The Second American Revolution

The year 2020 has been a perfect storm for social and political change and we are just halfway through it. It began with Jeffrey Epstein and the revelation that some of our Western leaders were involved in what is effectively being called a pedophile ring. What little faith we had in those who govern was and is further damaged as we shook our heads with disgust at what men and women in power are capable of. 

Then we got smacked with COVID19 and  witnessed an over-reach of government power. The same government we all find so untrustworthy. It wasn't the social distancing guidelines, face masks, or hand-washing that those of us that are fond of liberty found objectionable, it was the shuttering of businesses and the enforcement of the guidelines as rules or law that was a blatant overreach of power and an infringement on our civil liberties that concerns us. What the government showed us in many states was that such rights they swore to defend are no longer ours, no longer inalienable in their eyes, these rights are government-given and can be taken away. By leveraging our fear they made most of us compliant in action. As a result jobs were lost which hit certain minorities especially hard. This loss was hard to take for many, while our federal government passed stimulus to keep the unfortunate housed and fed, there's still the loss of purpose that we derive from our vocation, even the jobs we hate. This breeds frustration, especially in a situation where the government has made it even more difficult for any of us to do anything about it.

When things began opening back up, we found that because many businesses closed permanently many jobs would not return. Frustration evolves into anger and disenfranchisement with the system of controls that encompass our society. Our trust in government is damaged even more. We also discovered that many of the unemployed refused to return to work because their unemployment benefits, as part of a stimulus bill, far exceeded their previous wages... hurting businesses, particularly small businesses, even further. Government incompetence was highlighted by this and trust was damaged further.

Carole Baskin! If you didn't see the Netfix series, The Tiger King, you won't know what I am talking about here, but damn! We binged this stupid show, and for at least the first few episodes I held onto the possibility that we viewers were being punked. These people were unbelievable, this crap was too nuts in my mind to be true. But it was. Bunch of crazy, f'ed-up white people. All of them white, and all were the worst examples of human beings. Many viewers that weren't white pondered the question, 'WTF is wrong with white people?', and if not that, we still wondered how anyone can get so nuts here in America.

Murder Hornets! WTF?! Crazy, huge bees that are not only dangerous to people but pose a significant environmental and agricultural threat (as they kill off more numerous pollinators) and we wondered what can be done to deal with this and by whom? But the news cycle did not stick with Murder Hornets, or Tiger King for very long. COVID dominated the news cycle until some dirt-bag cop, who I won't name, killed George Floyd.

We have seen and dealt with police brutality before. Rodney King and many others, but something was different this time. Maybe it was because it was so well-recorded and so blatantly obvious to all of us that this was unjustified. Maybe it was because many of us were jobless and already frustrated with authority. Maybe it was because police brutality had not in fact been properly dealt with as I suggested above. Maybe, more likely, it is the perfect storm of all of these things that caused many in society decided to try and burn it all down.

Is it systemic racism that we are raging against? Where is this 'systemic' racism evident? Not in the law, the laws on the books have been thoroughly cleaned of bigotry of any type, particularly following the latest supreme court ruling that the civil rights act be extended to LGBTQ persons. Is it in the application of the law? In 2019 there were over ten million arrests, just over one thousand of those involved a shooting or 0.0104%. Of those shootings 41 were against unarmed suspects, or 3.9% of shootings and 0.00041% of arrests. Of those 41 shootings against unarmed suspects 9 were black, 19 where white and the other 13 were a mix, mostly Hispanic. Going back to the 10 million arrests, over 50% were against black suspects, mostly males between the ages 15-38. What this means is that over half of the police arrests were with black suspects but less than 25% of the unarmed shooting victim incidents were against that same group. There might be racists in police departments, but overall there isn't racism in policing. Unarmed white men were shot at a rate that is over 2x than of black men despite the fact that the arrest rates of white men were about half that of black men, meaning that if you an unarmed white male you are 4x more likely to be shot by a cop than an unarmed black male.

Maybe the systemic racism is in the court system? Black males are incarcerated at a higher rate and for a longer sentence on average than white males. Why is that? Here are some more numbers; African Americans make up 13.4% of the US population, whites 60.1%. If we average out the last decade, 56% of violent crime is committed by African Americans and 90% of those are by men (of both/all races). Lets just say that men are roughly half of the population, that makes black males, 6.5% of the population, responsible for ~50% of the violent crime. Two things can come from the numbers, one of them is prejudice, in the average person as well as the judicial system. The other item I'd like to mention is that there are drastically more repeat offenders amongst black males which factors into sentencing. There are admittedly outlier cases where a black male with no prior convictions is dealt a tougher sentence by the same judge as a white male of the same crime. When we factor out the other circumstances of the case/conviction these become even more rare... they are statistical outliers, but they have happened. All we can definitively say about them is that the judge is a bigot, not the system.

Is there racism in America? Yes, definitely. Racism is not exclusive to white people, I have been on the receiving end of what we would call 'hate speech' from a person that I would classify as a bigot if not a racist who was not white. Is it systemic? I don't believe so, I have not seen evidence to support such a claim, at least not in the way that is being suggested or implied by media and leftist politicians at present.

For the past several years the media and Democratic politicians have been capitalizing on any incident where an unarmed black person is shot and killed. In the case of Martin & Zimmerman, the shooter looked white enough even though his mixed ancestry qualified him as Hispanic, the media quickly turned the issue into a race issue without gathering the facts first. They paraded images of Treyvon from when he was 13 years old, pandering to our emotional outrage that a white grown man had shot a child. The truth was that a Hispanic grown man had shot a black grown man who was beating the former to death by smashing his head on the sidewalk, repeatedly. 

The media pounced on the slaying of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson. Black victim, white cop, must be racism. Turned out that Brown was the suspect that multiple police units were looking for and when Wilson approached in his cruiser the suspect reached into the police car for Wilson's sidearm. We still don't remember this fact, we are still told that it was racism, Brown is still hailed as a victim. Floyd is a victim, murdered, and there are others, my main point here is that racism has been suggested so much to us all as the problem that we have begun to believe it. Police brutality is definitely the issue here, not racism... but then why the focus on racism? Don't we want to actually solve the problem? If not then what problem are we trying to solve?

I believe the issue of racism has been hyper-inflated so that it can be weaponized for a social change that has nothing to do with race and everything to do with economics. Everywhere we look now the figures of the past are having their statues and memorials ripped down, even those that fought to abolish slavery like U.S. Grant. Maybe this is a fair act against the monuments of the confederacy, I can see why people feel so. But Washington, Jefferson, and F. Scott Key? Certainly these guys weren't perfect, but judge them by their day, not ours, and then marvel at the positives they accomplished. What is going on is that people are attacking the foundations of a nation. If we can vilify the founders then we can take a jack-hammer to the foundations. We hear chants that 'Capitalism is racist', that makes no sense, but when chanted enough people start believing it. What we have is a Capitalist economy, and what else we have is an African-American sub-culture that is disproportionately suffering economically. These two things are true but not mutually inclusive. Allow me to elaborate.

Following the civil rights act, pushed for by Republicans in the North, East, and West and opposed by Democrats in the South, LBJ (D) committed himself and the Democratic party to buying every black vote that he could, "If the blacks are going to vote, we'll have every N----- voting Democrat" -L.B.J.

The social welfare program that LBJ and the democrats enacted required single mothers remain unwed, incentivizing single-parent household. They (dems) then had their people go specifically into black communities and to black homes to explain the program and get people signed up, targeted marketing of welfare. In 1968 single parent households represented 9% of black households and 12% of white. By the year 2010 it grew to 74.5% for blacks and over 25% for whites. If 75% of a population or group of people are raising their children with only one parent and on welfare, the economic opportunities of that group are going to be drastically impacted. This isn't an opinion, this is what the science indicates... so in this case it is not Capitalism that is racist, turns out it is Socialism that is racist, maybe systemically. Social welfare is not a feature of capitalism, neither are Planned Parenthood centers that were also strategically located near black neighborhoods by the Eugenicist Margaret Sanger (look it up).

My point is that the headless leadership behind the protests and statue removers have hijacked our appropriate outrage against police brutality, turned it into an issue of 'systemic racism' and have weaponized that against the Western principles of Liberty, Freedom, and Capitalism... to tear them down! The objective is to rebuild from the foundation up a more socialist society. The waters for Socialism have been tested with candidates like Bernie Sanders and AOC. The waters for Government overreach have been tested with COVID, and now the see an opening to make us all mad enough to demand change and they have the tools in place to demonize anyone who resists this change as a racist thanks to the PC orthodoxy and its speech control. Socialists in America have been working at this for decades, and in order for them to accomplish the change they want, support needs to be broad and opposition needs to be muted. Now take another look at 2020. Take a look at the media narrative we're being spoon-fed that ignore the atrocities of the rioters whom take cover among the protesters, ignore the good policing, and highlight the bad policing. Take a look at the politicians that pander to the demands of the protesters. Take it all in and try to process this. Where do you see it going? Some are talking about civil war, which to me seems hyperbolic, but if not some sort of civil war or revolution, then what?

The past is being erased and all that is being left are the shells and ghosts of inequity so that we might believe that it is all bad and all that we have now are the remnant patterns of sinister inheritance so that we can be convinced that this can and must change. Reality is not longer reality, it is being scripted as a prison for your conscience so that you can help through action or inaction to usher in the Second American Revolution.

"Who controls the past now, controls the future, who controls the present now, controls the past." -Rage Against the Machine 1999