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Kevin Williamson has been prolific lately. In one 10 day period he produced a thousand word essay each day. We’ll catch up a little today. His first article is titled “Black Lives Matter” and closes with these paragraphs;
… And thus we have the very peculiar situation in which “Black Lives Matter!” but black perpetrators don’t. Only white perpetrators matter. And if, as in the case of George Zimmerman, they are not exactly white, then they can be declared white by the New York Times. Only white perpetrators matter to the people behind the Ferguson protests because only white perpetrators are politically useful.
The overwhelming majority of violent deaths suffered by black Americans are the result of simple crime, and crime is, as an issue, of no use to the Left. But when a black man dies at the hands of a white man — especially a white police officer — then that breathes life into the ghost of “white supremacy,” the infinitely malleable, endlessly useful set of imperial robes detectable only by the finest sensibilities on MSNBC. Actual white supremacists represent a dwindling and (metaphorically and, more often than you might expect, literally) toothless tendency restricted mostly to hillbilly precincts and anonymous Internet cowards. But if one already wants to boycott Wal-Mart, and a white cop shoots a young black man, then — abracadabra! — the Left is boycotting Wal-Mart because of . . . white supremacy, or something. Agitating for a $40 minimum wage? “Justice for Mike Brown!” Looking for even more generous solar-power subsidies? “Justice for Mike Brown!” Anointing AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka president-for-life? “Mike Brown would have wanted it that way!”
If you believe that black lives matter, then you should be working for school reform, economic growth, and — yes — more effective law-enforcement and crime-prevention measures to protect black communities, which suffer an enormously disproportionate share of crime and violence. Never mind the stagecraft: That’s what you actually do if you think black lives matter.
And the drama that’s going on in Ferguson right now? That’s what you do if you think black lives are merely useful to you — and, in the end, expendable.
Speaking of boycotting Wal-Mart, Williamson has this to say;
… There’s no sign of it here in Magnolia, Ark., but the boycott season is upon us, and graduates of Princeton and Bryn Mawr are demanding “justice” from Wal-Mart, which is not in the justice business but in the groceries, clothes, and car-batteries business. It is easy to scoff, but I am ready to start taking the social-justice warriors’ insipid rhetoric seriously — as soon as two things happen: First, I want to hear from the Wal-Mart-protesting riffraff a definition of “justice” that is something that does not boil down to “I Get What I Want, Irrespective of Other Concerns.”
Second, I want to turn on the radio and hear Jay-Z boasting about his new Timex.
It is remarkable that Wal-Mart, a company that makes a modest profit margin (typically between 3 percent and 3.5 percent) selling ordinary people ordinary goods at low prices, is the great hate totem for the well-heeled Left, whose best-known celebrity spokesclowns would not be caught so much as downwind from a Supercenter, while at the same time, nobody is out with placards and illiterate slogans and generally risible moral posturing in front of boutiques dealing in Rolex, Prada, Hermès, et al. …
…Ultimately, these campaigns are exercises in tribal affiliation. The Rolex tribe, and those who aspire to be aligned with it, signal their status by sneering at the Timex tribe — or by condescending to it as they purport to act on its behalf, as though poor people were too stupid to know where to find the best deal on a can of beans. Or call it the Trader Joe’s tribe vs. the Wal-Mart tribe, the Prius tribe vs. the F-150 tribe.
We see this everywhere: In Ferguson, self-righteous and self-appointed spokesmen for the marginalized point to the fact that the criminal-justice system generally produces far worse outcomes to the poor and the non-white than it does to the well-off and white. This is, generally speaking, true. And though the dynamics are equally complicated, the same thing is true of the government schools, which do a pretty good job for rich white kids in the suburbs while functioning as day prisons and incubators of dysfunction for poor minority kids, especially in big cities. But the social-justice warriors in Ferguson will fight on bloody stumps to prevent reform of the government-school cartels, the endless failures of which do far more to harm the lives of the economically and socially vulnerable than any police department does. Why? The teachers are part of the tribe, and the cops are part of a rival tribe, which is why nobody ever bought a Rolex out of the royalties of a song titled “F**k the Milwaukee Public Schools.”
Kevin next turns his thoughts to where the 2016 conventions might be held.
… The Democrats, if they had any remaining intellectual honesty, would hold their convention in Detroit. Democratic leadership, Democratic unions and the Democratic policies that empower them, Democrat-dominated school bureaucracies, Democrat-style law enforcement, Democratic levels of taxation and spending, the politics of protest and grievance in the classical Democratic mode — all of these have made Detroit what it is today: an unwholesome slop-pail of woe and degradation that does not seem to belong in North America, a craptastical crater groaning with misery, a city-shaped void in what once was the industrial soul of the nation. If you want to see the end point of Barack Obama’s shining path, visit Detroit. …
… Then there’s Philadelphia. …
… Philadelphia-style misgovernance is not funny at all: The city’s murder rate is three times New York’s and even higher at the moment than murder-happy Chicago’s. It graduates barely half its high-school students, and black students drop out at twice the rate of whites. Its median household income is 30 percent less than the national average, and 26 percent of its people live in poverty. Which is to say, it’s more or less like most cities where Democrats have long enjoyed uncontested dominance. …
Mr. Williamson’s Thanksgiving message celebrates the ungovernable colonists.
The American colonies must have been an unruly place, full as they were of religious fanatics and slave traders, second sons and fortune hunters, criminals and former political prisoners, and all manner of people in between. The first settlements hugged the coast, where one set of adventurers looked seaward while another looked to the interior wilderness. It was, in retrospect, almost inevitable that North America would quickly become the wealthiest place in the world by the 17th century.
Why? Because those seditionists, fanatics, and gamblers were impossible to rule. While we are counting our blessings this Thanksgiving, let’s not forget to count that one: Our ancestors did not much like being told what to do, and we — and the world — are immeasurably richer and happier for that. …
… There’s a famous meme that made the rounds during Occupy Wall Street, with a hippie-dirtbag protester labeled “Wants More Government” and menacing police in riot gear closing down on him labeled “More Government.” Those of us who want less government do not want only that: We want what flourishes when men are left free to pursue their own ends. The Left, on the other hand, takes every instance of unhappiness as an argument for more government — including bad government. Our founding fathers knew when to build, and when to fight. More importantly, they knew what to build, and what to fight.
The most shocking act of nonconformity in Ferguson, the boldest declaration of independence, would be starting a business rather than burning one.
For his next act, Kevin turns his attention to pundits and their predictions.
It’s December, meaning that the pundits-and-predictions season is upon us. In the name of public safety and common-sense reform, somebody has to put a stop to this madness.
Regular readers will have by now detected my pronounced skepticism of government regulation — of both its wisdom and its effectiveness. But even the most gimlet-eyed small-government man has his hesitations — e.g., William F. Buckley Jr.’s late-in-life confession that he would, despite his free-market principles, ban smoking, had he the power to do so. If I were inclined to violate my own libertarian leanings, I’d lobby the new Republican majority in Congress to enact the Better Expertise Through Monetary Exposure Act of 2015 — the BET ME Act. The purpose of the BET ME Act would be two-fold: First, it would impose accountability on pundits and self-appointed experts of all descriptions by requiring them to wager a month’s pay on the real-world outcome every time they published a prediction.
Second, and consequently, it would surely eliminate the national debt in a matter of months.
I was on the fence about this until I read the latest from UberFacts, the runaway leader in the race to be the most boneheaded thing on Twitter not called Sally Kohn: “Experts predict that solar power will be the primary source of energy on the planet in 2025.” That may be true if by “solar power” we mean the solar energy stored in dead dinosaurs and pumped out of the ground by Exxon; if by “solar power” we mean photovoltaic cells and the like, then I want these so-called experts to put their money where their tweets are. Similarly, unless you’re ready to take the appropriate position on oil futures, I don’t want to read your apocalyptic “peak oil” pabulum. …
And, just in time, Mr Williamson kicked out a Corner Post on the topic de jour – Rolling Stone’s embarrassment.
When I was a student at the University of Texas, I served as managing editor of our school paper, the (all hail!) Daily Texan, as a consequence of which I did something that no self-respecting journalist should do: I took a journalism class, media law and ethics, which was a requirement for serving as M.E. For my sins, I drew as my professor the daft left-wing windbag Robert Jensen, whose first lecture consisted of a screed against the presence of sports sections in newspapers, which Professor Jensen considered an ethical problem in that they contributed what he believed to be an unhealthy competitiveness in our society. Naturally, I never went to Professor Jensen’s class again, and got my media law and ethics from the superb Mike Quinn, who also had some interesting observations about JFK conspiracy theories. (Quinn had covered the assassination for the Dallas Morning News.) I learned some useful and practical things, one of which was how to go about preventing myself from publishing lies fed to me by others, a useful skill if you spend time around politicians and political activists.
Rolling Stone could have used the services of the mighty Quinn. …
… A responsible critic would have concluded that the Rolling Stone account was a defective piece of journalism as journalism even if every single word of it were true. The reason we have safeguard processes is to ensure that we present reasonably reliable information — that we do not go willy-nilly accusing people of rape based on the say-so of one anonymous person. We know — for a fact — that people sometimes lie about having been raped, just as they lie about all sorts of things. Horrible as it is, that is a fact, and one that cannot simply be set aside for reasons of ideological expedience. If the story had turned out to be true, Sabrina Rubin Erdely would not be a better journalist — she simply would have been lucky. And Rolling Stone would not be a better magazine. It would only be one that had escaped its current embarrassment.
You would think it improbable that Kevin Williamson would get cross ways with Rush Limbaugh. But he did, and he tells that story in another post to The Corner in The Curious Case of Williamson v. Limbaugh.
So Rush Limbaugh is a little upset with your favorite correspondent today, because of some remarks I made on the Bill Maher program on Friday. Rush, usually an astute observer, is off-target here: He has simply misunderstood what I said.
What I said was that the Republican party has a problem telling its entertainers from its elected officials and office-seekers. It is one thing to have Rush say something outrageous or cutting, but another thing to have a governor or a would-be senator say the same thing in the same way — or, more accurate, to try to say the same thing in the same way. Rush has a particular rhetorical gift that is seldom found in other talk-radio hosts, much less in office-seekers. That is why I once described him as the “only man in the Republican party who speaks English.” When office-seekers try that, they usually end up embarrassing themselves and, not infrequently, losing their races.
This all took place in the context of a discussion of Mississippi governor Phil Bryant’s boneheaded remarks about working mothers. It was conventional-wisdom stuff — that children do better when the mother is at home rather than working outside it — and, as is very often the case, the conventional wisdom is wrong here. …
This issue is good enough for it to be left up for a couple of days. The next posting will not be until Monday evening.