When I observe what is happening to America—the country in which I grew up, in which I was educated, and that I served in the U.S. Army—I am appalled. Anarchy, violence, looting. This is NOT the country I know and love. This is an aberration, a disfigurement of our Republic.
America’s past is a checkered one. No doubt about it. Slavery, discrimination, lynching. They are stains on our history; blemishes on an imperfect nation. Yet, America remains the only country where people can strive freely for a more perfect union, where they are free to speak their minds, to protest, to worship as they wish, to be individuals, to pursue happiness, and to hold elected officials accountable without fear of retribution.
Today, some want to rip our nation apart and divide us into belligerent tribes based on race, religion, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, achievement, failure, livelihood, and political power. As a firm believer in America’s motto: E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) I will oppose the tribalists to my last breath.
For the next several days I am reposting commentaries from Americans of all races and occupations who are as concerned as I am about this attempt to obliterate our country from within. I hope you will find them as illuminating and significant as I have.
The identity of RBF remains a mystery to me, but the quality of his/her writing has grabbed my attention.
Is America “Gone With the Wind?”
BY RBF
“Racism is not dead. But it is on life-support, kept alive mainly by the people who use it for an excuse or to keep minority communities fearful or resentful enough to turn out as a voting bloc on Election Day.”
So said Thomas Sowell, senior Hoover Institute fellow, and among the most significant living social-political theorists. Dr. Sowell happens to be black.
In the face of reams of empirical data to the contrary, how have race hucksters, with media complicity, so successfully merchandised the canard that America remains a country of systemic racism? Not a hypothesis for a national debate, but assumed ipso facto.
When propaganda overrides facts, brainwashing occurs. This hypnosis impairs not the capability to reason, but rather a refusal to use the brain to consider ideas which might disrupt false narratives. Fully functioning intelligent liberals exhibit extreme agitation over the proposition of differing perspectives. If they preach loud enough, maybe it becomes real.
Leftists put forth a panoply of medicines to treat our diseased country.
Virginia governor Ralph “blackface” Northam righteously promised removal of Robert E. Lee and four other noxious Confederate statues polluting Richmond Virginia.
CNN’s Angela Rye imperiously points to Washington D.C.’s Washington and Jefferson monuments as insidious replicas of slave-owners rather than, respectively, the father of our country and author of one of the most transformative American documents. NASCAR nobly did their part, banning Confederate flags. Senate Republicans in the armed services committee agreed to reformat numerous military bases commemorating Confederate generals. This thesis subscribes that removing all above mentioned carefully orchestrated concatenation of Confederate symbols surely concludes in newfound racial harmony.
Nationwide, anarchists deface or obliterate monuments remembering Christopher Columbus. Black Lives Matter Boulevard debuted in Washington D.C. Advertisers boycott Fox News host Tucker Carlson for statements critical of Black Lives Matter; disagreement defaults to racism. Incorruptible T-Mobile, Disney, and Papa Johns have honorably withdrawn support. Mike Lindell, the founder of “My Pillow,” contributes a brave whiff of integrity and will continue endorsing Carlson, and adds “all lives matter.”
Advertisers that unabashedly cave in, signal not the moral superiority they crave, but ethical cowardice manifest to anyone courageous enough to pull back the curtain exposing decades-long narratives of orchestrated media prevarications.
While room for a civil debate on the fate of iconic structures can be valid, rewriting or revising history is in the interest of no one. Our past is what it is, and society must look the good and the bad squarely in the eyes and learn from mistakes. America’s warts are no more pronounced than most nations, and ad hoc media-driven proclamations of our inherent evil do nothing towards advancing the dialogue of reconciliation.
The media offered a healing gesture with HBO MAX’s decision to remove that perennial archetype of bigotry, “Gone with the Wind.” Not to be outshined, A&E Network eliminated thirty plus years leviathan “Live PD,” in homage of deprecating all things police.
CORPORATE AMERICA’S HONORABLE RESPONSE
Estee Lauder is a paradigm for truckling behavior of corporations that, when confronted with the mildest of criticism, grovel to appease and show obeisance to the gods of structural racism.
A hundred Estee Lauder employees delivered a letter to executive chairman William Lauder commanding resignation of Trump supporter and company director, uncle Ronald Lauder. Additional stipulations of $5 million spent on “social, economic and racial justice” plus similarly high-minded rebukes rounded out this revolt.
Remarkable that an organization of 48,000 genuflects to a mere hundred employees. Why not expeditiously annunciate to these recalcitrants a genuine appreciation and respect for their misguided opinions simultaneously, including a resignation form for those unwilling to labor for a business that tolerates the diversity of beliefs. In a gesture of virtue, Estee Lauder pledged $10 million to the NAACP.
Many companies try to run ahead of the sure to come corporate shakedowns. Bank America quickly announced a four year billion-dollar initiative for its culpability in social injustice. Happily, Pepsi put up $400 million to annihilate the scourge, concurrently gaining enormous corporate self-esteem.
CEO Rodney McMullen penned a sycophantic trope flagellating Kroger’s corporate culture, begging mercy for a litany of sins; likewise, Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon, and dozens of others followed suit. And in a gesture of Platonic purity, Wells Fargo tethered executive pay with the high-minded goal of doubling black employees.
To avoid persecution, Jews during the fifteenth century Spanish Inquisition renounced their beliefs and embraced Catholicism. More than a few of these so-called “Conversos” were rightly suspected of continued secret adherence to Hebrew rituals. J
Jealousy over their financial success combined with suspect religious beliefs, the Papal sanction of a formal Inquisition sought to exorcise this inherent tumor preventing further metastasis; property confiscation, torture, and burning apostates and the final indignity of official Baptism.
Corporations will remain under minute scrutiny as inquisitors seek to root out twenty-first century “Conversos” to ensure fulfillment or not of lofty corporate mission statements. Ultimately in Spain, Grand Inquisitor Torquemada expelled thousands of Jews. Those that remained became subject to new “purity of blood” laws codifying Jewish prejudice axiomatically circumscribing opportunities. Henceforth, nothing could be done to expunge Jewishness.
Will modern-day social justice warriors consolidate enough power to extirpate companies not suitably compliant to the unbending “Catholic” (i.e., anti-Trump) ideology?
Since Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, the U.S. government has spent many trillions on countless welfare programs to improve the circumstance of black society. Instead of a look inward and accepting a modicum of responsibility for rampant teen pregnancy, broken fatherless homes, low literacy rates, high crime, and an ethos of non-assimilation, liberals methodically fabricated the marketing hoax of “Systemic Racism.”
As putative data annually announced the hundreds of billions in government outlays to blacks in food stamps, Section 8 housing subsidies, Medicaid, weren’t yielding desired results, the deception of racism and white supremacy fills the void of a horribly failed culture.
This vast apparatus depends on the integral cog of white guilt. Elites preach evermore government spending, generating endless new programs that will unlock the shackles of poverty and cycles of crime and recidivism. Beneath outward speech of grand equality, the subtext patronizes blacks as incapable dolts forever dependent on government largesse.
Ironically this addiction to intrusive government perpetuates more public reliance ergo discouraging self-reliance. All the tax dollars and programs are a ball and chain, a modern form of the same slavery that many black people hold as 150-year-old evidence of continued white supremacy.
New Leftist demands seek to guarantee blacks absolute “population-based” quantitative representation in industry and all professions. What more do these reactionaries want? For decades blacks have received preferential admissions to the finest universities.
Corporations do back-flips to hire people of color. Everyone winks and nods that they may not be the most qualified, so it has become an unspoken act of charity.
These newly enshrined numerical assurances seem devoid of qualitative requirements? Performance and capability get omitted from the manifesto of doctrinaire radicals. Is America prepared for Progressive’s envisioned defenestration of our meritocracy, the bedrock of this country’s exceptionalism?
Perhaps Silicon Valley has trouble hiring 13.2 percent population quota of black engineers because the best and the brightest are often Asians from Stanford and Berkeley. The standard script loudly promulgates a premeditated racist plot, anything but an acknowledgment that maybe there aren’t enough qualified black engineers.
While black poverty and attendant miseries are the focus, little hype goes toward the rising black middle class and that 8 percent of American millionaires are black.
In another contradiction of sorts, the percentage of black homeownership is highest in southern states, including Texas, almost all of which are Republican. Leftist progressive strongholds California, New York, and occupied Seattle report among the lowest rates.
I wonder how the many bright, accomplished black men and women that fought honestly to climb the ladder react to new mandates effectively demeaning their achievements? Do they lump themselves with members of their race pushed through the system solely because of their color?
The current zeitgeist debases the black intellect. The top-down approach, advancing people through skin color, never can accomplish a bottom-up course of action. But changing mindsets and ethics, building new black societies with cohesive families with education paramount would be difficult, time-consuming, and with no guarantee of desired results. Once again, take note of the stunning hypocrisy of the Left’s universal carping regarding discrimination based on skin color.
POLICE VIOLENCE
Evidence of organized collusive police violence against blacks fails even cursory statistical analysis.
Black Lives Matter use violence and intimidation filled campaigns, tacitly goaded in lockstep complicity from media and academia who inculcate their venom appealing solely to passions. A police officer is more than 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black American than for a law enforcement officer to kill an unarmed black person. The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database.
In 2018, there were 7,407 black homicides, with 93 percent committed by other blacks. Just over 1/10 of one percent of black men died at the hands of police.
According to social researcher and author Heather McDonald, “In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous.
African-Americans accounted for 235 or less than a quarter of the total. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders and committed about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.”
With 375 million annual civilian police encounters, more than 99.999 percent of law enforcement encounters are non-deadly.
A bad cop tragically murdered George Floyd. Then an apotheosis of this repetitive felon with multiple prison stints was as swift as it was incredible. A career criminal high on fentanyl passing counterfeit currency gets instantaneously transmuted to a gentle giant relocated from Houston to Minneapolis to start a new life.
Prejudice exists in America and every society worldwide. It always will. It’s endemic to humans that people tend to covey up with like-kind. There are plenty of black bigots as well as white ones. Listening to all news outlets might lead one to conclude that black people alone are uniquely subjected to discrimination. Yet, anti-Semitism stands at near-record levels, and lots of people describe all Muslims are terrorists.
CONCLUSION
Media propaganda constructs a society paralyzed with fear. Differing from liberal dogma earns an all-encompassing indictment of racism often corroborated by editing, and then broadcasting innocent comments taken out of context. The sophists of the Left contrive a world with a harsh doctrinaire fiction, disparaging facts, and replacing them with frenzied emotion conjuring white guilt and systemic racism, overwhelming those gullible enough to forfeit their reason.
George Floyd was brutally and unjustly murdered. Any unjust killing is one too many. Sadly, the recent shootings by a black man of Baton Rouge, La police officers pass unnoticed. Likewise, slain black officer David Dorn, bravely trying to stem ANTIFA and BLM hooligans. Place a value on these law-abiding lives?
The George Floyd Memorial Fund has pocketed over $14 million. Floyd’s gold casket and eponymous street names make lovely trappings for his ongoing rehabilitation. Logic dictates the Left choose this scoundrel as their martyr, their sordid icon, representing America’s perdition. I hear some calling for commissioning of George Floyd statues, perhaps where those of Lee once stood.
FYI, all the crazy ideologies seeking to restructure society with new norms or standards with the intent to eradicate a structural racism that mostly doesn’t exist to begin with, only begets bitterness, resentments, and bigotry where often none existed.
