LAPD Officers Feared Ambush Because of Rappers' Video

At the Los Angeles Times, "LAPD shooting: Officers feared ambush after seeing video, attorney says":

For days, a 15-second video circulated on social media that alarmed Los Angeles police.

Taken from a vehicle parked behind a black-and-white police cruiser in downtown L.A., the clip opened with a view of the patrol car then flashed down to show someone holding a revolver. The person showed the gun off for the camera, then cut back to the patrol car as an officer got out and walked away.

Worried the video was a threat against its officers, LAPD officials briefed the rank-and-file about the recording, warning officers in roll call meetings to be on alert.

On Tuesday, police said that the department’s robbery-homicide detectives — tasked with investigating the LAPD’s more complex and high-profile cases — now believe the video wasn’t a threat against officers but a promotional video filmed by an early 1990s rap group trying to earn street cred and make a comeback.

The clip, however, has already had serious consequences. Investigators have arrested one person who they say was in the car at the time and have a warrant for the man they believe was holding the gun.

Meanwhile, an attorney representing two officers who fatally shot a man Saturday night said the pair had seen the video and thought they were under attack when the man threw what turned out to be a beer bottle through their patrol car’s back window.

Attorney Gary Fullerton said the video was discussed in at least two roll call meetings that the officers attended, including one the same day as the shooting. The officers were also warned that they might be ambushed from behind, he said.

“Both officers were very focused on that,” Fullerton said. “When the window got blown out, they looked at each other and said, 'We're being shot at.'“

Fullerton said that after the shooting, the officers told investigators they thought they were being attacked because of the video they had seen.

The lawyer said that even if the video wasn't a threat, there are others who do want to harm police officers. He defended the officers' actions, saying it was reasonable for them to think they were being fired upon.

“Officers feel very, very vulnerable out there right now. They feel that at any moment somebody could attack them,” he said. “The officers feel terrible because they were 100% convinced that the guy was shooting at them.”

As of Tuesday evening, the man's name had not been released by coroner's officials, who are still trying to locate his family. He was the 18th person shot and killed by LAPD officers this year.

LAPD officials said the man walked up behind the police cruiser, which was stopped at a red light in Van Nuys, and threw a 40-ounce beer bottle, shattering the car's back window. The two officers bailed out of the car and opened fire, killing the man.

When investigators searched his body and the nearby scene, police said, they did not find a weapon...

Keep reading.

The Breakdown of the Black Family

From Kay Hymowitz, at the Atlantic, "Mass Incarceration and the Uncomfortable Realities of Black Family Life":

With the publication of “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” Ta-Nehisi Coates has added an elegant and forceful voice to the growing frustration with the inefficacy and injustice of America’s criminal-justice system. Mandatory-sentencing laws, the War on Drugs, juvenile-justice sentences that seem to do more to create than deter criminals, racial arrest and sentencing disparities: All are ready for a tough national cross-examination.

But even in the unlikely event that Washington and state legislatures successfully adapt the nation’s crime policies to a safer, more racially sensitive era, the nation will still look around to find more black men in prison than it might expect or want. There’s a simple reason for that, one that Coates himself notes: Relative to other groups, blacks commit more crimes. To understand why is to tackle some very hard-to-talk-about realities of black family life.  And on that issue—and despite his announced interest in the topic—Coates has been the opposite of lucid.

Coates puts forward two interconnected, but flawed, theories about mass incarceration. First, he argues that there is no relationship between crime and incarceration rates, pointing his readers to a chart showing two apparently disparate trend lines. The first line shows crime levels rising dramatically after 1960; the second shows the rise in incarceration rates coming some 15 years later. Because of the 15-year gap, Coates concludes something other than a crime wave must have led Americans to lock up so many black men after 1975. “Imprisonment rates actually fell from the 1960s through the early ’70s,” he writes “even as violent crime increased … The incarceration rate rose independent of crime—but not of criminal-justice policy.”

That conclusion ignores something American history teaches over and over: The democratic process is groaningly, and often tragically, slow. Policy lags the most pressing social problems: Today’s exhibit A is immigration. “Thought leaders were slow to catch up,” after crime rates began falling and incarceration rates rising in the early 1990s, Coates observes. So too were they slow to catch up in the 1960s as crime was on the rise while incarceration rates moved not at all. It takes time to distinguish trends from blips, national changes from local upticks; witness the current debate over the significance of murder rates that are rising in Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., while remaining relatively flat in New York and Los Angeles. Contemporary surveys of public opinion show precisely the expected reaction to rising crime. “Popular support for liberal policies on crime and rehabilitation grew steadily” from the 1930s until the mid 1960s,” according to Thomas and Mary Edsall. “At that juncture public opinion shifted decisively in a rightward direction as crime rates rose sharply.”

Courts and legislatures dawdled, as they often tend to do. Today’s agonizing pictures from Europe, though, illustrate how people, particularly parents, living under the threat of violence will vote with their feet if they possibly can. In the 1960s, whites still living in increasingly crime-ridden urban areas, and more than a few blacks, simply left for safer suburbs. (An excellent chronicle of how this played out in the South Bronx can be found here.) Those blacks who remained, often because of the discriminatory housing policies Coates describes, joined local community and church groups to demand more aggressive policing and harsher penalties for crimes, including for drug offenses.


Black alarm about crime raises doubts about Coates’s second theory, that “the carceral state” was a new “system of control,” of black people. According to this line of thinking, the reason Americans started putting more people in jail circa 1975—“mass incarceration” wasn’t “mass” for years after it started—was that they wanted to perpetuate a racial caste system, or as Coates puts it, to keep blacks “unfree.”

Keep reading.

Hymowitz is the author of, Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age.

America's Legal Order Begins to Fray — #FergusonEffect

Remember, here's the trend, "Ferguson Effect: Murder Rates Rise Sharply in Urban Areas Across the U.S."

From Heather Mac Donald, at WSJ, "Amid the escalation of violent crime are signs of a breakdown of basic respect for law enforcement":

After two decades of the most remarkable crime drop in U.S. history, law enforcement has come to this: “I’m deliberately not getting involved in things I would have in the 1990s and 2000s,” an emergency-services officer in New York City tells me. “I won’t get out of my car for a reasonable-suspicion stop; I will if there’s a violent felony committed in my presence.”

A virulent antipolice campaign over the past year—initially fueled by a since-discredited narrative about a police shooting in Ferguson, Mo.—has made police officers reluctant to do their jobs. The Black Lives Matter movement proclaims that the police are a lethal threat to blacks and that the criminal-justice system is pervaded by racial bias. The media amplify that message on an almost daily basis. Officers now worry about becoming the latest racist cop of the week, losing their job or being indicted if a good-faith encounter with a suspect goes awry or is merely distorted by an incomplete cellphone video.

With police so discouraged, violent crime has surged in at least 35 American cities this year. The alarming murder increase prompted an emergency meeting of the Major Cities Chiefs Association last month. Homicides were up 76% in Milwaukee, 60% in St. Louis, and 56% in Baltimore through mid-August, compared with the same period in 2014; murder was up 47% in Minneapolis and 36% in Houston through mid-July.

But something more fundamental than even public safety may be at stake. There are signs that the legal order itself is breaking down in urban areas. “There’s a total lack of respect out there for the police,” says a female sergeant in New York. “The perps feel more empowered to carry guns because they know that we are running scared.”

The lawful use of police power is being met by hostility and violence, often ignored by the press. In Cincinnati, a small riot broke out in late July when the police arrived at a drive-by shooting scene, where a 4-year-old girl had been shot in the head and critically injured. Bystanders loudly cursed at officers who had started arresting suspects at the scene on outstanding warrants, according to a witness I spoke with.

During anticop demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., last month, 18-year-old Tyrone Harris opened fire at police officers, according to law-enforcement officials, and was shot and wounded by police in response. A crowd pelted the cops with frozen water bottles and rocks, wounding three officers, while destroying three police cars and damaging businesses, Ferguson police said. “We’re ready for what? We’re ready for war,” some protesters reportedly chanted.

In Birmingham, Ala., an officer was beaten unconscious with his own gun last month by a suspect in a car stop. There was gloating on social media. “Pistol whipped his ass to sleep,” read one Twitter post. The officer later said that he had refrained from using force to defend himself for fear of a media backlash.

Officers are being challenged in their most basic efforts to render aid. A New York cop in the Bronx tells me that he was trying to extricate a woman pinned under an overturned car in July when a bystander stuck his cellphone camera into the officer’s face, trying to bait him into an argument. “You can’t tell me what to do,” the bystander replied when asked to move to the sidewalk, the cop reports. “A few years ago, I would have taken police action,” he says. “Now I know it won’t end well for me or the police department.”

Supervisors may roll up to an incident where trash and other projectiles are being thrown at officers and tell the cops to get into their cars and leave. “What does that do to the general public?” wonders a New York detective. “Every time we pass up on an arrest because we don’t want a situation to blow up, we’ve made the next cop’s job all the harder.”

That's actually kind of depressing.

More at the link.

Ferguson Effect: Murder Rates Rise Sharply in Urban Areas Across the U.S.

Well, events are proving Heather Mac Donald correct. Remember her piece on the "Ferguson Effect" at WSJ? See, "The New Nationwide Crime Wave." Radical leftists went batshit crazy.

Well, murders have surged across the U.S., no doubt coinciding with the retreat of law enforcement from the most dangerous urban areas.

See the New York Times, "Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many U.S. Cities":

MILWAUKEE — Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines, and few places have witnessed a shift as precipitous as this city. With the summer not yet over, 104 people have been killed this year — after 86 homicides in all of 2014.

More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago. In New Orleans, 120 people had been killed by late August, compared with 98 during the same period a year earlier. In Baltimore, homicides had hit 215, up from 138 at the same point in 2014. In Washington, the toll was 105, compared with 73 people a year ago. And in St. Louis, 136 people had been killed this year, a 60 percent rise from the 85 murders the city had by the same time last year.

Law enforcement experts say disparate factors are at play in different cities, though no one is claiming to know for sure why murder rates are climbing. Some officials say intense national scrutiny of the use of force by the police has made officers less aggressive and emboldened criminals, though many experts dispute that theory.

Rivalries among organized street gangs, often over drug turf, and the availability of guns are cited as major factors in some cities, including Chicago. But more commonly, many top police officials say they are seeing a growing willingness among disenchanted young men in poor neighborhoods to use violence to settle ordinary disputes.

“Maintaining one’s status and credibility and honor, if you will, within that peer community is literally a matter of life and death,” Milwaukee’s police chief, Edward A. Flynn, said. “And that’s coupled with a very harsh reality, which is the mental calculation of those who live in that strata that it is more dangerous to get caught without their gun than to get caught with their gun.”

The results have often been devastating. Tamiko Holmes, a mother of five, has lost two of her nearly grown children in apparently unrelated shootings in the last eight months. In January, a daughter, 20, was shot to death during a robbery at a birthday party at a Days Inn. Six months later, the authorities called again: Her only son, 19, had been shot in the head in a car — a killing for which the police are still searching for a motive and a suspect.

Ms. Holmes said she recently persuaded her remaining teenage daughters to move away from Milwaukee with her, but not before one of them, 17, was wounded in a shooting while riding in a car.

“The violence was nothing like this before,” said Ms. Holmes, 38, who grew up in Milwaukee. “What’s changed is the streets and the laws and the parents. It’s become a mess and a struggle.”

Urban bloodshed — as well as the overall violent crime rate — remains far below the peaks of the late 1980s and early ’90s, and criminologists say it is too early to draw broad conclusions from the recent numbers. In some cities, including Cincinnati, Los Angeles and Newark, homicides remain at a relatively steady rate this year.

Yet with at least 35 of the nation’s cities reporting increases in murders, violent crimes or both, according to a recent survey, the spikes are raising alarm among urban police chiefs. The uptick prompted an urgent summit meeting in August of more than 70 officials from some of the nation’s largest cities. A Justice Department initiative is scheduled to address the rising homicide rates as part of a conference in September...

The Justice Department? What a joke.

No one's going to address the problem, which is the glorification of black thug life and the evil of political correctness that prohibits leftist elites from even discussing it.

It's going to get worse before it gets better, and it won't get better until we elect law-and-order Republicans to office in the country's inner cities.

Still more at the link.

Nashville Bystanders Stop Black Purse-Snatching Mofo in Moment of Good Samaritan Righteousness (VIDEO)

This is the freakin' best!

At the Nashville Tennessean, "Caught on video: Good Samaritans nab doughnut theft suspect."

And at WZTV FOX 17 Nashville, "Nashville Good Samaritans Conduct Heart-Pounding Citizen's Arrest."



The suspect, Ezell Graham, 31, is a hardened criminal with multiple priors. He cries like a child when he's called out by the woman, his target (I won't call her a victim because she's too freakin' righteous!)

Also on Facebook, "This was the intense scene at a Tiger market here in Tennessee after a suspect robbed a woman and was captured by three men." (Don't miss the comments.)

Bwahaha! #Ferguson Protesters Charged with Assault, Damaging Car, After Blocking Traffic on I-70 (VIDEO)

Following-up from Monday, "Protesters Shut Down Interstate 70 in St. Louis."

Here's the video, "Protestors block Interstate 70 in St. Louis #Ferguson #MoralMonday Action."

At at St. Louis Magazine, "Car Plows Through Ferguson Protesters; Protesters Charged With Assaulting Driver, Damaging Car."

Added Bonus: They're lesbians.

On Monday, protesters commemorating the anniversary of the Michael Brown shooting shut down Interstate 70 during rush hour, forming a human chain across the roadway. Undeterred, a woman in an SUV pushed her car through the crowd, knocking protesters aside.

Now, charges have been filed, but not against the driver—against two of the protesters.

Brittany Ferrell, 26, and Alexis Templeton, 21, prominent protesters who founded the group Millennial Activists United, were arrested yesterday in Clayton. Ferrell has been charged with first-degree property damage, first-degree trespass, and peace disturbance. Templeton has been charged with third-degree assault, first-degree trespass, and peace disturbance.

“The charges stem from the efforts of the defendants to block traffic on Interstate 70," says County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch. "Templeton is accused of punching the victim as our victim attempted to drive past the defendant. The victim suffered an eye injury as a result. Ferrell kicked the victim’s car as she passed causing nearly $5000.00 in damage.”

They're hate criminals, lol.

More.

And idiot leftist are shocked that Ferrell and Templeton were charged, and not the driver. Heh, from the numbskulls at Daily Kos, "Angry driver plows into protesters on I-70, police file charges against protesters for SUV damage":

This video has been gnawing at me since the moment I saw it being livestreamed on YouTube by St. Louis American. During the livestream of the I-70 highway shutdown by Black Lives Matter protesters, an angry driver plowed directly into a line of protesters. The video bothered me on a number of fronts and made me question whether a St. Louis police officer might have even given the go-ahead for the SUV driver to run directly into the protesters. If you watch the video, you can see the driver motioning to a police officer, who comes over and has a very brief conversation with her. We don't have any idea what was said, but you can clearly see in the video that from the moment the police officer began to walk away, the driver of the SUV began to drive directly into the protesters. The officer even looks back and sees the SUV driving into the line of people. More protesters gathered and stood in front of the SUV and then the driver punched the gas, pushing protesters to the side and dragging a "Ferguson is everywhere" box sign with it. A few protesters can be seen banging on the car to get the driver to stop.

I watched with a mix of horror, anger and relief. Horrified that the driver had willfully driven into a group of people. Anger that the officer actually looked back at the vehicle, saw it plowing into the people and kept walking away. Relief nobody was seriously injured...

Oh, the horror! Bwahaha!!

WATCH: Police Release Surveillance Video in Tyrone Harris Shooting

At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "Surveillance video shows man with gun before he was shot by police during Ferguson protests, authorities say."

Ty Glocks Thug Life Facebook Account!

I posted Got News' entry to the sidebar, but this Tyrone Harris' "Ty Glocks" Facebook page is getting mainstream media coverage in the local news.

AT KPLR News 11 St. Louis, "Tyrone Harris showed off guns on Facebook, was out on bond for other felony charges":

When will the media report truths @FoxNews @CNN @msnbc Here is Tyrone Harris aka Ty Glocks pic.twitter.com/FVcJnlOAXA

— Renegade Cowboy⚓️ (@Rene_gadeCowboy) August 10, 2015

FERGUSON, MO (KPLR) – Tyrone Harris, Jr. showed off guns on Facebook, was out on bond for other felony charges.

18-year-old Tyrone Harris, Jr. was released on bond for a different felony case, before the August 9, 2015 gun battle.   He`s now charged with ten additional felonies including 1st degree assault on law enforcement officers. Minutes before his shooting, we were at the front line when we heard about looting at a strip mall one parking lot over. That’s where the gunfight broke out.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar called it ‘a remarkable amount of gunfire.’

Police said Harris shot at them. Belmar added, ‘The plain clothed detectives returned fire from the inside of their van.’

Harris survived and was transported to a hospital. Police said he was carrying a stolen 9 mm handgun. Belmar said, ‘The suspect`s gun was stolen in 2014 from Cape Girardeau.’

We`ve confirmed with police sources, the Facebook page of Tyrone Harris. He calls himself TY Glocks. He`s posted dozens of pictures with him holding guns, often posting them with the #pistolgang. His last post was about an hour before the shooting. It said “I (expletive) around go on West Florissant tonight.”

The gun battle started after reported looting at 10:20 pm. St. Louis County Police swarmed West Florissant. FOX2 had two crews on the ground. After more reported looting, away from the protest line, at least 30 shots rang out...

And on Facebook.

Protesters Shut Down Interstate 70 in St. Louis

Our old nemesis Cassandra the Israel-bashing racist is on the scene, "Car just plowed through protesters #Ferguson."

And at Twitchy, "‘Awesome’: Driver breaks through human chain of protesters blocking I-70 in Ferguson [videos]."

More at Gateway Pundit, "Breaking: #BlackLivesMatter Mob Shuts Down I-70 Both Ways in St. Louis – Driver Plows Through Line (VIDEO)."

BONUS: At CNN, "Protesters block interstate near Ferguson."

ADDED: From Joe Biden's Hairplugs, "Black lives don't matter on I-70. Run those fuckers over."

WATCH:The Moment Shots Fired at Ferguson #BlackLivesMatter Protest (VIDEO)

I saw this last night, practically in real time.

Via Ruptly:



PREVIOUSLY: "Black Suspect Tyrone Harris Charged with Assault After Opening Fire on St. Louis County Police," and "St. Louis Post-Dispatch Reporter Paul Hampel Beaten and Robbed by #BlackLives Matter Protesters in #Ferguson."

Debunking the Left's 'Missing Men' Theory of Mass Incarceration Causing the Breakup of Black Family

The disintegration of the black family predates the rise of mass incarceration, and so leftists have reversed the causal arrows to remove the pathologies of the black urban culture from the national debate over #BlackLivesMatter.

From Kay Hymowitz, at the Wall Street Journal, "The Flawed ‘Missing Men’ Theory":

.@MadJewessWoman #FERGUSONLOOTCREW mofos #Ferguson. pic.twitter.com/HunKokXD4t

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) August 10, 2015

As riots tore through Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore this winter and spring, so did denunciations of a criminal-justice system that has placed a disproportionate number of black men behind bars. One widely aired theory holds that not only are racial disparities and mass incarceration patently unjust on their own terms, but they also result in, to quote Hillary Clinton in the first policy speech of her campaign, “missing husbands, missing fathers, missing brothers.”

The missing-men theory of family breakdown has the virtue of being easy to grasp: Men who are locked up are obviously not going to be desirable husbands or engaged fathers. It also bypasses thorny and deadlocked debates about economics and culture. Still, the theory has a big problem: It’s at odds with the facts.

What extensive data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and National Vital Statistics Reports show is that the black family was in deep disarray well before America’s prison-population increase. As the 1960s began, 20% of all black births were to single mothers. By 1965 black “illegitimacy”—in the parlance of the time—had reached 24% and become the subject of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prophetic but ill-fated report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”

Yet the figure that so worried future Sen. Moynihan turned out to be the ground floor of a steep 30-year climb. By 1980 more than half of black children were born to unmarried mothers. The number peaked at 72.5% in 2010 and is now just below 72%.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, as nonmarital births raced upward, the number of black men admitted to state and federal prisons annually hovered between 20,000 and 27,000, showing no significant trend up or down. The later 1970s showed a notable increase, so that in 1980 alone there were 53,063 black males admitted to prison. Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, black prison admissions grew to historic highs and peaked at 257,000 in 2009. They have since declined slightly.

If anything, the timing of the two problems points to the opposite causation from the one assumed by “missing men” theorists: As the family unraveled, crime increased—the homicide rate doubled between the early 1960s and late ’70s, with more than half of the convicted being black—leading to calls for tougher sentencing to place more bad guys behind bars. In other words, family breakdown was followed by increased crime and more-crowded prisons...

It's a bit more complicated, but you get the gist of it.

Keep reading.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Reporter Paul Hampel Beaten and Robbed by #BlackLives Matter Protesters in #Ferguson

I saw Hempel's tweets last night around 11:30pm Pacific.

Attacks like these, and the fact that Tyrone Harris opened fire on police with a stolen 9mm, need to be the focus of press coverage.

All the rest is a bunch of bull.

At Twitchy, "‘I got swarmed’: Post-Dispatch reporter beaten, robbed while covering Ferguson break-ins."

Black Suspect Tyrone Harris Charged with Assault After Opening Fire on St. Louis County Police

The dude wasn't a "victim" of a "police shooting" during "peaceful protests" in Ferguson.

The fucker opened fire at cops with a stolen 9mm. And this chump was a "good friend" of Michael Brown.

Because social justice.

At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "Northwoods man charged with assault after shootout with police during Ferguson protests":

Now I'm seeing that a reporter was attacked by "peaceful protestors." Horrible.

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 10, 2015

Memorializing a guy who robbed a store and attacked a cop by ... robbing stores and attacking cops. Good grief.

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 10, 2015

Sad to see the lies certain people tell themselves to justify selling their soul.

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 10, 2015

Cops are blamed for shooting suspect with stolen gun who fired on them in Ferguson last night. Of course. http://t.co/USULGK6wd6

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 10, 2015

ST. LOUIS • A Northwoods man shot by police Sunday night during street protests in Ferguson was charged Monday with four counts of assault on police and other charges.

Tyrone Harris, 18, of the 6700 block of Donald Street in Northwoods, was charged with four counts of first-degree assault on a law enforcement officer, five counts of armed criminal action and shooting at or from a motor vehicle. Bail for Harris was set at $250,000 cash.

Police said in court records that at 11:23 p.m., Harris was running in the 9200 block of West Florissant Avenue during street demonstrations and firing shots. Harris fired at least one shot into an officer's vehicle, and that police officer returned fire, the documents say. Officers got out of their car and chased Harris, who fired shots at them as he fled.

Police critically wounded Harris and said they recovered a 9mm Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol next to his body. Harris was still hospitalized Monday.

Harris has a court date later this month in another case.

He faces charges in St. Louis of stealing a motor vehicle, theft of a firearm and resisting arrest by fleeing. He is scheduled to go on trial in St. Louis Circuit Court on Aug. 31.

According to the complaint filed by a city police officer, Harris is accused of stealing a Dodge Intrepid and a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol from someone who lives on the 1400 block of Union Boulevard on Nov. 3 between 1 a.m. and 7:35 a.m. The next day, an officer saw the car, and other detectives arrived to help keep an eye on the car and set up spike strips. After two police officers tried to pull the car over by activating lights and sirens, the car sped off and went the wrong way down Theodosia Avenue, forcing a car off the road. The Intrepid then hit the spike strips and stopped just over the St. Louis County line.

As an officer approached the car, he observed Harris as he removed the stolen 9mm pistol from his waistband and put it between the seat and console, the complaint said.

Harris admitted to the officer that he had stolen the car and gun, the complaint said.

A trial had been scheduled for July 20, but was postponed because a witness was unavailable, according to court records.

More at London's Daily Mail, "Ferguson is in a state of emergency AGAIN - after police are shot at and shops looted as town marks anniversary of Michael Brown's death."

Democrats Stoking Black Anger (Which May Mean Riots) to Keep White House in 2016

No doubt.

From Steve Sailer, at VDare.

The Culture War Returns

Well, it's not just now returning, although no doubt he's onto something.

From Jacob Heilbrunn, at the National Interest":

1968 IS BACK. A growing chorus of voices on the right is arguing that the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson are ushering in a new round of the culture wars. On the website Breitbart, for example, Robert W. Patterson, a former George W. Bush administration official, wrote, “The Grand Old Party must decide: Go libertarian, and sympathize with the protesters and rioters? Or does it want to be conservative, and side with the police, the rule of law, and the forces of order? The lessons of the 1960s suggest the latter is the path to victory.” William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, observed during the recent riots in Ferguson, “It does feel like a Nixon ’68 moment. Who will speak for the Silent Majority?”

It was a revealing question. In 1968, Richard Nixon tapped into white working-class antipathy toward student and black radicalism to defeat Hubert Humphrey. The Southern Strategy was born. Two years earlier, Ronald Reagan had won election as governor of California by denouncing the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and promising to “throw the bums off welfare.” Reagan would go on to midwife what became a potent alliance between the emerging neoconservative movement and traditional conservatives. The neocons began to share the traditionalists’ belief that, as Burke put it, “Men of intemperate mind can never be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

The maiden neocons had themselves emerged from the intensely partisan milieu of the 1930s to become respected public intellectuals. They viewed the scaturient passions of the New Left that had suddenly emerged in the 1960s as a clear and present danger—what the literary critic Lionel Trilling deemed an “adversary culture.”

Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and a number of other neoconservatives were deeply influenced by Trilling’s criticism of liberalism from inside the movement. They were also influenced—Kristol and Himmelfarb in particular—by the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who had fled Nazi Germany. Strauss believed that the culprit for much of what had gone wrong in Western civilization could be traced back to Machiavelli, who had lowered man’s sights away from a transcendent good. The result was the rise of relativism, in which one view of how humans should behave is as good as another. Strauss, by contrast, promulgated a different message, one that resonated with the new generation of conservatives—a return, after centuries of neglect, to classical virtue.

Kristol assailed what he called a “new class” of managers, lawyers, bureaucrats and social workers who promoted new issues such as women’s rights, sexual liberation and minority rights. Himmelfarb’s numerous books lauded the idea of Victorian virtue, stressed self-help and charity, and argued that the public dole had profoundly corrosive moral effects, foremost among them creating a culture of dependency on government.

Though it has tended to be scanted in recent years, neoconservatives—“Liberals mugged by reality,” as Kristol once put it—were initially much less preoccupied with foreign than domestic issues. Domestic policy is where they made their bones. Kristol and Daniel Bell founded the Public Interest in 1965 (though Bell ended up resigning as coeditor in 1973). The National Interest didn’t appear until 1985, just as the Cold War was beginning to reach its terminal phase. Political scientist James Q. Wilson, a regular contributor to Commentary and the Public Interest, devised the “broken windows” theory, which holds that stopping petty crimes is a vital step toward preventing major ones from occurring. RIOTING IN the inner cities in 1968, the disintegration of New York City, the rise of black militants and the introduction of affirmative action hardened neocon attitudes. Nathan Glazer called affirmative action “affirmative discrimination.” In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued a report warning about the collapse of the black family. Two years later, he delivered a speech to the Americans for Democratic Action stating that “liberals must somehow overcome the curious condescension that takes the form of defending and explaining away everything, however outrageous, which Negroes, individually or collectively, might do.” Other neocons blamed a new antinomianism for America’s ills. The emphasis on individual needs and wants—feminism, multiculturalism and the like—meant that the idea of a common civic good was disappearing. In their view, it was being replaced by a society of disgruntled supplicants.

Neocon apprehensions about crime and the sexual revolution were also acutely reflected in literary form. In novels like Mr. Sammler’s Planet and The Dean’s December, Saul Bellow vividly evoked the racial tensions of the 1970s, prompting charges that he was himself a racist. The Dean’s December focuses on the murder of a white graduate student named Rick Lester by a black hoodlum and a female prostitute. The protagonist Alfred Corde, a dean at the University of Chicago, registers his sympathy with the underclass but suggests that the basic problem is insoluble:

We do not know how to approach this population. We haven’t even conceived that reaching it may be a problem. So there’s nothing but death before it. Maybe we’ve already made our decision. Those that can be advanced into the middle class, let them be advanced. The rest? Well, we do our best by them. We don’t have to do any more. They kill some of us. Mostly they kill themselves.

Sounds familiar.

But keep reading.

C-Span of the Streets

At the New York Times, FWIW, "Glare of Video Is Shifting Public’s View of Police."

This is a terrible report, mainly because it (deliberately) fails to put the police videos into context, even including the Mike Brown case, which was completely debunked by the federal grand jury.

Yes, more videos provide greater accountability, and they may help rein-in police misconduct. But the left doesn't want accountability, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement is essentially a revolutionary communist program to take down the "racist" "imperialist" police system altogether.

Baltimore Police to Beef Up Manpower to Fight Spike in Criminal Violence (VIDEO)

At CBS News 13 Baltimore, "Police Announce Increase In Manpower to Fight Violence Spike."

BONUS: At Progs Today, "Homicides in Baltimore Now Highest Since 1972."

Taking Down Ta-Nehisi Coates

I'm gaining a lot of respect for Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, who is also a regular columnist at Politico.

Here's his review of Ta-Nehisi Coates' new book, "The Toxic Worldview of Ta-Nehisi Coates."

Read it all at the link. (Via Memeorandum.)

I'm not running out to get a copy, although I expect I'll read it soon enough. I'm a firm believer of not hammering a book until I've read it, although I've read enough of Coates' writing to have a pretty good heads up.

If you're interested, FWIW, at Amazon, Between the World and Me.

WATCH: New Video Shows Baltimore Riots Erupt While Police Told to 'Hold the Line' and 'Do Not Chase' — #FreddyGray

Yeah, the video comes out months later. Like it was some secret.

Remember, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake wanted to create "safe space" zones for black thugs to destroy the city.

Via CNN:



FLASHBACK: "Baltimore in Flames."

'Visceral' Ta-Nehisi Coates

We're currently living through Ta-Nehisi Coates's fifteen minutes of fame.

This New York Times piece isn't as fawning as the Washington Post article I wrote about earlier. See, "Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Visceral’ Take on Being Black in America."

Tyler Cowen writes about Coates' new book, here.

And at Amazon, Between the World and Me.