Last year, in Houston, several white liberals knelt and asked forgiveness of a group of blacks.
Tyler O’Neil, at PJM, has the best outrageous Leftism story of the week.
[P]arents in Dallas just got a wake-up call. The local Black Lives Matter group Dallas Justice Now launched a new campaign, urging white parents in wealthy Highland Park to sign a pledge to keep their children from applying to America’s top colleges — in the name of “equity.” The organization’s letter to parents lays the guilt on thick.
“We are writing to you because we understand you are white and live within the Highland Park Independent School District and thus benefit from the enormous privileges taken at the expense of communities of color,” Dallas Justice Now writes to parents in the area. “You live in the whitest and wealthiest neighborhood in Dallas. Whether you know it or not, you earned or inherited your money through oppressing people of color.”
“However, it is also our understanding that you are a Democrat and supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement which makes you one of our white allies and puts you in a position to help correct these cruel injustices,” the letter continues. “We need you to step up and back up your words with action and truly sacrifice to make our segregated city more just.”…
“We are asking you to pledge that your children will not apply or attend any Ivy League School or US News & World Report Top 50 School. If you do not have children under 18 then we ask you to pledge to hold your white privileged friends, family, and neighbors with children to this standard,” the letter demands. “These schools have afforded white families privilege for generations. Having your children attend these schools takes away spaces from students of color who really need the job opportunities, education and influence that these schools provide.”
“We know that this sounds like a tough commitment to make. But it is truly disheartening to see wealthy white folks sending charitable donations, posting #BlackLivesMatter on social media, or putting up yard signs as if to say that minimal effort is all they are prepared to do in the fight for racial justice,” the letter adds.
The pledge reads as follows:
As a white person with privilege both from my whiteness and my neighborhood I recognize the need to make sacrifices for the purpose of correcting hundreds of years of murder, slavery, discrimination, and lack of educational and economic opportunities perpetrated upon people of color. I understand that access to top schools is a key component in economic and social advancement. Therefore, I commit that my children will not apply to or attend any Ivy League School or US News & World Report Top 50 School so that position at that school is available for people of color to help correct historical wrongs. If I do not have children under 18 then I will commit to encouraging my white privileged friends, neighbors, and family members with children to sign the pledge and holding them accountable until they do so.
Update: This story has been denounced as a spoof by the liberal Dallas Observer. They are suspicious because efforts to locate “Dallas Justice” and its principals were not successful.
I think we’ll know more tomorrow. The Observer could be right, but the story is not really that implausible. Equally outrageous demands and proposals are advanced all the time these days.
Charles C.W. Cooke, tongue firmly in cheek, has loads of fun joining Bree Newsome and Lebron James in sticking up for teenage knife fighting.
Since when do we need the cops to intervene in the recreational stabbings of our youth?
Just when I thought that America couldn’t possibly get any softer, people start suggesting that there’s a role for the police in preventing knife murders. The snowflake generation strikes once again.
Is there any tradition that the radicals won’t ruin? As the brilliant Bree Newsome pointed out on Twitter, “Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons.” And now people are calling the cops on them? I ask: Is this a self-governing country or not? When Newsome says, “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon,” she may be expressing a view that is unfashionable these days. But she’s right.
Disappointingly, my colleague Phil Klein has felt compelled to join the critics. In a post published yesterday, Phil asked in a sarcastic tone whether the police should “somehow treat teenage knife fights as they would harmless roughhousing and simply ignore it.” My answer to this is: Yes, that’s exactly what they should do — yes, even if they are explicitly called to the scene. I don’t know where Phil grew up, but where I spent my childhood, Fridays were idyllic: We’d play some football, try a little Super Mario Bros, have a quick knife fight, and then fire up some frozen pizza before bed. And now law enforcement is getting involved? This is political correctness gone mad.
It’s hypocrisy, too. Who among us hasn’t come within a second or two of murdering someone else with a steak knife? My best friend in school, Bobby “The Blade” Simpson, used to throw shivs at the smaller kids in the music room. Did we need the authorities to step in when that happened? No, we did not. As MSNBC’s Joy Reid argued smartly on her show last night, pranks such as these were dealt with by our teachers — just as we all expected they would be. And if something went wrong? Well, that’s why we had substitutes.
In all honesty, I worry that this sort of helicopter policing is making us weak. Back in my day, the people who survived a good stabbing came out stronger for it.
Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons. We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers. Y’all need help. I mean that sincerely.
The New York Post reports that Marxism and protest politics have paid off big for Patrisse Khan-Cullors.
As protests broke out across the country in the name of Black Lives Matter, the group’s co-founder went on a real estate-buying binge, snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone, according to property records.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors, 37, also eyed property in the Bahamas at an ultra-exclusive resort where Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods both have homes, The Post has learned. Luxury apartments and townhouses at the beachfront Albany resort outside Nassau are priced between $5 million and $20 million, according to a local agent.
The self-described Marxist last month purchased a $1.4 million home on a secluded road a short drive from Malibu in Los Angeles, according to a report. The 2,370 square-foot property features “soaring ceilings, skylights and plenty of windows” with canyon views. The Topanga Canyon homestead, which includes two houses on a quarter acre, is just one of three homes Khan-Cullors owns in the Los Angeles area, public records show.
Some fellow activists were taken aback by the real estate revelations. …
Khan-Cullors embraced activism and Marxism at a young age. “It started the year I turned twelve,” she writes. “That was the year that I learned that being black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready.”
But she didn’t rise to national prominence until 2013, when she and two other activists protested the not-guilty verdict against George Zimmerman, who shot dead Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in Florida.
Black Lives Matter protests erupted again in 2020 after the May killing of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck during his arrest.
Donations and pledges from corporations and individuals poured into the movement at that point. In February, the BLM non-profit co-founded by Khan-Cullors told the AP that they took in $90 million in 2020, with $21.7 million committed to grant funding and helping 30 black-led groups across the country.
Black Lives Matter leaders would not specify how much money they took in from prominent donors, according to the AP report.
It’s also not clear how much Khan-Cullors makes in salary as one of the leaders of the movement, since its finances are split among both non-profit and for-profit entities and difficult to trace.
Jason Whitlock got suspended by Twitter for tweeting this comment:
Do you even comprehend my take? She had a lot of options on where to live. She chose one of the whitest places in California. She'll have her pick of white cops and white people to complain about. That's a choice, bro. https://t.co/rBkOnSjb4u
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
Andrea Widburg passes along an interesting Instagram video by a black conservative from Texas.
[The] truth.. about the Black Lives Matter movement is perfectly highlighted in a video that Damani Felder, a black conservative in Texas, posted to Instagram on Monday. Felder was dining with friends at an outdoor venue next to an open plaza in Dallas, Texas. As he repeatedly pans the dining area with his camera, you can see that the diners are a mix of races and ages.
The film begins immediately after a group of about 20 or 25 Black Lives Matter protesters arrayed themselves in an ankle-deep fountain running the length of the dining area. The protesters are, by a pretty clear margin, young, white, and female. In other words, they perfectly match the demographics in American colleges, which are also mostly young, white, and female.
These are the good little girls who have always worked hard in school, diligently imbibing everything their hard-left Democrat teachers and professors have taught them. These “educators†have played on their sense of self-worth, guilt, and credulity to turn themselves into the foot soldiers of anarchy.
Felder knows what’s going on with these young people:
The majority-white people in the crowd that want to feel good about themselves. Look at this. They want to feel good about themselves, so they’re here ruining an otherwise peaceful evening with their B.S.
[snip]
Look at this. Majority-white people, out here acting the fool because they want to feel like they are important.
Look at this. Look at the racial make-up of this. Think about what the purpose of this would be. Remember that Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors are the founders of this organization, and they are admitting on camera that they are trained Marxists. All they care about is anarchy and social unrest.
Look at this. Look at this. Again, majority-white crowd because they want to feel that they belong to something.
What’s unique about the video, in addition to Felder’s astute insights, is that we can watch how the protesters transform in real-time from being loud and vulgar to being so violent that the police bring tear gas and pepper spray to stop them (but not before the protesters throw things, breaking windows and possibly doing other damage). The bewildered diners, who had been hoping these human mosquitoes would spontaneously depart, end up scattering, their lovely evening completely spoiled.
In this time of Cancel Culture, not all exhibitions of self-indulgent racial melodrama win Pulitzer Prizes. This recent Harvard grad posted the above rant on TikTok, and was consequently fired by Deloitte.
Their HR Department, alas! poor girl, took her rather-extreme metaphor literally as a “threat.” I’m sure that she actually had no intention of stabbing anyone, but her personal participation in contemporary group psychosis does have plenty of unfortunate real world consequences.
The African-American pattern of persecution fantasy functions to justify unearned and undeserved favoritism and privilege as “compensation.” It operates as an excuse for the suppression of free speech and honest debate. And it fuels a demented and overwheening self-importance, persuading silly people that they are special and specially-entitled on the basis of historical victimhood, that nobody has suffered as they’ve suffered (and are still suffering!) and nobody else can possibly compete in status and entitlement and nobody else can possibly understand how they’ve suffered (and are still suffering!). Being the ultimate entitled victim and at the same time a haute bourgeois elite Ivy League graduate is nice work if you can get it.
Fueling and participating in this nonsense is intellectually dishonest and socially and politically destructive. This fantasy corrupts society, fosters limitless injustice, and sews bitter divisiveness. Stupid people, even some who did not go to Harvard, will swallow this feel-good, addictive poison and proceed to act on it. Last year, just for instance, 23-year-old Temar Bishop raped and beat a 20-year-old white college student to avenge his historical group grievances.
She was a white girl. She deserved it because us minorities have been through slavery.â€
“This is what they used to do to us,†he allegedly told the witness, according to the criminal complaint. “This is what they did to us during slavery. They used to beat us and whip us.â€
The victim suffered a broken nose and teeth, and vomited blood after the attack.
I thought it was sad that she lost her job for a private opinion and because her figure of speech was taken literally, but there is the consolatory thought that she obviously would not feel a bit sorry if the shoe were on the other foot, and some opponent of her Racialist Agitation had his career carpet-bombed due to some social media indiscretion. On the contrary, I have every expectation that she would gloat.
In St. Louis, protesters knocked down a gate and invaded a private road in search of Mayor Lyda Kewson’s home. They wanted her resignation after she the released names and addresses of residents who suggested defunding the police department. The Mayor’s home was invaded and occupied, and presumably looted.
Meanwhile, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, two married local attorneys, succeeded in saving their own stately home nearby in the same historic district by standing outside with guns and standing off the mob. Liberals were outraged.
The radical left is evolving into the monster that can no longer be controlled, with the Democratic Party playing the role of Dr. Frankenstein.
At the same time, American citizens are gearing up for the challenge, as seen Sunday in St. Louis when an armed couple stood guard outside their historic home located on a private road, as Black Lives Matter protesters marched outside.
The dramatic scene was either inspirational or terrifying, depending on your views of private property and the God-given inherent right to defend yourself.
Organizers can be seen in the video moving the mob along, as the husband and wife hold a pistol and automatic rifle outside the upscale property.
With rioters burning and looting all across America these past weeks, destroying all that stands in its path, the couple cannot be blamed for wanting to protect the palace.
The words of an organizer of the protest, Ohun Ashe, as reported by KSDK, adds to that concern: “It’s meant to be disruptive. It’s meant to be disturbing.â€
The home is reportedly on the National Historic Register, as Ian Miles Cheong, the managing editor of Human Events, tweeted.
Hundreds of protesters were marching to the home of Mayor Lyda Krewson, calling for the Democratic politician’s resignation for releasing the names and addresses of residents wanting to defund the police department, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. …
The couple seen above are neighbors of the mayor, and their home is on a private road, the newspaper reported.
As BLM protesters march down a public street, a faction can be seen breaking off to enter through a side gate to gain access to the property.
A sign posted outside the gate clearly reads: “Access Limited to Residents.â€
The CBS affiliate KMOV noted in a photo description that protesters “broke down a gate in the neighborhood to march past their home.†…
At one point, the wife walked out onto the lawn and is seen pointing her handgun at protesters.
[T]he rage mob is offended that the property owners are willing to protect the mansion to the death, if necessary.
[T]he law in Missouri appears to be on their side.
Paris Review’s first issue, Spring 1953, cost 75¢.
The Paris Review was founded in 1953 by three literary-minded American graduates of elite schools (M.I.T., Yale, and Harvard).
William Styron wrote an editorial statement on the new quarterly’s intentions:
The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines. […] I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they’re good.
That was then; this is now.
The latest issue of the Paris Review, June 8, 2020, features an editorial titled, Let It Burn, by one Robert Jones, Jr.
The United States of America is, by its very nature, anti-Black.
It isn’t the only anti-Black nation and it isn’t only anti-Black (it also despises the Indigenous, the queer, the trans, the poor, the disabled, and many others). But anti-Blackness is, indeed, the American fact. The nation was constructed on the notion that white people are the only fully human beings on earth, and that humanity exists on a spectrum that moves from the “purity†of whiteness to the “impurity†of Blackness. This isn’t merely some abstract idea; it’s the foundation of every American institution and what animates every American person. It’s what allows, for example, the American media to uphold the pretense that pro-Blackness and anti-Blackness are equal moral propositions or that there can ever be “both sides to the story†when it comes to a state agent murdering a Black person. …
That is the beauty of these uprisings—which are happening in all fifty states; Washington, D.C.; Puerto Rico; and all around the world, joined, surprisingly, by non-Black people who I can only imagine could no longer suffer under the strain of the guilt that is their blood memory (but not only memory). They hint at the possibility of Black liberation. It will not be achieved, of course. The United States of America would unleash the full fury of its military might upon its own citizens before it would allow that to happen. An America without its proverbial knee on the necks of the Black populace is not America at all. And that is their greatest fear: the collapse of all they hold sacred, which is held together, really, by the fiction that Black people are not people.
We must resist even if defeat is imminent.
I don’t believe we will be liberated from the American regime through superficial and incremental reforms (do you reform a lynch mob by giving them a willow tree instead of a sycamore from which to condemn the hanged?). That is the sacred knowledge that Assata Shakur prophesied for the flock to receive. What is required is a reevaluation, a dismantling. And no nation will go down quietly—especially not one whose character is no different than that of a tick, sucking the blood of the warm body to which it has attached its mandibles until it’s engorged, leaving disease in its wake. When I was a child, I was told that one way to remove a tick was to light a match and hold it near.
So, the reader might suppose that the author is a poor, constantly persecuted minority, living in fear, forced to do hard labor, and surviving barely above starvation level in some hovel.
Not really. Robert Jones, Jr. is actually a comfortable haute bourgeois homosexual living in Brooklyn, writing for ethnic magazines and the New York Times, and travelling nationally and internationally.
He got a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. at Brooklyn College, and he has a literary agent and his first novel will be being published by Putnam’s next January 5th.
This particular “editorial” is, of course, one of countless pieces of current African-American political manifestos comprised of totally hyperbolic, utterly paranoid, self-indulgent, malicious, fantastical nonsense, peddling limitlessly inflated historical grievances and expressing the most pernicious, offensive and insolent sorts of racial animosity and group chauvinism.
Reading it the second time, in the light of my just-acquired familiarity with the author’s bio, I could not help but smile, as I recognized that all this hypertrophied ebullition of hysterical complaint and rabid racial hatred was nothing real at all.
All this essay is is a classic example of over-the-top homosexual self-indulgent emotional dramaturgy. The homosexual struggles with identity and views the world in terms of theatrical scenes and roles. Mr. Jones is not really oppressed. Black blood is not really flowing down his gentrified Brooklyn street. Mr. Jones does not really hate America or hate white people. He is just pouring all of his ever-too-available emotional energy into a role: the role of the Angry Black Man.
Take that, whitey! You were afraid that the Big Bad Black Man was going to start the Revolution, waving a machete, and coming after you with a big Kalashnikov. In reality, if you looked Robert Jones, Jr. in the eye, and cried: Boo! The fierce guerilla fighter would instantly wilt and melt into tears.
So, the question becomes: how naive, how stupid, how infantile has the elite American establishment become when the editor of Paris Review cannot distinguish a ridiculous piece of homosexual role-playing fantasy from a serious statement of supposed factual observation and political analysis and intent?