourself. (The DOJ, by the way, is run by Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat.)
There would be some cosmic justice if the Bucks ended up losing this series. The Bucks’ owners are well-known Democrats. Fiserv Forum, built with $250 million in taxpayer dollars, was built in part to attract the 2020 Democratic National Convention, which of course wasn’t really held in Milwaukee due to the coronavirus pan(dem)ic. (Someone predicted that Milwaukee would take a bath over the convention. He was right for reasons that didn’t exist when he thus opined.)
Beyond the political issues (actually, not, given the Democratic governor’s shutdown of this state earlier this year), the Bucks clearly suffer when not playing at home. The NBA “bubble” has had the impact of completely negating home court advantage. It’s as if the NBA designed it to eliminate the Bucks’ chance of getting to the NBA FInals, let alone winning.
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The headline is a quote from U.S. Sen. George Aiken of Vermont about the Vietnam War.
James Freeman has a current parallel:
Politicians and pundits have been recklessly casting the effort to resist Covid-19 as a “war” for months. Maybe they’re finally ready to sound the metaphorical retreat. For starters, this catastrophically costly war of choice doesn’t seem to have resulted in the capture of any territory or the destruction of the enemy. Don Luskin of TrendMacrolytics writes in a Journal op-ed:
Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health—first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections.
Just like a real military force, the Covid warriors have wreaked severe destruction, but it’s all been inflicted on our own society. Speaking of the domestic destruction, this is perhaps the one way in which the campaign against Covid really has been similar to a war. The Journal’s Kate Davidson reports:
U.S. government debt is on track to exceed the size of the economy for the 12 months ended Sept. 30, a milestone not hit since World War II that has been brought into reach by a giant fiscal response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Congressional Budget Office is expected to report on Wednesday that federal debt held by the public is projected to reach or exceed 100% of U.S. gross domestic product, the broadest measure of U.S. economic output. That would put the U.S. in the company of a handful of nations with debt loads that exceed their economies, including Japan, Italy and Greece—though investors remain unfazed by the rising red ink.Federal taxpayers will someday have to pay all these bills, but state and local governments are primarily responsible for waging the campaign against prosperity and public health. And one of the country’s most committed warriors, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.), seems to have selected his latest targets almost at random. It is perhaps another lesson in the inhumanity of war. Chris Woodyard writes in USA Today:
…California has embarked on a new tiered plan for reopening businesses that has some crying foul.
Critics say the system doesn’t take into account that some businesses can operate safely even in counties with relatively high numbers of COVID-cases. And it hits some businesses harder than others, even when it appears they perform similar services.
“While certain businesses are allowed to open … many others continue to be greatly limited, hampered or even closed,” said San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, who held a news conference on the issue Monday. “The state continues to change the targets and move the goal posts.”This column appreciates Mr. Desmond’s effort to introduce a sports metaphor into the discussion. But it is the language of warfare that has been used to justify the abuse of children who are currently being denied educational opportunities–which will reduce their future earnings–even as the grown-ups inflict upon them a World War II level of debt. The financial obligation forced on today’s students keeps getting bigger as government school closures reduce their ability to service it. Perhaps some enterprising tyke will consider starting a Young Lives Matter protest movement.
Another way in which the Covid campaign is very different from actual combat is that typically war mongers are not simultaneously serving as conscientious objectors. But there is a disturbing recent pattern of government officials displaying an unwillingness to engage in the fighting they demand of others. Now this week Fox News reports:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited a San Francisco hair salon on Monday afternoon for a wash and blow-out, despite local ordinances keeping salons closed amid the coronavirus pandemic…
In security footage obtained by Fox News, and timestamped Monday at 3:08 p.m. Pacific Time, the California powerhouse is seen walking through eSalon in San Francisco with wet hair, and without a mask over her mouth or nose.Perhaps like many Americans, the speaker doesn’t really think Covid is as deadly as she says. Perhaps she read a New York Times report saying that many Covid tests come back positive even when the patient carries an insignificant amount of virus and began to wonder how many people have died with Covid rather than of Covid. Given that the overwhelming majority of Covid-related deaths occur in older people with co-morbidities, perhaps the speaker is also privately questioning how many patients died of Covid shortly before they were likely to die of another underlying condition. In New York State alone, thousands of recorded Covid deaths have involved people at least 80 years old and suffering from dementia. Does the speaker wonder if perhaps such deaths are not exactly the same in terms of lost years of life as an 18-year-old dying in battle? Maybe the speaker has considered all of this and has also noticed that states like New York with the highest death totals also imposed the most extreme lockdowns.
If Speaker Pelosi isn’t harboring such doubts, why would she run the risk of an unmasked hair appointment? Perhaps she is simply following the dictates of her conscience and must adhere to a deep-seated belief in professional styling. But probably not.
It’s time to declare an armistice.
Or something. As of mid-week, after 5½ months of Gov. Tony Evers’ lockdowns and mask order:
- 6.07 percent of Wisconsinites who are either sick enough to be tested or have a reason to be tested (suspected exposure), have tested positive for COVID-19 — 1.3 percent of the state’s estimated population.
- Of that population, 7.69 percent (0.467 percent of those tested) have been sick enough to be hospitalized.
- 1.48 percent of those who tested positive (0.09 percent of those tested) have died. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 94 percent of those who have died had additional contributing conditions.
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The Wall Street Journal:
The 2020 Republican convention focused on issues in a way that the Democratic parley did not. Perhaps most striking was the impassioned—and repeated—demand for school choice. No convention had ever featured speaker after speaker who promoted choice in human and moral terms.
Like the virtual convention format, this owes something to Covid-19. As parents, teachers, principals and students have adapted to the pandemic, too many traditional public schools have been far less nimble in serving students than have charters, private and religious schools. Many parents are realizing this won’t change as long as funding is tied to buildings and bureaucracies rather than students.
Americans are also realizing that much of this is because the big school decisions are made by teachers unions. In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot had planned to reopen classrooms until the Chicago Teachers Union threatened a strike, and now that’s been put off until at least November. In Maryland a health officer twice ordered private and religious schools closed, lest they embarrass their public counterparts.Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says reopening schools is itself a matter of public health because the harm to keeping children out of the classroom is “well-known and significant.” The CDC adds that keeping schools closed “disproportionately harms low-income and minority children and those living with disabilities” because their parents lack the resources to switch to a private school, hire a tutor, or even sign up for after-school programs.
All of this has been eye-opening for parents whose options are limited by the status quo. Having to monitor remote learning, parents are also discovering the woke political bias that passes for education in too many schools. In Philadelphia, a public school teacher tweeted his concern that “‘conservative’ parents” listening in “are my chief concern.”
The GOP convention hit all of this from multiple angles. Tera Myers expressed gratitude for an Ohio scholarship program that allowed her to find a school that works for her son, Samuel, who has Down syndrome.
Rebecca Friedrich, a long-time California public school teacher, spoke of her battle with unions that force teachers to pay dues to finance causes they don’t agree with. Like other speakers, she zeroed in on the human costs, noting that the teachers unions spend “hundreds of millions annually to defeat charter schools and school choice, trapping so many precious, low-income children in dangerous, corrupt and low-performing schools.”
The demand for more choice was particularly strong among the black speakers. “We want school choice,” said Kim Klacik, the Republican running for the Baltimore seat of the late Rep. Elijah Cummings. “For the sake of our children,” said former NFL star Jack Brewer, we can’t allow concerns about President’s “tone” to “allow Biden and Harris to deny underserved black and brown children [their] school of choice.”
Studies have shown that choice causes public schools to improve. In Washington, D.C., where about 44,000 low-income kids are enrolled in charter schools and 1,800 receive private school vouchers, the share of fourth-graders and eighth-graders who scored proficient in math last year on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams doubled from 2009. Incredibly for a man whose sons attended Catholic Archmere Academy in Delaware, Joe Biden wants to eliminate the D.C. scholarship program.
Mississippi has shown the largest learning gains in the country since establishing education-savings accounts in 2015. These accounts let parents purchase private educational services. The achievement gap since 2015 has fallen by half between whites and Hispanics and 15% between whites and blacks.
A new University of Arkansas study that looked at the pioneering Milwaukee Parental Choice Program found that students in the program were 53% less likely to commit drug crimes and 86% less likely to commit property crimes than peers in public schools. Private schools can enforce discipline and teach moral values without fear of political complications.
Whatever the moral and substantive case, Republicans wouldn’t pitch this at a convention if they didn’t think education choice has political salience. The issue’s potential potency has increased as Democrats have moved away from their former support for charter schools or any school choice under the sway of teachers unions. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis showed the power of the issue to attract black voters in 2018, and now the Trump campaign is betting on it.
Nothing matters more to social justice than educational opportunity, and too many public schools fail to provide it. School choice is the real civil-rights issue of our time, and the GOP deserves credit for making it a marquee part of its 2020 agenda.
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As various American cities descend into weeks or even monthslong street disorder, launched by anger and anguish over police brutality, standard American political ideas and groups seem equally powerless to preserve the domestic tranquility for which Americans theoretically give over large chunks of our fortunes and our choices to government. Many of these protests have evolved into generalized orgies of destructionand even arson, which is the most fiendishly destructive thing the average person can do in dense cities and which has been done with careless glee dozens of times.
In the places Americans gather to publicly reason with each other via awkward two-sentence chunks and snide insults, a disturbingly large number of people are insisting we recapitulate the stark choices that Germany seemed to offer its citizens a century ago between the world wars: a controlling, decadent left out to destroy private property, and a right that embraces a harsh, violent authoritarianism suspicious of outsiders of all stripes.
Both sides’ appeal is energized by the existence of the other, and both seem so obviously intolerably evil to each other that they agree on one thing: that no moral or prudential choice exists other than to join one of those two sides and come out swinging.
The blood on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin (Kenosha, Wisconsin!) [last] week is a small preview of where that path leads.
Traditional American libertarianism, to the extent either side acknowledges its existence, is seen by both leftists and rightists as either supporting the Evil Side or, at best, a pusillanimous, pie-in-the-sky distraction from the necessary business of seizing state power to crush the enemy.
But that old school, non-revolutionary, bourgeois American libertarianism, if actually embraced by most Americans, remains the only peaceful way out.
That it’s a mistake—both morally wrong and likely ineffective—to use government force to solve most social problems is one of libertarianism’s staid tenets. As the past months should have made evident, police power in the conventional sense can’t keep cities secure if even a small number of people are unwilling to live and let live. State power simply cannot rule a people if even a small, energized minority refuses to let it. If you actually care about a functioning civilization, it is never enough to have the state controlled by the “right side.”
What makes civilization work, when it does, is people roughly hewing to libertarian principles, which, fortunately for Western civilization, most people do even when they are not being governed in a libertarian manner.
What makes civilizations collapse, as we are now seeing, is people relentlessly seeking state or state-like solutions to their perceived grievances, particularly the kind that threaten your fellow citizens’ liberty to live, think, express, work, save, and do business in peace, even if you have a good reason to be angry and feel a burning, even justified, need to see things change.
To begin at the root of the current unrest, a more libertarian world would not have a police force engaged in continual series of overaggressive assaults on citizens, whether or not suspected of crimes. We suffer that now because police, as representatives of the state, are not subject to the same discipline for their crimes that most citizens are.
At that same time, a more thoroughly libertarian world would not see certain tactics pursued by some on the progressive left who agree with the libertarian goal of reducing police’s unjust spasms of “authority.” For instance, that world would not have angry mobs insisting threateningly that random fellow citizens join them in some public expression of political piety, however noble the cause. It would also lack roving mobssetting fire to buildings and breaking windows.
Those actions, unchecked and continual, tear at the roots of civilization that have made us as wealthy as we are—the relatively free and unmolested ability of people to possess wealth and space and use it to offer goods and services to others for a price.
American movement libertarianism was revolutionary—but only intellectually so. Most American libertarians, even in the face of continual obscene injustices on the part of the state, never figured that reducing the civic order to a violent battlefield was the just or prudent response, especially in a world where most fellow citizens didn’t want libertarian governance. The mission has always been selling people on the idea that they would benefit from more libertarian governance.
Thus, the notion of “no justice, no peace” that animates both angry anti-police-brutality progressives and major aspects of historic American foreign policy doesn’t quite ring true for most American libertarians. Another country’s criminality has often been insufficient to convince many libertarians that the mass life and property destruction of war were justified. Likewise, even though they are inspired by justified anger at recalcitrant and evil government policy, the weeks of property destruction and occasional attacks on bystanders are perhaps not the just or effective response.
Libertarians have a narrow sense of when and how force can be justly brought to bear to right wrongs. When it comes to either overseas war or domestic battles to change government policy or public attitudes, most libertarians can’t agree that the lives and property of those innocent of committing the crime should suffer, especially when the connection between the violence or destruction and righting all relevant wrongs is tentative and uncertain.
The standard American libertarian has been traditionally and boringly bourgeois. Many think that while preserving life is indeed a higher priority than preserving property, property’s vital role in human flourishing and happiness both individually and socially means that one cannot blithely treat it as sacrificeable to make some point about how angry you are or to pursue a vaguely seen path to “justice” for others.
The fanaticism of seeking to bloodily right all the world’s wrongs, then, was never really the libertarian thing. The love of peace and prosperity that motivates libertarians to embrace liberty inclined them to think that truly effective and secure social change came not from violence, chaos, and force, but from treating fellow human minds and bodies with respect, as ends not means, and attempting to persuade them that libertarian ideas ought to shape human social life.
The fanatical pursuit of “no justice, no peace” makes any reasonable civic life impossible. In a polity where agreement from a critical mass of your fellow citizens is necessary, certain sacrifices of peace in pursuit of justice will likely damage your chances of getting the kind of justice you say you want.
Such possibly counterproductive sacrifices include large scale denials of the right to use public streets unmolested and the idea that the livelihoods and savings of people with no direct connection to the wrongs can be justly ruined, most especially given what we know about how weeks or months of urban violence destroy prosperity for decades
Those craving hope for America’s near future might take small comfort in the fact that, as newsmaking as they rightly are, as fascinatingly grim as they are to discuss, as much as they dramatize in a colorfully violent way real fault lines in the beliefs and hopes of America writ large, the number of people so far fighting in the streets, breaking windows, and setting fires is very, very tiny in comparison to the vast number of Americans who do in fact, consciously or unconsciously, live their lives according to the tenets of bourgeois libertarianism.
That is the lived philosophy of the peaceful enjoyment of life and property, mostly minding one’s own business, living and letting live, not enforcing orthodoxies of thought and expression no matter how good the cause, or treating other people’s lives and property as sacrificable for a political goal. We are seeing that even a small number of people choosing to not live in accordance with those libertarian principles creates civic spaces in which no one can thrive—not even, in the long run, the people choosing to create chaos in the name of justice.
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Kenosha, Wisconsin is situated in the southern part of the state, about an hour and a half from Chicago, and has a population of approximately 100,000. Republican Rep. Bryan Steil, who represents Kenosha in Wisconsin’s First Congressional district, told The Federalist the city “is like a lot of cities in Wisconsin.” Steil says Kenosha is “family-centered” and “hard-working.”
Kenosha became a very different place after police shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times. Subsequent video footage showed that Blake was armed with a knife and had been wrestling with officers, threw off a Taser, and was disregarding police commands to stop after they were called to address a domestic violence complaint.
Following the shooting that left Blake paralyzed, rioting erupted in the city. Although the first night was relatively peaceful, after the second night, things were “spiraling out of control,” said Steil. Fire and looting consumed uptown and downtown Kenosha, and Steil said the city was no longer the “Kenosha we know.”
In uptown Kenosha, on Tuesday night, a woman, who said she has lived in Kenosha for more than 40 years, broke down in tears, saying her city felt like a “war zone” and she was “terrified.”
A woman, who said she has lived in Kenosha for over 40 years, broke down in tears saying that her city felt like a “war zone” and she was “terrified”. She requested that her face not be shown. pic.twitter.com/zi9KLQc2Xz
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) August 25, 2020
Indeed, the scene on Tuesday night was something I had only seen in photos of war-torn countries. Men and women stood with baseball bats, hand-guns, semi-automatic rifles, and shotguns in front of their businesses and homes. Many Kenoshans explained to me that law enforcement lacked the necessary numbers of officers to control the situation, forcing them to focus on defending public buildings, such as the courthouse, leaving citizens to fend for themselves.
Chuck, who owns an uptown tire shop, said he has been spending every night on his roof guarding his shop “with guns.” Chuck, who said he is “for Trump all the way,” was exhausted from several sleepless nights and fed up with his livelihood and life being terrorized by Black Lives Matter rioters. Chuck glared into my iPhone camera and said to the rioters, “Come to my shop and I’ll blow your heads off.” “I’ll even tell you where I’m at,” he said, adding, “C’mon, boys, I got something for your -sses.”
Chuck has been spending every night on his roof guarding his uptown tire shop “with guns.” He believes the rioting will affect the 2020 election, and he is “for Trump all the way.” To the rioters he says: “Come to my shop and I’ll blow your heads off.” pic.twitter.com/5oFvKgj2c5
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) August 28, 2020
Not everyone was as prepared as Chuck. People who did not take their defense into their own hands met a sad fate. Sam, an Indian immigrant who owns a family-run car dealership in downtown Kenosha, lost “every dime” he has, and the 20 people Sam employed have all lost their jobs “for nothing.”
Sam is an Indian immigrant who owns a family-run car dealership that was destroyed by BLM arsonists. “What did we do to deserve all this?” said Sam. pic.twitter.com/hgDjbIq9pA
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) August 29, 2020
Sam said his family has been “in tears” for the last few days. BLM rioters burned his lot two nights in a row, destroying all the cars and looting his office before burning that as well.
Overwhelmed law enforcement protected the courthouse, but Sam’s business and many others were left at the mercy of the mob. “I’m a taxpayer,” said Sam, clearly distraught that law enforcement did nothing to protect his business. “This is not the America I came into,” the shattered man said. “What did we do to deserve all this?” he asked. “I’m a minority too. I’m a brown person. I have nothing to do with this.” Sam and his family set up a Go Fund Me page, which at this moment, has raised a little over $10,000, nowhere close to the over $2 million raised for Blake.
After it was clear that law enforcement did not have the resources to protect people like Sam, Steil “got to work.” On Tuesday morning he said he was able to get through to President Trump within “8 minutes.” Steil told the president that Kenosha was in desperate need of resources and reinforcements. President Trump then reached out to Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, extending him an offer for aid, which Evers refused.
For three nights, Kenosha experienced dangerous rioting. It wasn’t until three individuals were shot and two died that Evers accepted help from President Trump. “It’s pretty darn clear who demonstrated leadership and who did not,” said Steil. Since federal agents and national guardsmen were sent to Kenosha, there has been relative peace in the city.
The overwhelming consensus among Kenoshans is that violent rioters did not come from their city. “Kenosha locals did not do this to their town, man!” said Jason, who came to Kenosha to check on his family.
One woman, who was working in uptown Kenosha on Wednesday morning, confirmed, “Out of town-ers came in and rioted in our city… if you don’t live here you shouldn’t be here right now.” She refused to make further comments on the rioters, explaining, “I don’t want people mad at me.” She is not alone. Many people that I asked to speak with denied an interview out of fear of being targeted by Black Lives Matter.
Alvin was with his young daughter, Kaya, on Wednesday morning after visiting and shedding “some tears” with the son of a shop owner whose business was destroyed. “All this destruction did not come from Kenosha,” he said, “People came in here and did this.”
Alvin was with his young daughter, Kaya, after visiting and “shedding tears” with the son of a shop owner whose business was destroyed. “All this destruction didn’t come from Kenosha,” he said, “People came in here and did this.” pic.twitter.com/STk5wWTWaS
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) August 27, 2020
Another indication that the rioting did not come from Kenosha is the widespread community effort, called “Love is the Answer,” to get rid of any political and divisive BLM graffiti that has been splattered all over the city, replacing it with positive unifying statements and murals.
Kenosha residents are painting over BLM graffiti in a community organized effort called “Love is the Answer.” pic.twitter.com/ktK15f8Wro
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) August 27, 2020
One woman, who is part of the “Love is the Answer” movement, explained, “A lot of people knew a lot of the business owners… I really don’t believe that anyone that’s been from Kenosha would be willing to watch their city be torn up that way.”
On Thursday afternoon, I came across a group of young people carrying signs and water out of several vehicles with blacked-out license plates near the county courthouse. Among the vehicles was a large black van with the words “BLM,” “ACAB,” and “The Revolution” written on it.
This van, with the words “BLM”, “ACAB”, and “The Revolution” written on it, is one of several vehicles BLM organizers have parked near the Kenosha County Courthouse. pic.twitter.com/GWz91NRpMs
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) August 27, 2020
I approached the BLM organizers and asked where they were from, but they refused to answer. I also asked if they knew Kenoshans didn’t want outsiders coming into the city. One of the organizers responded, “Oh, yeah.” He followed up saying, “This is the earth, it belongs to everybody.”
I tried asking more questions of the individuals who were with him, but they refused to engage because I wasn’t wearing a mask, even though we were six feet apart and outdoors, perhaps another indication that the individuals were not native Kenoshans, or even Wisconsinites. Not one Kenoshan I interviewed was wearing a mask. Outside of big liberal cities, where virus counts are extremely low, large numbers of Wisconsin citizens have been unreceptive to Evers’ mask mandate. In fact, many county sheriffs have refused to enforce it.
On Wednesday evening, local and federal law enforcement officials stopped an out-of-state caravan of vehicles filled with fuel cans and illegal fireworks. Police reported, “the vehicles contained various items, including helmets, gas masks, protective vests, illegal fireworks, and suspected controlled substances.” Nine people were arrested for disorderly conduct and are awaiting charging decisions by the Kenosha County district attorney.
Wisconsinites have seen the violence in America’s major cities, but never imagined it would come to one of theirs. The destruction and violence that outside agitators brought to Kenosha has scared many people who once believed the state, which is 97 percent rural and home to long vowels, rhubarb pie, and friendly folks, was a “safe place,” as Sam said.
This could be very bad politically for Democrats in Wisconsin, a crucial swing state in the 2020 presidential election. Many Wisconsinites blame Democrat Evers for allowing a historic industrial Wisconsin city to go up in flames.
For better or worse, Democrats have tied themselves politically to the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization. Joe Biden, who has not been to Wisconsin in 670 days, finally but weakly denounced violent rioting, although he refused to explicitly condemn Antifa or BLM.
CNN anchors Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo also condemned the violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday because recent polling shows rioting is not being well received by voters. Even though the corporate media is beginning to denounce violent rioting, they still do not seem to care much for the victims of BLM, like Sam, by refusing to report their stories. Polling in the upcoming coming weeks will show whether Biden’s response was too little and too late, and if support of BLM by the Democrat Party and corporate media is out of step with average Americans.
Unequivocal support may prove to be a politically untenable position for Democrats if riots begin to erode support from key demographics such as suburban moms, blue-collar workers, and black inner-city voters, who live in the areas most devastated by BLM riots and lack of police protection. Watching Kenosha burn at the hands of out-of-state BLM rioters may have a significant impact on Wisconsin voters, who may now be adding safety and security to their list of top election issues.
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The latest act in this week’s Protestarama was National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball players’ deciding not to play games in protest of the police shooting in Kenosha earlier this week.
Jason Whitlock said this before this week, but one assumes he still believes what he said:
Nearly 30 years ago, in a 1993 Nike commercial, professional basketball legend Charles Barkley fired the first shot at the “role model” concept popularized by Columbia University sociologist Robert K. Merton in the aftermath of the 1960s counterculture movement. “I am not a role model,” Barkley proclaimed in the half-minute spot. “I’m not paid to be a role model. I’m paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court. Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.”
Barkley’s words landed with a force every bit the equal of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s National Anthem knee 23 years later. Former Vice President Dan Quayle defended Barkley, while Barkley’s fellow NBA superstar Karl Malone criticized him in Sports Illustrated. Leading news magazines, including Time and Newsweek, published articles exploring the controversy. Newspaper columnists from coast to coast—on and off the sports pages—also weighed in. The topic still sparks debate today.
Of the many phrases and concepts Merton coined—including “self-fulfilling prophecy” and “unintended consequences”—“role model” has had the most impact. On the surface, the argument that young people tend to model their behavior after high-profile, successful adults is harmless. However, in retrospect, the elevation of athletes and other celebrities as primary figures in the formation of behavioral norms for young people helped create the conditions that are powering the destructive Black Lives Matter movement today.
Merton’s role model concept undercuts the importance of parents and nuclear families. That was the point of Barkley’s criticism. Feminists and other progressive critics of America’s “patriarchal” society—including the Black Lives Matter movement, whose Marxist-influenced statement of purpose opposes “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—have used Merton’s concept to great effect. Muhammad Ali, Pete Rose, Farrah Fawcett, Barbara Streisand, Mick Jagger, Marvin Gaye, and Burt Reynolds infringed on territory primarily reserved for mom, dad, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and teachers.
Technology has helped advance the process, diminishing the influence of traditional authority figures and strengthening the reach of celebrities. Kids shut their bedroom doors, turn on their televisions, laptops, and game consoles, plug in earbuds, open social media apps, and disappear into a world far removed from mom and dad. With a mere push of a button they tune out the worldview of their families and tune in the worldview of athlete LeBron James, actress Lena Dunham, rapper Snoop Dogg, social media race-baiter Shaun King, and others like them.
On top of all this, we now see America’s enemies, particularly China, using these modern role models to promote racial division and destabilize our country—with those on the political Left as their accomplices. Today, they have coalesced around the Black Lives Matter movement to push America toward a level of racial dysfunction and animus not experienced since the Civil War.
It’s fitting that Charles Barkley fired the first shot against this trend, because American sports have become the Gettysburg of what some have called our “cold civil war.” And if China and the Left complete their radicalization of sports, our nation may never recover.
***
Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.
Nelson Mandela, the South African freedom fighter-turned-statesman, spoke those words in an effort to heal the country he came to lead after spending a quarter century incarcerated for opposing apartheid. Mandela embraced sports’ power to bridge racial divides, looking on athletic competition as a kind of antibiotic for racial animus and discrimination. South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup and Mandela’s presentation of the Webb Ellis Cup to team captain Francois Pienaar stand as an iconic symbol of unity in post-apartheid South Africa. Clint Eastwood directed a movie, Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, that memorialized the importance of the moment. It bears re-watching today.
Since sprinter Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and boxer Joe Louis scored a first-round knockout over German heavyweight Max Schmeling in 1938, sports have served as a powerful racial unifier in America as well. The victories earned by Owens and Louis punctured Hitler’s Aryan superiority myth, unified black and white Americans in celebration, and established Owens and Louis as this country’s first black national heroes.
Owens and Louis laid the foundation for Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey’s partnership with Jackie Robinson to integrate our national pastime, Major League Baseball, a decade later. Robinson’s successful integration of baseball, in turn, inspired Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.
Indeed, Barack Obama, America’s first black president—the world’s first black leader of a predominantly white country—credited Robinson’s career for his own political rise. “There’s a direct line between Jackie Robinson and me standing here,” Obama said in January 2017, while hosting the world champion Chicago Cubs at the White House. He continued:
There’s a direct line between people loving Ernie Banks, and then the city being able to come together and work together in one spirit. . . . Sometimes it’s just a matter of us being able to escape and relax from the difficulties of our days, but sometimes it also speaks to something better in us. And when you see this group of folks of different shades and different backgrounds, and coming from different communities and neighborhoods all across the country, and then playing as one team and playing the right way, and celebrating each other and being joyous in that, that tells us a little something about what America is and what America can be.
Yes, America is a shining example of sports’ transformative power. The games we play, the games at the center of our social behavior, combine with our founding principles to enhance the American experience. America’s enemies know this, which is why the culture war has moved to our arenas and stadiums. Sports are now in the same crosshairs as our Founding Fathers, under attack for past racial sins and unappreciated for their vital role in cultivating racial unity. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but by writing the Declaration of Independence he made the emancipation of slaves inevitable. American sports were once segregated, but no American industry can match sports’ empowerment of black men.
The black-player-dominated National Football League is the most powerful force in American popular culture. It provides the number one television show on five different networks—CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, and the NFL Network. In this era of have-it-your-way TV, where consumers record and watch shows when they want while fast-forwarding through advertisements, only live sporting events can be consistently counted on to deliver audiences that sit through commercials.
But while American sports have never been more influential, they’ve also never been more vulnerable to foreign influence. Their partnership with global brands and their desire to build global audiences have given foreign countries a pathway to manipulate American sports and culture.
Look at how China, with its 1.4 billion consumers, rules the National Basketball Association and its de facto parent company, Nike, the same way it rules Hollywood. Access to China’s consumers and Asia’s cheap labor (even sometimes slave labor) is the key to Nike’s economic growth. The Portland-based shoe and apparel manufacturer generates $40 billion a year in revenue. Its global reach, agenda, and revenue streams dictate the strategy of the $8-billion-a-year NBA. Many are unaware that Nike, and not the NBA, controls basketball. One could make a fair argument that the NBA is nothing more than the in-house marketing department of Nike.
Both Nike and the NBA kowtow to China, which explains their silence on the horrific human rights abuses inside China and the suppression of Hong Kong freedom fighters by China’s communist government. More important, Nike and the NBA’s China agenda helps explain why Nike pitchmen LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick enthusiastically smear the United States as inherently racist and evil. From Joseph Stalin to Fidel Castro to our own time, the communists’ favorite propaganda tactic has been to paint the West, and the U.S. in particular, as racist.
The militant social justice messaging of James and Kaepernick serves the interests of not only the Chinese Communist Party and globalist corporations like Nike, but also our political Left. Kaepernick’s National Anthem defiance in 2016 gave the Left an opportunity to politicize football, America’s new national pastime, and force it into the kind of “progressive” posturing already commonplace in the NBA and Hollywood. Arrogance, lack of foresight, and the advice of an inner circle that included former Clinton administration press secretary Joe Lockhart as the NFL’s vice president of communications, explain commissioner Roger Goodell’s laissez-faire approach to Kaepernick’s protest. Underestimating the determination of the Left and the power of social media to intimidate corporate America, Goodell and the NFL’s TV partners wrongly thought that the Kaepernick controversy would fade over time.
Instead, four years after Kaepernick first knelt, the Leftist mob has forced the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball Association to take their own knees and pay homage to the dishonest Black Lives Matter narrative on police brutality. The NFL plans to paint social justice messages across its end zones this season and to allow players to wear helmet decals with the names of alleged police victims. The San Francisco 49ers fly a BLM flag next to an American flag at Levi’s Stadium. MLB opened its COVID-shortened season with “BLM” carved into pitcher’s mounds, and the Boston Red Sox put up a 254-foot BLM billboard outside Fenway Park. NHL players are now regularly kneeling during the National Anthem. The NBA’s basketball bubble at Disney World is a virtual shrine to BLM: “Black Lives Matter” is painted on the court, players wear social justice messages on the back of their jerseys, and it’s major news when a player stands during the National Anthem.
The entire American sports world—a culture that traditionally celebrates victors, meritocracy, colorblindness, and patriotism—has suddenly immersed itself in black victimization and left-wing radicalism. This immersion threatens to do permanent damage to American culture as a whole. It has certainly undermined national pride. A country that no longer believes in its founding ideals cannot prosper and survive.
***
If our sports stadiums and arenas have become the Gettysburg of the culture war, Lebron James and Colin Kaepernick are playing the roles of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, fighting to divide the nation even further than it is. The mainstream media is only half right in casting them as modern-day equivalents of Muhammad Ali. Ali’s religious sect, the Nation of Islam, was certainly divisive: it championed black secession. But unlike the BLM movement, it also rejected victimhood. Its founder Elijah Muhammad and its spokesman Malcolm X promoted bootstrap self-reliance and were disdainful of liberal politics. “The worst enemy that the Negro [has],” said Malcolm X,
is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal. It is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems.
Pro-BLM athletes today have moved beyond the idea of a role model that was debated in 1993—the idea of modeling behavior to be imitated, such as self-reliance, hard work, responsibility, and good parenthood. Through the power of social media, to which they are addicted, these modern role models exert influence by promoting commercial products and political causes. In the case of NBA athletes like Lebron James, this means turning their backs not only on the oppressed people of China and Hong Kong, but also on the poor and underprivileged in America among whom so many of these wealthy athletes grew up, and who they now condemn to victimhood and dependency with their political activism.
Charles Barkley was right 30 years ago. Parents, not athletes, should be role models. Today the situation is even worse, with sports further dividing an already dangerously divided nation, rather than providing the unifying and even healing force Nelson Mandela described. Predictably, there are now calls to boycott sports, and it seems inevitable that the TV ratings of the pro sports leagues will decline. This is unlikely to matter, however, to the suddenly-woke billionaire team owners and their handpicked commissioners.
As fans, we can only hope and pray that these feckless leaders will reconsider their embrace of the BLM cult—a necessary first step to returning American sports to what it has been in the past: a force for unity and a model of a diverse and colorblind meritocracy.
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Kyle Peterson is watching the Republican National Convention so you don’t have to, and he noticed …
Some of the strongest rhetoric at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday didn’t come from famous politicians or even Melania Trump. It came from regular people like Ryan Holets, an Albuquerque, N.M., police officer. Three years ago, he was called to duty at a gas station and found a pregnant woman preparing to shoot heroin.
The homeless addict, Crystal, “confided that she loved her unborn baby” and wanted to find an adoptive family, as Mr. Holets recounted in a video broadcast in prime time. “God showed me exactly what I had to do: Without hesitation, I told her that my family would welcome her baby.” That girl, Hope, is now 2 years old. Mr. Holets is “enormously grateful to the president for his leadership” in fighting the opioid crisis, he said. “Drug overdose deaths decreased in 2018 for the first time in 30 years.”
Jason Joyce, a lobster fisherman from Maine’s Second Congressional District (whose one Electoral College vote went to President Trump in 2016, the first time ever that the state’s electors split), praised Mr. Trump for brokering “a deal to end European Union tariffs of 8% on Maine live lobsters and up to 20% on Maine lobster products.” If Joe Biden is elected, Mr. Joyce said, “he’ll be controlled by the environmental extremists.”
Three featured Americans hailed from Wisconsin (10 electors, which Mr. Trump won by 22,748 votes). John Peterson, from Wausau, said that his metal-fabrication company “scratched” and “clawed” to hang on through the Obama-Biden years, but it’s thriving under President Trump. “When I hear that Joe Biden is ready to raise taxes, crush us with regulations and weaken our international trade position, I shudder,” Mr. Peterson said. “We simply cannot endure a Biden-induced recession.”
Sarah Hughes said that her 8-year-old son Jack “would have slipped through the cracks in public schools.” The family applied for a voucher through Wisconsin’s school-choice program. “Having the option to go to a school that fits him,” Ms. Hughes said, “has been a real game-changer for us.”
Move next door to Minnesota (10 electors, which Mr. Trump lost in 2016 by a mere 44,765 votes). The state’s Iron Range, with its taconite ore mines, is historically Democratic. When Republicans took the Eighth District congressional seat in 2018, it was only the second GOP victory there in 70 years. “I am a lifelong Democrat,” said Robert Vlaisavljevich, the mayor of Eveleth, population 3,500. But under President Trump, the region “is roaring back to life.” The risk, Mr. Vlaisavljevich said, is the new Democratic agenda: “Their so-called Green New Deal is a job-killing disgrace, dreamt up by people who don’t live in the real world.”
Fact-checkers can perhaps punch some holes in the political details of these stories. China is a huge market for lobster, but thanks to Mr. Trump’s trade escalations, U.S. exports have been tagged with a 30% retaliatory tariff. This has given Maine’s competitors in Canada a serious advantage. Steel tariffs might aid Minnesota’s Iron Range, but they’re a tax on millions of other Americans who buy or use the metal.
That said, as a matter of persuasion, it was a Wisconsinite, a Minnesotan and a Mainer making the case to fellow potential swing voters that Mr. Trump is the better choice. At the Democratic convention last week, they had John Legend, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Billie Eilish. Republicans don’t have that, but they do have a cop, a metalworker and a small-town mayor. Which sounds more likely to convince the Rust Belt?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 